Page 81 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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66 Then
allow their unchecked spread beyond a particular locale – unlike
such contemporary manifestations of the falsely abstract culture
industry as the global reach of the fast-food/coffee-shop franchise. It
is only with the rise of the falsely abstract dominance of the general
over the particular that humanity begins to fully see the enormous
power, and cost, of identity thinking – a fate we shall see Marshall
McLuhan discuss in terms of autoamputation: with every media-
enabled physical gain comes a concomitant psychic loss. The emer-
gence of universal concepts represents a new stage in the relation
between the thought and the world, if mythology aspired to provide
a totalizing account it was compromised by the fact that it still
represented that which was essentially unknowable; it was an index
of all that was unknown. The universal concept in its first stages
offered a more detailed account of this unknown (that is, the world
of nature and the primordial fear it inspired). Nevertheless, it still
dealt in abstractions, in vague totalizations. With the advent of the
Enlightenment this situation is irrevocably altered. Reason is no
longer the manipulation of universal concepts, but the concept of
the rationality of all. Enlightenment believes that everything is
ultimately accessible to reason: ‘enlightenment is as totalitarian as
any system … In the anticipatory identification of the wholly con-
ceived and mathematized world with truth, enlightenment intends to
secure itself against the return of the mythic. It confounds thought
and mathematics. In this way the latter is … made into an absolute
instance’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997: 25).
What distinguishes the (necessarily) false totality of Enlightenment
reason and its precursors, is the unprecedented command of the
material world it presents; it does not merely cast a veil over a
fearful unknown, but renders it pliable. However, the conceptual,
and hence material, mastery of the external world that accompanies
instrumental reason comes at a cost:
Human beings purchase the increase in their power with
estrangement from that over which it is exerted. Enlightenment
stands in the same relationship to things as the dictator to
human beings. He knows them to the extent that he can
manipulate them. The man of science knows things to the
extent that he can manipulate them. Their ‘in-itself’ becomes
‘for him’.
(Adorno and Horkheimer 2002: 6)
The unchecked spread of instrumental reason dissolves the potential
of Enlightenment itself and raises in its place a pure calculability
that we see later manifested in the formulaic nature of Banality TV
and Kracauer’s previously cited notion that: ‘Ratio is complete only
when it removes its mask and hurls itself into the void of random
abstractions that no longer mimic higher determinations, and when

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