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dialectic-read-along · 2 years

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Some thoughts on how this book fits into the information age

I'm not even sure where to begin with this, so this is going to read like an incredibly pretentious "we live in a society" kind of rant. Dialectic of Enlightenment is an old book. I put this project on pause because I've been busy, and have a horrifically short attention span, but I've been slowly going through the first chapter, skimming the rest, going back to where I left off, and putting it down because something feels unaddressed inside me that I have to recognize every time I pick it back up. I'm not only in a different time period than the writers were in when they were saying a lot of poignant things about how the enlightenment functions in the grand scheme of society and what it was built on, etc., I'm also not nearly well read enough to understand what they're referencing, or even in some cases mentally equipped to know what they're saying. Furthermore, I still have one foot in the institutions and mentality of those "enlightened" individuals who believe that the world should or can only be improved through science and technology. I feel like this is what I'm really wrestling with. I love science, but I hate the culture surrounding it, and the various complicated feelings I have about STEM culture TODAY is what prompted me to do a deep dive into this book.

I can look at Elon Musk (the concept his fans have of him anyway), Viktor as the Machine Herald (I'm hyperfixated on LoL lore now, get into it), or any other archetypal transhumanist tech savior that may appear in news or fiction and cringe as I recognize that their approach to solving humanity's problems is fundamentally flawed, but I'm only scratching the surface as to why, I think. The main thing that I come up with when I'm trying to pinpoint why these characters unsettle me is that they overlook social solutions because, to them, there is no power more effective than technology at equalizing people, not even power that is inherent to people. I'm not the first person to point this out, I know, I watch a lot of leftist youtubers and I regurgitate their points, but, y'know. To these characters, humanity is fundamentally flawed and there is nothing essentially human that could save us from ourselves. There's a lot to unpack in that idea, and the Dialectic does a great job at getting into the many beliefs that sort of build the foundation of it, Bacon's idea of science being an equalizer for one, but it's hard to say whether they are inherent to the foundation of enlightenment or just sort of occur with it for some other reason (Bacon's clearly is, but others seem incidental at times). I feel like if we were to look at the mentality of an enlightened individual in this time period, The Age of Information, operating within the free market economy of the 21st century, the concurrent beliefs that form the full picture of the kind of person I'm describing would be very different. And I want to know why (besides just the obvious "it's a different world now").

I think what really bothers me is how this sort of libertarian transhumanist mentality really diverged from minimizing the role of man as an objective observer, a catalyst of the almighty Idea (or even the dominator of nature), to a fundamentally flawed subjective animal that must enhance itself through the Power Of The Idea in order to carry out the supreme and objective organizational structure of this Idea and impose it on humanity. It's not that I don't think the scientist is subjective, it's that it bothers me that that's seen as an aberration by the scientist rather than a feature of the "objective platonic form" or whatever that governs their work. I know this sounds like an appeal to nature, that bothers me as well. I think the sentiment that that observation (and unhappy judgement of that particular fallacy) is based on is where I still agree with the contemporary enlightened man. It's not that we were never meant to deviate from nature, I still don't believe that, but it's that, in our attempts to become better tools through which nature is observed and enacted, we are punishing ourselves for being subject to the aspects of it we don't understand or can't control or can't see as a part of a perfectly organized nature. How this differs from the ideas posed in the Dialectic, I'm not sure, maybe it doesn't.

I guess I don't see the enlightened man as a borderline sadistic domineering patriarch, but as a sad, self flagellating man who couldn't live up to his father's expectations. The Dialectic too sees the enlightenment as self destructive, but I think for different reasons. From what I can tell so far, the Dialectic sees the enlightenment as consistently destroying previously held ideas, whether they come from mythology/superstition or from the processes of science, but from what I can tell, today, it's enlightened *people* destroying themselves through the devaluation of the role of the "magician" scientist (to borrow a term from the first chapter). The scientist who sees themselves as a human being temporarily embodying the role of the observer or the inventor rather than permanently being the perfect tool and avatar of order and Idea. The ability to put on and take off the mask of the scientist is the both the flaw and the POWER of a human being who sees some merit in scientific advancement. Today's enlightened man can't handle that, and maybe the enlightened man of Horkheimer and Adorno's time couldn't either, but I feel like I didn't see that idea handled as much as I would have liked to in what I've read of the Dialectic so far. Maybe I just didn't understand it, there was A LOT of that book so far that went completely over my head. It seems like the ego of the enlightened man of their time that allowed him to see himself as a conqueror of nature wasn't fulfilled through satisfying social change brought about by science and now today's enlightened men are punishing themselves for the failure to meet the standard of the pure rationalist that supposedly could have brought this much needed change about. The failure to recognize the beneficial power of subjectivity, both within oneself and in society, is where the punishment and self negation really happens. This is what creates the libertarian transhumanist I think.

