Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Cultural Memory in the Present)

by Max Horkheimer

Myth becomes enlightenment and nature mere objectivity. 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 make them. Their “in-itself” becomes “for him.” In their transformation the essence of things is revealed as always the same, a substrate of domination.

Every mythical figure is compelled to do the same thing over and over again. Each of them is constituted by repetition: its failure would mean their end. They all bear features of the fate which, in the myths of punishment in the underworld, is meted out by Olympian judgment to Tantalus, Sisyphus, and the Danaids. They are figures of compulsion: the horrors they commit are the curse which has fallen on them. Mythical inevitability is defined by the equivalence between the curse, the abominable act which expiates it, and the guilt arising from that act, which reproduces the curse. All law in history up to now bears the trace of this pattern. In myth each moment of the cycle pays off the preceding moment and thereby helps to establish the continuity of guilt as law. Against this Odysseus fights.

The lone voyager armed with cunning is already homo oeconomicus, whom all reasonable people will one day resemble: for this reason the Odyssey is already a Robinsonade. Both these prototypical shipwrecked sailors make their weakness—that of the individual who breaks away from the collective—their social strength. Abandoned to the vagaries of the waves, helplessly cut off, they are forced by their isolation into a ruthless pursuit of their atomistic interest. They embody the principle of the capitalist economy* even before they make use of any worker;* but the salvaged goods they bring with them to the new venture idealize the truth that the entrepreneur* has always entered the competition armed with more than the industry of his hands. Their powerlessness in face of nature already functions as an ideology for their social predominance. Odysseus’s defenselessness against the foaming sea sounds like a legitimation of the enrichment of the voyager at the expense of indigenous inhabitants. Bourgeois economics later enshrined this principle in the concept of risk: the possibility of foundering is seen as a moral justification for profit.*

However, the lawless Polyphemus is not simply the villain he appears to be according to the taboos of civilization and as the giant Goliath appears in the fables of enlightened childhood. In the meager domain in which his self-preservation has taken on orderly habits, he is not without redeeming traits. When he puts the young sheep and goats to their mothers’ udders, this practical action shows a concern for creaturely life itself, and the famous speech of the blinded Polyphemus in which he calls the leading ram his friend, asking whether it is the last to leave the cave because it is grieving for its master’s eye, has a power and poignancy equaled only at the highest point of the Odyssey, when the homecoming Odysseus is recognized by the old dog Argus—despite the appalling brutality with which the speech ends. The giant’s behavior has not yet been objectified as character.

Enthusiasm is bad. Calm and resolution constitute the strength of virtue. “That is the state of health in moral life, whereas the affect, even when it is excited by the idea of the good, is a momentarily lustrous phenomenon which leaves behind lassitude.”25 Juliette’s friend Clairwil makes exactly the same observation with regard to vice.26 “My soul is hardened, and I am far from preferring sensibility to the happy indifference I now enjoy. Oh Juliette . . . perhaps you are deceiving yourself about the dangerous sensibility prized by so many fools.” Apathy arises at the turning points in bourgeois history, as in the history of antiquity, when the pauci beati become aware of their powerlessness in face of the overwhelming historical tendency. It marks the retreat of the individual’s spontaneity into the private sphere, which is thus established as the truly bourgeois form of existence. Stoicism—which is the bourgeois philosophy—makes it easier for the privileged to look what threatens them in the eye by dwelling on the suffering of others. It affirms the general by elevating private existence, as protection from it, to the status of a principle. The private sphere of the bourgeois* is an upper-class cultural asset which has come down in the world.

Dorval, the leader of a respectable Paris gang, expounds for Juliette the secret creed of all ruling classes, a creed to which Nietzsche, proclaiming it to his own time, added the psychology of resentment. Like Juliette he admired “the beautiful terribleness of the deed,”42 even though, as a German professor, he differed from Sade in rejecting criminality, because its egoism “is restricted to such base goals. If its goals are lofty humanity has a different standard, judging ‘crime,’ even when committed with the most terrible means, not to be such.”43 The enlightened Juliette is still free of such prejudice in favor of greatness, a prejudice which, indeed, is characteristic of the bourgeois world; for her the racketeer is not less admirable than the minister because his victims are fewer. For the German, however, beauty is a function of size, and amid the twilight of the idols he cannot shake off the idealistic habit of wanting to see the petty thief hanged while imperialist raids are transfigured into world-historical missions. By elevating the cult of strength to a world-historical doctrine, German fascism took it to its absurd conclusion.

