Abstract
This paper re-examines the relationship between power, reason and history in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. Contesting Habermas’ highly influential reading of the text, I argue that Dialectic of Enlightenment, far from being a dead-end for critical theory, opens up important lines of thought in the philosophy of history that contemporary critical theorists would do well to recover. My focus is on the relationship that Horkheimer and Adorno trace between enlightenment rationality and the domination of inner and outer nature.
The leading contemporary proponent of the Frankfurt School approach to critical theory, Jürgen Habermas, is firmly, perhaps even deeply, committed to the notion of historical progress. 1 Inspired by Kant, Hegel and Marx, Habermas attempts to develop a post-metaphysical, deflationary, and practical understanding of progress, an understanding that makes room for the contingency of historical processes and that acknowledges that those contingent processes often generate as much regress as progress (see especially Habermas 1976, 1979). But still the notion of a progress plays a crucial role for Habermas, in his theory of social evolution (initially espoused in the early 1970s but never given up), in his defense of the normative content of modernity, and in his meta-ethics. 2 Habermas understands progress not just as a moral or political imperative – the thought here is that we need to believe that progress toward some future good society is possible in order to do critique 3 – but also as a historical reality – the thought here is that we are entitled or perhaps even required to reconstruct the historical process that has led to ‘us’ as one of historical development, as a socio-cultural learning process, and that doing so grounds the normative concepts and principles that have resulted from that learning process.
And yet this embrace of the idea of progress is in conflict with one of the major critical and theoretical – not to say political – movements of our time, namely, postcolonial theory. However deflationary and postmetaphysical Habermas’ conception of progress may be, it still seems to require that those who identify as the inheritors of the project of European modernity view those who do not as in some way less evolved, less developmentally mature than ‘we’ are, in the sense that they have not yet learned something that ‘we’ have already learned. 4 In this way, it seems to encourage, at least tacitly, the view of non-modern, non-European peoples as ‘human embodiments of the principle of anachronism’, as Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it (2000: 238). Perhaps this fact, more than any other, explains why the second generation of the Frankfurt School has been, as Edward Said has noted, ‘stunningly silent’ on matters of imperialism and colonialism (1993: 278). 5 This silence is problematic in a rather obvious way. If we accept, as I think we should, Nancy Fraser’s (1989) claim that in order to be truly critical, critical theory must engage in the self-clarification of the central social and political struggles of the age, then critical theory must figure out a way to take on board a postcolonial perspective. And yet, it is difficult to see how critical theory can be de-colonized without giving up its commitment to the idea of historical progress, a move that seems to threaten its normative foundations and its conception of critique.
In light of these concerns, I want to suggest that we would do well to return to the principal text of the first generation of the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (2002). This text is not only of great interest in its own right, it is of particular interest at this moment in the development of the project of critical theory inasmuch as it rather dramatically departs from this Hegelian narrative of historical progress. For this reason, the text can serve as a resource for theorists seeking to connect the projects of critical and postcolonial theory. Moreover, this text had a decisive – if largely negative – impact on the subsequent development of Habermasian critical theory as a research program. The core insight of Habermas’ critical social theory – his distinction between strategic and communicative rationality – was developed in large part in response to his understanding of the theoretical impasses and normative deficits of first-generation critical theory, impasses and deficits that are, for Habermas, crystallized in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. For Habermas, Horkheimer and Adorno’s stated project of enlightening enlightenment about its own regressive tendencies is doomed to self-contradiction that undermines the project’s own critical force. By equating strategic or instrumental rationality with rationality per se, and reducing rationality to domination, Horkheimer and Adorno committed the grave error of ‘turn[ing] against reason as the foundation of its own validity’ (1987: 118–119). However, once Horkheimer and Adorno’s mistaken conflations of instrumental rationality with rationality, and rationality with power, are corrected, it becomes evident that their allegedly pessimistic, total critique of modern society is unwarranted. The growth of strategic rationality throughout modernity, though undeniable and undeniably dangerous, is counterbalanced, in Habermas’ view, by the increase in communicative rationality and the progressive rationalization of the lifeworld, which provides the normative grounding for a reasoned critique of power.
