2. DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT
Horkheimer and Adorno wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1944, while living in Los Angeles. They had fled Europe for America, for obvious reasons, some years earlier. The book was meant to try to explain the enigma of "why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, [was] sinking into a new kind of barbarism" (DE, xiv), why the Enlightenment's utopian promise of a golden age of reason, freedom and human dignity had turned out to be so disastrously mistaken. Horkheimer and Adorno saw this barbarism on both sides of the Atlantic—while they were certainly grateful to be living in a country whose national infrastructure was not dedicated to exterminating them, they were nonetheless horrified by the grotesque excesses of American mass culture, which they felt were, in a certain sense, just as radically dehumanizing as Nazi totalitarianism. The fourth and fifth chapters of Dialectic of Enlightenment, entitled "The Culture Industry" and "Elements of Anti-Semitism," respectively, link the sublimated barbarism of America with the overt barbarism of Germany.
They felt certain that the events they were witnessing debunked once and for all the "myth of progress" that had been the linchpin of liberal thinking from the Enlightenment onward. The falsehood of the secular-messianic narrative of liberalism—meaning the assumption, first put forth by Kant and perpetuated in the nineteenth century by thinkers like Mill, that in the wake of the Enlightenment the world should just get better and better—was, as far as they were concerned, self-evident; even the loosest, most "liberal" retelling of the story could not include the systematic slaughter of six million Jews, along with a war that cost some 50 million lives and laid waste to the very continent from which that optimistic story had sprung, without bursting apart at the now all-too-conspicuous seams. But this, of course, still left the quandary of how to explain it. To negate categorically the entire notion of reason in history, to explain all events uniformly as nothing more than the random and meaningless flailings of a blind species, would be to abandon thought entirely, and thereby to concede total hopelessness. Conversely, writing the catastrophe off as a mere aberration in the interest of preserving the structural integrity of the liberal meta-narrative would be tantamount to the relinquishment of reality. The daunting task they had set for themselves was to navigate, somehow, between the two equally lethal extremes of despair and delusion. Their rather uncharacteristic mention, in the Preface, of "the mismatch between [the project] and our own capabilities" (DE, xiv) is not false modesty—these formidably intelligent men were genuinely humbled by the monstrous difficulty of their charge.
The account they ultimately developed in their book preserves the notion of reason, of sorts, in history while simultaneously revealing a deep, constitutive link between reason and unreason. They wrote in a later preface that "our book demonstrates tendencies which turn cultural progress into its opposite" (DE, xiii). The name they gave to this complex historical dynamic is "dialectic of enlightenment.” Neither of the summary characterizations of the dialectic of enlightenment in this paragraph do it any sort of justice; to someone unfamiliar with the book they will seem cryptic and paradoxical, and only a thorough exposition will elucidate them. I should make clear from the outset that the dialectic of enlightenment is an historical tendency; it is not, at least in the conventional sense, a narrative. The authors' intent, as the above quote makes clear, is for the reader to grasp it precisely as a tendency, as a pattern that is discernible at all stages of history.
The book's original title, "Philosophical Fragments," is apt: just as its conception of history is not organized around an overarching narrative, the book itself has no overarching structure. The table of contents is not an orderly progression of Roman-numeraled chapters, beginning with "Introduction" and ending with "Conclusion" and divided neatly into numbered subheadings. Instead the first chapter, entitled "The Concept of Enlightenment," is followed by two chapters labeled "excursus," the first about the Odyssey and the second about the Marquis de Sade's pornographic novel Juliette. Then come the above-mentioned sections about mass culture and anti-Semitism, and finally a series of short fragments, ranging from less than a quarter of a page to eight pages, collectively titled "Notes and Sketches." This fragmentary structure has a certain pathos: it gives the impression of having been assembled in a hurry by two exiles who must convey their message as quickly as possible, before the world has been irretrievably overrun.
The fragmentary structure, though, belies a strong inner coherence: the dialectic of enlightenment itself, which throughout the book remains its true subject matter, yokes all the disparate sections together like a necklace-string pulled firmly if almost invisibly through a series of manifestly incongruous beads. As for what the dialectic of enlightenment is, I will summarize it here in somewhat greater detail—although, again, the meaning of the phrase will not emerge in its full depth until seen as a function of the concrete historical moments in which it appears. The word "enlightenment” does not refer merely to "the Enlightenment" of the 18th century, although "the Enlightenment" is certainly a key instance of "enlightenment." In keeping with the book's above-mentioned emphasis on historical tendency over historical narrative, "enlightenment" is an historically mobile concept, referring to a recurrent phenomenon present in all eras of human history. The word "enlightenment" refers, then, to the unmasking of myth at any stage in history, the Enlightenment being only the most dramatic example.
