A semblance of freedom: Horkheimer and Adorno’s conception of myth

Abstract

In this paper I argue that the pessimistic reading of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, which suggests reason is ensconced within the domination of myth, misses a key component of the authors' argument. Specifically, it misses the possibility that the liberation from the heteronomy of myth might occur via a critique of myth. Using Owen Hulatt’s reinterpretation of Adorno’s account of the tension between mimesis and self-preservation as a point of orientation, I show that while myth for Horkheimer and Adorno is synonymous with a heteronomous form of life, they simultaneously recognize it as an incomplete but largely untapped mediator of the history of human experience (via language), and thus a promising source of rational self-knowledge. Specifically, myth can illuminate fragments of both the contingent factors that led to human sociality becoming entwined with domination, while also offering momentary reflections of the kinds of life that were relinquished in the drive for instrumentalised survival. I propose that for Horkheimer and Adorno it is myth’s linguistic mediation between a community of speakers and their (often violent and ambiguous) pasts that is unique. It is thus myth’s capacity to offer a meditation on those other possibilities of human existence that presents a renewed chance of enlightenment.

Dialectic of Enlightenment is well known for its critique of enlightenment, the culture industry and anti-Semitism. However, it also represents a problematisation of any reductive account of myth as a human phenomenon that can be progressively eliminated. Horkheimer and Adorno argue that the enlightenment project has ‘always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters’. ¹ The authors argue, however, undoubtedly partly as a result of their own historical moment, that any notion that there has been a cumulative, rational elimination of fearful superstition can be quickly undermined. ² In short, for the authors, the idea that there is a correlation between the passage of time and the liberation from mythic fear had to be re-evaluated. Many of the arguments contained in Dialectic of Enlightenment remain highly ambiguous and much disputed in the secondary literature. It is common for the primary argument to be reduced to a totalising critique of reason itself, where reason is inherently dominating and oppressive. ³ The initial reception of the pair’s work has contributed to the loose collection of intellectuals now known as the ‘Frankfurt School’ to be associated, on the matter of the hopes of enlightenment, with a form of pessimism akin to a resignation. This reading is often summarized by referencing the famous dictum in the 1944 preface: ‘Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology’. ⁴

In this paper, I will argue that an entirely pessimistic reading of Dialectic of Enlightenment, wherein enlightened reason comes to be merely a reflection of the domination of mythology, is mistaken. ⁵ The error, I will contend, derives from a particular misreading of Horkheimer and Adorno’s association of enlightenment with myth: specifically, the singularly negative connotations affiliated with the conception of myth itself. Such an interpretation stems from a particular reading of Freud’s influence, and his theory of the teleology of rational development, which saw ritualistic forms of magic based around mimesis as a precursor to first myth, and then reason. ⁶ However, a possible correction to this interpretation lies in a dimension of Horkheimer and Adorno’s understanding of myth (and its connection to mimesis) that is often overlooked. It can now be approached much more explicitly in light of Owen Hulatt’s reinterpretation of Adorno’s theory of mimesis, and in particular the historical connection between mimesis and language. ⁷

I intend to use Hulatt’s detailed reading of Adorno’s account of mimesis to uncover a conception of myth in Dialectic of Enlightenment that does not approach it merely as a universal category of primitive or naive thinking (following a traditional reading of Freud), but also as representing a linguistic carrier of historically particular instances of repression and trauma. One of the key implications of Hulatt’s argument is that reason is not the opposite of mimesis. Rather, human mimetic practices (which would begin with the most rudimentary physical expressions of the body, gradually becoming more complex) take on increasingly abstract and rationalized forms to satisfy the human drive for self-preservation. This implies that language, which showcases both its mimetic origins and its later abstract and symbolic ones, gives us some understanding of this increasingly rationalized form of mimesis that Hulatt has in mind. Because the depositing of mimetic practice into language is in effect the depositing of forms of human experience, I propose that for Horkheimer and Adorno language also offers a fragmented insight into the forms of life and associated forms of social relations that accompanied that process of rationalization. Given language is a kind of ‘bearer’ of the historically contingent manner in which human practices and institutions became associated with forms of domination, my suggestion is that Horkheimer and Adorno are attentive to the ways in which language can illuminate the negation of that history. Specifically, the detritus of modes of existence (or the longing for such modes) not associated with the patriarchal division of class and labour that were relinquished in prehistory. ⁸ The value of myth in this context for Horkheimer and Adorno, I argue, derives from its representing a deep linguistic repository of human experience – a space in which human beings can self-reflexively meditate on the manner in which human freedom has thus far failed to materialize, as well as see a momentary glimpse into the other possibilities of human existence and organization that present a renewed chance of enlightenment. ⁹

