Status Updates From Dialectic of Enlightenment:...

Technical rationality today is the rationality of domination. It is the compulsive character of a society alienated from itself. Automobiles, bombs, and films hold the totality together until their leveling element demonstrates its power against the very system of injustice it served. For the present the technology of the culture industry confines itself to standardization and mass production and sacrifices…

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At last, THE CULTURE INDUSTRY: ENLIGHTENMENT AS MASS DECEPTION

(I didn’t post any quotes from the last chapter. To be honest, I didn’t find it very convincing. Adorno and Horkheimer’s engagement with Enlightenment thought is actually very superficial. Their analysis of Sade is mostly in dialogue with Nietzsche.)

forgot to update yesterday (yes this is me lowkey having a uni crashout lol)

The superiority of nature in the competitive struggle is repeatedly confirmed by the very mind which has mastered nature. All bourgeois enlightenment is agreed in its demand for sobriety, respect for facts, a correct appraisal of relative strength. Wishful thinking is banned. The reason, however, is that all power in class society is beset by the gnawing consciousness of its powerlessness in face of…

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In class society, the self’s hostility to sacrifice included a sacrifice of the self, since it was paid for by a denial of nature in the human being for the sake of mastery over extrahuman nature and over other human beings. This very denial, the core of all civilizing rationality, is the germ cell of proliferating mythical irrationality: with the denial of nature in human beings, not only the…

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Enlightenment is more than enlightenment, it is nature made audible in its estrangement. In mind’s self-recognition as nature divided from itself, nature … is calling to itself … as something blind and mutilated. In the mastery of nature, without which mind does not exist, enslavement to nature persists.

The tide of what has been has receded from the rock of the present, and the future lies veiled in cloud on the horizon. What Odysseus has left behind him has passed into the world of shades: so close is the self to the primeval myth from whose embrace it has wrested itself that its own lived past becomes a mythical prehistory. It seeks to combat this by a fixed order of time. The tripartite division is…

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