3105-Ch-2.qxd
8/7/2006
6:24 PM
Page 25
CULTURE AS MYTH
mathematics as ‘the ritual of thinking’ (1979: 25). The effect is to turn thought into a thing, an instrument for the domination of nature. Instead of being free and open, thought follows a process – that of rationality – which is already set for it: ‘For enlightenment is as totalitarian as any system. Its untruth does not consist in what its romantic enemies have always reproached it for: analytical method, return to elements, dissolution through reflective thought; but instead in the fact that for enlightenment the process is already decided from the start’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1979: 24). This repetitive and controlled form of thought becomes as restricted and unquestioning as mythic thought. Adorno and Horkheimer argue that enlightenment thought has ceased to think about thinking: it doesn’t question the basis of knowledge or the practices of thinking. Science does not confront the issues of ethics and morality, aesthetics and beauty, of what is good and true that are traditionally dealt with in myth. Instead it propounds a limited and closed objectified system of thought which is ‘an automatic, self-activating process; an impersonation of the machine that it produces itself so that ultimately the machine can replace it’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1979: 25). A traditional view of modernity as progress would see a withering away of myth in the face of scientific thinking – as a mode of knowledge that tolerates fiction, myth is no match for one that replaces it with a factual account of reality. But the critical theorists argue that the form of myth actually resurfaces within the adoption of the methods of science and technology as the only adequate mode of knowledge. What appears as rationality, as based in reason, as an account of the facts, begins to operate as myth in the sphere of culture. Enlightenment thinking for practical purposes, especially to do with the material world, may be effective in realising the will of humans, but as a cultural system it becomes mythic through rigidifying the processes of nature, treating them as predetermined and beyond the power of human will. It is the unitary and unbending form of reason in modernity that lends itself to domination, both of nature and of human will. It seems at times as if the Frankfurt theorists are against science as a mode of thought, but of course they accept it has a way of thinking that is appropriate for understanding the material world and one that can oust metaphysical and theological illusions. Their critique focuses on how the success of scientific methods during the nineteenth century in making sense of the physical world led to them being applied to understanding the human world of history, politics, philosophy and sociology. It seemed as if mathematically based science provided a model of how all human knowledge should be: grounded in sensory experience, observation and deduction. It is particularly the attempt to introduce ‘positivism’ into the human sciences that they attack consistently (Adorno 1979; Marcuse 1941) for its effective undermining of the critical component in social theory that uses metaphysics, imagination and reason to dare to think differently from what is given. As Held sums up their position: ‘Resignation to the given follows from the positivist
25