Hence, the centerpiece of Habermas’ criticism of Horkheimer and Adorno’s text is his accusation that its authors are ‘insensitive to the highly ambivalent content of cultural and social modernity’ (1987: 338, emphasis in original). However, to the extent that the normative force of Habermasian critical theory is dependent upon an overly sharp distinction between (communicative) reason and (strategic) power, many of Habermas’ critics have wondered whether he is any more successful in theorizing this ambivalence. Indeed, in the contemporary theoretical and cultural moment, Habermas’ attempt to insulate communicative reason from the effects of strategic power relations, his reliance on the notion of the unforced force of the better argument, and the idealizing presuppositions of discourse that underwrite these ideas have become increasingly difficult to defend (see Kompridis 2005: 299). A central worry is that the attempt to insulate communicative reason and its idealizing presuppositions from the impact of power relations feels like a power play (Butler 1995: 39). 6 The attempt to ground the normativity of critical theory in a progressivist understanding of modernity as the outcome of a learning process only deepens this worry.
In an effort to steer clear of what he saw as the normative, philosophical and political dead-end of Dialectic of Enlightenment, a dead-end that resulted from Horkheimer and Adorno’s reduction of reason and normative validity to power relations, Habermas seems to have overcorrected by trying to insulate communicative reason from relations of (strategic) power. For now, rather than dwelling further on the problems associated with this move, I would like to consider instead whether Habermas was right in viewing the path opened up for critical theory by Dialectic of Enlightenment as a dead-end in the first place. What if, contra Habermas, Dialectic of Enlightenment is not a dead-end at all, but instead charts the way forward for critical theory? What if the future of critical theory depends on its ability to recover the insights into the conceptual and historical dialectic of reason and power that are found in this text? Any attempt to take stock of what was gained and what was lost in critical theory’s transition to a Habermasian paradigm – in the interest of staking out an alternative, post-Habermasian future path for critical theory (see Kompridis 2006) – would do well to reflect on these questions.
The key to seeing the continuing importance of Dialectic of Enlightenment for contemporary critical theory turns, I suggest, on how we understand the term ‘dialectic’, and on the double meaning of the very idea of a dialectic of enlightenment. Properly understood, I argue, Horkheimer and Adorno’s notion of the dialectic of enlightenment can provide us with a framework for thinking through the ambivalent entanglement of reason and power in human social life but commits us neither to a negative philosophy of history nor to a problematic reduction of reason to domination. My main concern in what follows is to argue for this claim, through a reading of the text itself and a critical discussion of the readings of Horkheimer and Adorno’s project offered by Habermas and other critical theorists. Finally, by way of a conclusion, I will say a few words about what contemporary critical theory stands to gain with respect to its engagement with postcolonial theory by following the path opened up by Dialectic of Enlightenment rather than the Habermasian alternative.
The dialectic of Dialectic of Enlightenment
The Dialectic of Enlightenment opens with a thunderbolt: ‘Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity’ (2002: 1). The source of the fascist and totalitarian regression to barbarism that Horkheimer and Adorno witnessed as they wrote is not merely the concrete historical or institutional forms to which enlightenment thinking has given rise, it appears to be enlightenment thinking or rationality itself, which is described as ‘corrosive’ and ‘totalitarian’ (2002: 4). The key to this shocking claim lies in Horkheimer and Adorno’s understanding of the term ‘enlightenment’. It refers not – at least not exclusively and not even primarily – to the historical epoch of European Enlightenment that began in France and flowered in Germany in the 18th century but rather to a more general process of progressive rationalization that enables human beings to exercise greater and greater power over nature, over other human beings, and over themselves. It is the latter meaning of enlightenment that allows Horkheimer and Adorno to link enlightenment rationality with a will to mastery, control, and the domination of inner and outer nature; this will to mastery comes to fruition in the historical period known as the Enlightenment, but it does not originate there.
To be sure, Horkheimer and Adorno also hold out some hope for a positive conception of enlightenment. For instance, in the preface, they maintain that the aim of the book is to enlighten enlightenment about itself by unmasking its self-destructive tendencies. In this context, they readily acknowledge that ‘freedom in society is inseparable from enlightenment thinking’ (2002: xvi). And yet, they continue, ‘the very concept of that thinking … already contains the germ of the regression which is taking place everywhere today’ (2002: xvi). Enlightenment must reflect on this ‘regressive moment’ lest it ‘seal its own fate’ and descend completely into barbarism (2002: xvi). Through an analysis of the intertwinement of enlightenment rationality and a social reality permeated with relations of oppression and domination, Horkheimer and Adorno maintain that they aim to ‘prepare a positive concept of enlightenment which liberates it from its entanglement in blind domination’ (2002: xviii).