As for the dialectic of enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno summarize its operation with two paradoxically interlocking theses: "Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology" (DE, xviii). Enlightenment, as we have already discussed, is that thought which seeks "to dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with knowledge" (DE, 1). But the relationship between enlightenment and myth is, of course, not so simple and unidirectional, and the chiastic interpenetration of the two theses expresses its complexity. Like enlightenment, "myth" is also a mobile concept denoting a motif present throughout history; it refers, roughly, to any comprehensive conceptual structure, belonging to a certain epoch, that gives an account of "the way things are," providing a stable ontological ground and an unquestioned locus of authoritativeness; "enlightenment," then, given in these terms, is that "advance of thought" (DE, 1) whereby the veil of myth is torn aside to reveal that "the way things are" is not really the way things are, for the purpose of "liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters" (DE, 1).
The first of the two theses refers to the fact that what we consider "myth" from our modern perspective was actually the result of enlightenment. For instance, "the solar, patriarchal myth was itself an enlightenment, fully comparable on that level to the philosophical one" (DE, 7). The second thesis means that enlightenment, as a consequence of the very act of dissolving myth, unavoidably ends up reinstating myth once more; it must replace the mythic account of "the way things are" with its own account of "the way things really are," which is by its very structure no less a myth than the account it superseded. The crucial corollary of this idea is that even the philosophical Enlightenment that gave rise to modernity is not exempt from the dialectic of enlightenment; it, too, succumbed to the inevitable regression into myth. And this, in brief, is Horkheimer and Adorno's explanation of the disaster of the 20th century: following the greatest enlightenment of all, the most triumphant dissolution of myth, was the most catastrophic reinstatement of myth.
3. PRIMAL HISTORY OF SUBJECTIVITY
Dialectic of Enlightenment is presented out of chronological order—it is a synchronic retelling of history, in the style of T.S. Eliot or James Joyce. It does not seek, however, to vanquish time.[1] The "primal history of subjectivity" can be put in sequential order; and although there is certainly no transhistorical telos of history—that is, no meta-narrative—there is still a rational sequence of events in the sense that each stage appears logically in response to the previous one. What emerges is a compellingly coherent interpretation of human history. It seemed horrendously bleak at the time it was written; but today, in the age of postmodernism, it feels refreshing, almost optimistic in its certainty that the movement of history makes any sort of sense at all. It resonates with the sentiment expressed in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49: even a horrific meaning is preferable to horrific meaninglessness.
In Negative Dialectics, Adorno makes the pregnant suggestion that “one might write a primeval history of the subject—as outlined in Dialectic of Enlightenment” (ND, 185). To take on this challenge and write out such a large-scale primeval history is far beyond the scope of this essay, but Adorno’s remark implies quite clearly that it could potentially be done. In what follows I sketch a rough outline of what such an unfolded Dialectic of Enlightenment—that is, Dialectic of Enlightenment’s philosophy of history reorganized into sequential order—might look like. The method, or style, that emerges is a rather novel sort of historical speculation. I wanted to stay as close to the text as possible, but because Horkheimer and Adorno only give a few brief hints about the earliest stages of the dialectic of enlightenment, I also had to do some imaginative work in order to fill in the gaps. I should acknowledge that the outline I have laid out is only one possible interpretation, and moreover one that, owing to limited space, must leave out many important details. A more thorough reconstruction would surely yield a better interpretation that contradicts mine and makes it obsolete. I have valued internal coherence over completeness—from a future interpretation that leaves fewer points unconstellated there will likely emerge an essentially different image. I should also note that the “primal history” that follows is only meant as an exposition and interpretation of Dialectic of Enlightenment. I do not make the claim that this is how it “actually happened,” nor am I entitled to do so. Although it is couched in historical terms and presented as though it were an historical narrative, it should be understood more as a conceptual framework. The figures who appear in it—the shaman, the sorcerer, and the priest—are more like formal categories than they are like actual historical phenomena, and the progression from one to the next is meant to be understood logically; we could say it is a little bit like an anthropomorphized version of Phenomenology of Spirit. My intention is that it should explain the book to those who have not read it and at the same time offer a fresh interpretation that will be valuable to those who have.
A. The Shaman
Adorno explains the precise nature of "subjectivity” in the early fragment "Theses on the Language of the Philosopher," which begins with a discussion of the rarified conception of subjectivity formulated in modern idealist philosophy. "The distinction between form and content in philosophical language," he writes, which
belongs specifically to idealist thought... is based on the view that concepts and, with them, words are abbreviations of a multiplicity of characteristics whose unity is constituted solely by consciousness. If the unity of the manifold is subjectively imprinted as form, such form is necessarily thought as separable from content (TLP, 35).
This “unity of the manifold” is implicit in the operation of language itself, and has been from the beginning. The “primal history of subjectivity” is an historical account of humanity’s growing awareness of this dynamic, how it comes to be represented concretely and then how that concrete representation leads to further developments.
