Continental
Mythological enlightenment, back to myth.
Myth already gives you an enterance into enlightenment. It is already a kind of weak reason.
[How do we explain the difference between mythological reasoning and the kind of reason that arrises in capitalism, they fail to say the difference].
Myth is already rational [in the sense that it is a kind of reasonable explanation].
Enligthenment promises freedom, democracy, happiness and knowledge, but this is unfulfilled.
”Enlightenment’s program was the disenchantment of the world. It wanted to dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with knowledge”.
Max Weber
Influenced both philosophy and sociology.
Framed the notion of disenchantment: modernity is the age of disenchantment; god retires from earth, and can no longer intervene in secular events. He shows how the spirit of disenchantment is intertwined with protestantism, a new kind of religiousity where disenchantment is part of faith. So protestantism participates in this kind of disenchantment.
Enlightenment rather puts the magic back into the world, it is a new enchantment. The enchantment of capitalism.
”the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity”.
Capitalism creates new social distortions.
Self- and world-relations are only considered under the sign of their usability.
Everything that is encountered in a capitalistic is shed in a certain light as being commodities. Everything can be bought. Everything is identical or reducible to the general equivalent. This does something bad to the world.
”Bourgois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes dissimilar things comparable by reducing them to abstract quantities. For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion.”
General equivalent = money. Money is a commodity too, but it can be exchanged for everything. Everything is measurable in terms of it. Money makes everything reduced to abstract homogenic quantities. It takes away any chance they have for a qualitative determination. The only thing that distinguishes things is quantitative.
The book is mainly important in how it explains how thinkers felt when they faced the holocaust (It is not awfully rigorous, and is not really meant to be).
[In capitalist societies, everything that is produced are produced to be sold at a market. In pre-capitalist societies, things were mainly produced because they had a need by someone. This is not necessarily the case in capitalism, as only a small segment is actually produced for the sake of being sold].
[The book also heavily critiques modernity. The entry-point to globalised capitalism was the French revolution, but a lot of what they speak begin already with the mathematication of the natural sciences with people like Descartes, Galileo, Newton etc. This is a turning point in the history of philosophy, because before this, no one believed that the laws of the world was written by pure figures of mathematical numbers, and as something we have to grasp in a mathematical formula
If you look at the discursi by Galileo, he says that the entire world is a book written by God in the shape of general formulas. As such, there is a kind of religious thinking apparent at the first mathematical projection on the world.
Newton says, infinite time, is the sensorum Dei, absolute space, in which all events happen. Now this is heavily mystical and religious. But it is through these ideas, that a new vision, our current vision, remains rooted.]
Adorno and Horkheimer read capitalism and modernity as inextricably intertwined processes.
The problem of Bourgois society is the fact that modern reason is instrumental and calculating.
Instrumental because it calculates means and ends, and calculating because it uses general formulas to come to understand this kind of being.
Weber initially frames calculating and instrumental reason.
Modern reason is intrinsically imperialistic; modern rationality seeks only to dominate, not to actually understand nature.
”Therefore, no doubt, the sovereignty of man lie hid in knowledge; now we govern nature in opinions, but we are thrall unto her in necessity: but if we would be led by her in invention, we should command her by action” Bacon in Novum Organon
Notice how the world is female and needs to be dominated by man.
Nature needs to be dominated, and we should be guided by nature in the invention of our experiment, but we do so only in order to decipher the secrets of nature that will then allow us to dominate it [or her in this case].
Francis Bacon introduced empiricism into the natural sciences, and creating them as we know them today. Bacon rejected Aristotelian physics. He introduced experimentation. Descartes and Galileo combined both.
”Power and knowledge are synonymous” Adorno & Horkheimer.
Modern reason stands in a similar relation to things, nature and men, as a dictator to its servants.
In modernity all things become substrates of domination. Things, the being of things, are there to be dominated, they are servants to the dictator of calculating reason.
This reminds us of Heidegger; the being of things in modernity is the being of being exploitable.
After enlightenment: globalised capitalist market & the dynamics of utilisation permeates all spheres of life.
There is no escape from the life of seeing all things and social relationships as being shaped and dominated by the equivalent. We hardly touch or do anything without money.
Why and how does instrumental reason return to mythology?