Admittedly, however, the text focuses much more on the historical process whereby enlightenment reverts to barbarism and much less on the articulation of the positive concept of enlightenment to which Horkheimer and Adorno refer in their preface. The text offers only a few glimpses of this positive concept of enlightenment, and even those emerge more or less indirectly. One such indirect glimpse comes in the excursus on ‘Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality’, where Horkheimer and Adorno argue that the ‘dark writers of the bourgeoisie’ such as Sade and Nietzsche expose the inherent amorality of the enlightenment. Unlike the apologists for the bourgeoisie, Sade and Nietzsche did not shy away from the consummation of enlightenment in immoralism. ‘While the light-bringing writers protected the indissoluble alliance of reason and atrocity, bourgeois society and power, by denying that alliance’, Horkheimer and Adorno write, ‘the bearers of darker messages pitilessly expressed the shocking truth’ (2002: 92). In their proclamation of ‘the identity of power and reason, their pitiless doctrines are more compassionate than those of the moral lackeys of the bourgeoisie’ (2002: 93).
This last passage is ambiguous (perhaps intentionally so), but it suggests that by proclaiming the identity of power and reason, Nietzsche and Sade hold up a mirror to enlightenment that enables enlightenment to reflect on its own regressive tendencies and thus ‘opens to view what lies beyond it’ (2002: 92). This further suggests that their own position is not that power and reason are identical. It is true that this is what Sade and Nietzsche proclaim, but they do so not as enemies of the Enlightenment, but rather in the service of its rescue. Moreover, the ‘light-bringing writers’, the ‘apologists’ for the Enlightenment and the bourgeoisie, who deny the alliance between reason and power by espousing ‘harmonistic doctrines’, in so doing unwittingly reinforce that alliance (2002: 92). Thus, the holding up of a mirror to enlightenment so that it can become aware of its regressive tendencies goes together with the relatively hopeful note on which the book ends: ‘Enlightenment itself, having mastered itself and assumed its own power, could break through the limits of enlightenment’ (2002: 172). The possibility of breaking through the limits of enlightenment is rooted in a form of open-ended ‘reflection’ that is exemplified by (though perhaps not limited to) aesthetic mimesis.
This dialectical relationship between the negative, totalitarian, regressive, barbaric, amoral aspects of enlightenment and its positive, reflective, and liberatory aspects, between enlightenment as domination and enlightenment as the capacity for rational self-reflection, is the philosophical core of the book, and it has often been misunderstood by critics and commentators. One can find two different lines of interpretation in the critical theory literature on this text, both of which rely on what seems to me to be a mistaken, we might even say undialectical, understanding of how the term ‘dialectic’ functions in Dialectic of Enlightenment.
The first, and simplest, interpretation sees the project of Dialectic of Enlightenment as wholly negative, as aiming at a total unmasking of enlightenment rationality and a reduction of rationality to totalitarian domination. On this reading, the book and its authors are totally pessimistic about the prospects for progressive change in contemporary late-capitalist societies, and their pessimism results in a political quietism that later degenerates into conservatism in the face of the rise of the new social movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s. 7 Sophisticated versions of this line of interpretation acknowledge that Dialectic of Enlightenment taken by itself is entirely negative in the sense that it equates instrumental rationality with domination, but that this negative project is not incompatible with, indeed must be understood as implicitly in conversation with, a positive concept of rationality, where that positive concept is filled in by Habermas’ notion of communicative rationality. For example, Hauke Brunkhorst (2000) maintains that Horkheimer and Adorno’s call for the self-reflection of enlightenment makes no sense if rationality is equated with instrumental rationality. 8 Implicit here must be some appeal to an alternative notion of rationality, one that contains a ‘moment internal to all rationality that differs from domination’; this is precisely, according to Brunkhorst, the concept of communicative or dialogical rationality (2000: 138). Alas, Horkheimer and Adorno never developed the notion of communicative rationality implied by their understanding of the self-reflection of enlightenment. On this view, this shortcoming can be overcome, however, by embracing Habermas’ more differentiated conception of rationality.
