Page 79 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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64 Then
systematic application of reason to intellectual, material and social
problems, and which found its fullest expression in the physics of
Newton, the politics of revolutionary France and the American
constitution, and the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Given that its
science resulted in the Industrial Revolution and its politics in liberal
democracy, it is no exaggeration to say that the Enlightenment
constitutes the foundation of contemporary Western society. The
Enlightenment’s advocates believed that it was without a doubt a
major advance in human development – indeed the very notion of a
linear historical progress from barbarism to culture is part of its
legacy.
Adorno and Horkheimer’s assessment of the Enlightenment and its
consequences was somewhat different. It is encapsulated by Ben-
jamin’s famous dictum that there is ‘no document of civilisation that
is not at the same time a document of barbarity’ (1973: 258).
Similarly for Adorno there was ‘no universal history leads from
savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the
slingshot to the megaton bomb’ (Adorno 1992: 320). Reason is not
some inviolate faculty embedded in the human mind, to be excavated
from the slag of superstition, refined and applied to all human
affairs. Instead it is always intertwined with a history of domination.
Barbarity and reason are inextricably, or better dialectically, inter-
twined. Adorno and Horkheimer thus speak of ‘instrumental reason’
and the phrase ‘dialectic of enlightenment’ serves to offer an account
of its various stages. But what do Adorno and Horkheimer mean by
‘instrumental reason’? They argued that reason or, more generally,
the intellectual faculty of the human mind was first and foremost
utilitarian, its purpose to define, and so control, elements of the
organic life-world in which humankind finds itself. This was achieved
through identification, naming and thus objectifying the elements of
experience and imbuing them with stable properties. The imposition
of such stability where previously nature reigned involves substituting
the particular aspects of the world as it presents itself in each fresh
individual encounter, with a more controllable and manipulable
general conception. For example, a particular sunset with all its
individual properties and impressions is subsumed under the notion
of ‘sunset’. In this regard, thought, language and, consequently,
reason have their origin in a certain kind of violence, power and
domination carried out against the particular. All concepts involve
violence because they seized an entity and reduced its specificity, its
myriad difference, to an identity. To identify is to dominate and
Adorno and Horkheimer believed this entailed the sacrifice and
repression of the non-identical – those differences or particularities
that are not accommodated in the generic concept. Instrumental
reason renders objects and their concepts interchangeable.

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