The unity of subjectivity first appears in the magical rites of the shaman, with whom the dialectic of enlightenment lurches into motion. At this stage, "the identity of mind and its correlative, the unity of nature, which subdues the abundance of qualities" (DE, 6)—that is, unity per se—has not yet emerged. "Neither [identity, i.e. mind or nature,] was presupposed by magical incantation...The spirit which practiced magic was not single or identical; it changed with the cult masks which represented the multiplicity of spirits" (DE, 6). But although there is no absolute or overarching unity, no "impenetrable mask" (DE, 6) of the self-identical ego, each mask donned by the shaman in his rituals constitutes a local unity of sorts, a representation of a particular spirit.
Even this unity, though, is not yet unitary. Of the "multiplicity of spirits" represented by the shaman's masks, each one is itself a multiplicity—that is, a manifold. And the medium of the shaman's influence is mimesis—the threatening spirit and his counter-spell "were linked...by resemblance or name. The relationship was not one of intention but of kinship" (DE, 7). In his ritual he masters the power of the spirit or demon by imitating it, by repeating it on his own terms. What precedes unity, therefore, is identity—the identity of the spiritual event and the shaman's ritual reenactment of it. Although Horkheimer and Adorno do not come right out and say this, it seems that the "cult masks" must represent a somewhat later stage in the development of shamanic magic, a stage at which the "multiplicity of spirits" has begun to coagulate into a stable inventory of deities, each of which has been assigned a proper name—considered, at this stage, identical with its essence—by the shaman. It is at this stage, when ad hoc repetition of singular spiritual phenomena gives way to the assigning of names, that unity, represented by the mask, truly emerges.
Horkheimer and Adorno also give an account of how exactly this establishment of unity, this naming, took place, explaining it in terms of the "murky, undivided entity worshipped as the principle of mana at the earliest known stages of humanity" (DE, 10). This mana is "that which transcends the bounds of experience, the part of things which is more than their immediately perceived existence" (DE, 10). "What the primitive experiences as supernatural," write Horkheimer and Adorno, "is not a spiritual substance in contradistinction to the material world but the complex concatenation of nature in contrast to its individual link" (DE, 10)—mana, in other words, is the totality of nature, the sum total of its individual connections.[2] It is "not a projection," but on the contrary "the echo of the real preponderance of nature" (DE, 10-11) in the primitive psyche. This experience—whose external instantiating event, if there was one, is unspecified—is what inspires the shamanic utterance: "The cry of terror called forth by the unfamiliar [i.e. mana] becomes its name" (DE, 10).
There is therefore a crucial difference between, on the one hand, the mimetic aspect of shamanic magic, which preserves the multiplicity of the object by repeating it, and on the other hand the naming that is a prerequisite for the masks that are also an element of the shaman's ritual—to wit, the primal, unitary name is not a mimetic enactment but a "cry of terror," which refers only to mana, the subjective experience of the unfamiliar and supersensible, and whose form is indifferent to the specificity of the external object or event that brought it on. It is precisely this indifference to its object that makes possible the self-identical unity of the name: it remains the same regardless of the situation in which it appears. It is therefore this "cry of terror," and not the shaman's mimesis, which is "the primal form of the objectifying definition, in which concept and thing became separate" (DE, 11). This act of naming, in which "even the division of subject and object is prefigured" (DE, 11) is the birth of intentionality, which begins to supplant the "kinship" of mimetic enactment as the relation between speech and material reality. And although speech and reality are still thoroughly intertwined, at this point the unifying name is in principle already separable from its object; the removability of the shaman's mask attests to this.
Although the specific events which instantiated the shaman's mimesis and the "cry of terror" which constitutes the act of naming are both left unspecified, what is clear enough is that they were separate events; either could have arisen independently of the other.[3] But in the shaman's ritual, which involves both the dynamic sequentiality of mimetic enactment and the petrified, atemporal unity of the name, materialized in the mask, these two forms of utterance have been synthesized. If the unitary name first arises as "the mere tautology of terror itself" (DE, 11), it comes to have determinate content after becoming associated with one of the shaman's mimetic enactments. "Through the deity speech is transformed from tautology into language" (DE, 11). The subjective experience of mana is attributed to deities that the shaman has identified, which come eventually to inhere in perceptual, material reality as sacredness: "the tree is addressed no longer as simply a tree but as evidence of something else, a location of mana" (DE, 11). With sacredness the unifying definition, in which sign and intention become separate, is injected back into reality: the unity of the sacred object is attributed to the object itself, not to the not-yet-unitary consciousness that defined it. There emerges here
the contradiction that [the object] is at the same time itself and something other than itself, identical and not identical...The concept, usually defined as a the unity of the features of what it subsumes, was rather, from the first, a product of dialectical thinking, in which each thing is what it is only by becoming what it is not (DE, 11).
The contradiction is at this stage still only latent, although its very form implies the separateness, and separability, from content that becomes explicit in the idealist formulation given by Adorno in the “Theses.”
