Enlightenment in an Age of Destruction: Intellectuals, World Disorder, and the Politics of Empire

By Christopher Britt, Paul Fenn and Eduardo Subirats

This book is about the ways in which modern enlightenment, rather than liberating humanity from tyranny, has subjected us to new servitude imposed by systems of mass manipulation, electronic vigilance, compulsive consumerism, and the horrors of a seemingly unending global war on terror. The main intellectual aims of this title are the following: the analysis of spectacle, the criticism of providential enlightenment, and the examination of positive dialectics. The spectacle, in this case, is the apotheosis of the culture industries, a total inversion of reality and of our existences. Providential enlightenment is not only a critique of the failure of enlightenment, but of the mutilation of historical enlightenments. Positive dialectics signal a new era of intellectual engagement in the construction of our historical future. During a time in which national democracies seem an imperial farce, it is not enough for intellectuals faced with all this destruction to blithely recommend resistance. The book thus ties American, British, French and German theoretical traditions into a reflexive challenge to the notion of intellectual as critic, and argues instead for a trespassive tradition of cultural leadership.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Jan 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9783319707846

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© The Author(s) 2018

Christopher Britt, Paul Fenn and Eduardo SubiratsEnlightenment in an Age of DestructionCritical Political Theory and Radical Practicehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70784-6_1

1. Redefining Enlightenment

Eduardo Subirats¹ 

(1)

New York University, Princeton, NJ, USA

1.1 Melancholia

We have experienced successive wars. We have witnessed the military destruction of entire cities. We know there have been hundreds of thousands of humans sacrificed. On our screens we have seen concentration camps all around the world for people fleeing desolation and misery. Desperation for millions.

Humanity has never before been confronted by such an imminent end of times: the global biological collapse unleashed by the industrial warming of the atmosphere, the chemical poisoning of the waterways, the massive destruction of biological species and their habitats, the disappearance of languages and cultures, technologies of final destruction, the global expansion of terrorism and war…A final age.

Condorcet’s Tableau historique des progrés de l’esprit humaine, with its exemplary hopeful vision of the future that has dominated the most outstanding artistic and intellectual expressions of the industrial age, has yielded to the icon par excellence of the postmodern age, the Angelus Novus: a historical subject compelled forward by the hurricane winds of progress, which it is incapable of confronting and much less controlling, all the while its gaze is fixed backward to contemplate an immense valley of ruins.

But we are immersed in a historical age configured under the providential sign of unlimited economic and technological development. The democratic political system triumphantly lifts up its grammar of liberty urbi et orbi. On all of the political stages in the grand theater of the world, human rights are wielded as invincible. Politically correct linguistics have canceled out, on the virtual webs and worlds, racial and social resentments, and regional and national conflicts. The sacred values of equality and fraternity are succesfully campaigned for on public platforms. And women’s rights crown a worldwide architecture of a universally achieved patriarchal reason. Last but not least, we are free. We are subjects of an indisputable and undisputed freedom . We live in a completely enlightened age.

1.2 Enlightenment as Spectacle

The spectacle is the system of industrially produced representations of reality and of our existence in this system. It is an electronic, financial, and political reduplication of being. It can be defined as an integral artwork designed, produced, and globally distributed through predefined cognitive frameworks and the institutional powers that sanction them. But what distinguishes the spectacle from historical works of art, such as Greek tragedy or modern opera, is instead a determined pretense of totality and a totalitarian élan that aspires to install its unreality as universal and true. Modern spectacles are the autos-da-fé of the inquisition or the revolutionary altars to the Goddess Reason of Les Lumières. The theaters of unlimited world war, regional and global catastrophes, and the flourishing of the electronic megalopolis are its contemporary expression.

From an ontological point of view, the spectacle is something more than fiction or magical realism, in the sense of Marx’s critique of ideologies. It is ontologically denser than a mere ideology. It is true that it coincides with the fabricated discourses of the corporate media outlets. However, it is not limited to a system of globally disseminated appearances. It includes grammars and ideologies, just like the catechisms of the colonial missionaries were a combination of lexicography, grammar, and theology. What ontologically confers onto the spectacle its character of a primordial and universal reality is the construction of an objective and agreed-upon reality; it does not matter how fictitious its media packaging appears: a coup d’etat represented as a democratic revolution, colonial invasions depicted as wars of liberation, human rights spread out like an electronic screen while the militarization of the planet unfolds right behind it.