A serious challenge for this first line of interpretation is that although Horkheimer and Adorno often talk about enlightenment rationality in purposive or instrumental terms, there are also passages in Dialectic of Enlightenment where their critique of enlightenment seems much more general than this. At such moments, their trenchant critique of enlightenment reason seems to apply equally to instrumental and communicative rationality. For example, in the opening chapter, ‘The Concept of Enlightenment’, which serves as the theoretical framework for the rest of the text, Horkheimer and Adorno write: ‘the entire logical order, with its chains of inference and dependence, the superordination and coordination of concepts, is founded on the corresponding conditions in social reality, that is, on the division of labor … Power confronts the individual as the universal, as the reason which informs reality’ (2002: 16). This more global critique of reason is echoed in the opening pages of the excursus on Juliette, where reason or discursive logic is once again presented as an inherently hierarchical power relationship. Thinking, as understood by the Enlightenment, is the process of establishing a unified, scientific order and of deriving factual knowledge from principles, whether these principles are interpreted as arbitrarily posited axioms, innate ideas, or the highest abstractions. The laws of logic establish the most universal relationships within the order and define them. Unity lies in self-consistency. The principle of contradiction is the system in nuce. (2002: 63)
Though this passage starts out talking about the role that a certain conception of science and the mathematization of nature plays in the Enlightenment, understood as a specific historical epoch – hence it starts out looking like a claim about a narrowly instrumental conception of rationality – it quickly moves to general claims about the laws of logic as such. The general, hierarchical nature of conceptual thinking, the laws of logic, and in particular the law of non-contradiction are all implicated here as key parts of enlightenment in the broad sense, and all of these are preserved in the notion of communicative reason.
The recognition of this point motivates the second line of interpretation, according to which the account of the relationship between reason and power in Dialectic of Enlightenment is so negative, so pessimistic and so dark that it is incompatible with any and all positive conceptions of enlightenment or rationality, including the communicative one. As Albrecht Wellmer puts this point, ‘since Horkheimer and Adorno … see conceptual thinking – geared to domination and self-preservation – as the ultimate root of the perversions of modernity, they cannot even trust that the idea of an unperverted rationality could be kept alive in the sphere of discursive thinking’ (1983: 93). This, according to Wellmer, leaves Horkheimer and Adorno in the ‘desperate position’ of trying to ‘defend an idea of reason which, strictly speaking, [they] can no longer defend in the medium of discursive thought’ (1983: 93). This is why they must appeal to a radically utopian other of reason – represented by mimesis and art – as the only way out of the regression of enlightenment to barbarism traced in Dialectic of Enlightenment. As Wellmer sees it, this means that Horkheimer and Adorno are unable to resolve the Weberian paradox of rationalization – the paradox being the fact that ‘“rationalization” connotes emancipation and reification both at the same time’ (1983: 88) – and instead are left with a ‘radical’ and ‘abstract negation of the historically existing forms of rationality’ (1983: 95).
And yet, the assumption that the aim of Dialectic of Enlightenment is to resolve the paradox of rationalization should give us pause. It is indicative of a misunderstanding of how the term dialectic is being used in Dialectic of Enlightenment, a misunderstanding that is evident in both of the lines of interpretation that I just sketched. On the first line of interpretation, the problem with the Dialectic of Enlightenment is that it is not dialectical enough, or at least not in the right sort of way. The text offers us only one half of a dialectic; its sole focus is on the barbaric, totalitarian, and regressive tendencies of enlightenment. This negative picture of enlightenment cries out for dialectical reconciliation with its positive other, the content of which is supplied by Habermas’ notion of communicative rationality. On the second line, once again there is the implicit assumption that the dialectic laid out in Dialectic of Enlightenment is one in which the opposition or contradiction between reason – represented in modernity by the forces of (capitalist) economic, bureaucratic, and technical-scientific rationalization – and power – what Wellmer, glossing Weber, calls ‘an increasing imprisonment of modern man in dehumanized systems of a new kind’ (1983: 88) – can or should be resolved or reconciled at a higher level of dialectical complexity. However, Wellmer is not optimistic that this reconciliation can be accomplished simply by joining the critique of instrumental reason in Dialectic of Enlightenment to Habermas’ positive notion of communicative rationality. Rather, he suggests that the critical theory of Dialectic of Enlightenment leads to a theoretical impasse that can only be avoided with a change in ‘conceptual strategy’ of social theory, from the Horkheimer/Adorno strategy to the Habermas one (1983: 95). 9
The problem with both of these interpretations is that the dialectic of Dialectic of Enlightenment does not aim at reconciliation or resolution at all. Its aim is not to resolve the paradox of enlightenment – that enlightenment rationality is predicated on domination (of self and of others, particularly the others of reason) and that domination is predicated on rationalizing itself – but rather to articulate and illuminate that paradox and to think through its implications. At a conceptual level, the dialectic of enlightenment has the structure not of two opposing but incomplete conceptions that can be resolved with a more complex and internally differentiated concept but instead has the structure of an aporia.