Capitalism is one of the main driving forces that I personally see creating this new enlightened doomer, but I want to talk about the internet/information. The idea that something Is or it Is Not isn't a new one in the history of enlightenment thinking, or even in the history of human thought (we can think in pretty fucking black and white terms just as people it seems, just look at the first instances of dualistic religions), but when it comes to identity or function, I think the information age really amplified this. We tend to see ourselves differently when we interact virtually than we do when we're in public and this isn't just because we're upholding social media personas, though that is part of this whole picture don't get me wrong. I mean on like a deep psychological level and even, obviously, a physiological level we are not interacting with the world virtually as we would in person.

I've had dreams after a few too many weeks of 5+ hours of daily screentime where the world around me changes as though I've passed in or out of a screen. After I've physically interacted with people and objects in one dream space, the corners of the world close in around me and suddenly I'm sitting in another room, looking in at the space I've just left being represented on my laptop or the phone I'm holding in my hands. I can't overemphasize just how seamless these transitions from physical to virtual are. The point I think I'm getting to here is that I will tend to view the physical world as though it's something I could or should be able to interact with virtually and this includes my own body and to an extent the information I interact with in my own mind. I've gotten accustomed to near total control over the flow of information in whatever space I see myself as occupying in that moment. Without contradicting my point about seeing ourselves differently in virtual spaces than how we do in public ones, I'm going to try and posit that this distinction is getting harder and harder to *comfortably* hold in mind. Today our black and white thinking doesn't really account for whether we Are or Are Not online, rather we've gone back to simply recognizing whether we Are or Are Not and absorbed the features of the virtual world as features of that being to one degree or another. Basically we're at odds with our own physicality and lack of control of our own internal and external environments as much as we are at odds with our own being. This isn't really a new thing, but the character of this cognitive dissonance in the information age is unique I think.

All of this is to say if we can't control how much of a more perfectly organized natural design we can observe or create, we take it more personally since we have been able to control more and more of what we interact with on a daily basis through virtualization. This control is part of our psyches. So much so that when we can't perfectly engineer the flow of our own thoughts we think there's something wrong with us. Even more so when we see ourselves as enlightened scientists (which we have to see ourselves as 24/7 in order to ever be them due to the nature of enlightened men as instruments, observers, and, most importantly, in control taskmasters of Truth, not flawed humans who only embody the scientist role when we both want to and can). We recognize that can't really turn our thoughts on and off like machines and this stresses us out, so if we aspire to be enlightened people, we have to be these people constantly. If we ever fail to uphold the values of the enlightenment, like an unstable internet connection, this is an error on the part of our mind machines. I guess? I dunno.

Capitalism and grind culture really drive this forward too I think. I can't really think of these aspects of the culture progressing linearly to create the new enlightenment mindset because they're all kind of raw dogging us at once. This makes it really difficult to track which aspect of our collective psyches, or our cultures, build on or lead to which. This is not even to mention how these aspects could differ in various parts of the world (I'm a U.S. citizen in North America and tbh I went at this rant with all of the cultural solipsism characteristic of my people without even thinking, I don't have to tell you that all of this is totally colored by my own narrow perspective, but, well, there you go). I want to be clear that I'm not saying "brrr phone bad" or anything. I think we just need to look kindly and earnestly at ourselves and how we see technology. Ironically, saying "brrr phone bad" seems like just as much of a product of the enlightenment style glorification of objectivity as seeing the creation of an algorithm that can predict the exact kind of thing you want to consume before you've thought of it as "something that will definitely improve the life of a consumer (since we're all consumers now rather than people, innovation yay)" does. It still puts a piece of technology before the person using it is what I'm saying, basically.

