Cultural Labyrinth…Organic Machines

Sitting at my designated desk within a self-contained apartment, boxed in within a panopticonish building designed to dominate even my private moments through the mechanisms symbolised most closely by the figuration of the fire-alarm looming above my head, I ponder on the question: Is modernity dark? The standardised lamp hovering above my computer is of artificial light. The natural source of fire and warmth technologically manipulated through the scientific trajectory that developed the oil lamp into the gas lamp and currently the modern filament bulb. Am I writing in darkness? Since what is utilised as light is in fact electricity and I have distinctly moved away from the sun, keeping a keen eye on tactical shades when navigating the city during the day. Surely it is within an enlightened age indicative of a progressive science in which the course of my consciousness and reasoning has developed. So from where do I take a vantage point within a naturalistic subjectivity to measure the advantages and disadvantages of modernity?

I shall then refer to history. Not history rooted in objectivism but the genealogical projects of Adorno’s conception of the enlightenment and Nietzsche’s critique on the uses of history, both self-reflexive works that respectively offer a negative dialectic within the complicity of enlightenment itself and a heroic propagation through the reformulation of our use of knowledge. To emphasis the importance of artistic endeavour, I will periodically refer to Apichatpong’s Tropical Malady (2005), a film that reflexively plunges the viewer into an excursion through the discursive dynamics of the nature/civilisation and light/darkness binary, distancing itself from the repetitive and demeaning nature of much contemporary mainstream art as conceptualised by Adorno in ‘The Culture Industry’. It is exemplar of the canon of “authentic works of art” that is “able to avoid the mere imitation of that which already is” (Adorno, 1972, p. 18). The film’s play with narrative activates the “sublime metaphysical illusion” as “an instinctual accompaniment to science, and repeatedly takes it to its limits, where it must become art: which is the true purpose of this mechanism” (Nietzsche, 1993, p. 73). Thus, it signifies “incredulity towards metanarratives,” not within the playfulness of a postmodernist pop-cultural institution, but with a gravely momentous desecration of the modernist claim of truth as empirical knowledge, emphasising the need for an honest superhuman confrontation with the beast within, in which the process of heightened emotional intensity will “seduce the senses” to awaken the truly enlightened man (Lyotard, 1998, p. 27; Nietzsche, 1990, p. 99).

To denote the conclusion I am striving towards, I shall emphasis that my perceived mode of modernity is indeed dark, resembling a labyrinth when I attempt to trace my own narrative that is inevitably interwoven with the after-effects of enlightenment. When I use the word ‘after-effects’, I am articulating the personal, coming to terms with the fact that having been internalised into twenty-first century modernity, within my bleak horizon, I am unable to experience the agency of the enlightenment process. By no means does it signify the stagnancy of modernity’s progressive trajectory. Instead of navigating the mechanisms of scientific knowledge with an emotively individualistic dissertation of its aims, I perpetuate it as a means to and end… for what? I cannot truly feel. But as an after-effect, I am symptomatic of disorientation and perpetual confusion. These symptoms are nullified by repetition and daily routine and perpetuated by the emblems of the various institutions I function in. Rather than perceiving such symptoms as a deadlock to the after-effects of modernity, it is my aim to employ the critical frameworks fore-grounded by Nietzsche and Adorno as a guide. If the darkness of modernity is metaphorically deployed to signify its effects in domination, a metaphor of light can signify an attempt to navigate the darkness. To deduce if such a light is borne out of darkness, as in artificial light, or a pure source of light… Such a question cannot and should not be analysed in the open, as it runs the risk of transforming into an objective methodology. Instead, within a subjectivism of our personal developmental trajectory, perhaps it can be answered in the most truthful manner; by judging ourselves with the gauge of critical humanistic agency to measure the degree of sincerity that ultimately relates to honesty.