There has been a great deal of scholarly work recently dealing with the first-generation Frankfurt School’s – but especially Horkheimer and Adorno – philosophy of language, focusing in particular on key affinities between it and the ordinary language movement in the analytic tradition (mostly the latter Wittgenstein). ¹⁰ While I do not engage directly with the question of the affinities between the Frankfurt School and Anglo-American tradition, the argument presented here does agree with the broad thrust of this recent scholarship that argues that Horkheimer and Adorno’s project broadly conceived is closely tied to a philosophy of language. This is by virtue of the fact that language offers up to reason a mirror by which it can come to understand its history – both its failures to realize its hopes and the possibilities by which it may yet do so. In my view, for Horkheimer and Adorno, myth is one of the primary sites in which such work occurs.

Reason, mimesis, and survival

In his paper ‘Reason, Mimesis, and Self-Preservation in Adorno’, Hulatt offers a reinterpretation of Adorno’s theory of mimesis. ¹¹ Hulatt rejects the common reading of Adorno’s account of mimesis as existing in a simple binary opposition to reason, and instead proposes a ‘…tri-partite conflict between reason, self-preservation, and mimesis’. ¹² Horkheimer and Adorno’s conception of mimesis was heavily influenced by Roger Caillois and the collaborative research of Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss (amongst others). As Hulatt argues, these thinkers all viewed mimesis as the ‘assimilation of the particular to its environment’, a process that allowed early human beings to ‘come into relation’ with the world). ¹³ As Hulatt points out, however, this model of mimesis is ‘devoid of an internal motor that could be…responsible for the developmental narrative of increasing abstraction’. ¹⁴ As a result, he argues that the common binary distinction between mimesis and reason in Adorno (whereby abstract reason drives the movement away from mimetic impulses) is incorrect.

Using historical practices like magic ritual as an example of the mediation, or intermingling, between mimesis and abstract reasoning, Hulatt suggests that it is the human drive for self -preservation that can explain the process, or the motor, from ‘raw mimesis to structured substitution’. ¹⁵ In Hulatt’s reading of Adorno, the arousal of fear in early humans, occasioned by the drive for self-preservation, eventually ceases to be assuaged by mimetic activity and, instead, ‘drives the generation of conceptuality’. ¹⁶ Thus, ‘self-preservation…intercedes into the life of the primitive consciousness and countermands the desire for raw mimesis…When magic is hit upon as an epistemic strategy, we see mimesis and self-preservation become intermingled’. ¹⁷ In this model, according to Hulatt, for Adorno, early historical examples of human practice such a magic ritual are not iterations of pure mimetic irrationality. Rather, they are an early manifestation of the negotiation of abstract reasoning and mimetic practice, which is driven by the self-preserving drive’s need to control its environment which pure mimesis, with its ‘tendency toward collapse into undifferentiated oneness with its environment’, no longer satisfied. ¹⁸ If we understand mimesis as the phenomenon of the human body coming into relation with, and orientating itself in, the physical world, and we also acknowledge that these mimetic practices came to be enmeshed within increasingly abstract schemas, we can begin to see how these initial experiences of human beings came to be deposited within rationalized concepts as a kind of memory. As I will outline in the coming sections, this is one way of understanding how language, as a rationalized system of mimetic functions, can become a repository of human experience.

Hulatt’s argument goes on to deal with Adorno’s understanding of the relation between mimesis and the work of art; specifically the fact that mimesis' refuge in art is not a case of the artwork’s protecting the ‘irrationality’ of mimesis but, rather, a case of the self-preserving drive allowing art a ‘privileged sphere in which self -preservation is not…pressed as a task’. ¹⁹ For my purposes, this opens up interesting questions about myth, as a historical phenomenon where rational abstraction and aesthetic mimesis intermingle. Hulatt’s discussion of myth is limited, mostly because in his account he sees magic and myth as equivalent, insofar as he sees them as different words for the same phenomenon whereby human beings develop ‘a species of cunning directed at the preservation of the self and attendant control of the environment’. ²⁰ These forms of cunning, like magic ritual and mythic authority, come eventually to be abandoned as more effective forms of self-preservation emerge, in the form of increasingly abstract reasoning. ²¹ This close association of myth and magic as meeting places of reason and mimesis also suggests the existence of myth in modernity as a case of the re-emergence of a preconceptual, mimetic assimilation to surroundings, ‘a raw impulse towards inaction and dissolution’. ²² Following Callois and Freud, this can only lead in the end to death. ²³ While I think there are reasons to doubt the strict equivalence of magic and myth, what is crucial for my own argument rests on Hulatt’s notion that magic ritual and myth involved the intermingling of mimesis and abstract reason. As I will discuss in later sections, my suggestion is that the emphasis on the dialectical relationship between mimesis and instrumental reason helps illuminate the ways myth offers both fragmented historical insights into the dimensions of human experience and sociality that were favoured in the drive for self-preservation and by extension the faintest outlines of those that were abandoned in that process. My suggestion is that myth’s capacity to illuminate this process linguistically is crucial in this regard.

