In June 2020, I was supposed to be on the faculty of the Critical Theory Summer School at the Birkbeck Humanities Center in London. Because of the global coronavirus pandemic, this, like everything else, was cancelled. As a way to give myself some structure, I've thought to start posting some of the reading and thinking that I was planning to do for that course. At this point, I don't know whether this will happen with any consistency, but I thought I'd try.
The intuition behind my course is the sense that there are claims regarding the newness of climate change, especially with regard to (1) the challenge climate change presents for critical thought and (2) the ways to address this challenge. In these posts/lectures, I will consider some of these more closely. At the outset, I am skeptical regarding the claim for newness as well as of the response to the perceived newness, as will become clear. Nevertheless, I hope to draw out aspects of these texts that are still helpful (in other words, to engage in sympathetic readings, although, who knows, they are just as likely to be symptomatic readings; what they might be symptoms of I cannot say).
I have three provisional wagers that I hope to explore in these posts/lectures:
- Horkheimer's and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment presents advance versions of some of the arguments most prevalent in climate change writing in the humanities;
- This resemblance, foreshadowing, or prefiguration is a clue to the assumptions that give climate change writing in the humanities their basic shape, namely assumptions regarding the limits of reason and politics.
- These assumptions are driven by an anti-communism that prevents them from escaping the confines of capitalism.
Introduction (commentary on xi -xvii of the Introduction to Dialectic of Enlightenment, Continuum Press edition, 1982)
Dialectic of Enlightenment is a critical rejection of the conceits or premises of European modernity. The basic argument regarding the self-destructiveness of Enlightenment, not only Enlightenment's limits --enabling impediments -- but the dangerous effects of these limits/impediments, repeats Rousseau from "The Discourse on the Origins of Inequality" -- the more we know, the less we know. Although Horkheimer and Adorno don't refer to Rousseau directly, they appear to gesture to this text when they write "The fallen nature of modern man cannot be separated from social progress" (xiv). "Discourse on the Origins of Inequality" is a story of the fall into civilization, of how a free being becomes neurotic and enfeebled by its dependence on the opinions of others. For Horkheimer and Adorno, we pay a price for scientific achievements -- more questions, confrontations with the limits of our knowledge, and a decline in other dimensions of understanding -- just as Rousseau's "civilized man" loses the capacities of so-called natural man. The limits of Enlightenment re-embed us in myth, in an irrationality that, the more we try to escape, the more deeply entraps us, again just as Rousseau's civilized man is ultimately fearful and enslaved. Enlightenment's push for freedom produces an all the greater unfreedom.
To illustrate the point regarding how knowledge turns into its opposite we can point to confidence in scientific methods of inquiry. Measurement, data gathering, model generation, predictions, etc have been accompanied by a loss of confidence in (denigration of) other forms of knowledge and theorization: interpretation/hermeneutics, critique, imagination, "women's ways of knowing," rich description, folk knowledges, etc. In political science we see this in the bizarre positivism that insists on all sorts of "rigorous" methods to prove common sense or tell us that common sense is wrong (as with a claim that class inequality has a damaging impact on democracy). A more contemporary example might be Big Data and algorithms. In 2008, Chris Anderson argued that theory was dead, over. Big data enables the discovery of correlations -- knowing why things correlate doesn't really matter if we know that things correlate. "With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves." Models, theories, and interpretations are no longer necessary. Understanding is old school, outmoded.
Where Horkheimer and Adorno go further than Rousseau is with their explanation of why Enlightenment turns into its opposite. Their answer concerns the social forms that sustain thought, that enable scientific production. The problem is in the institutions that make thought possible. This element of their argument comes from Hegel. Recall how in The Philosophy of Right Hegel emphasizes the institutions of civil society and the state that are necessary for the idea of freedom to realize itself in the world. Freedom depends on the institutions and practices that transmit and secure it. Horkheimer and Adorno write:
"Just as the Enlightenment expresses the actual movement of civil society as a whole in the aspect of its idea as embodied in individuals and institutions, so truth it not merely the rational consciousness but equally the form that consciousness assumes in actual life" (xiv).