All mass culture under monopoly is identical, and the contours of its skeleton, the conceptual armature fabricated by monopoly, are beginning to stand out. Those in charge no longer take much trouble to conceal the structure, the power of which increases the more bluntly its existence is admitted. Films and radio no longer need to present themselves as art. The truth that they are nothing but business is used as an ideology to legitimize the trash they intentionally produce. They call themselves industries, and the published figures for their directors’ incomes quell any doubts about the social necessity of their finished products.

The mentality of the public, which allegedly and actually favors the system of the culture industry, is a part of the system, not an excuse for it. If a branch of art follows the same recipe as one far removed from it in terms of its medium and subject matter; if the dramatic denouement in radio “soap operas”* is used as an instructive example of how to solve technical difficulties—which are mastered no less in “jam sessions” than at the highest levels of jazz—or if a movement from Beethoven is loosely “adapted” in the same way as a Tolstoy novel is adapted for film, the pretext of meeting the public’s spontaneous wishes is mere hot air. An explanation in terms of the specific interests of the technical apparatus and its personnel would be closer to the truth, provided that apparatus were understood in all its details as a part of the economic mechanism of selection.* Added to this is the agreement, or at least the common determination, of the executive powers to produce or let pass nothing which does not conform to their tables, to their concept of the consumer, or, above all, to themselves.

Not only do hit songs, stars, and soap operas conform to types recurring cyclically as rigid invariants, but the specific content of productions, the seemingly variable element, is itself derived from those types. The details become interchangeable. The brief interval sequence which has proved catchy in a hit song, the hero’s temporary disgrace which he accepts as a “good sport,” the wholesome slaps the heroine receives from the strong hand of the male star, his plain-speaking abruptness toward the pampered heiress, are, like all the details, ready-made clichés, to be used here and there as desired and always completely defined by the purpose they serve within the schema. To confirm the schema by acting as its constituents is their sole raison d’être. In a film, the outcome can invariably be predicted at the start—who will be rewarded, punished, forgotten—and in light music the prepared ear can always guess the continuation after the first bars of a hit song and is gratified when it actually occurs.

The more strongly the culture industry entrenches itself, the more it can do as it chooses with the needs of consumers—producing, controlling, disciplining them; even withdrawing amusement altogether: here, no limits are set to cultural progress. But the tendency is immanent in the principle of entertainment itself, as a principle of bourgeois enlightenment. If the need for entertainment was largely created by industry, which recommended the work to the masses through its subject matter, the oleograph through the delicate morsel it portrayed and, conversely, the pudding mix through the image of a pudding, entertainment has always borne the trace of commercial brashness, of sales talk, the voice of the fairground huckster. But the original affinity between business and entertainment reveals itself in the meaning of entertainment itself: as society’s apologia. To be entertained means to be in agreement.

It is not only the standardized mode of production of the culture industry which makes the individual illusory in its products. Individuals are tolerated only as far as their wholehearted identity with the universal is beyond question. From the standardized improvisation in jazz to the original film personality who must have a lock of hair straying over her eyes so that she can be recognized as such, pseudoindividuality reigns. The individual trait is reduced to the ability of the universal so completely to mold the accidental that it can be recognized as accidental. The sulky taciturnity or the elegant walk of the individual who happens to be on show is serially produced like the Yale locks which differ by fractions of a millimeter. The peculiarity of the self is a socially conditioned monopoly commodity misrepresented as natural.

technology has changed human beings from children into persons. But all such progress of individuation has been at the expense of the individuality in whose name it took place, leaving behind nothing except individuals’ determination to pursue their own purposes alone. The citizens whose lives are split between business and private life, their private life between ostentation and intimacy, their intimacy between the sullen community of marriage and the bitter solace of being entirely alone, at odds with themselves and with everyone, are virtually already Nazis, who are at once enthusiastic and fed up, or the city dwellers of today, who can imagine friendship only as “social contact” between the inwardly unconnected.