10
Horkheimer and Adorno make this quite explicit in their preface, where they write: The aporia which faced us in our work thus proved to be the first matter we had to investigate: the self-destruction of enlightenment. We have no doubt – and herein lies our petitio principii – that freedom in society is inseparable from enlightenment thinking. We believe we have perceived with equal clarity, however, that the very concept of that thinking, no less than the concrete historical forms … with which it is intertwined, already contains the germ of the regression which is taking place everywhere today. (2002: xvi)
The talk of aporia here is related to their claim much later in the book (cited above) that the law of non-contradiction contains the system of enlightenment in nuce. As we all know, the law of non-contradiction states that a statement and its negation cannot both be true. In other words, according to the law of non-contradiction, the two statements ‘enlightenment rationality is freedom’ and ‘enlightenment rationality is domination (unfreedom)’ cannot both be true. But this is precisely the truth that Dialectic of Enlightenment strives to express, and it is a truth that can only be expressed through a fundamentally aporetically structured argument. In other words, the dialectic operative here is not the notion of dialectic that is implicitly or explicitly assumed by Horkheimer and Adorno’s critical theory critics – a basically Hegelian notion in which contradictions are reconciled through the articulation of more complex and internally differentiated concepts. Rather, Dialectic of Enlightenment employs an Adornian notion of dialectic where the dialectical contradiction is not to be resolved because there can be no reconciliation or resolution without remainder. As Adorno would later put the point in his introduction to Negative Dialectics: ‘The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy’ (1966: 5). 11
Unlike other critical theory critics of Dialectic of Enlightenment, Habermas seems at least to recognize the aporetic structure of the text (1984: 344, 366). 12 But his account of how Dialectic of Enlightenment ends up in aporia is curious. Habermas’ starting assumption is that the aim of the text is to reduce enlightenment rationality – and with it the normative validity claims that such rationality makes possible – to sheer power relations. As Habermas puts it, in Dialectic of Enlightenment ‘it is no longer possible to place hope in the liberating force of enlightenment’ (1987: 106); according to this text, ‘in cultural modernity, reason gets definitively stripped of its validity claim and assimilated to sheer power … power and validity claims enter into a turbid fusion’ (1987: 112); hence, Horkheimer and Adorno are guilty of a ‘naturalistic assimilation of validity claims to power claims and the destruction of our critical capacities’ (1987: 113). This is, in Habermas’ view, a massive oversimplification of the historical transition to modernity in the West and of the rational and normative potentials unleashed by that transition; hence Horkheimer and Adorno offer a one-sided and incomplete account of the dialectic of enlightenment in modernity (1987: 114).
Moreover, and this is the second assumption in Habermas’ reading, having turned against reason by assimilating it to power, the critique of Dialectic of Enlightenment becomes a total, abstract negation of enlightenment rationality. This is what leads to the self-undermining nature of the critique of Dialectic of Enlightenment. As Habermas puts it, ‘to be sure, this description of the self-destruction of the critical capacity is paradoxical, because in the moment of description it still has to make use of the critique that has been declared dead. It denounces the Enlightenment’s becoming totalitarian with its own tools’ (1987: 119). This leads the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment into the dreaded performative contradiction.