Enlightenment objectivity sees only benefits or drawbacks to the lives of the people it purports to satisfy the demands of under capitalism, and only in the form of technological innovation or technological domination. We've accepted technological innovation as both a necessity and a force beyond human control all at once. The only harm it could do now comes from the inability of human beings to adequately control it, almost as though we've forgotten that the harm it does comes directly from those who control it and wield it over us. We're solving problems that powerful human beings only exacerbate with technology because of their interests in upholding a social hierarchy that could exist with or without the technological advancements that came about after the enlightenment WITH technology because we see it as the only driving force for change, positive or negative. We're selling ourselves short I think, and I think it's because, like the Dialectic seems to conclude, science is our god now (I know I'm waaaay oversimplifying this). Technology is the metaphorical cage surrounding our conception of social actions and reactions (including power relations) and the internet has only made that statement even more literal. Technology is now not only the wall we can't look over to see the driving force of societal phenomena, but it IS our society. It's interesting to note that those with immense power are using technology to virtualize the world around us (think Mark Zuckerberg's Meta) when they make "daring leaps into the future" and those without seem to dream of cyberpunk futures in which we use technology to enhance our OWN bodies. More on that later hopefully.

Anyway, go to YouTube and watch CJ The X's video on Bo Burnham and Jeff Bezos if you haven't already. Watch that before you read Dialectic of Enlightenment at the risk of never reading Dialectic of Enlightenment. Literally, it's so good. CJ The X could have written the Dialectic, but Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno never could have made that video.

#Dialectic of Enlightenment #Max Horkheimer #Theodor Adorno #I feel like this isn't radical enough to go on leftblr #long text #not anti transhumanism #just anti capitalism

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dialectic-read-along · 3 years

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Chapter 1: The Concept of Enlightenment, Paragraph 1

Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at 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.* It wanted to dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with knowledge. Bacon, "the father of experimental philosophy,"1 brought these motifs together. He despised the exponents of tradition, who substituted belief for knowledge and were as unwilling to doubt as they were reckless in supplying answers. All this, he said, stood in the way of "the happy match between the mind of man and the nature of things," with the result that humanity was unable to use its knowledge for the betterment of its condition. Such inventions as had been made-Bacon cites printing, artillery, and the compass-had been arrived at more by chance than by systematic enquiry into nature. Knowledge obtained through such enquiry would not only be exempt from the influence of wealth and power but would establish man as the master of nature:

Therefore, no doubt, the sovereignty of man lieth hid in knowledge; wherein many things are reserved, which kings with their treasure cannot buy, nor with their force command; their spials and intelligencers can give no news of them, their seamen and discoverers cannot sail where they grow: now we govern nature in opinions, but we are thrall unto her in necessity: but if we would be led by her in invention, we should command her by action.2

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Commentary

In the 1944 preface of this essay, Adorno and Horkheimer explain that this first section is meant to "prepare a positive concept of enlightenment". In their words, "freedom in society is inseperable from enlightenment thinking". I think this quote from Bacon is included to provide an example of the kind of optimism that many enlightenment thinkers had for the potential equalizing effect of reason. The idea Bacon seemed to have was that all people, regardless of social class, could attain mastery of their surroundings if they only studied nature closely enough. Horkheimer and Adorno introduce the motivation of the early enlightenment thinkers as a liberation from fear specifically at first, but I think including the quote that they did paved the way for an examination of the relatoinship between social status and enlightenment ideals.

That being said, the authors already begin to stress the importance of systemization to early enlightenment thinkers. As we will see in later paragraphs, the dispelling of myths, according to those with values predicated on enlightenment thinking, can only be accomplished though a kind of observation of nature that's been repeated, time tested, and regimented. The claim the authors seem to be making before they introduce the above quote is that the systemization itself is a key element in the construction of a relationship between man and nature in which man is dominant and nature is subordinate.

#dialectic of enlightenment #theodor adorno #max horkheimer #read along

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