The ontological condition of the spectacle, the premise of its objective system of fictitious reality that is represented as indisputable truth, is the complete aesthetic and intellectual disarticulation of individual experience. Expressed in logical-transcendental nomenclature, it is the deconstruction of self-consciousness and a grammatical reconstruction of individuals as post-subjects. In circles of literary criticism, it has been called the end of the subject, the death of the human, the crisis of self-consciousness. And it has been celebrated aesthetically and ritualistically through a varied representation of psychotic regression, from the Cartesian autism of Beckett’s clowns to the schizophrenic disarticulation, spiritual agony, and death of self-consciousness of Kafka’s K. and Joseph K.

This process of the disarticulation of human consciousness encompasses the aesthetic norms of abstract art and post-art, and the processes of the linguistic fragmentation of cultural memory in the corporate system of the humanities. This systemic disarticulation of human experience and consciousness contributes to a series of institutional and cultural phenomena: the linguistic and institutional deconstruction of the arts, the fragmentation of knowledge, the industrial production of literature as fiction, the corporate bureaucratization of the intellectual , and so on.

The principle of reason sufficient for this civilizational deconstruction of human consciousness is the supplanting of the individual categories of the reflexive experience of the real with automatic processes of recognition. A linguistic replacement on one extreme, and a propagandistic one on the other, of the reflexive recognition of reality through automated linguistic registers should not be understood reflexively as the experience of an individual consciousness . The virtual realities of the spectacle can only be read as mute forms of a trans-individual and opaque reality.

Under the linguistic and epistemological premises of this deconstruction of subjects, individual consciousness has become impoverished, it has fractured internally, and its autonomy has dissolved in a large part. Reality itself has also become intellectually and sensorially impoverished, fragmented, and degraded.

Because of this, the spectacle is much more than a dazzling total system of propaganda. More specifically, it is the synthesis of a decapitated consciousness and the corporate representation of trans-subjective packages of a prêt-à-porter reality. The superstitious fascination sparked by the blinding lights of its screens instantaneously dissolves the linguistic and psychological conditions of all reflexive autonomy, at the same time that it magical-realistically transforms the unreality of its fiction into objective truth. Its semiotic universe erases the borders between the real and the fantastic and between what is true and what is false. The poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal expressed its ultimate consequence in The Letter to Lord Chandos: the words ‘spirit,’ ‘soul,’ or ‘body,’…abstract words…disintegrated in my mouth like rotten mushrooms (Hofmannsthal 2014, p. 40).¹

But in the center of this spectacle, which is configured today by the grand global stages of sports, fashion, politics, or war, the concept of scientific progress materializes, and the principles of justice and democracy that the Enlightenment philosophers defended are achieved. What reigns supreme in the spectacle, and only in the spectacle, is the hypothesis of sapere aude under which Kant fused the infinite interiority of Protestantism with techno-scientific reason. In this spectacle, which surrounds us like a total universe, we are recognized and we recognize ourselves as legally free subjects in possession of human rights. The spectacle represents an entirely enlightened world.

In his celebrated response to the question, What is Enlightenment?, Kant did not recognize our historical era as an enlightened age, ein aufgeklärtes Zeitalter, but rather as an age of enlightenment (Aufklärung) (Kant 1964, vol. VI, p. 53). He understood this enlightenment as an intellectual process and underlined the sense of the verbal action of enlightening, emancipating, and constructing the human sense of being. But Kant, at the same time, emphasized this meaning of enlightenment as an action in itself, enlightening, instead of as a proper noun and in opposition to degraded synonyms such as scientific and objective. The enlightenment is an intellectual , existential, active, creative, and transformative experience in an infinite time and space. Its objectification as an achieved reality carries with it the interruption of human existence as a process of development. The spectacle is the representation of an objectified aufgeklärtes Zeitalter, a completely enlightened age.

Its lights are brilliant: the epiphany of a porn star, the revelation of a presidential candidate, the unlimited reproduction of military, paramilitary, or criminal violence in front of an invisible mass of hundreds of millions of electronically assaulted consumers. Its ethic finality cannot be summed up by Horace’s sapere aude. Nor is it distinguished by Freud’s Wo Es war soll Ich warden. Its linguistic, psychological, and ontological foundation is rather the unlimited repetition of signs without memory, a superlative redundancy of slogans without substance, and the progressive impoverishment of human experience. Debord : "Le spectacle est la inversión concrète de la vie… le mouvement autonome du non-vivant… le moment où la marchandisse est parvenue à la occupation totale de la vie sociale… la falsification de la vie sociale… " (Debord 1967, p. 9).

