Learning from the Power of Things: Labour, Civilization and Emancipation in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This article proposes a novel reading of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s emblematic book Dialectic of Enlightenment(1947). Horkheimer and Adorno took as their starting point the observation that modern liberal, human and social progress has tipped over into a new form of barbarism but explicitly refused to develop it into a rejection of the enlightenment and its values as such.
Instead, the dialectical view seeks even in the darkest moment of the failure of civilization, which is here epitomized in the Holocaust, reasons to defend a self-reflective, more enlightened form of human civilization. The dialectical theory does not reject but rearticulates the idea of progress that remains central to most forms of liberal and socialist theory. One of the central questions is, under what conditions do the instruments of enlightenment and civilization, including scientific and technological rationality, social organisation and general productivity, serve either emancipation or barbarism. Warding off the positivistic attack on any form of metaphysics and utopian thinking, Horkheimer and Adorno emphasised the need for enlightenment to be based on non-empiricist, reality-transcending, critical thinking in order to be in the service of emanci- pation rather than domination. The human mind atrophies when deprived of its freedom of movement. The more abstract, philosophical argument of Dialectic of Enlightenment is developed through several more historically specific materials, one of which is the interpretation of modern antisemitism. Horkheimer and Adorno combine in this context a Marxist analysis of aspects of continuity between liberal and fascist governance, based on the concepts of the commodity-form and the wage-form of modern social relations, with an anthropological interpretation of pogroms and genocide as ‘rituals of civilization’. Civilization aims at the liberation of human life from labour but does so by way of organizing and intensifying labour, discipline and identity, generating resentment as well as streamlining and destroying thought.
Civilization thus produces furious anger both at those deemed to represent more ‘primitive’ levels of civilization and at those perceived as driving it.
Nevertheless, Horkheimer and Adorno argue that enlightenment itself produces the means to overcome its own entrapment. The ‘forces and things’ it produces serve domination but also encourage humans to overcome domination: the reification of the means of domination – knowledge, in particular – mediates, moderates and potentially democratizes power.

참고문헌 (Reference)

1 Shakespeare, William, "Venus and Adonis"

2 Lukács, Georg, "The Theory of the Novel" MIT Press 1971

3 Horkheimer, Max, "Gesammelte Schriften Band 5: Dialektik der Aufklärung und Schriften 1940-1950. Herausgegeben von Gunzelin Schmid Noerr" Fischer 11-290, 1987

4 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, "Faust. Der Tragödie erster und zweiter Teil" Kröner

5 Keats, John, "Brief an John Hamilton Reynolds"

6 Keats, John, "Brief an Haydon"

7 Stoetzler, Marcel, "Antisemitism and the Constitution of Sociology" University of Nebraska Press 2014

8 Stoetzler, Marcel, "Antisemitism and the Constitution of Sociology" University of Nebraska Press 66-89, 2014

9 Bonacich, Edna, "A theory of middleman minorities" 38 : 583-594, 1973