 

Adorno: Modernity Reverts to Myth

Upon reading the Dialectic of Enlightenment, one is grasped by what seems like a disorientating maze of fragmented narratives interwoven through an ironic framework that facilitates its claims through the self-reflexive referral of an array of artworks, often contradictory in its context. Similarly, in Tropical Malady, Apichatpong seemingly utilises the rational construct of filmic structure, but is quick in revealing is unconventional two part structure that dichotomises civilisation and nature, worldly action and mythic action. Ultimately such intent is obscured when the civilisation fragment resonates a mythic aura through a dreamy and spotless narrative, while the mythic mood in the second fragment utilises magical segments strongly rooted to a sense of realism. The viewer is also exposed to the critical flexibility of the medium when a heightened awareness of our spectatorship is established through scenes when characters eerily turn their heads to achieve confronting stares at the audience. The darkness of modern cinema is attributed to that modern cinematic function, a formulated narrative. Both work as an opiate to lull the senses revolving around human contact and encourage a projection of it into the enjoyment of the film itself. When we are stared at in Tropical Malady, darkness is illuminated and the gulf between screen and spectator opens up. At times like these, I turn and acknowledge my fellow cinemagoers. Thus, conventional filmic narrative is a parallel to systematic reasoning in writing that is an academic style aiming at clear articulation through organisation. As Apichatpong detotalises the grasp of scientific totality in film, Adorno’s prose can then be seen as reflective of the claim that “qualitative specificity of social experience is actually more likely to go missing in social science when it attempts to be absolutely literal in its presentation of results” (Jarvis, 1998, p. 21-22). Thus, taking systematic writing itself as indicative of enlightenment’s dark totalising rationality, Adorno rejects scholastic deployment of language, developing a style more indicative of avant-art that reflects his problematic thesis.

On language, Adorno mentions its split in function. As image it works in pure mimetic function “in order to be nature entire” and of systematic signification it “is required to resign itself to calculation in order to know nature” (Adorno, 1972, p. 18). This highlights a distancing of art and science, an antithetical formulation that is ruthlessly perpetuated within modern education. This is apparent in the emphasis of scientific endeavour as the practical means to life and artistic as the contemplative path not borne in absolutes, causing the social stigma of two particular sets of traits associated with the conflicting disciplines. Though “postulated oppositions,” both “blend with one another, and their separation is, in fact, an ideological fiction” (Bauer, 1999, p. 29). The modern administration of education itself utilises myth to support the enlightenment aim in debunking myth. Rather than seeing this as a paradox, it is an inevitable complicity between rationality and myth. I shall state my point on the deployment of language in Adorno’s dialectic. It is its use of style that aims at representing art, not in a mimetic fashion, but within a synthesis with philosophical reasoning. This achieves confident self-reflexivity that represents the possibility of a merger between image and sign. The schizoid narrative(s) is a negatively dark dialectic, indicative of navigating the dark complicity of myth in rationality and vice versa.

Adorno claims “the program of the Enlightenment was the disenchantment of the world; the dissolution of myths and the substitution of knowledge for fancy” (1972, p. 3). It is a process that has its roots within the distancing of nature from human subjects in an attempt at domination. It is the project of sceptical rationality, extreme objectivity, technological advancement, metaphysical phobia, the progress of knowledge that runs its clutches in transcendental “content or meaning lying outside thought it” (Jarvis, 1998, p. 25). By referring enlightenment as myth, a historical benchmark of such a quest for and uses of knowledge is forsaken and enlightenment is outlined as a dark gloomy spectre haunting human development. Thus, it is not taken within a specific history such as Nietzsche’s location of the birth of nihilistic modernity within Socratic reasoning. Rather it is a rationalising principle effective in myth overriding nature as a “utopian dream of organic wholeness,” a singular intention running its course through history, in which modernity is the murky depths of an escalation of domination (Paddison, 1996, p. 28).

Within the soldier’s exploration in the jungle in the second segment of Tropical Malady, he descents into a state of despair in his attempt to capture and instrumentalise the beast as objectified by the mythic tiger. Within a deep state of hallucinatory awareness, he stumbles upon a majestic tree that resonates of mana. He observes the gentle buzzing of an unknown language as the tree illuminates into a transcendental light-force. With his body battered into weakness, he is reduced into a state of observation. Adorno claims, “when the tree is no longer approached merely as tree, but as evidence for an Other, as the location of mana, language expresses the contradiction that something is itself and at one and the same time something other than itself” (1972, p. 15).