The terror from which mana was born

Thus far, I have argued that Hulatt’s rearticulation of Adorno’s theory of mimesis has important implications for a more nuanced understanding of Horkheimer and Adorno’s account of myth in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Hulatt’s account of mimesis as a historical category of human practices that came to be (largely but not entirely) abandoned in favour of abstraction recontextualises the mythic traditions left to posterity. Myths were not just fantastic and superstitious stories. By virtue of their close structural and genealogical association with magic ritual, as well as their linguistic, rational organization, myths also offered a historical representation of the ways mimesis and rationality were deeply intertwined within human sociality broadly conceived. My claim is that this is not merely conceptual (i.e. myths, structurally, embody mimetic representation and abstract reason, although they do) but also historical, insofar as these mythic traditions tell us something about the kinds of social organization and cultural identities and commitments that human beings may have been forced to abandon in the drive for self-preservation.

This is an admittedly controversial idea. My claim is not that myth offers up unambiguous, literal representations of forms of life that were relinquished in the deep past. Rather, my suggestion is that Horkheimer and Adorno recognized the myths of oral tradition and later their ‘finalization’ in epic as genuine (albeit fragmented and ambiguous) reflections of a community’s deep cultural memory. These memories included not only what human beings had been forced to do in the drive for survival, but recognized that history as the negation of another history: the kinds of human organization and expression that were perhaps relinquished with great reluctance in the face of self-preservation’s demands. Or, perhaps even those that never actually manifested in human social relations, but which were the object of a community’s deep longing. ²⁴ That is, myth represented not merely a purely aesthetic or allegorical account of the emergence of Western subjectivity, but a linguistically mediated reception history of communities reflecting on their own deep past. The layers of these traditions, as I will argue, go very deep. These oral traditions that survived (presumably due to their importance to a sociocultural community) offered fragmentary insights not only into the comparatively recent past, but also deeper cultural memories that dealt specifically with the transition from early, tribal forms of authority into formalized systematic forms of tyranny. Myth’s capacity to linguistically mediate obscure fragments from a collective past is clarified to some extent when we look more concretely at Adorno’s philosophy of language, which Philip Hogh argues is intimately tied to a philosophy of history. Hogh writes:

Whilst Adorno claims that ‘all philosophical critique is today possible as the critique of language,’ this idea is based on a notion of language as a historical practise in which the real life of human beings is sedimented. It is not understood as an autonomous form that would remain untouched by life: ‘Through language history wins a share in truth. Words are never merely signs of what is thought under them, but rather history erupts into words’. ²⁵

Thus, Hogh’s argument (which I will return to in detail in the final section) helps illuminate the idea that myth, as a linguistic phenomenon, bears the concrete traces of what human beings underwent in the emergence of modern subjectivity.

In fact, Horkheimer and Adorno describe in detail the kinds of pressure human beings probably underwent as part of the drive for self-preservation. In the first chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment, the authors describe in more general terms the forms of trauma that early human beings would have undergone in order for modern subjectivity to be possible (I will discuss their concrete representation in epic in the next section):

Humanity had to inflict terrible injuries on itself before the self – the identical, purpose-directed, masculine character of human beings – was created, and something of this process is repeated in every childhood. The effort to hold itself together attends the ego at all its stages and the temptation to be rid of the ego has always gone hand-in-hand with the blind determination to preserve it. ²⁶

They allude here to Freud’s theory of repression. In this model, the emergence of the human subject is a product of both the ego’s ‘holding together’ of the individuated elements of the psyche, as well as the more basic urge to get rid of the ego that comes to be reflected in the mimetic drive. ²⁷ Just as something of the patient’s childhood is revealed in his neuroses, myths provide the fragmented evidence of ancient unconscious traumas, both in terms of what was retained for the sake of survival, but also that which was abandoned. They write:

Over the millennia the living memory of prehistory, of its nomadic period and even more of the truly prepatriarchal stages, has been expunged from human consciousness with the most terrible punishments. ²⁸

Horkheimer and Adorno argue that the ambiguous and incomplete legacy of this process is visible in the ways early mimetic practice, and the associated beliefs, were immediately sanctioned into law:

Wherever it is found in ethnology, the terror from which mana was born was already sanctioned, at least by the tribal elders. Unidentical, fluid mana was solidified, violently materialized by men. Soon the sorcerers had populated every place with its emanations and coordinated the multiplicity of sacred realms with that of sacred rites. ²⁹

Crucially, the authors go on to speculate that the movement from individuated forms of existence toward structured forms of societal hierarchy would have been marred by violence:

In the first stages of nomadism the members of the tribe still played an independent part in influencing the course of nature. The men tracked prey while the women performed tasks which did not require rigid commands. How much violence preceded the habituation to even so simple an order cannot be known. In that order the world was already divided into zones of power and the profane. ³⁰

In these passages, Horkheimer and Adorno suggest that even the earliest forms of social organisation already showcase the violent transferal of authority from individuals to centralized shamanic rule. They further contend that these rudimentary forms of priestly jurisdiction eventually transformed into codified systems of control (which further accelerated following the emergence of agriculture) all as a result of pressures in the deep past, and the self-preserving drive’s response. ³¹ While the passages above are clearly speculative insofar as they make generalized conclusions about the emergence of subjectivity and its relation to systems of social domination, I think two important points are worth highlighting. Firstly, they appear to support the idea that Horkheimer and Adorno saw the violence that humanity had undergone as not innate to the species or to reason itself. Rather, violent domination emerged due to the contingent, particular demands humanity faced in its (unknown) prehistory, and in so doing it also represents the negation of whatever forms of life were (or might have been) abandoned in that process. ³² Secondly, the passages' proximity to Horkheimer and Adorno’s sustained and rigorous readings of myth, suggests that, for the authors, the fact of this contingency – that human life might have been otherwise – is best examined via what they considered the richest repository of humanity’s self-reflexive understanding of itself: language and the history of experience deposited within it.

The germ of the regression

Following Hulatt’s argument that the disappearance of magic and myth is due to the increasingly conceptually abstract ‘responses’ to the drive for self-preservation, I have suggested that, for Horkheimer and Adorno, myth’s capacity to linguistically mediate deep cultural memories offers an insight into how particular human practices and beliefs (as expressions of self-preservation) came to be favoured over others. Subsequently, my suggestion is that while myth gives an insight into the ways in which human life came to fall under systems of domination, it also offers a fragmentary glimpse into the kinds of life that may have had to be relinquished in the dogged drive to survive. The authors suggest that myth grants a locus in which these fragments of abandoned or imaginary life are momentarily familiar to us as a source of communal reflection, specifically when we recognize the kinds of heteronomous life that did obtain also represent the negation of other relinquished or unrealized forms of life. It should be stressed that this is not a Romantic argument. For Horkheimer and Adorno, there can be no return to more ‘authentic’ versions of life. These past forms of existence that are reflected ambiguously in myth are fundamentally unrecoverable and perhaps never occurred. They maintain, however, that a genuine meditation on those detrital dimensions of our past might trigger qualitatively new forms of rational reflection, and thus an interruption to the ongoing violence of history. ³³

This aspect of the argument is evident in Horkheimer and Adorno’s claim that Homer ‘bears witness to the dialectic of enlightenment’. The comparatively modern, rationalized, organization of disparate Mediterranean stories are, in the authors' eyes, in constant tension with their ‘clear links to myth,…[to] popular tradition’. ³⁴ They write:

But as the Homeric spirit takes over and “organises” the myths, it comes into contradiction with them…The two concepts diverge. They mark two phases of an historical process, which are still visible at the joints where the editors have stitched the epic together. ³⁵

Thus, although Homer represents a comparatively late ‘finalization’ of a much older series of Mediterranean traditions, those legacies of the past, these forgotten pressures of life, remain embedded in the story patterns. The authors' presentation of this idea is worth quoting at length:

Myths are precipitated in the different strata of Homer’s subject matter; but at the same time the reporting of them, the unity imposed on the diffuse legends, traces the path of the subject’s flight from the mythical powers. This is already true, in a profound sense, of the Iliad. The anger of the mythical son of a goddess against the rational warrior king and organizer; the hero’s undisciplined inactivity; finally, the enlistment of the victorious, doomed hero in a cause which is national, Hellenic, and no longer tribal, an allegiance mediated by mythic loyalty to his dead comrade – all these reflect the intertwinement of history and prehistory. The same development is still more vividly present in the Odyssey…The contrast between the single surviving ego and the multiplicity of fate reflects the antithesis between enlightenment and myth. The hero’s peregrinations from Troy to Ithaca trace the path of the self through myths, a self infinitely weaker in comparison to the forces of nature and still in the process of formation as self-consciousness. The primeval world is secularised…the demons populate only the distant margins and islands of the civilised Mediterranean, retreating into the forms of rock and cave from which they had originally sprung in the face of primal dread [Schauder der Urzeit – literally the ‘shudder of prehistoric times’]. The adventures bestow names on each of these places, and the names give rise to a rational overview of space. ³⁶

The primary argument that the authors make in this passage suggests that the conditions of possibility for Western subjectivity bears the traces of the trauma implied by the transition from archaic modes of living to more modern ones. This is embodied in someone like Achilles, who represents the not entirely easy transition from tribal to urban life. The great hero personifies both a warrior of Mycenaean Greece, as well as the collective memory of an earlier pastoral, warrior society. His raging against the bureaucracies implied by a nationalist war show the extent to which he represents a cultural memory of the Greek’s confrontation with their own deep past, probably originating in Neolithic, pastoral horse tribes from the Eurasian steppes. ³⁷ However, as I have argued, Horkheimer and Adorno suggest the memories contained in the Homeric myths go deeper still, and include not just the forms of life that were favoured in the drive towards modern subjectivity, but also those that had to be relinquished, or perhaps those that were only ever objects of longing. As I outlined earlier, this should not be taken in strict literal or empirical terms (wherein mythic traditions tells us straightforwardly what early forms of human subjectivity and life were ‘like’). Instead, Horkheimer and Adorno pay very close attention to what a close critique of myth might offer, when myth is understood as an imperfect reflection of a people’s cultural memory, and by extension as a source of communal self-knowledge. I will expand on some concrete examples below.

This reading of the Odyssey suggests that the things recalled in the epic represent the shadows of the diverse configurations of life that predated states, cities and rulers. These were forms of life to which early humans were deeply attached, and which had to be relinquished in the passage of history, or perhaps were only ever objects of desire, longing or nostalgia. These are forms of experience radically unfamiliar not only to modernity, but even to the earliest stages of recorded history. Horkheimer and Adorno see the embodiment of this tension in Odysseus' need to forcefully remove his men from the blissful existence with the lotus eaters:

Perhaps the temptation ascribed to it is no other than that of regression to the stage of gathering the fruits of the earth and the sea, older than agriculture, cattle-rearing, or even hunting – older, in short, than any production. ³⁸

Here the authors contend that the temptation embodied by life with the lotus eaters lies not in a desire to return to simpler, pre-agricultural traditions, but rather to an existence that pre-figures the dangers and trauma of the need for conscious survival. They see this in the epic’s connection of ‘the idea of the life of idleness with the eating of flowers’. The eating of flowers in modern cuisine recalls what the authors suggest is ‘the promise of a state in which the reproduction of life is independent of conscious self-preservation…[the joy of which] flashes up before the sense of smell’. ³⁹ Other adventures and characters of the epic represent other ambiguous memories, such as Odysseus' encounter with the Cyclops, which offers a peculiar and incomplete Bronze Age recollection or fantasy of its pre-agricultural and ‘lawless’ origins. The lawlessness of Polyphemus, Horkheimer and Adorno remind us, does not infer a criminality, but that his thought itself is ‘rhapsodic’. ⁴⁰ In fact, the Cyclops does live according to laws, but they are laws radically unfamiliar to both the listener of the epic, and also Odysseus himself. Although he boasts of being ‘stronger’ than Zeus and the gods, Horkheimer and Adorno suggest that, ‘what the giant really meant was: “We are older.”’ ⁴¹ Embedded within the depiction of this strange, ancient kind of existence, the authors argue, is a life ‘not without redeeming traits’. ⁴² While Odysseus is horrified by Polyphemus, Homer himself depicts a momentary, gentler picture of the Cyclops, which perhaps reflects a particular (now largely lost) strand of Bronze age interest in the story patterns. Having been blinded by the cunning hero, Polyphemus strokes his largest and favourite ram: ‘Sweet ram, why are you last to leave the cave?...You grieve for master’s eye, that wicked man,/ helped by his nasty henchman, got me drunk/ and blinded me’. ⁴³ Here, we see a momentarily merciful, even tragic, depiction of the Cyclops, who is otherwise portrayed as a monster. That the familiar story ends with Odysseus outwitting and mocking the blinded and vulnerable creature goes someway to representing the kinds of practice and behaviour that human beings came to favour in the quest for environmental control and rational subjectivity. That the Homeric version lingers briefly on a merciful understanding of the beast shows the extent to which the finalization of myth in epic contains countless older versions of the story, many of which might have offered an entirely different accounts and solutions to Odysseus' plight.