1.3 Let Newton Be! and All Was Light

The impulse of the Enlightenment cuts across the history of European modern philosophy like a continuum of definitions and redefinitions of its ethical principles, critical epistemologies, and liberal politics. The spiritual principle of personal emancipation and sovereignty, which Kant formulated with his sapere aude, sparks with its sacred fire precisely those thinkers that, like Goethe , Nietzsche, or Adorno , have made manifest the dark side of this Enlightenment, whether its mechanistic reduction of nature, the scientific impoverishment of human experience, or the mythologizing of techno-scientific reason.

But of all the diverse conflicts, themes, and projects of the European Enlightenment, the theoretical work and practical consequences of Bacon , Newton, or Hobbes have prevailed and still prevail: philosophical reflection reduced to a techno-scientific grammar, a mechanical system of universal domination of nature, and, above all, the political reason of capitalist imperialism . The predominant discourses of the European Enlightenment that have privileged its instrumental legacy above its emancipatory legacy have prevailed and still prevail.

Nietzsche and Adorno and Horkheimer have marked two great moments of rupture with the epistemologies that run through this anti-enlightening Enlightenment; this Enlightenment reduced to its techno-scientific epistemologies, to its mechanistic physics, and colonial politics. Both made manifest the regressive cultural processes that accompany modern progress. Nietzsche underlined the rationalizing and colonizing effect of modern scientific reason on human imagination and intelligence, and he anticipated the dissolution of its mythological ties with the past and the elimination of cultural memory in a future of fanaticism and total war. Adorno and Horkheimer reconstructed the inverse and complimentary process of the transformation of scientific reason into dogma and the supplanting of the system of individual reason by media propaganda corporations. They both announced a general process of invisible totalitarian controls, of human degradation and biological decay as the necessary consequence of capitalist progress.

1.4 Negative Dialectics

The negative dialectics of Horkheimer and Adorno , which the scholastic tradition of Marxism and structuralism repudiated as off-the-rails thinking, marked, however, a crucial moment in the history of the West. Dialektik der Aufklärung is the philosophical expression of the failure of a historical reason providentially achieved under the sign of progress, democracy , and liberty. A historical reason that, in 1776, had forged the anticolonial revolution of the United States of America and, a decade later, the French Revolution against absolute monarchy. However, it is a scientific, historical, and revolutionary reason that has culminated in systems of vigilance and manipulation of the electronic masses, in the destruction of the ecological equilibrium of the planet, and in the strategies of total war. The Dialectic of Enlightenment represents the descent of scientific reason, of state reason, and of the historical logos to the hell fires of systems, networks, and modern bureaucracies.

Horkheimer and Adorno illuminate a logical fundamental nexus that, at the same time, is irreconcilably contradictory. The logos of the empirico-critical revolution, which crystalized in the Instauratio Magna of modern technoscience elevated by Bacon into a principle of universal domination, had gone beyond the limit. Technoscience had been sanctified as a system designed to emancipate the human being from the sweat of his labor, from political domination, and from anguish in the face of his own death. It was called upon to sustain his ethical autonomy against the churches and thrones of his enemies. However, industrial power, productivistic logic, and the technological instruments that make up the system of Western civilization have interiorized and assimilated that same destiny which they attempted to overcome: nature degraded by industry, electronic systems of vigilance, and the anguish of human existence faced with its extinction.

On the fronts of global wars, and in the corporate megamachines , the scientific construction of reality effectively and ostensibly conflates with electronic surveillance and propaganda networks through a violent system of human exploitation. Auschwitz is the visible symbol of this destructive logos . The sacrifice of millions of humans reduced to ashes in the etymological sense of the signifier holokaustos. Its maximal nihilistic expression is the threat of the nuclear genocide of humanity announced in the holocaust of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Under this historical constellation Dialektik der Aufklärung enunciated its first sentence: Die vollends aufgeklärte Erde strahlt im Zeichen triumphalen Unheils—[Yet] the wholly enlightened Earth is radiant with triumphant calamity (Horkheimer and Adorno 1947, p. 13).

The same consciousness of historical catastrophe runs through Nietzsche’s philosophy of decadence and Kandinsky’s spiritualist aesthetics; we find the same vision of a violent dehumanization of life under industrial capitalism in Beckmann and Orozco’s expressionism; a similar negative anthropology underlies Anders’s concept of the human without world, or the renunciation of existence and the capitulation to the power of the other in Binswanger’s etiology of schizophrenia; this same kind of ethical defeat is also made manifest in Beckett’s and Rulfo’s characters (Anders 1993, p. XI; Binswanger 1957, pp. 20, 25). The witnesses of this inexorable panorama can be infinitely enumerated. In all of these examples, we find the same fundamental vision: the historical and scientific reason that Descartes’s or Hume’s skepticism held up as a principle of human sovereignty has broken down. They have all foreseen the ecological and social destruction that runs through modern capitalism. And they have all pointed to the final agony of a scientific reason incapable of reflecting on the destructive consequences of its epistemologies on the ethical order of human existence and the living cycles in nature.