It is within this act of abstraction in which he demonstrates that the conceivability of the unknown that soothes fear dates back to the mythical conceptualisation of mana itself. This is an objectifying function as in modernity “in which concept and thing are separated” (ibid). The soldier in his solidarity is unable to communicate and is too weak to dominate it. Perhaps, it is the lesson given by nature if we could take the first step into the jungle. The resultant journey to understand it induces a state of positivist stupor that reduces the soldier into a state of nostalgic contemplation of an absence of instrumental rationality. However, the soldier’s very presence signifies the attempt at domination and such nostalgic reflection must be grasped together with a sense of lethargy. Ultimately, it demonstrates Adorno’s attempt at refuting the nostalgia of a time before rationality to the assertion that “enlightenment is mythic fear turned radical” (ibid, p. 16). The soldier’s agency resonates of the sweeping attempts in the historical progress of knowledge from conceptualising the social within Marxism to the subject in psychoanalysis. While seemingly positive on the outside, there is the dark will that lurks within such knowledge itself.

As asserted by Nietzsche, modernity has killed the significance of God. We are left to pick up the pieces through a scientific maze that extends outwards. The modern conceptualisation of faith is wrapped up in knowledge, refused its heroic irrationality of Abraham’s plunge into god’s will. Adorno states that its uses from Protestantism have reinvested the act of faith into “symbolic power” resulting in “obedience to the word” utilised as modernity’s “particular stratagem” (ibid, p. 20). The sacred is rejected for its uses in instrumental rationality, which sees its results in our acceptance of its mythical nature to the effect of calming us into compliance. Similarly, mimesis is “progressively replaced by identification” in which an emphasis in numerical calculation “subsume and classif[ies] the object,” resulting in the cancellation of sacredness (Jarvis, 1998, p. 27). While extending its control over nature as object, the enlightenment process ultimately works towards the domination of human subjects.

A comparison with Freud’s conceptualisation of the ego-drive and id-drive further illustrates the problematic of enlightenment. While the id-drive represents spontaneous unrestricted emotive humanity that served as an emphasis in the unhistorical mood of the Greeks, the ego-drive propels the subject into a state of order to comprehend its surroundings. The enlightenment’s project of maturity that “pursues a form of Subjectivity constituted by the predominance of the ego-drive” is a narcissistic instability that marks its decline into myth, resulting in the loss of “pleasure in relation to reality” (Sherratt, 2000, p. 533, 536). Adorno refers to the Odysseus to illustrate its consequences. Homer’s steering of the ship signifies the goal of enlightenment’s rationality, the modern spirit. His administrative self-control is tantamount to an increase in regression as perpetuated on his workers, while the obstacle of the Sirens is in fact an embodiment of the id that constitutes an all-rounded meaning in life. By plugging his rowers’ ears, they “know only of the song’s danger but nothing of its beauty,” leaving Homer tied to the mast in a reproduction of his original intent (Adorno, 1972, p. 34). The endless duplication of enlightenment’s deficiency of an all-rounded psychologically established subjectivity escalates into mythic illusionary meaning that replaces pleasure rooted within reality. There is a split in which “the internal sphere” of enlightenment “is successful and increasing in strength relative to the external sphere” that “is regressing to encompass” mythic features (Sherratt, 2000, p. 538).

Within modernity, the utilisation of mythic delusion is increasing and seeping in to the internal sphere in relation to the advancement and precision of “the social, economic, and scientific apparatus with whose service the production system has long harmonised the body” (Adorno, 1972, p. 36). The id is forsaken for a monstrously scientific propagation of the ego’s objective necessity that in turn serves as a replacement object for the id. This results in psychological shift of an attainment of pleasure, which amounts to meaning, from experience itself into that of instrumental knowledge that becomes the deceptive source of meaning. Thus, it can be seen as a form of perversity. In Tropical Malady, the soldier’s flirtation with the country boy situates its narrative within the field of civilisation, pointing towards a process of conceptualising the desired human object into a materiality to be dominated. The concluding scene in which the soldier consummates his motives by licking the country boy’s hand is returned with a seemingly similar gesture rooted with a haunting eroticism that reflects an attempt at consuming the soldier’s hand. The desired ‘object’ smiles and descends into the woods leaving the soldier within his blankness. Has the object turned instrumental, with desire dominated upon through a methodical flirtation that hints at domination, in which it returns the gesture through domination upon human agency amounting into a state of blank paralysis?