B. The Sorcerer
The sundering of sign from intentional content will not come to full fruition for a long time yet, but the next stage of the dialectic of enlightenment brings it one step closer: the shaman gives way to his successor, the sorcerer.[4] The difference is that, while the shaman's magic consisted in the performance of certain rituals, involving certain masks and corresponding to certain deities, ceremonies that probably involved everyone in the tribe or clan, the sorcerer—who is, at least at the beginning, itinerant—"begins the ceremony by marking out from its surrounding the place in which the sacred forces are to come into play" (DE, 14). Because this "sorcerer's circle" is then compared to the art-work, which is "closed off from reality by its own circumference" (DE, 14), we can probably presume that this is the sort of magic he is talking about when he writes in Minima Moralia that "art is magic delivered from the lie of being the truth" (MM, 222). By that logic, the sorcerer's magic is art that people still believe is real—although the sorcerer himself is no doubt fully aware that he is deceiving them.
I say the sorcerer is probably itinerant, unlike the shaman, because his ritual has developed a moment of universality: the particular, archetypal, culture-specific unity of the shaman's masks has given way to the all-encompassing, universal unity, the unity as such, of the sorcerer's circle. Inside his circle, "special laws prevail" (DE, 14)—mysterious forces seem to be at work, and the sorcerer seems to be in control of them. The specific, material content of this deception is once again, as it were, left blank, but it is clear enough that the sorcerer is a master of deception—his mantra was "Ignore that man behind the curtain" from the very beginning. This is surely part of why the word "sorcerer," unlike the word "shaman," has distinctly negative connotations in popular consciousness.
There may be another reason as well, though: it is with the sorcerer that the movement of the dialectic of enlightenment really begins to pick up speed. The sorcerer has developed the ability to convince others that he is able to cordon off a portion of the world in which spirit seems to have absolute power over matter. The more successful he is in captivating his audience with his deceptions, the more he can manipulate them, the more powerful he becomes, and the more he is able to increase the size of his circle and the impressiveness of his magic shows. His power starts spinning off into infinite regress: like the movement of enlightenment itself, once it "is able to develop unhampered by external oppression, there is no stopping it" (DE, 3). [5] This multivalent sentence could also refer to the power of the sorcerer himself within the circle, thought that is "unhampered by [the] external oppression" of the laws of ordinary reality; this might remind us of the passage in the Critique of Pure Reason in which Kant warns of the fruitlessness of "pure speculation," cognition that is "unhampered" by the participation of material reality[6].
Meanwhile, the teachings of the shaman have not died out; they have persisted in the form of the popular legends and modest household gods that constituted the spiritual life of people in small-scale agrarian societies. "Civilization," as the term is commonly understood, is simply what happens when an agrarian society such as this one, or alternatively a hunter-gatherer society, is conquered and enslaved by a warlike society that then becomes the ruling class. In this sense Walter Benjamin's remark that "there is no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism" is almost literally correct: barbarism is, quite simply, a material prerequisite for the emergence of civilization as we know it.
C. The Priest
With this development, the sorcerers undergo another change, becoming the priestly class. Now that we have reached the third link on this chain, we can see some general patterns about the evolving type that has generated out of the figure of the shaman. We might understand this type in terms of the idea, which recurs often in Adorno’s thought, that “culture originates in the radical separation of mental and physical work” (P, 26). In light of that we could say that the shaman and his counterparts are the keepers of culture, the members of society who perform mental labor and must rely on others to provide for their physical needs. The shaman, unlike the other men of the tribe, does not hunt; the sorcerer, unlike the villagers, does not farm; and the priests, unlike the aristocratic warrior class whose protection they enjoy, do not fight. These guardians of culture always stand outside the process of material production, which is perhaps why classical Marxist materialism had such a difficult time accounting for them. As the priestly class, when they share this privileged economic position with the warrior class, they are spared the danger and hardship of battle; the king or the lord goes off to protect his land from foreign invaders, and the priest stays behind and shares the safety of the serfs.
It is with priests that we finally see the full emergence of myth, as the term is meant in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Myths inherit their content from the shamanic stage. “Each ritual contains a representation of how things happen and of the specific process which is to be influenced by magic” (DE, 5), and it is crucial to note that this passage denotes two distinct representations, “how things happen” in general, as well as “the specific process”—that is, the universal and the particular. In myth, the “theoretical element of the ritual became autonomous” (DE, 5); a myth is just a narrative that sets down the account of “how things happen,” rather than an invocation of the universal power for the purpose of bringing about a certain result.