Habermas seems, in general, overly confident in the power of performative contradiction arguments. 13 That issue aside, however, it is interesting that Habermas seems to think that Horkheimer and Adorno have backed into this performative contradiction. Their aim, on Habermas’ view, was to conduct a totalizing critique, an abstract negation of enlightenment rationality, by showing it to be nothing more than sheer power. But if the aim of this totalizing critique is still that of enlightening (the reader), and if this critique is still put forward in a language of rational, conceptual thought, then it can only denounce enlightenment by making use of enlightenment’s tools. But this generates a performative contradiction between the content of Horkheimer and Adorno’s thought – enlightenment is totalitarian – and the enlightened – discursive, rational – way in which they express that content. As Habermas sees it, at this point, Horkheimer and Adorno just throw in the towel; rather than trying to find a way out of or a response to this performative contradiction, Horkheimer and Adorno just revel in it. They respond ‘by stirring up, holding open, and no longer wanting to overcome theoretically the performative contradiction inherent in an ideology critique that outstrips itself’ (1987: 127).
There are two problems with Habermas’ reading here. First, Habermas is wrong to suggest that Horkheimer and Adorno get unwittingly caught in this aporia by virtue of their attempt at a total critique of enlightenment rationality. Their aim is not a total critique or abstract negation of rationality, but rather an articulation of the paradoxical nature of enlightenment, its necessary entanglement with (which is not the same as reduction to) power and domination. Second, if there is a contradiction inherent in the conceptual structure of Dialectic of Enlightenment, it is not, or at least not only, a performative one. The contradiction between enlightenment as rationality and enlightenment as domination is first and foremost a substantive contradiction (and only indirectly performative), and the argument of Dialectic of Enlightenment is that it cannot be resolved, at least not without remainder, not without doing conceptual violence to one or the other of the poles of the dialectic.
Despite this misreading, Habermas does pose a significant challenge to the embrace of aporia advocated by Dialectic of Enlightenment. As he puts it, ‘anyone who abides in a paradox on the very spot once occupied by philosophy with its ultimate groundings is not just taking up an uncomfortable position; one can only hold that place if one makes it at least minimally plausible that there is no way out’ (1987: 128). Habermas, of course, thinks there is a way out and that he has found it, through the communicative turn. He takes the fact that Dialectic of Enlightenment gets mired in aporia as a sign that its authors are working in an exhausted philosophical paradigm, that of the philosophy of consciousness. As Habermas puts it, ‘the critique of instrumental reason, which remains bound to the conditions of the philosophy of the subject, denounces as a defect something that it cannot explain in its defectiveness because it lacks a conceptual framework sufficiently flexible to capture the integrity of what is destroyed through instrumental reason’ (1984: 389). For Habermas, Horkheimer and Adorno’s notion of mimesis gestures in the right direction, that is, toward a ‘relation between persons in which the one accommodates to the other, identifies with the other, empathizes with the other’ (1984: 390). But the account of mimesis in Dialectic of Enlightenment does not get at what Habermas calls the ‘rational core of mimetic achievements’, a core that can be explicated through the notion of communicative rationality (1984: 390).
Explicating the rational core of mimesis enables Habermas to reformulate the paradox of rationalization. As Wellmer notes, for Habermas, the ‘paradox of rationalization does not express an internal logic (or dialectic) of modern rationalization processes’; there is, for Habermas, strictly speaking ‘neither a paradox of rationalization nor a “dialectic of enlightenment”’ (1983: 99). Thus what Habermas attempts is not so much a resolution of the paradox of rationalization or of the dialectic of enlightenment as a dissolution of it. On Habermas’ view, there is no paradox internal to rationality or enlightenment per se; there is instead an ambiguous historical process of modernization, which consists on the system side of a growth in capitalist markets and bureaucratic administrations and on the lifeworld side of a progressive growth of communicative rationality and the postconventional ego structures that realize it. In other words, for Habermas, the paradox of rationalization is displaced from within the notion of enlightenment rationality itself and onto the opposition between a rationalized system governed by strategic imperatives and the communicatively rationalized lifeworld which that system increasingly threatens to penetrate. The latter provides the normative grounds for a critique of the power relations that are characteristic of the former.
But is Habermas correct in claiming that an attempt to articulate an internal tension or paradox to enlightenment or rationalization necessarily ends up mired in aporia, unable to ground its own critique? And does he really have a way out? Notice that implicit in this discussion are two very distinct ways of understanding the very idea of a dialectic of enlightenment. On the first reading, the connection between enlightenment and domination is a conceptual one, hence the reversion of enlightenment to domination is necessary and inescapable. This is essentially Habermas’ understanding of what Horkheimer and Adorno mean by the dialectic of enlightenment. This understanding leads to the worry that either there is no way out – and that Horkheimer and Adorno’s talk of a way out is either disingenuous or confused – or that if there is one it can only be found through a nostalgic return to a romanticized understanding of magic/mimesis, since this way of relating to nature alone escapes the inexorable and ineluctable dialectic of enlightenment that starts with myth.
