Enlightenment in an Age of Destruction

Intellectuals, World Disorder, and the Politics of Empire

Christopher Britt, Paul Fenn, Eduardo Subirats

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319707846
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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

© The Author(s) 2018

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

Begin Abstract

1. Redefining Enlightenment

Eduardo Subirats¹

(1)

New York University, Princeton, NJ, USA

End Abstract

1.1 Melancholia

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

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

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

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

1.2 Enlightenment as Spectacle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1.3 Let Newton Be! and All Was Light

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

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

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

1.4 Negative Dialectics

The negative dialectics of Horkheimer and Adorno , which the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Redefining Enlightenment
• 2. Critique of Providential Enlightenment
• 3. Enlightenment and Power
• 4. Enlightenment in an Age of Destruction
• Back Matter