The consumer becomes the ideology of the amusement industry, whose institutions he or she cannot escape.* One has to have seen Mrs. Miniver,* just as one must subscribe to Life and Time. Everything is perceived only from the point of view that it can serve as something else, however vaguely that other thing might be envisaged. Everything has value only in so far as it can be exchanged, not in so far as it is something in itself. For consumers the use value of art, its essence, is a fetish, and the fetish—the social valuation which they mistake for the merit of works of art—becomes its only use value, the only quality they enjoy. In this way the commodity character of art disintegrates just as it is fully realized. Art becomes a species of commodity, worked up and adapted to industrial production, saleable and exchangeable; but art as the species of commodity which exists in order to be sold yet not for sale becomes something hypocritically unsaleable as soon as the business transaction is no longer merely its intention but its sole principle.

Today, when the free market is coming to an end, those in control of the system are entrenching themselves in advertising.* It strengthens the bond which shackles consumers to the big combines. Only those who can keep paying the exorbitant fees charged by the advertising agencies, and most of all by radio itself, that is, those who are already part of the system or are co-opted into it by the decisions of banks and industrial capital, can enter the pseudomarket as sellers. The costs of advertising, which finally flow back into the pockets of the combines,* spare them the troublesome task of subduing unwanted outsiders; they guarantee that the wielders of influence remain among their peers, not unlike the resolutions of economic councils* which control the establishment and continuation of businesses in the totalitarian state. Advertising today is a negative principle, a blocking device: anything which does not bear its seal of approval is economically suspect.

The Jews had not been the only people active in the circulation sphere. But they had been locked up in it too long not to reflect in their makeup something of the hatred so long directed at that sphere. Unlike their Aryan colleagues, they were largely denied access to the source of added value. Only at a late stage and with difficulty were they allowed to gain ownership of the means of production. To be sure, in the history of Europe, and even in imperial Germany, baptized Jews had reached high positions in administration and industry. But they always had to justify this with redoubled devotion and diligence, and stubborn self-denial. They were only admitted if, through their behavior, they tacitly adopted and confirmed the verdict on the other Jews: that is the purpose of baptism. All the great achievements of their prominent members were not enough to allow Jews to be admitted to the peoples of Europe; having been prevented from putting down roots they were then criticized as rootless. They always remained the protected Jews, dependent on emperors, princes, or the absolutist state.

Just as women adore the unmoved paranoid man, nations fall to their knees before totalitarian fascism. The paranoid element in the devotees responds to the paranoiac as to the evil spirit, their fear of conscience to his utter lack of scruples, for which they feel gratitude. They follow the man who looks past them, who does not treat them as subjects but hands them over to the operations of his many purposes. Like everyone else, these women have made the occupation of greater or lesser positions of power their religion, and themselves the malign creatures society takes them for. And so the gaze which reminds them of freedom must strike them as that of the over-naive seducer. Their world is inverted. But at the same time they know, like the ancient gods who shunned the gaze of the faithful, that something lifeless resides behind their veil. In the trusting look of the nonparanoid they are reminded of the spirit which has died in them, because they see outside them only the cold means of their self-preservation. To be touched in this way awakens in them shame and rage.

That cleverness is becoming stupidity is inherent in the historical tendency. To be reasonable, in the sense used by Chamberlain when he called Hitler’s demands at Bad Godesberg* unreasonable, means to insist that there be equivalence between giving and taking. Such reason is modeled on exchange. Objectives may be attained only through the mediation of a kind of market, in the little advantages that power can steal while respecting the rule by which one concession is exchanged for another. Cleverness is helpless as soon as power disregards that rule and simply appropriates directly. The medium of traditional bourgeois intelligence, discussion, is in decline. Even individuals can no longer converse, and know it; that is why they have turned card games into a serious, responsible institution that calls on all their powers, so that although there are no conversations, the silence goes unheard. It is no different on the big stage. A fascist does not like to be spoken to. When others have their say, he takes it as an impudent interruption. He is impervious to reason because he recognizes it only in concessions made by others.