The soldier descends into the jungle to hunt down the desire as symbolised through the mythic tiger with the aim to control it. He eventually realises that it is both his friend and foe, resulting in the dark act of presenting his soul to that primitive force. It is dark in terms of enlightenment’s rationalistic impulse. However, within the soldier’s agency in his search for his soul, it is the reclamation of the id that is achieved, resulting in the emergence of meaning.

Modernity as reflected through the workings of popular culture, especially within our consumption of it as a daily affair, is indicative of the depletion of the id, in which the repetition of instrumental systems permeate our enjoyment of it as such. It is within such a framework that Adorno conceptualises the ‘Culture Industry” that sees an individualistic and critical creation and reception of art moving towards repetitive industrialisation, in which it fixates the attainment of meaning to a senseless preoccupation with technology and capital. Adorno states that “the technology of the culture industry [is] no more than the achievement of standardization and mass production” towards “the rationale of domination itself” (2005, p. 33). The archetypical filmic structure as a model of economic machinery blocks out any reference to its medium in an attempt to disable the audience through its controlled automated receptivity. In terms of the promise of pleasure, “the culture industry does not sublimate” but “represses” through the spectacle of pleasure itself, situating the promises it makes within an illusionary field, in which genuine “moments of happiness” are replace with humour that “takes the place of the pain found in ecstasy and in asceticism” (ibid, pp. 38-39). Within postmodernism’s inclusion of irony into pop-cultural institution, there is even an escalation of blank indifferent irony in which the consumers laugh at the perpetuated domination yet remained glued to the mediascape by the illusion of self-reflexivity robbed of its critical nature through repetition. On popular music, Adorno sees a similar repressiveness as “the familiarity of a piece is a surrogate for the quality ascribed to it,” in which pleasure is attained through recognition of repetitive elements” (1982, p. 271). Thus, the Culture Industry can be seen as an onset of mythic totality, in which consumers are reduced into copies of a copy and the standardization of cultural products darken the possibilities of creating and decoding autonomous art with truthful understanding.

 

Nietzsche: Navigating a Mythic Totality

Adorno’s negative dialectic runs its trajectory within Nietzsche’s genealogical project. Both reflect the critical stance of self-reflexivity in the evaluation of modernity, questioning its inclinations and contemplating the regression that results from an overabundance of a systematic scientific drive. Both also acknowledge a complicity of their critique with enlightenment itself. The positive pursuit of knowledge and the uses of history are paramount towards reaffirmation of the enlightenment project and must be reconceptualised with an acknowledgement of its darker inclinations towards a dominating metanarrative. Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals investigates the modern conceptions of morality not through a universally contingent path but through the fissures and undirected routes as driven by a will to power. He exposes the regressive element of modernity’s slave morality in which individuals relapse into a herd resentful to a more bodily and creative effort in human agency, resulting in a loss of health and progressive culture within the human species. This approach in critically examining morality is similar to Adorno’s dialectic in which enlightenment is investigated as “flexible metaphors reverberating throughout history” that moves through “more or less mutual processes of subjugation, resistance, and defense transformations” (Bauer, 1999, p. 69). However, there is a difference in mood between both critiques. Despite the self-reflexive impulse in the dialectic, it inevitability reverts into myth through its totalising conceptualisation of enlightenment’s regressive trajectory. Hence the pessimistic tone which paints an overly dark picture of modernity. However, there is an optimistic tone and creative drive within Nietzsche’s critique that propels the genealogist towards a “productive and consistent resistance to enlightenment’s inflated estimation of history and rationality” (ibid, p. 51). It is within such an honest reaffirmation of life that gives us strength to work from within the nihilism and instrumentalism of modernity, to continue the process of enlightenment within a re-evaluated framework in an attempt to shed some light within the darkness to enable, in the most basic sense, good health.