Horkheimer and Adorno’s quasi-archaeological approach to the different strata of the story patterns that come to be finalized in the Odyssey has important repercussions for their conception of myth more broadly. I think the vital implication of this insight for Horkheimer and Adorno lies primarily in its emphasizing the central (but ambivalent) role of our collective pasts (both those which obtained, and those elements of human organization that were relinquished or the object of longing) as a locus of reflection. This dialectical approach to myth represents a way of engaging with our collective pasts as a position from which human communities might self-reflexively reflect on their capacities as moral creatures. Referencing Novalis' claim that all philosophy is homesickness, Horkheimer and Adorno suggest that that statement ‘holds good only if this longing is not dissipated in the phantasm of a lost original state, but homeland, and nature itself, are pictured as something that have had first to be wrested from myth’. Here, they suggest that the failure of reason to reflect meaningfully on its history dissolves its critical and redemptive possibility. Thus, through the conduit of myth, our fragmented and incomplete pasts emerge as a cite of ambivalent negotiation and, potentially, enlightenment. This was not the proposal for a straightforward ‘reflection’ on, or ‘working through’ of, our pasts. Achilles' rage, and Odysseus' fear of Polyphemus, reflects the radical changes human societies have undergone, even within the traditions familiar to us. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the complexity of the story patterns highlight that a peoples' past is not simply passed down as unchanging ‘tradition’, but rather something that repeatedly presents itself anew as a source of communal work and imagination. As my final section will show, this is a possibility created by myth’s linguistic foundation.

Language and freedom: The caesura

My argument here is that for Horkheimer and Adorno, language, and by extension myth, both opens and closes the possibility of self-knowledge. One of the primary problems with the claim that there is an emancipatory account of language in Horkheimer and Adorno’s work is the fact that their major arguments seem to disallow it. This is the basis of Habermas' claim that the first generation of the Frankfurt School, by offering a totalising critique of modernity, failed to retain an account of reason that was independent of the instrumentalised rationality they disparage. ⁴⁴ The implication is that their critique itself was subject to the same problems of instrumentalisation, and could therefore offer no way out of our entrapment. One of the worries here is that if one is to defend an account that suggests Horkheimer and Adorno retain a positive account of enlightenment (as I do here), it risks falling into a kind of Habermasian theory of rational communicative action (which would betray the central tenants of their initial argument). ⁴⁵

In a recent paper, Fabian Freyenhagen has challenged this view. He argues that Horkheimer and Adorno defend an account of language (and thus reason) that allowed for the possibility of emancipation, without falling into a Habermasian model. ⁴⁶ He does this in terms similar to mine: he suggests that for Horkheimer and Adorno, language remains a ‘repository’ of objective reason even when it has been largely co-opted by subjective or instrumental reason. ⁴⁷ Freyenhagen spends some time parsing what might be meant by objective reason, but for my purposes here it is sufficient to simply highlight that he suggests, for Horkheimer and Adorno, objective reason amounts to a ‘property of… the social world’. ⁴⁸ Unlike the formal, abstract and subject-oriented autonomy of instrumentalised reason which alienates the subject from her experience and its history, objective reason retains a concrete connection between a situation and action, which has roots in a mimetic relation between the human life form and its surroundings. ⁴⁹ My suggestion is that this claim can be read as presenting the idea that language, by being a repository of objective reason, is in effect a bearer of a concrete history of human experience that can never be fully dissolved into instrumentality. ⁵⁰ Unlike Habermas, who needs language to provide transcendental, normative foundations for rational emancipation (an ideal speech situation) Horkheimer and Adorno merely show the extent to which language is intimately tied to the long and ambiguous history of human experience (this goes beyond a history of ‘ideas’ and extends to a history of the physical human life form’s interaction with the world). It embodies therefore both a legacy of failure (instrumentalisation) but also a unique locus in which human beings can come to understand elements of their past that are unfamiliar as a source of rational orientation; a case of reason recognizing the precarity of its position, and the need for it to negotiate the limits and fallibility of its hopes. While Freyenhagen does attempt to show explicitly what it might look like to attend to both the distorted and objective forms of reason in language, I think myth offers the best, most concrete example because it goes beyond singular words (which remains important) and instead provides the complexity of myriad story patterns, and the associated forms of life reflected in them. ⁵¹