On the second possible reading of this idea, the connection between the historical concepts and ideals of enlightenment and relations of domination of inner and outer nature is understood as a historically emergent, contingent phenomenon. Hence there is a way out – or, at least we could say that there is no reason to think that there is no way out – and that way out can be found through the development of a greater appreciation for the normative gains brought about by the transition to modernity, in particular the communicative resources generated in modern lifeworld structures. This is essentially Habermas’ position when he denies that there is a dialectic internal to enlightenment and translates that internal dialectic into the opposition between system and lifeworld.
What is interesting about the way that Horkheimer and Adorno understand the dialectic of enlightenment is the way in which they combine elements of these two understandings, and this combination helps to illuminate their persistent (if underdeveloped) faith in the positive concept of enlightenment, its relationship to freedom. Habermas is right that the dialectic of enlightenment is presented in conceptual terms – though, as I argued above, this conceptual aporia is not something that Horkheimer and Adorno back into unwittingly, in their attempt to offer a wholly negative, abstract negation of enlightenment rationality; rather the illumination of this conceptual aporia is one of the central aims of the text – for example, in the passage that I have already quoted from the preface: ‘the very concept of [enlightenment] thinking, no less than the concrete historical forms, the institutions of society with which it is intertwined, already contains the germ of the regression which is taking place everywhere today’ (2002: xvi). In this sense, Horkheimer and Adorno do posit an essential tension between enlightenment rationality in the broad sense and power relations understood as the control or domination of inner and outer nature. As I suggested above, this is the fundamental aporia that Horkheimer and Adorno are trying to illuminate, and this is the point of view from which Habermas’ assumption that the way out involves invoking a notion of communicative reason purified of its entanglements with power relations can be called into question.
And yet the particular historical unfolding of this entanglement that has led to the barbarism and totalitarianism of the 20th century need not be seen as historically necessary or inevitable. Indeed, Horkheimer and Adorno sharply criticize a philosophy of history that claims to know the telos of historical development. ‘With determinate negation’, they write, ‘Hegel gave prominence to an element which distinguishes enlightenment from the positivist decay to which he consigned it. However, by finally postulating the known result of the whole process of negation, totality in the system and in history, as the absolute, he violated the prohibition and himself succumbed to mythology’ (2002: 18). Notice that the prohibition here is not just on the positing of absolute knowing as the endpoint of the historical development of reason, but also on the positing of a known result to the endpoint of the dialectical process. Hence this criticism applies not only to positive philosophies of history of the Hegelian variety, but also to declinist readings of history that hold, negatively, to mirror-image epistemological and metaphysical assumptions about the directedness of history.
This suggests that Horkheimer and Adorno do not themselves subscribe to such a negative philosophy of history in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Rather, the particular path that has been taken by the dialectic of enlightenment in European modernity can be seen as the contingent historical result of the joining of forces of a modern technologically-oriented science, capitalism and the bourgeois morality that rationalizes it, and anti-Semitism. Although the concept of enlightenment in a broad sense is entangled with power relations – in that sense, it carries within itself the seed or the germ of its own regression, or represents the system in nuce – the particular way that this relationship has been worked out in the history of the West – in such a way that the potential for regression and domination that is present in the concept of enlightenment has grown and blossomed into full-fledged barbarism – can be seen as contingent. Within that contingent historical framework, ‘adaptation to the power of progress furthers the progress of power, constantly renewing the degenerations which prove successful progress, not failed progress, to be its own antithesis. The curse of irresistible progress is irresistible regression’ (2002: 28). Hence, on this view, as Brian O’Connor (2011) has noted with respect to Adorno’s philosophy of history, if progress is to be achievable this will only be possible once we have abandoned the narrative of progress.
