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May 29, 2008
I've always struggled to grasp the argument is Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment. Though I've read it several times, I've never firmly grasped its argument about he assumptions of instrumental reason. Even though I understood that it was a philosophical critique of the positivist Enlightenment I never clicked into how the Freud psychoanalysis fitted into this critique.
What if this text can can be interpreted as a genealogy critique? This is what Roger Foster argues in Dialectic of Enlightenment as Genealogy Critique in Telos Summer 2001
He says:
Genealogy is a form of critique which uses historical analysis to undermine the ideological self-understanding of dominant thought structures. Historical analysis is employed to uncover needs and
interests central to the formation of thought systems, but forgotten or repressed when that system becomes dominant. Horkheimer and Adorno use genealogy to criticize a positivist variant of rational thinking that defines itself as rational thinking as such. Here cognition takes the form of a classification of facts within mathematized formulas, which serves productivity through increased control over natural processes. Horkheimer and Adorno understand positivism as the philosophical expression of that structure of knowledge concerned with the technically useful. By means of genealogy, they criticize the positivist version of the Enlightenment, and not reason as such. The purpose this critique is to uncover alternative possibilities of rational thinking, which are suppressed by the positivist definition of reason.
Foster says that Horkheimer and Adorno develop this genealogy critique by modifying the cultural anthropology deployed by Freud in Totem and Taboo. In this work, Freud constructs an interpretation of “primitive” thought organized around psychoanalytic categories. Animistic beliefs, Freud argues, derive from the cultural equivalent of that psychic process which, at the individual level, gives rise to obsessional neurosis. Foster says that:
Freud is thus able to dispense with the view of early ethnologists that animism is a result of intellectual error, and also with the Durkheimian view that animism represents a hypostatization of social forces. Horkheimer and Adorno modify Freud’s account by arguing that animism and mythic thought systems in general originate in a primordial fear of the unknown. The positivist Enlightenment can then be revealed by genealogy critique as a culturally sublimated expression of primordial fear. On this basis, they are able to uncover the contingent, non-rational origins of the restriction of thought to the technically useful.
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Excellent post. Very interesting. Fear, Im sure, motivates pretty much everything that is not motivated by desire - and maybe much of that which is too.