The isolation once inflicted on prisoners from outside has by now implanted itself universally in the flesh and blood of individuals. Their well-trained souls and happiness are as bleak as the prison cells which the rulers can already do without, since the entire labor force of nations has fallen to them as spoils. The penal sentence pales beside the social reality.

It is, of course, mistaken to believe that the truth of a theory is the same as its fruitfulness. There are some, however, who appear to assume the opposite. For them, theory has so little need to find application in thought that it should dispense with thinking altogether. They misinterpret every utterance as a final profession of belief, an injunction, or a taboo. They seek to submit to the idea as to a god or attack it as an idol. They lack freedom in relation to it. But it is in the nature of truth that one is involved in it as an active subject. People may hear propositions which in themselves are true; but they experience their truth only by thinking as they hear and by continuing to think.

In popular fairy tales the metamorphosis of humans into animals is a recurring punishment. To be imprisoned in an animal body is regarded as damnation. To children and peoples, the idea of such transformations is immediately comprehensible and familiar. Believers in the transmigration of souls in the earliest cultures saw the animal form as punishment and torment. The mute wildness in the animal’s gaze bears witness to the horror which is feared by humans in such metamorphoses. Every animal recalls to them an immense misfortune which took place in primeval times. Fairy tales express this dim human intuition. But whereas the prince in the fairy tale retained his reason so that, when the time came, he could tell of his woe and the fairy could release him, the animal’s lack of reason holds it eternally captive in its form, unless man, who is one with it through his past, can find the redeeming formula and through it soften the stony heart of infinity at the end of time.

When captains of industry and fascist leaders have animals around them, they are not domestic poodles but Great Danes and lion cubs. They are there to add spice to power through the terror they inspire. So blind is the murderous fascist colossus in face of nature that he conceives of animals only as means of humiliating humans. Nietzsche’s unjust accusation of Schopenhauer and Voltaire, that they “knew how to disguise [their] hatred of certain men and things as pity toward animals,”22 applies truly to the fascist butcher.

The emblem of intelligence is the feeler of the snail, the creature “with the fumbling face,” with which, if we can believe Mephistopheles,23 it also smells. Meeting an obstacle, the feeler is immediately withdrawn into the protection of the body, it becomes one with the whole until it timidly ventures forth again as an autonomous agent. If the danger is still present, it disappears once more, and the intervals between the attempts grow longer.

The higher animals have themselves to thank for their greater freedom; their existence is evidence that feelers were once stretched out in new directions and not repulsed. Each of their species is a monument to countless others whose attempts to develop were blocked at the outset, which gave way to fright if only a single feeler stirred in the path of their evolution.

That first, tentative look is always easily repulsed; behind it stand goodwill, fragile hope, but no continuous energy. In the direction from which it has been definitely scared off the animal becomes shy and stupid.

Stupidity is a scar. It can relate to one faculty among many or to them all, practical and mental. Every partial stupidity in a human being marks a spot where the awakening play of muscles has been inhibited instead of fostered.

Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment is undoubtedly the most influential publication of the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, and one of its most compressed theoretical statements. The book was written during the Second World War, between 1939 and 1944, and first published in 1944 in a limited edition, as a hectographic typescript of the Institute for Social Research, on the occasion of Friedrich Pollock’s fiftieth birthday. It was published as a printed edition by Querido of Amsterdam, the most important publisher of German writers in exile, in 1947.

“Myth is already enlightenment, and: enlightenment reverts to mythology.”2 This paradox is the fundamental thesis of the book. Reason appears as inextricably entangled with domination. Since the beginnings of history, liberation from the compulsions of external nature has been achieved only by introducing a power relationship of second degree. Both the repression of the internal nature of human drives, and social domination, are already at work in myth. Finally, fascism and the modern culture industry are the forms taken by a return of repressed nature.