Instrumental reason becomes progressively independent from subjectivity. It becomes a mechanistic thinking, where thinking becomes mere ritual, and is void of any critical dimension. As such people apply blindly instrumental reason to the calculation of means and ends, and subject themselves and are used to the application of formulas.
As such, people become incapable of seeing reason’s destructive tendencies.
For Adorno, this starts a new kind of mythology wherein the thinking of modernity is a thinking of mere calculating that can be done in an entirely blind way.
We can for example, know the number 100 without ever ”seeing as such” the number.
It becomes uneigentlich/symbolisch, according to Walther Benjamin.
Calculating reason uses symbols to indicate thoughts that are not thought, we jump to the conclusion without having intuitional grasp of what we are thinking. As such, thinking is only the repetition of thinking that is in itself ritual.
”Thought is reified as an autonomous, automatic process, aping the machine it has itself produced, so that it can finally be replaced by the machine. Mathematical procedure became a kind of ritual of thought.”
There is a self-annulation of thought. Reason commits suicide.
[Adorno is still a thinker of enlightenment, he urges us to think critically. Kant initially wrote three critiques that open and legislate three different domains of philosophy. The notion of critique is a core notion of the enlightenment, and for Adorno, if philosophy is really philosophical then it is critical.]
[Vernunft is the higher use of reason, whilst verstand is the lower].
Habermas: instrumental reason has a right to exist and it opens up new venues of knowledge. So we can’t fully get rid of it, and we don’t want to do that.
But the problem is that this reason has colonised all venues of knowledge.
They ignore the fact that we witness different forms of discourses in modernity which did not exist before, like aesthetic or political discourses. Adorno and Horkheimer is itself a result of a production of new forms of rationality in Enlightenment. We have to preserve all these forms of reasons in enlightenment against instrumental reason.
We are blinded in a capitalist society, as we see no critical reason. Ein gesellschaftlicher Verblendungszusammenhang.
Critical theory as such is about demythologising the myth of enlightenment.
Getting rid of all the French values basically.
It is an anti-pattern of thought. It is an idea that has lost its meaning as something with emancipatory power.
There is no personalised evil in Adorno, there is only structural evils. No capitalist is evil, just their position.
Reason becomes myth in the way that it is reduced to instrumental reason.
This creates a general dynamic of exploitation appear as a force of fate, destiny and an inevitable historical necessity. And there is no alternative to capitalism before there is a critical approach to undermining it.
Blindness is just a relative and purely subjective incapacity.
Instrumental reason is a historical contingency and so can change.
The function of reason in history conceals its own contingency, and concealment reinforces the illusory character of fate.
Culture industry is when culture itself becomes a product. The cultural industry is part of the cultural context of blindness. It is an ideological product because in cultural industry is that people consume ways of life that are not different from the kind of lives that the kind of lives that they are actually living. What they see in cinema are just dramatised versions of the kind of life that they are already living.
As such, culture doesn’t only become a commodity, but the kind of thinking that is trigged in the consumer due to culture industry is a kind of flat thinking which fails to be critical. Only true culture can be critical, and as such the culture industry fails to produce any real culture at all. We need something that motivates ourselves to go beyond the given, whilst culture industry only serves to fortify the idea that it is what it is.
What Adorno and Horkheimer dismiss is that Enlightenment manages to produce wondeful artpieces and critical thought. What they are focusing on is the rational organisation of society, and say this is the problem. They dismiss the other spheres and inventions of Enligthenment. The idea of riutalistic thinking can only be seen in that very sphere of calculation; eg. the holocaust or wall street.
Foucault’s Modernity
Started out as a psychologist.
Was interested in the history and application of psychiatry. Worked as a clinical psychologist at the l’hoptial saint Anne. This is where he got to know people like Lacan. Foucault discovered his homosexuality around the time of 17-18 in life. He experienced the oppresion of homosexuals for himself. Attempted suicide as a cause of this during his university years.
This led him to reflect on the psychological consequences of thinking about madness and social norms in the European society. He was a critical who had a difficult time getting a position at a university due to his homosexuality. He went around to Germany and Prague where he had different functions in different French institutions.
He ultimately occupied the chair of history of systems at the College du France. Back then it was for a lifetime, now it is only for a few years. It is not really a school so much as a place where brilliant people are placed.