Horkheimer and Adorno argue that the form consciousness assumes is a form of unfreedom -- conformity, fear of deviation. This form is a product of social institutions and the habits and mindset they produce.
"The dutiful child of modern civilization is possessed by a fear of departing from the facts which, in the very act of perception, the dominant conventions of science, commerce, and politics -- cliche-like -- have already molded; his anxiety is none other than the fear of social deviation" (xiv).
Language becomes debased. Any ideas or expressions that don't conform to the dominant mentality are condemned. We see both elements in critiques of theoretical jargon. On the one hand, jargon can be so cliched as to be a prison, absolutely incapable of expressing anything original, complexity and obscuring attempting to mask the fact that actually nothing new is being said. On the other hand, the critique of jargon is anti-intellectual, reinforces a generalized attempt to rule out complex thought, and operates to police and marginalize theoretical work. So here the critique of jargon affirms the dominant mentality and rules out critical thinking. Both hands are true at the same time.
Before too quickly acceding to Horkheimer and Adorno here, it's important to situate their argument in the broader set of criticisms of mass society circulating mid-century. At the same time that the social welfare state, emerging as a result of the post-war labor-capital compromise, was beginning to secure social benefits for ever wider portions of the population, its institutions came under fire for generating conformism and stifling individual creativity. There is something to be said about the critique of commodity culture. After all, rather than promoting individual consumption, post-war economies in the west (particularly the US) could have invested more in the development of social consumption as had been done in the thirties. But Horkheimer and Adorno don't take their argument in this direction. Instead, they level it at the loss of individual freedom and creativity, offering a version of the argument Hannah Arendt would make ten years later in The Human Condition.
"On the one hand the growth of economic productivity furnishes the conditions for a world of greater justice; on the other hand it allows the technical apparatus and the social groups which administer it a disproportionate superiority to the rest of the population. The individual is wholly devalued in relation to the economic powers, which at the same time press the control of society over nature to hitherto unsuspected heights. Even though the individual disappears before the apparatus which we serves, that apparatus provides for him as never before. In an unjust state of life, the impotence and pliability of the masses growth with the quantitative increase in commodities allowed them. The materially respectable and socially deplorable rise in the living standard of of the lower classes is reflected in the simulated extension of the spirit. Its true concern is the negation of reification; it cannot survive where it is fixed as a cultural commodity and doled out to satisfy consumer needs. The flood of detailed information and candy-floss entertainment simultaneously instructs and stultifies mankind" (xiv -xv).
My ungenerous read here is that Horkheimer and Adorno are simply elitists and it makes no sense that they have somehow been viewed as theorists on the left. The victim in their sad story is the individual who disappears because of the rise in the overall standard of living. Notice: they don't make a class argument that says that increases in capitalist productivity immiserate the workers such that immense plenty is accompanied by immense deprivation. They don't present an "unjust state of life" in terms of racism, imperialism, sexism or other kinds of inequality prevalent at mid-century. Neither do they blame private property and the pursuit of profit for functioning as barriers to the greater justice expanded productivity enables. It's hard to know what to make of the idea that the rise in the standard of living of the lower classes is deplorable. This is a critique of technocracy and the administered society, that is, a critique of the possibility of using public institutions for the public good. It is one whose basic categories render it unable to distinguish between capitalist consumerism/mass democracy, soviet socialism, and fascism.
For Horkheimer and Adorno what lurks behind the administered society of mass culture and mass consumption is fascism: "progress becomes regression" (xv). That Germany did not pursue rigorous de-nazification after the war is true, but it's not their point. That the US brought over all sorts of Nazi scientists and assimilated them into US life is also not their point. Their point is more abstract, a point about the entanglement of rationality and social actuality. The rational is manifest in the social practices and institutions that produce it. Enlightenment ultimately means/leads to self-destruction: the destruction of the self, as a free and rational self, in positivism (scientism, technocracy), bureaucratic conformism, and mass culture.
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