Historicity taken within its conventional terms perpetuates the rationalism of the enlightenment, the means to modernity. A reformulation of its narrative, in which one inserts an atmosphere of criticism on its repressiveness and evaluation on its progressive uses, detotalises its supportive function to the effect of revealing enlightenment’s artifice. This would be a form of counternarrative that exposes the ideological functions through a meditation on the fissures inherent in the falseness of viewing history as continuous. Nietzsche claims “there is a degree of sleeplessness, of rumination, of the historical sense, which is harmful and ultimately fatal to the living thing,” insisting that “a living thing can be healthy, strong and fruitful only when bounded by a horizon” (1983, pp. 62-63). The frame of mind instituted by this horizon, a sense of the unhistorical, is attributed to Greek civilization in its passion and exaltation of the senses.

This statement enabled a simple epiphany through a relation to a recent event. It was a period in which I was grasped by an uncontrollable fervour upon digesting a certain critical thought. The previous lethargy attributed to the dirge of a systematic approach in education that justified itself through its own progressive course gave way to a heightened sense of present awareness. It made the past an opiate-like narcotic. The present moment resembles a naturalistic high, an uncontainable sense of mindfulness without the conscious effort of diligent practice. The city was illuminated, revealing itself as a canvas that enabled multiple explorations and discoveries. My obligation to strive within an academic institution as motivated by grades yielded into a sense of carelessness. However, after two intense weeks fully immersed in this state without any attempts to grasp and control it, it slowly faded back into that original state and I was almost forced to fulfil, through the pressure of a modern conscience, all the obligations neglected during that period. I attribute that almost ‘careless’ state to a bout of unhistorical living, an almost animalistic antithesis to the pressures of modern society. In a relation to the id, it embeds meaning to life itself and avoids overt scepticism that would result in instrumental rationality of modernity.

While acknowledging it as the force that propels constructive action, Nietzsche suggests that “only by imposing limits on this unhistorical element by thinking, reflecting, comparing, distinguishing, drawing conclusions” and utilising “a powerful instinct for sensing when it is necessary to feel historically and when unhistorically” that we can raise ourselves into “a suprahistorical vantage point” (ibid, p. 63-65). Thus, the rational use of history is rejected as simply regressive but championed as a critical framework to creatively and instinctively employ the unhistorical drive. Through a constant flux of this synthesis in relation to particular situations and perspectives, historiography is refused a scientific status and reaffirmed as a genealogy towards the benefit of life.

It is within the advent of Socratic thought that Nietzsche pinpoints the onset of modernity’s nihilistic tendencies. It signals the submission of a strong progressive culture ala the vibrancy of the Greeks “to a subjectification, in which reason and rationalization come to form a cultural complex hostile to the body, strong individuality, and cultural diversity” (Kellner, n.d., p. 8). This results in a negation of the possibilities that could result in a plurality in perspectives that will encourage a healthy disposition in contrast to the stagnant nature of modernity’s excessive use of history in its decadence. Nietzsche conceptualizes three uses of history as the monumental, antiquarian and critical. Monumental history which “espous[es] the knowledge that it was once possible for the great to exist” signifies a hope for humanity in reaffirming moments of greatness, inevitably “diminish[es] the differences of motives and instigations so as to exhibit the effectus monumentally” (Bauer, 1999, p. 52; Nietzsche, 1983, p. 70). As a result, truthfulness is substituted by a mythic convention that perpetuates a totalisation leading towards fanaticism. Antiquarian history is associated with a deeply rooted relation of present conditions with the historical development of one’s tradition. In modernity, it is used within an ideological framework in nationalistic regimes to instill a sense of pride that ensures the willing reproduction of specific cultures taken as the singular vantage point. Nietzsche asserts that by  “reject[ing] and persecut[ing]” all that is “new and evolving,” Antiquarian history leads to stagnancy by “know[ing] only how to preserve life” (1983, pp. 74-75). It is through the excessive usage of these two forms of history that demands the need of critical history “propelled by the negativity, the radical criticism, and the drive for destruction” to “allow the rise of the new” (Bauer, 1999, p. 53). By the rejection of a particular nature as absolute, critical history employs discursive frameworks that enable the possibilities of ever changing instincts to the needs of humanity.

