seen from Yemen
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seen from Japan
seen from United States
seen from Netherlands
seen from Netherlands
seen from United States
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The power of forgetfulness is great; it has grown and is still growing with the spread of communications. One novelty drives another from the limelight of press and radio, but the old continues to exert its influence in hidden and uncontrolled ways.
Max Horkheimer, Critique of Instrumental Reason, p. 121
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The gods cannot take fear away from man, for they bear its petrified sound with them as they bear their names.
Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944/1947)
Conservative popular opinion is like a merry-go-round featuring a recurring lineup of demonized people, ideas and shifting cultural values. Villains du jour include feminism, secular humanism, atheism, LGBT people, people with foreign accents, people who weren't born here, college professors, journalists - the list goes on and on.
The more inquisitive reactionaries look for historical precedents and intellectual genealogies. Satan is behind it all, according to the Bible-slapped. Some exalt the Middle Ages and trace what they hold to be the current decadence and malaise to modernity. Communism, elevated into a preternatural force that seeps into everything mostly unseen and with unnerving cunning, becomes the bête noire for others.
And then there's the Frankfurt School. The more I read of this school's original writers like Horkheimer, Adorno and their successors, the stronger becomes the conclusion that what drives such conspiratorial and unhinged opposition to these writers is at root an inability to handle philosophical skepticism and rational critique applied to everything - economics, culture, the family, gender roles, religion, art, music, literature, and so forth. The criticism of everything in sight is necessary if you're to live with both minimal illusion and the possibility of changing human realities. There exist, however, certain psychologies for whom open ended reason is a primal threat.
Despite how much conservative opinion I read, I still don't have a good handle on how widespread Frankfurt School conspiracism is on the right. In his last chapter of Splinters in Your Eye: Frankfurt School Provocations (2020), "Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as Scapegoat of the Lunatic Fringe," Martin Jay has the following eyebrow raising anecdote:
For more background on this rightist bogeyman check out the recent Acid Horizon podcast episode below:
The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West with A.J.A. Woods by Acid Horizon on
«Los hombres se han emancipado, pero del individuo depende demasiado poco para que las palabras que él habla, en cuanto esta persona singular determinada, puedan valerle para expresarse: sirven como instrumento, contraseña, arma. El nivel -tan frecuentemente debatido- de la industria del tiempo libre no caracteriza la situación: es discutible si una película detectivesca o Rigoletto, en la pantalla de la televisión, ejercen un efecto beneficioso, y es de temer que pronto se requieran estimulantes más fuertes; lo que la caracteriza es el mutismo de los individuos singulares.»
Max Horkheimer: «La filosofía como crítica de la cultura», en La función de las ideologías. Taurus Ediciones, pág. 50. Madrid, 1966.
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Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton
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The ruthless unity in the culture industry is evidence of what will happen in politics. Marked differentiations such as those of A and B films, or of stories in magazines in different price ranges, depend not so much on subject matter as on classifying, organising, and labelling consumers. Something is provided for all so that none may escape; the distinctions are emphasised and extended. The public is catered for with a hierarchical range of mass-produced products of varying quality, thus advancing the rule of complete quantification. Everybody must behave (as if spontaneously) in accordance with his previously determined and indexed level, and choose the category of mass product turned out for his type. Consumers appear as statistics on research organisation charts, and are divided by income groups into red, green, and blue areas; the technique is that used for any type of propaganda. How formalised the procedure is can be seen when the mechanically differentiated products prove to be all alike in the end. That the difference between the Chrysler range and General Motors products is basically illusory strikes every child with a keen interest in varieties. What connoisseurs discuss as good or bad points serve only to perpetuate the semblance of competition and range of choice. The same applies to the Warner Brothers and Metro Goldwyn Mayer productions. But even the differences between the more expensive and cheaper models put out by the same firm steadily diminish: for automobiles, there are such differences as the number of cylinders, cubic capacity, details of patented gadgets; and for films there are the number of stars, the extravagant use of technology, labor, and equipment, and the introduction of the latest psychological formulas. The universal criterion of merit is the amount of “conspicuous production,” of blatant cash investment. The varying budgets in the culture industry do not bear the slightest relation to factual values, to the meaning of the products themselves.
Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, The Culture Industry: Mass Enlightenment as Deception (1944)
The "Dialectic of Enlightenment", written by Marx Horkheimer (1895 - 1973) and Theodor W. Adorno (1903 - 1969) and first published by Querido in Amsterdam in 1947, is one of the most important texts of 20th century critical theory. Philosophical criticism, an examination of fascism and the results of many years of empirical research in the USA merge here to form a theory of mass culture that is still astonishingly relevant 75 years later. The authors and scholars of the Frankfurt School draw attention to the flipside of technical and social progress: Enlightenment as the rule of reason and the subjugation of nature for human purposes.
"Dialectic of Enlightenment" was written during World War II, a time of immense social and political upheaval. The authors aimed to understand how the Enlightenment, which was supposed to bring about reason, freedom, and progress, had instead led to new forms of domination, totalitarianism, and barbarism.
The central thesis is that the Enlightenment, while aiming to liberate humanity from myth and superstition through reason, has paradoxically resulted in new forms of oppression and unfreedom. This dialectical process means that progress and regression are intertwined. The authors propose that myth and Enlightenment are not opposites but rather interconnected. The Enlightenment's attempt to demystify the world has resulted in a new form of myth, where science and technology are worshipped without critical reflection, leading to a new form of domination.
Horkheimer and Adorno's work is a powerful critique of modernity and a call to rethink the promises and pitfalls of the Enlightenment.
„Die Schande dieser Ordnung liegt nicht darin, dass es einigen besser, sondern dass es vielen schlecht geht, obgleich es allen gut gehen könnte. Nicht dass es Reiche, sondern dass es angesichts der menschlichen Fähigkeiten heute Arme gibt, spricht ihr das Urteil. Das zwingt zur Vergiftung des allgemeinen Bewusstseins durch die Lüge und treibt diese Ordnung zum Untergang.“ Max Horkheimer: Dämmerung