And the figure of the sorcerer gives us an idea of how this transformation could have taken place. “It is in the nature of the work of art, of aesthetic illusion, to be what was experienced as a new and terrible event in the magic of primitives: the appearance of the whole in the particular” (DE, 14). This explanation of “aesthetic illusion,” which straddles the temporal divide between art and the magic of the sorcerer, shows what it has inherited from the shaman and also what has changed: whereas in shamanic magic the deity is invoked in order to accomplish some goal, it seems that, at least to some extent, the sorcerer’s magic is simply the invocation of the deity. Whereas the shaman, within the context of his society, is given the authority to invoke the deities, the itinerant sorcerer’s ability to invoke the deities is what gives him authority. The precise nature of the deities that the sorcerer invokes, which to his audience are both new
The sorcerer becomes a priest when, after the warlike society conquers the peaceful agrarian one and establishes itself as an aristocracy, he manages to win their favor, and once again gains the place within established society that was his back when he was a shaman. As a sorcerer, his authority rested solely on his skill in deceiving people; once he becomes a priest, he also has the power of the ruling class at his disposal. With this he is able to extend his circle indefinitely in every direction, on the condition that the myths that fill out the space within it affirm the rights of the ruling class. “The local spirits and demons [are] replaced by heaven and its hierarchy” (DE, 5), a hierarchy closely resembling the one that reigns on earth. The chthonic deities of the shaman’s ritual have given way to gods and forces residing in the sky, which meets earth at the horizon to mark the circumference of the priest’s realm. As his magic circle is bounded only by the ever-expanding horizon, the priest points to the sky to indicate the locus of his authoritativeness. The “theoretical element of the ritual” (DE, 5) becomes universalized as myth. If in the shaman’s ritual the universal element—the mask, representing a deity—was balanced with the sequential, temporal ritual that mimetically enacts the specific phenomenon to be influenced by magic, in myth the universal element itself is enacted in a mythic narrative that even in its sequentiality begins, on account of its claim to eternal validity, to take on the static, atemporal character of a shaman’s mask. Myth draws this sense of eternity from the infallibly regular motion of the heavenly bodies, which is perhaps why so many societies at this stage—such as the Egyptians and the Aztecs, two of the ancient world’s greatest pyramid-builders—become sun-worshippers.[7]
At this point, we would do well to recall that this narrative has been an attempt to reconstruct the “primal history of subjectivity” outlined in Dialectic of Enlightenment. This mostly amounts, as “Theses on the Language of the Philosopher” suggests, to a primal history of the subjective experience of unity as formulated explicitly in idealist philosophy, which understands it as the unitary subject’s synthesis of manifolds. What my reconstruction has shown is that this synthesis of the manifold, this labor of unification, was at every stage the prerogative of the historical type that we have seen develop from shaman to sorcerer to priest. The shaman synthesizes the wild multiplicities presented to him by the motion of the natural world in which he is still embedded, some of which eventually solidify into the conceptual unity of the named deity. The sorcerer, whose circle expresses and enacts for the first time the experience of unity as such, also awakens the idea that thought, even if only within the limited realm of the magic circle, might have the power to impose itself upon the material world. And finally the priest extends the magic circle to encompass the entire cosmos, enshrining the magic ritual as a myth that synthesizes the manifolds of heaven and earth—with the orderliness and regularity of the former taking precedence over the messy contingency of the latter—into a unified system, mostly calculated to legitimate the authority of the ruling class.
D. Recapitulation
I pause here to point out another motif that has emerged in the course of this retelling: the dialectical interplay of mimesis and naming, which, as you recall, appear to have emerged independently of one another before becoming synthesized in the shamanic ritual. The difference between the two is mostly analogous to the difference between sign and image, which Horkheimer and Adorno explain as follows: “As sign, language must resign itself to being calculation and, to know nature, must renounce the claim to resemble it. As image it must resign itself to being a likeness and, to be entirely nature, must renounce claim to know it” (DE, 13). These two dichotomies correspond to one another inasmuch as mimetic enactment strives to be identical to its object, while the naming utterance (the “cry of terror”) is identical only to itself. Mimesis is dynamic in accordance with the dynamism of its object, whereas the name is static and fixed. And there is, to begin with, only one name, the cry of terror. Mimesis, in contrast, does not yet know unity at all; it is still pure manifold. Neither one, purely on its own, has quite what it would take to constitute language, which requires, paradoxically, both the self-identity of the name and the multiplicity and concrete determinacy of mimesis.
In the first section of this essay I explained the basic “operation” of the dialectic of enlightenment using abstract concepts, focusing on unfolding Horkheimer and Adorno’s chiastic double-thesis. In the second, I gave a brief outline of the linear history of subjectivity as implied by the book, focusing on firmly concretizing each of the three main stages. In this third section I will bring the first and the second together, showing the specific ways in which the movement form one stage to the next is dialectical. And I am not referring, in this context, to the atemporal instantanaeity of Adorno’s “stereoscopic” dialectical thinking, but rather the more conventional notion of dialectic as sequential development. My focus in this section is the transformation and evolution of the dialectic itself. The different figures will serve as narrative signposts—having established and explained them in the previous section, I will now refer to them freely, as though they were mutual friends. The dialectic, as I have already mentioned, begins with the collision of mimesis and naming; as the section proceeds I observe the development of the dialectic and gain a more concrete understanding of the logical progression from one figure to the next.