Foucault particiapted in the 68 revolt, and as such it was dangerous to put him in a university chair.
Has very different faces of his critical thinking.
From the beginning of the 60s til the 69 his inquiry was about the origin of ”human sciences”.
They gained their scientific independency from philosophy throughout the 19:th century. He witnessed something very important here, that all the conflict and all the norms and structures of the 20:th century were shaped in the 19:th century. This first phase of his critical thinking he called his archeological approach. It goes into the hidden originary layers of society.
The history of madness, the birth of the clinic, the order of things, the archeology of knowledge
He works here with the notion that he calls Episteme, but understands it as a meta-scientific configuration, in these preceding works it means that every science pre-supposes an episteme, which is a kind of framework which is not visible by the framework itself, but which provides the implict structure for the science to unfold. As such it defines how a certain scientific practice refers to the things it determines. So an episteme is the kind of space in between the scientist and their object. It gives the scientist a certain perspective on the field of objects, and therefore shapes its own field of objects.
In psychology, it is a science of madness, and this meta-configuration allows the scientist to identify their object of scientific inquiry as madness – not as an idenity that has existed throughout all of humanity – but which takes shape in a sociopolitical framework that takes place in the 19:th century. Previously, this madness was framed by a different episteme.
As such it is a kind of historical configuration in which science unfolds. An episteme is entirely historical.
The archeology of Foucault divides up history according to the epistemic configurations that has succeeded one after another. He wants to use structuralism in a kind of historical function.
They are a closed system in which everything has its own place.
For Foucault, we live in a modern episteme (1800-1950). Foucault asks whether we have already left the modern age and are in a post-modern age.
He talks about the end of humanity and asks if we are not already entering the area of life after the human. The modern area is the area of humanism, where the human emerges as central, and its universalism is only a historical idea. This is why humans die and disappear. The self-understanding of us as humans might disappear and change. But before the modern era, there is a classic age [1660-1800]. Les Mots et Les Choses, 1966 [the structuralist year].
What is characteristic for the modern era is time. Humans understand themselves as temporal and everything is in motion. Reflection is on the change from one system to another, all considerations are historical, and humans become understood as temporal. Foucault disrespects this view, as the human who stands in the middle of the human sciences is never adressed, and as such stands as an empty shell. The core of the human sciences is an emptyness that is not included in philosophical reflection.
He distinguishes this with the taxinomies of the classical age, where one thing springs from another.
Eg. in evolution.
After this he starts doing geneaology in the Nietzschean sense instead. This is where he is quite viral and where his critique against modernity is realised.
Surveiller et punir (Discipline and punish)
”To reveal hidden forms of domination & oppression, underneath the modern narratives of emancipation, rationalisation and a progessive gain of knowledge.”
This is already the geneaological work of Nietzsche.
This is a reflection on power. What are the forms of power, macht, that dominate society.
”The formation of knowledge and the increase of power regularly reinforce one another in a circular process”.
Power needs knowledge to grow, and knowledge is nothing else than the application of power.
Knowledge and the human sciences, better understanding human psychology, education etc. are all fueled by an intrinsicate will to power, we want to dominate these little beasts.
[read l’Emile by Rousseau]
We really need to dominate and inject these little shitty beasts with reason and understanding. All the sciences are fueled and motivated by wanting to dominate this yet irrational segment of society. And in doing this, in widening our power over these individuals, we come to know them and understand why they are fuck-ups.
Foucault wants to make visible the power practices working in accordance with a rationally ordered apparatus of ideas.
Together with these new sciences emerges the labels of mankind as individuality, or person etc.
These labels don’t label something that has always existed, humanity is free and these things are not necessarily this. Humanism presupposes that the individuals it describes has always existed.
No, rather, these entities are produced in modernity, by techniques of domination, which are always techniques of knowledge.
Humanist notions construe what they name. We are producing the individuals called individuals, they are the result of an institutional production.
In a humanist society, people are transformed into people with the sole aim to better dominate them.
The notion of the person since the seventeenth century, think Hobbes or Locke, is the notion of a person as a legal person. They are protected by inalienable rights which even the king has to subject themselves to. Only people who went to school become people.
A human is just the outcome of a form of repression.
(Discipline is one label for the modern form of power, which is important, but not related to the title, his works are always translated in very strange ways].
