Talking about some thinkers who were known as the founders of critical theory.

The the original Frankfurt School philosophers who wind up immigrating from

Germany during the Nazi period. And some working in the United States New

York, California, elsewhere. and we will be looking today at a brief

text. Brief but as you know, if you've tried to

read it dense text from Horkheimer and Adorno, and then we'll go on to the next

generation really, of critical thinkers, sometimes associated with even with

deconstruction. We'll talk about that next time with

Michel Foucault. So, we're moving quickly toward the

present of the Horkheimer and the Adorno's text was published in in 1947.

but Foucault is doing his most important work in the 1960s and in beyond.

So we're, we're getting closer to the present.

And some of the issues that they're talking about will be, I think, much more

obviously relevant to the contemporary stage than, perhaps than were some of the

issues talked about from our 18th and 19th century thinkers.

Horkheimer and Adorno and Foucault this week.

I, I, I entitled this week on the syllabus, Getting out of Totality.

Getting out of Totality and I thought. Maybe I should begin with a word about

why I've used that, that header that, that title.

at getting out of totality refers to the ways in which Horkheimer and Adorno, and

the thinkers associated with their school saw a system of enlightenment that had

become ever tighter in its organization. More global in it's reach, and more

powerful in it's sort of ability, in it's ability to control people.

They saw this really nefarious globalization as a product of the

enlightenment. They saw modernity and enlightenment

joining hands to create a new universal myth.

That entrapped us with its appeal while controlling us and diminishing our

freedom at every step. Foucault had a different take on some of

those same issues, but he too saw the growth of a kind of global accumulation

of power. A global accumulation of power from which

it is increasingly difficult to escape. And even, one can say, that the attempts

to escape that power fed the oppressive power itself.

And and, and that really is the theme of, of these thinkers.

That there, that, ironically, if I could put it that way, ironically are attempts

at liberation, wind up being steps in our own oppression.

Our attempts in liberation wind up being steps in our own oppression.

I, I, I want to just start off by, by situating Foucault in relation to some of

the other theorists you've been hearing about and philosophical tradition you

know about. and and that for me is to, is to

emphasize that Foucault is a Nietzschean thinker.

and Nietzsche was for Foucault an important instrument for getting out of

historicism. and getting out of a mode of thinking

that the generation before his had developed as an extension of Hegelian

Marxist. The age we thinkers who really emphasized

they had a formation of the self was deeply formed by or conditioned by

temporal dimensions. And that by understanding temporal

dimensions, one had a confrontation either with politics or with

authenticity, with freedom, or with struggle.

that was the generation that preceded Foucault's.

So, Horkheimer and Adorno writing in the Nazi period what problem are they trying

to address? What issue are they trying to explain?

they come out of the Hegelian Marxist tradition.

That is one where the, the path of reason, the path of the master-slave

dialectic, which we spoke about early on in the semester.

accelerates becomes evermore prominent. But Horkheimer and Adorno the, the, the

dialectic that Marx saw as the engine of eventual freedom, the dialectic actually

accelerates our oppression. How so?

well, before we get to the solution or the, the mechanism, I just want to say

one more word about the problem they see. Remember, Marx in the Communist Manifest

that talked about how the accumulation of wealth would also result in the

accumulation of of the power of the proletariat.

The power of the lower classes to free themselves from the tyranny of capitalist

wealth accumulation. According to Marx and Engels, as we

became as the proletariat became more aware of it's oppression, they would turn

against the system that created that oppression.

What Adorno and Horkheimer are trying to understand is how, when the oppression

gets even more visible, as it does with the growth of fascism.

How when the oppression gets even more visible, masses of people don't rebel

against the oppression. In other words, they're trying to

understand the attractions of fascism and Nazism.

They're trying to understand why the working classes don't rebel against their

owners of capital. Why they don't rebel against the massive

corporations or the political parties that feed them.

Horkheimer and Adorno are trying to understand why we participate in our own

control or oppression. Why we give power to the things that turn

us into less free and less capable human beings.

they are interested in the persistence of domination despite the possibilities for

freedom. And they, they traced this problem, the

persistence of domination, back to the enlightenment.

As you see in the first sentence of the reading for this week they identify

enlightenment as the problem. And I'll just remind you of that

sentence, I'll read it to you now. Enlightenment, enlightenment, understood

in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating

human beings from fear. And I've highlighted that in my, it's

like, liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters.

Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity.

Enlightenment's program was the disenchantment of the world.

I want to just focus on a couple of pieces of that text.

I'll leave biographies of the thinkers and things like that for you to find on

yourself, your, your computers. But I want to focus on the text here of

Horkheimer and Adorno. Enlightenment focused on the liberating

human beings from fear and installing them as masters.

Remember that master slave dialectic is being echoed here.

Liberating human beings from fear. But, in fact, what happens in

enlightenment is they create conditions for a new kind of fear.

And then this sentence, the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with

triumphant calamity. It's a great phrase.

That is in the very triumph of technology of progress of industry of global global

reach of, of our of our tools, we have created the conditions for calamity.

and you can see this in, Horkheimer and Adorno see this in Nazism.

They see this in the weapons of mass destruction, we point today to the, the

environmental degradation or other global warming or other forms of calamity,

triumphant calamity. Calamity that is a result of the very

progress that we have been so proud of. for Adorno and Horkheimer, enlightenment

is a myth. Enlightenment starts out as a way of

getting rid of myth, remember? Voltaire says, you must squash all the,

this, the nonsense, the infamy get rid of it.

Adorno and Horkheimer's enlightenment's program,becomes so self-fulfilling,

self-justifying.It is itself a myth, and a myth that works against human beings

and comes to dominate us. Domination is a key term Horkheimer and

Adorno, and I I want you to think about what they mean by that.

This is really just from the second page of the reading they link technology and

domination. Here's what they say.

Technology is the essence of this knowledge.

That is enlightenment knowledge. It aims to produce neither concepts nor

images, nor the the joy of understanding, but method, exploitation of the labor of

others. What human beings, they write, seek to

learn from human nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human,

other human beings. Nothing else counts.

This is a phrase that they could've said again and again.

Nothing else counts. For Horkheimer and Adorno, knowledge

comes to mean domination of the world. It sets up the knower in a position to

dominate other things. And as knowledge gets equated with

domination, all other forms of understanding are pushed aside.

Hence, one of the roots of, of the, the problem, the problem of how our, our

methods of understanding come to actually oppress us.

What they see in this process is that quantification comes to be the only

framework for, that counts as knowledge. In other words in the 19th century, you

might have narrative. You might have philosophical explanation.

You might have other modes of qualitative experiments or qualitative investigation.

Counting is knowledge. by the middle of the 20th century,

Horkheimer and Adorno say that the only thing that really counts is knowledge.

The only thing that really will count as science is knowledge that can be

quantified, knowledge that results in the domination of the object studied.

That's key for them. That we, we come to think understanding

is grasping and dominating something. and this doubles back against us.

It's doubled back against us because it sets up the knower, what they call the

subject on pages five and six of the text.

It sets up the knower as the, as an agent who shows his or her power.

And it's usually a him, a man, shows his or her power through control of others.

Here is Horkheimer and Adorno man's likeness to God consists in sovereignty

over existence, in lordly gaze, in the command.

So, what they're trying to show here is that enlightenment pictures the human

being in his or her full capacity as someone who comes to dominate the world

through understanding. But like the master in the master-slave

dialectic, when you come to dominate the world, you actually destroy the

conditions of your own understanding.