In the shaman’s ritual the two elements of mimesis and naming are synthesized, but as a result each leaves its mark on the other. On the most intuitive level, as I have said, the mask corresponds to naming and the ritual to mimesis, inasmuch as the former is static and fixed and the latter is dynamic and temporal. But on another level the exact opposite is true: the mask, because it is a likeness of its object, is mimetic; and the ritual, inasmuch as it is a ritual and therefore formalized and scripted rather than emerging spontaneously as a direct response to a natural phenomenon, has acquired the arbitrariness of a linguistic sign. Even though naming and mimesis emerged separately, the shaman’s ritual gives us a precise index of the extent to which they have already become inextricably intertwined even in their irreconcilable opposition to one another—they have become, in other words, a dialectic. Even the very notion of a dichotomy between naming and mimesis has become so ambiguous as to be unhelpful: it cannot help us understand the duality of mask and ritual because each contains an element of both. If we are to make a meaningful distinction between the two we must find a new pair of terms. One pair that would fit the requirements is static vs. dynamic, or atemporal vs. temporal. We can say more or less unambiguously that the mask is a static object, which remains constant and unchanging throughout, while the ritual itself is a dynamic process that unfolds only in time.
The duality of static and dynamic remains more or less clearly defined as shaman becomes sorcerer, but with a crucial shift: the static element, the magic circle itself, becomes invisible. The shaman’s ritual was a scripted temporal enactment; no longer a direct imitation of a natural phenomenon, it sought instead to be self-imitating, to repeat its script as faithfully as possible. But to retain this self-identity, to repeatable, it required the static element of the mask. By that token, what the sorcerer offers his audience is a glimpse into a world in which the mask is no longer necessary, in which the ritual, even in its dynamism, somehow generates from within itself its own immanent unity. Again, how exactly he accomplished this is something we can only guess at, but he probably made use of something with which we are all quite familiar: internal logic. We know this phenomenon best from art, which Horkheimer and Adorno explicitly identify as the modern equivalent of sorcery—it is particularly evident in Adorno’s favorite art form, music. A Mozart piano concerto, for instance, begins by introducing a theme and then proceeds by unfolding the theme according to its own internal logic, which even someone who does not know the first thing about music theory will not fail to pick up on.
The sorcerer is able, within the space of his magic circle, to perform a ritual that appears to unfold, like a concerto, purely according to its own set of internally consistent rules. And this is precisely why his audience is so awestruck: up until this point they have only seen this sort of unification of the manifold occur in the context of the shamanic ritual, whose unity is imposed artificially by the mask. In that stage another more or less stable binary, along with static vs. dynamic, is unity vs. manifold itself—but in the sorcerer’s circle the latter has become ambiguous. And it is precisely this ambiguity that makes the sorcerer’s ritual such a “new and terrible event.” The separateness of the mask and the ritual affirmed, as in the modern idealist philosophy with which we began, both radical heterogeneity of unity and manifold and the sovereignty of the former over the latter—although for the shaman it is sovereign deity rather than the sovereign individual. By locating the principle of unity, which is also the principle of authority, solely in the mask, they ensure that their society’s locus of authoritativeness remains stable and unambiguous. By that token, the frightening event that takes place in the sorcerer’s circle is, as it were, a shamanic ritual without a mask, which has no visible unifying principle and yet somehow still feels uncannily unified.
The sorcerer’s show is, of course, a deception. Its power and seductiveness come from the fact that it appears as a manifold that generates its own unity out of itself, according to its own internal logic. In truth, though, it relies on two external principles of unity: first, the magic circle generates a sense of spatial unity by creating an enclosure of space; second, and more importantly, the internal logic of the ritual is actually just borrowed from the logic of society, which has begun to fragment with the transition to agriculture[8]. With this fragmentation, participatory, communal ritual loses the central role it played in hunter-gatherer societies—which implies, if we take a Durkheimian approach, that the individuals no longer have the opportunity to see the totality of their society represented to them symbolically. The shaman’s ritual represented the totality of society by acting out the relationship between the manifold of nature and the unifying power of language; but at the same time it designated the latter, and along with it the totality of society, as the locus of authoritativeness. When the society turned to agriculture, which is far more labor-intensive than hunting and gathering, the second, alternative interpretation must have begun to ring truer for them than the first. The ritual, which was meant to perpetuate social solidarity by enacting the true social totality—which is the unity of the manifold—seems more and more to be merely an expression of the compulsion of society over individuals.
As agriculture takes hold, and the communal hunter-gatherer societies break more and more into individual family units, the role of the shaman—that is, producer and guardian of culture—diffuses into the population at large in the form of legends, fairy tales, and household rituals. The content of all of these is precisely the “alternative interpretation” of the shaman’s ritual, according to which it symbolizes only the suffering and unfreedom of the individual at the hands of society and social compulsion. This content, although it misses the point of the ritual, is nonetheless completely true.