On the driving force initiating human agency, Nietzsche mourns the demise of a “tragic notion of accountability” that “illustrates the presence of a good conscience,” in which modernity is instead imbedded with “the moral idea of accountability” that “illustrates the presence of a bad conscience” (Owen, 1995, p. 56). It is the conception of slave-morality driven bad conscience that intertwines the modern man’s enlightenment with a sense of guilt and punishment to the benefit of the state’s instrumental reproduction. In Adorno’s dialectic, sacrifice in its mythic form of religious appraisal already signifies modernity’s capitalistic exchange that internalises self-sacrifice in the rational astuteness in domination. This genealogical account of enlightenment that demystifies the irrationality of sacrifice parallels Nietzsche’s conception of guilt as a symptom of man’s debt to society. It is through an internalisation process that subjects are formed. The modern subject is rooted to “the internal control mechanism of bad conscience” that “acts as the cultural and moral memory of society,” resulting in “the continued emphasis on self-sacrifice, renunciation, and alienation” to the effect of ensuring the fulfilment of debts” (Bauer, 1999, p. 73). This results in the instrumental use of knowledge that “acts as an agent for transforming the outside world but remains concealed within a chaotic inner world which modern man describes with a curious pride as his uniquely characteristic ‘subjectivity’” (Nietzsche, 1983, p. 78). Modernity results from uneasiness towards the natural world that seeps into humanity itself, causing the endless pursuit of knowledge and the nihilistic propagation of history. It creates only knowledge as a means to itself and not the development of culture towards the well being of individuals.

The scientific use of history has impelled the modern man into a state of unbecoming and a loss of personality within a repressive state regime. This constitutes the critical approach Nietzsche takes in his meditation on the enlightenment in which he paints a dark picture of modernity’s demeaning elements. However, to stop at this point would be to short-change Nietzsche’s overall portrait of modernity that strings together a liberating element, the possibility of emancipation. This is not a total rejection of the enlightenment project but a reconstitution of its aims, a genealogical approach that critically exposes its detrimental effects and rebuilds its spirit towards the cultivation of strong personalities. Nietzsche talks about this “venerable exemplar of the species of man” that “desires truth, not as cold, ineffectual knowledge,” and “the egoistic possession of the individual,” as in instrumental rationality and the conventional uses of history, “but as a regulating and punishing judge,” the “sacred right to overturn all the boundary-stones of egoistical possessions” (ibid, p. 88). The exemplary modern man that works towards the instillation of an affirmative sense of maturity deploys the rationality of the enlightenment through the uses of his creative facilities, hence the synthesis of Apollinian and Dionysian cultures. Thus, scientific rationality and historiography is reformulated into an imaginative critical science devoid of cynicism through “superintendence and supervision” of “a hygiene of life,” in which “the unhistorical and the suprahistorical are the natural antidotes to the stifling of life by the historical, by the malady of history” (ibid, p. 121).

This hopeful reaffirmation of a youthful stance towards the weakening of personality in modernity represents a mythic ideal itself. But it is not to be taken as a paradox as the Nietzschean drive recognizes its complicity with enlightenment. Adorno’s genealogical account on the entanglement of myth and enlightenment conceptualises the mythical regression of modernity as a negating life force perpetuating the means of domination. Its intentions are to be separated from the Nietzchean myth of the Ubermensch, whose aim is in the honest service of life experienced within a striving towards a greater capacity for agency, a telos firmly grounded to the will to power that moves towards autonomy. Thus, there should be a critical and creative effort in evaluating the multiplicity of myths in an attempt to reject and adopt the nihilistic and healthy respectively. It is within such a framework that Nietzschean genealogy rescues Adorno’s dialectic from an overt sense of pessimism. In conducting the ever continuous discursive process of genealogy, the uses of history, knowledge and the adaptation of myths for the sake of an honest progression of a positive progression of modernity to the interests of humanity, individualistic approaches would appear as variations of a theme. These variations would then individually reflect a microcosm of resistance towards the modern hegemonic order, with each attempt marked by its own concern and emphasis. Perhaps with individuals attempting such a course of action, a resulting healthy discourse would surface, signalling the possibly of the emergence of a truly affirmative culture.