The cause of enlightenment’s reversion to myth is ‘the fear of truth which petrifies enlightenment itself’ (2002: xvi). What is the truth that enlightenment fears? Precisely its entanglement with power relations. By holding up a mirror to this aspect of enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno hope not to disentangle reason and power once and for all, but rather to render reason self-aware of its inevitable entanglements with power; hence the positive concept of enlightenment will liberate us not from the entanglement with power per se, but rather with the ‘entanglement in blind domination’ (2002: xviii, emphasis added; see also 33). What would overcoming this blindness get us? It would enable us to see that ‘although humanity may be unable to interrupt its flight away from necessity and into progress and civilization without forfeiting knowledge itself, at least it no longer mistakes the ramparts it has constructed against necessity, the institutions and practices of domination which have always rebounded against society from the subjugation of nature, for guarantors of the coming freedom’ (2002: 32).
On this way of understanding the historical and conceptual dimensions of the dialectic of enlightenment, there are certain dangers that cannot be wholly purged from enlightenment rationality understood in the broadest sense – and this explains why the retreat to communicative reason does not really provide a way out, but instead offers a harmonistic doctrine that unwittingly preserves the association of power with reason by failing to acknowledge it – but this does not mean that enlightenment’s descent into fascist barbarism was inevitable. On this reading, then, Horkheimer and Adorno are not wedded to a negativistic philosophy of history nor does their invocation of the positive concept of enlightenment amount to a simple mistake or a confusion. On their understanding, the concept of enlightenment is not in itself barbaric or totalitarian; rather, it is deeply ambivalent, in the sense that it contains the potential to descend into barbarism and totalitarianism. But it contains other potentials as well, including the potential to reflect on its own regressive tendencies, to hold up a mirror to itself, and to break through its own limits. ‘What is at stake’, Horkheimer and Adorno write in the preface, ‘is not conservation of the past but the fulfillment of past hopes’ (2002: xvii). The historical story of the descent of enlightenment into barbarism is told in a thoroughly pitiless fashion because ‘only thought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myths’ (2002: 2). But through their lack of pity, Horkheimer and Adorno compassionately hold up a mirror to the particular historical configuration that enlightenment rationality has taken for us, thus opening up a view to what lies beyond it. ‘The spirit of such unyielding theory would be able to turn back from its goal even the spirit of pitiless progress’ (2002: 33).
The future of critical theory
By way of a conclusion, I will suggest why this discussion of Dialectic of Enlightenment matters at this point in the development of the project of critical theory. Why advocate a return to Dialectic of Enlightenment now, 65 years after it was written? Why think that this text offers us a productive way forward for critical theory?
I’ll close with one reason for thinking that it does. Consider once again the failure of critical theory to engage fully with the postcolonial critique of reason, which I discussed above. In the context of such debates, any attempt on the part of critical theorists to claim that reason is a universal human capacity pure of all entanglements with power relations on which the notion of cosmopolitan right can be grounded is likely to be met with charges of cultural imperialism. On the other hand, claiming that reason is not universal and that the claim that it is nothing more than an instance of imperial domination has an unintended consequence, namely that it forces the postcolonial subject into the position of the irrational Other. 14 Or perhaps more precisely, it forces the postcolonial subject to choose between subjection to the hegemonic power of Western reason and the position of the irrational Other. As I suggested above, appeals to a logic of development, modernization, and progress are of little help here, for such appeals simply displace this structure into a temporal dimension. There appears to be no way to reconcile this dialectic without doing conceptual (and perhaps real) violence to one side or the other. Progress will be made only when we give up the narrative of progress. Only a critical stance that acknowledges the irreconcilable dialectic of rationality and power in the history of the West can be equally appealing to the defender of modernity (who nonetheless acknowledges its role in rationalizing a great many evils) and to the postcolonial critic of modernity (who nonetheless adopts some of its self-reflexive modes). This is a matter, as Foucault once said, of continually asking ourselves: ‘How can we exist as rational beings, fortunately committed to practicing a rationality that is unfortunately crisscrossed by intrinsic dangers?’ (2000: 358). But only a critical stance that sees the particular way in which that dialectic has developed in the history of the West – as a descent into barbarism – as historically contingent rather than necessary will find it possible to make sense of the sense in which we are fortunate to be committed to this form of rationality. The trick is to be as mindful of the dangers of enlightenment rationality as we are of our commitment to it. In this respect, far from being a dead-end, Dialectic of Enlightenment shows us the way.