We can now give a more definite name to the “new and terrible event” that took place, or seemed to take place, before the eyes of the long-suffering peasants: as they stare into the magic circle, they catch their first, fleeting glimpse of what can quite rightly be referred to as freedom. The ritual that originally schematized the interaction of form and content, of unity and manifold, the peasants had reinterpreted to suit their needs: it became a story about the oppression of the individual by society. And so the sorcerer’s ritual, in which a manifold appears to operate in a unified way without the presence of an external unifying principle, has for the peasants an alternative interpretation as well: it is a symbolic vision of a society without oppression, a society that is free. This is why, in addition to being frightened, the peasants are also seduced by the sorcerer’s deceptions.
Ironically, the peasants’ sense that they were being oppressed by society from without was not even correct: it was only their own toilsome labor that they experienced as an external oppressor. It becomes correct, though, when they are conquered by warriors. If they are lucky it is a lone warrior, who establishes himself as a feudal lord and mostly lets the peasants go about their lives, as long as they give him a tribute and let him enjoy certain rights (e.g. prima nocta). If they are unlucky, though, they are conquered by a warlike civilization, which takes them from their land in chains and puts them to work building pyramids or temples. In latter case their fragmented society is forcibly reintegrated, along with all the other conquered and enslaved people, in the brutal uniformity of slavery.
The sorcerers, who had been living on the margins of society ever since the role of the shaman fell away, now become priests. The “aesthetic illusion” of the sorcerer’s ceremony was the first appearance of another world within the world of everyday life and yet separate from it, a spirit world that operates according to its own laws. It is thanks to this separateness from the material world that the illusion that takes place within the circle, the illusion of freedom, is possible—the circle, despite its seeming autonomy, can only define itself in contradistinction to what lies outside. When the priest expands this circle to encompass everything, and “nothing is allowed to remain outside” (DE, 11), this separateness vanishes, and with it the possibility of producing the semblance of freedom. By setting itself apart from everyday life, the magic circle was able to suspend the law of everyday life, which is bondage and labor. When the magic circle expands to encompass the world of everyday life, the spiritual semblance of freedom becomes a spiritual justification of unfreedom.
The part of the sorcerer’s magic that does carry over into myth is the unity of the circle, which becomes, finally, the unity of nature. Just as the priest, like the shaman, is again a fixture within society instead of an itinerant sorcerer living beyond its boundaries, the priest’s myth resembles the shaman’s ritual in that the unity and the manifold appear as two separate elements; whereas the sorcerer, by opening a space separate from the realm of society, had been able to produce the illusion of the reconcilement of form and content, or the resolution of form into content. In myth, though, the unity is total—whereas the shaman’s mask only unifies a particular manifold, the unifying principle of myth covers everything, which is why it is so often located in the sky.
Myth also inherits from sorcery the quality of internal logic, although because “nothing is allowed to remain outside,” the word “internal” no longer really applies. The “special laws” of the aesthetic illusion that operated within the magic circle were contrasted with the law of labor that ruled the social world without. That law, whose content was nothing more than “you shall earn your bread by the sweat of your brow,” was not written down but simply lived by the peasants who worked the land. In myth, the laws of magic and the law of society are conjoined such that the former legitimate the former by forming into a narrative that draws a line from the mythic principle of unity to the material conditions of society. Whereas before myth, people merely lived in toil, now they are given reasons for why they must live in toil, why living in toil is simply “the way things are.” In myth, the duality of unity and manifold has reached a form that is, to some extent, still with us today: the dichotomy between the manifold of the laws of inference and their ground, or first principle. The task of myth is to derive from the latter, by means of the former, a credible narrative that justifies the authority of the ruling class as well as the wretchedness of the workers.
This duality, though, inevitably becomes a problem. As time goes on, the system of myths proliferates, as it is called upon to explain and legitimate more and more details of social reality. At the same time, as the myths permeate into the sphere of public discourse, which emerges after the beginning of urbanization; they are retold among the public and checked against one another, and certain standards of internal consistency begin to develop. The manifold of stories begins to congeal into a unified system, which is when the duality begins to complicate. The more the manifold of myths congeals into a unified bundle of narratives, the more the authoritative center of gravity shifts away from the sacred first principle, the sun or whatever else, and toward the system of myths itself. The conceptual apparatus that mediated between the central node of authority and its various applications increasingly becomes a source of authority itself. Once it reaches a certain threshold of authoritativeness, it is called upon to justify the authority of the ground—which, paradoxically, implies its own authority over that of the ground.[9] It is at this point that myth comes fully into the form in which it appears in the two theses: a conceptual construct that is itself, independently of any object in nature, the locus of authoritativeness.