These analyses take place in specific places where humans are used and controlled and purposefully used. In all these institutions, Foucault asks how these institutions operate on the body. In what ways are the body put in a certain configuration to dominate the soul?
What are the material conditions for the existence of ”persons”, ”citizens”, ”workers”, ”soldiers”:
Power is materialised in certain sites, which are the sites of individuals, which is his general concession to Marxism. Generally Foucault does not like marxism.
The episteme is a transcendental foundation between the subject and its object, the subject doesn’t unfold its knowledge in the objectual sphere, but still it is not material in the sense which is mainly objective.
Marx is just one modern thinker for Foucault, who fully adopts the modern framework, and Marx is not even the most important economist for Foucault but rather Ricardo. One of his teachers, Louis Althusser, one of the staunchest marxists.
Foucault thinks he found his way out of the madness. Whilst Althusser kills his wife. Althusser does a structuralist reading of Marx. After Les Mots et Les Choses, he reads Marx seriously. He wants to think of domination as something that is bound to institutions rather than being free-floating.
The episteme is an anonymous force that dominates. What constitutes the episteme? Is it just a random historical process that leads into on or another?
Discipline = historical formaton of power (since 2nd half 17:th century 1660.)
Emerged in the classic Age and continued to be developed throughout modernity. It is in the bourgois society that new forms of power are implemented.
”Discipline may be identieifed neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levelso f application, targets; it isa ’physics’ or an ’anatomy’ of power, a technology.”
Discipline is a form of power that exists in its technique as something that controls.
It is an anatomy in the sense that it has to understand the physiogonomy of the human body in order to conquer the mind. Instead of forcing people, you train people to do things in a certain way. These things are discipline. We are all disciplined individuals in the sense that I am sitting here and listening quietly to my professor.
Discipline is a form of power that doesn’t destroy you but enhances your power and capacities to fit society better.
Technology here means a practical application of knowledge. It is practically applied to the body in question. Technology is a knowledge about the skill of the human body.
”knowledge about the human body, its movements, articulations, temporalities, geometry, its relationship to cognitive capacities and its possibilities of production.”
Human sciences emerge out of discipline and they serve discipline, so all human sciences are scientific epistemic configuration with the goal of enforcing discipline.
Only if we understand these configurations can we dominate them.
Discipline is only one specific form of power. Specific to disicpline is not the inhibition or the destruction of the subjected body, but rather the preservation and intensification of the body’s forces and strengths of its productive capacities.
Control serves a maximisation of productivity.
There is an ehancement at stake.
Discipline as a historical configuration of power is modern. But there can still have been similar techonologies, without this being the form of power that is present-in society.
If an individual has not gone through discipline, they will not be able to be present at large in society. These advancements are however there for certain very specific reasons, this being social institutions.
Discipline requires detailed under standing of the controlled bodies.
Meticulously performed control, a kind of ”art of the human body”
Applied for the first time in military, schools, and in prisons. This was invented before, but it was institutionalised at this point.
The oldest example being the monastaries, the originary site of disciplinary control. The life of a monk is tightly scheduled. Even the spatial configuration of the monastary is very special, there is a certain topography which is supposed to instill a certain religiosity in an individual.
”It was a question of not treating the body, en masse, wholesale, as if it were an indissociable unity, but of working it retail, individually; of exercising upon it a subtle coercion, of obtaining holds upon it at the level of the mechanism itself – movements, gesutres, attitudes, rapidity: an infinitesimal power over the active body”
The point is to understand how this disciplinarisation is inspired by this mathematical world-view, where one can subject everything about the subject to quantitative transformation. One can invent a tool that transposes the transformation of temperature to numbers. Differential calculus allows us to calculate this qualitative transofrmation as quantitative.
In discipline, we focus on the body and construe a microscopic understanding of it. Every possible configuration needs to be known to know to intervene in.
By small interventions we make great outcomes, because we can make interventions into the exact correct spot.
”There were always meticulous, often minute, technioques, but they had their importance: because they defined a certain mode of detailed political investment of the body, a new micro-physics of power; and because, since the seventeenth century,they had constantly reached out to ever broader domains, as if they tended to cover the entire social body.”
There is no moment of yourself that can escape this power.
It is not clear what kind of political organisation that one can proclaim because of this analysis.