In Tropical Malady, in a parallel to modernity’s relentless pursuit of knowledge, the soldier enters the mythical realm of nature in pursuit of the tiger, the figuration of the threat of animalistic origins and desire. Being the bearer of a strong ego, the soldier aims to contain and rationalise his desire. However, with the realisation of the tiger’s presence as inherent in his being, his friend and foe, he ends his hunt and aims instead at understanding and connecting with it. The instrumental rationality of modernity is subverted through a heightened sequence in which the soldier, devoid of intent in taming or control, heroically establishes eye contact with the tiger, resulting in a deep state of mindfulness.

In this act, it is the human figure that is tamed by the wild beast, resulting in the atmospheric of the forest revealed as a ‘song of happiness’. The sweeping shot of the forest that concludes the film is neither totally dark nor bright. Rather, it is the crack of dawn, the coming of light signifying a heroic becoming, a new perspective. With this I will conclude with the assertion that modernity is not fully dark. The self-negation trajectory of the enlightenment as conceptualised by Adorno reveals its complicity with myth, utilising and describing a dark negative dialectic. Its self-reflexivity enables the awareness of the mythical artificiality of light in modernity. Without doubt, modernity within its industrialisation and militarism situates the enlightenment project in an extreme mythical regression. At present times, perhaps the artificiality of light shines too bright and becomes jarring to the eye. By adapting a Nietzschean optimism to the benefit of all that is positively human, we can utilise this artificial light in ever creative and critical ways, dimming it when necessary and rewiring in subversion. The dichotomy between civilization and nature must be reworked by stepping into nature itself with an honest attempt to lose our fear of the unknown, of the beast within. Perhaps a genuine light source would be illuminated through such humane attempts. The possibility of light is inherent in us. The degree of brightness can be measured through our uses of artificial light.

 

References

 

Adorno, T. & Horkheimer, M. (1972). “The Concept of Enlightenment”. in The Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Seabury Press. pp 3-42.

Adorno, T. & Horkheimer, M. (2005). “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment As Mass Deception”. in During Simon (ed.). The Cultural Studies Reader. (2^nd ed.). London: Routledge.

Adorno, Theodor. (1982). “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening”. in Arato, A. & Gebhardt, E. (eds.). The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company.

Bauer, Karin. (1999). Adorno’s Nietzschean Narratives: Critiques of Ideology, Readings of Wagner. New York: State University of New York Press.

Jarvis, Simon. (1998). Adorno: A Critical Introduction. Oxford: Polity Press.

Kellner, Douglas. (n.d.). Modernity and Its Discontents: Nietzsche’s Critique. Retrieved 15 October, 2007, from http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/modernityanditsdiscontents.pdf

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. (1998). “The Postmodern Condition”. in Seidman, Steven. (ed.). The Postmodern Turn: New Perspectives on Social Theory. UK: Cambridge University Press.

Nietzsche, F. (1983). “On the Uses and Disadvantages of a History for Life” in Untimely Meditations. CUP.

Nietzsche, F. (1993). The Birth of Tragedy. London: Penguin.

Nietzsche, F. (1990). Beyond Good and Evil. London: Penguin.

Owen, David. (1995). Nietzsche, Politics and Modernity: A Critique of Liberal Reason. London: SAGE Publications.

Paddison, Max. (1996). Adorno, Modernism and Mass Culture: Essays on Critical Theory and Music. London: Kahn & Averill.

Sherratt, Y. (2000). Adorno and Horkheimer’s Concept of ‘Enlightenment’. British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 8(3), 521-544.