[1] Joyce and Eliot both construct their synchronic recastings of history in terms of primal, overtly mythic narratives that are supposed to be located outside of time. As much as they are trying to comprehend their own time, their writing is also motivated by a longing to escape their own time, to break out of history and into primal eternity. Adorno does not have such faith in the possibility of escape, and in this respect the analogy is flawed. A closer analogy might be Pynchon’s 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow, whose unifying image is not a primitive myth but something wholly modern and thoroughly inhuman: the V-2 rocket-bomb, whose arc-shaped trajectory, to which the title refers, represents narrativity itself, reduced to its barest, most skeletal essence. Adorno anticipated Pynchon with uncanny exactness when he singled out “Hitler’s robot-bombs…as one of the selected empirical facts by which [according to Hegel’s philosophy of history] the state of the world-spirit manifests itself directly in symbols…’I have seen the world spirit’, not on horseback, but on wings and without a head” (MM, 55).
[2] Cassirer writes that, in the experience of mana, “the whole existence of things and the activity of mankind seem to be embedded, so to speak, in a mythical ‘field of force,’ an atmosphere of potency which permeates everything, and which may appear in concentrated form in certain extraordinary objects” (Cassirer, Ernst, trans. Susan K. Langer. Language and Myth. New York: Dover, 1953). The similarity of Cassirer’s “field of force” to Adorno’s notion of “force-field,” by which he means the complex web of interconnections that makes up the substance of modern society, as well as the constellative writing style that seeks to mimic its structure, is striking.
[3] If we had to relate them to one another, we might possibly imagine the experience of mana as the inverse of mimesis: if mimesis is replicating a phenomenon in nature on one’s own terms, mana might have been the uncanny experience of perceiving a phenomenon in nature as a replication of oneself.
[4] The material social change to which this transformation corresponds is, once again, not made clear—my hypothesis is that it was the transition from a hunter-gatherer society, in which the shaman is a member of the community, to an agrarian economy in which itinerant sorcerers provide magical services for villagers.
[5] The story of "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" is the archetypal example of this aspect of the sorcerer—the apprentice, who makes the mistake of putting on the sorcerer's magical hat, is too inexperienced to handle that sort of power and allows it to develop into an infinitely regressive tautology loop. And it may be noted that, as if to further demonstrate his unworthiness to wield the sorcerer’s power, when the apprentice took hold of it, the first thing he did was to try and make the broom fetch water, which was one of the menial chores he was required to perform for the sorcerer as part of his apprenticeship—a true capitalist, he wanted to use supernatural powers for the sake of his own convenience. In our culture we are most familiar with the version of this story told by Walt Disney, one of the premier sorcerers of our civilization. (Incidentally, the sorcerer character in Fantasia was referred to around the studio as "Yen Sid".) The story, though, was originally based upon a ballad written in 1797 by none other than Goethe, who discerned all too well the ominously asymptotic trajectory of modernity.
[6] " The light dove cleaving in free flight the thin air, whose resistance it feels, might imagine that her movements would be far more free and rapid in airless space. just in the same way did Plato, abandoning the world of sense because of the narrow limits it sets to the understanding, venture upon the wings of ideas beyond it, into the void space of pure intellect. He did not reflect that he made no real progress by all his efforts; for he met with no resistance which might serve him for a support, as it were, whereon to rest, and on which he might apply his powers, in order to let the intellect acquire momentum for its progress." -Critique of Pure Reason, Introduction, sec. 3
[7] Sun-worship is perhaps the most rudimentary form of the “unity of nature” that characterizes myth; after all, if one were to designate one singular object in the material world to unify in its entirety the manifold of nature, the sun would clearly be the most obvious choice, especially for societies living in such hot climates. And the infamous Aztec practice of human sacrifice could easily be seen as an enactment, however perverse, of the “unity of the subject” that is ultimately formulated in Idealist philosophy: just as the sun stood for the unity of nature, the heart was seen as the vital center of the composite human body, the locus of its unity. And just as, in Idealist philosophy, form is considered separable from content, the Aztec priest affirmed the unifying power of the heart by separating it from the rest of the body.
[8] Likewise, neither does the concerto develop wholly according to its own inner logic: its logic comes from musical convention as well as the whole complex of its own historical moment; and it also requires the “magic circle” of a concert hall. In Jameson’s Marxism and Form, 12-40, there is an astonishing exploration, which is too extensive to summarize here, of this dimension of Western music, which “at the very outset marks itself off from the culture as a whole, reconstitutes itself as a self-contained and autonomous sphere at distance from the everyday social life of the period and developing, as it were, parallel to it. Not only does music thereby acquire an internal history of its own, but it also begins to duplicate on a smaller scale all the structures and levels of the social and economic macrocosm itself” (14). Jameson’s exposition, which extends from the classical period through Schoenberg, is quite analogous to my sequential reconstruction of Dialectic of Enlightenment, although his is based on Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music. I strongly urge my reader, if he or she is able, to seek out and read this brilliant passage.
[9] An anachronistic but still apt example is the struggle in medieval theology to prove the existence of God: if God must be proved by the laws of reason, then the laws of reason must be a more important source of authority than God himself—this becomes quite explicit in Descartes.