Some of the spokespersons for this terminal consciousness , Thomas Mann among others, tried to rescue a last light of that Enlightenment in the European mythological memory. Adorno himself restored its logical principle and gave it the title Negative Dialectics. This penultimate intellectual project of Enlightenment rested on a critique of the Western Enlightenment itself, both scientific and modern. It was an enlightenment of Enlightenment. A critique constructed from the circular hermeneutics of reason and myth , from mythology as an enlightening and rationalizing narrative of human existence. A critique of the regression of epistemological and scientific reason into a mythic principle. But it was also a critique of this dialectics of myth and rationalization and of reason and myth starting from this same principle. A negative reason that was directed against its own offspring: the instrumental epistemologies that regulate the technologies of vigilance and destruction in a world that is progressively alienated from human existence.

The most elaborate expression of this negative dialectics, and that which, at the same time, includes an attempt to go beyond the epistemological and techno-scientific premises of industrial civilization, is Lewis Mumford’s reconstruction of the pentagons of military and industrial power. Mumford’s civilizational panorama extended Horkheimer and Adorno’s negative dialectics, and the historical pessimism of post-war European existentialism, to the corporate megamachines and systems of information control and electronic vigilance of the human masses that we today assume as a fait accompli.

But what distinguishes Mumford from the critical theory of his European predecessors was that he did not veer from the logical or rational principle that runs through the scientific philosophies of Les lumières. Mumford made manifest the fact that the pentagons and megamachines of modern civilizational power had been predefined by the rationalist and mechanistic tradition of Descartes , la Mettrie, or Newton. And he underlined the technically totalitarian power of these corporate machines, with complete independence from the enlightened emblems of liberty, human rights, and democracy decreed by modern propaganda. The philosophical horizon that Mumford reconstructed signals the total collapse of the Western logos .

Today, in a world violently overrun by opposing military and financial forces, we passively contemplate the human exodus across a world in ruins. The premonitions of negative dialectics that cut through Western thought since the nineteenth century have fully come to fruition: the concentration of power and capital; financial, industrial, and military megamachines that are immune to any democratic regulation; electronic control systems and propaganda infiltrating all aspects of human life and society; and, above all, unlimited global war and destruction of the biosphere.

Whether through Nietzsche’s critique of abstract human conditions, morals, and existence, of an abstract aesthetics and philosophy of history, and the consequent loss of historical and ontological orientation of modern consciousness , or through the critique of industrial culture as a system of heteronymous configuration of human consciousness on a massive scale, this negative dialectics has been accomplished even in terms of its most catastrophic consequences. It has been accomplished through the destruction of cultural and natural habitats, the expansion of mass famine, and the unlimited propagation of the nuclear and chemical contamination of the Earth. It has been accomplished in the form of the technological advancement of instruments of manipulation and vigilance. The prognostications of these modern critical theories have been accomplished in all of their negativity.

No other icon in modern history represents this emptiness of human existence as dramatically as the Angelus Novus described by Walter Benjamin in his Theses on the Philosophy of History. This angel, which represents all of us, is a dazed consciousness . It represents a one-dimensional subject forced to face a past of piled-up ruins and tears, while the hurricane winds of progress push it toward an empty future. But it is also something more. This Angelus Novus is a postmodern inversion of Prometheus —the myth that founded a civilization around its farsighted vision and anticipatory gaze, in line with the etymology of his name, pro-methos. However, this negative angel of history now represents the capitulation of Prometheus . Its gaze is neither farsighted nor anticipatory. Instead its novelty consists in its complete refusal to open its eyes to the future.

It is a Prometheus without foresight and without a future. It is a transvestite Prometheus transformed into Epimetheus : the Titan that is mythologically complementary to Prometheus and who only possessed hindsight and the limited vision that, in the instant in which he should have distributed powers and virtues among all beings in nature, forgot about human beings, leaving them naked, barefoot, defenseless and powerless, according to the Platonic version of this Greek cultural hero (Plato 2010, p. 321 d).

1.5 Technical Enlightenment

The final philosophical expression of negative dialectics has been the existentialist anthropology of a human torn from his natural habitat, an orphan without historical roots and thrown into nothingness. It has been the philosophy