Philip Hogh’s work on Adorno is pertinent here. Although his work is aimed at constructing a philosophy of language from Adorno’s oeuvre, the thrust of his argument applies to the main claims of Dialectic of Enlightenment. Hogh writes:

The authors understood the long natural-historic process of becoming human as one in which the progression from animalistic natural being to cultural human being could be consummated only through the rehearsal of certain practices, whose central, but not exclusive, element was language. ⁵²

Hogh suggests that for Horkheimer and Adorno, language was ‘not exhausted by its identity as a sign system’, but also represented a material testament to the dialectic of myth and enlightenment, insofar as it bore the historical mark of an originary mimetic impulse, as well as the abstraction and conceptual complexity of enlightenment. ⁵³ As Hogh explains, language, as both a mimetic and rational expression, ‘enables the subject in her relation to her own needs, to the world, and to other subjects and objects. It introduces a distance between the subject and her needs…This distance makes autonomous agency possibly’. ⁵⁴ Thus Hogh suggests that for Adorno, the ability of language to distance the subject from the world represents a sort of freedom. However, as he goes on to say: ‘the flip side of freedom is that, in the process of enlightenment, the ends that were freely chosen eventually turn the subjects who chose them into mere means’. ⁵⁵ Thus, although language comes to represent a historical testament to the ways free human thought became ensconced in domination, Hogh concludes that for Adorno, ‘the prehistoric genesis of language is connected with a moment of freedom and, therefore, language continues to be imbued with the potential for generating freedom’. ⁵⁶ In the context of my argument, Hogh’s contention helps illuminate how myth, as a linguistic oral tradition, can be both intrinsically tied up into established forms of hierarchy and domination, while also representing the tentative grounds for a form of liberation from such things.

The implications of Horkheimer and Adorno’s interest in the dialectic of enlightenment encapsulated in language (namely, both a historical description of the ruthless relinquishment of life that did not serve survival, as well as a locus of freedom) are given in more concrete terms towards the end of the first Excursus. As the authors point out, the Homeric story of Odysseus' travels, although ancient by modern standards, is in itself a modern, ‘civilised’ rendition of much older story patterns. Horkheimer and Adorno cite the classicist Gilbert Murray’s theory that ‘scenes of torture have been expunged from Homer by civilizing censorship’, a case of older, more violent iterations of the tradition slowly being eliminated from the story in the passage of history. ⁵⁷ Where Murray saw a more conventional and reductive example of a civilizing process, my suggestion is that Horkheimer and Adorno seem to be arguing that these changes to the stories came about organically as countless linguistic communities gradually and collectively came to reflect on their predicament as human beings. This predicament includes their relationship to nature, but also what came to replace it: institutional authority, religious dogma, law, etc. The authors argue that the ways in which older myth is ‘disenchanted’ via its transformation into epic, constitutes what they call a ‘caesura’ for those that hear the story retold. ⁵⁸

This is not an argument for unambiguous historical progress, but rather one about how the change in the delivery of the story, from the older mythic song to the more sober epic, represents a changing dynamic in how an audience listens to, and reflects on, the narrative. Pace Murray, Homer is not a straightforward document of the civilizing process, but rather a self-reflexive reflection of how countless iterations of performances and attentive audiences came to think of themselves. Horkheimer and Adorno write: ‘it is not in the content of the deeds reported that civilization transcends that world. It is in the self-reflection which causes violence to pause at the moment of narrating such deeds’. ⁵⁹ The pause is created by ‘language as opposed to mythical song, the possibility of holding fast the past atrocity through memory’. ⁶⁰ The authors continue:

The cold detachment of narrative…for the first time reveals in all their clarity the horrors which in song are solemnly confused with fate. But when speech pauses, the caesura allows the events narrated to be transformed into something long past, and causes to flash up a semblance of freedom that civilisation has been unable wholly to extinguish ever since. ⁶¹

The example the authors provide is Homer’s description of Odysseus' execution of the maids who had been sleeping with the suitors. They are hanged, their bodies convulse on the end of the rope – ‘but not for long’, Homer reassures the audience. ⁶² It is not the story itself that represents the caesura, therefore, but rather the collective silence that follows the report of the maids' suffering. It is the silence that is key: ‘“Not for long?” the narrator asks by this device, giving the lie to his own composure’. ⁶³ Here, the author’s draw attention to the fact the silence of the pause reflects a collective horror at the maids' fate:

In being brought to a standstill, the report is prevented from forgetting the victims of the execution and lays bare the unspeakably endless torment of the single second in which the maids fought against death. ⁶⁴

As this passage shows, while the fate of the maids might represent a comparatively ‘civilised end’ if the alternative is torture, it remains horrifying. While their treatment in the Homeric version draws attention to the older, more violent versions of the maids’ fate, via their negation, it simultaneously depicts that which remains brutal and barbaric ‘under the aegis of justice and law’. ⁶⁵ My proposal is that what is unique in epic, for Horkheimer and Adorno, is this reflection of a collective acknowledgement that while the punishment that the law dictates might have been ‘moderated’, the logic of law (and its roots in mythic fate) remains. That is, myth, and more explicitly epic, provide a form of cultural memory wherein those that attended to the story would have come to know that the relationship human beings have to authority remained unchanged in spite of ‘progress’. That this moment of the epic is able to catalyse a moment of reflection in the audience on the horrors humanity has undergone in its history lies not in its signalling that those horrors have long receded, but rather in the fact that they remain embedded within the structure of civilization. As Horkheimer and Adorno argue, the fate of the maids (as well as ‘the mutilation of the goatherd Melanthios’) shows that, still, ‘civilization itself resembles the primeval world’. ⁶⁶

The caesura, then, represents a collective horror at both the barbarous development human being underwent in their movement towards subjectivity and abstract conceptuality as well as the still violent and regressive practices that permeate life, as seen in the depictions of the maids' execution. Horkheimer and Adorno suggest that the Homeric technique of distancing the events of the epic into the remote past, allows them to emerge as something that can be reflected upon collectively: ‘hope lies in the fact that it is long past’. ⁶⁷ They continue:

Over the ravelled skein of prehistory, barbarism, and culture, Homer passes the soothing hand of remembrance, bringing the solace of ‘once upon a time’. Only as the novel is the epic transmuted into fairy tale. ⁶⁸

They suggest that the distancing of events allowed for by epic language (as distinct from mythic song, which associates the narrative with an unchangeable heteronomous fate) causes a form of solidarity and freedom to ‘flash up’ before and within a sociolinguistic community, if only momentarily. ⁶⁹ Myth becomes a rational space to, perhaps, attempt to articulate or think another possibility for human life. These possibilities are refracted through our collective reflections on episodes such as the lotus eaters, Polyphemus, Circe and the merciless execution of the maids. In these examples, myth has a double, self-reflexive register: a meditation on life lived under the mythic statutes that had developed as part of the development of sociality, as well as a conduit for the communal reflection on abandoned or unrealized forms of life. Horkheimer and Adorno suggest that it was these kinds of communal reflection (for example, during the recitation of those oral traditions before an attentive audience) that might interrupt a violent history. Crucially, the moment of silence that witnesses and reflects on the barbaric death of the maids gestures to the possibility that the course of human history (and the things we did to ourselves and each other to get to this point) might have been, and might yet be negated: that is, it might have been, and might yet be otherwise. It is this possibility, I claim, that flits past in the silence of the caesura.

Conclusion

The idea that we might reconcile some elements of the long distant past derives from a psychoanalytic idea. However, my suggestion is that Dialectic of Enlightenment is not predicated upon an unambiguous ‘working through’ of the historical trauma of myth’s presence in human life. This would imply that the past was familiar to those of us in the present seeking to rationalize it. Rather, I argue that, following Freud’s argument regarding the ultimate unknowability, or unreachability, of the unconscious, Horkheimer and Adorno approach myth as reflective of lost possibilities for living a human life. This approach to the past would involve, thus, a recognition that a working through of historical trauma, of what has obtained in history, also gestures toward an acknowledgement of that which is unknown, unrealized and unreachable. A chance of liberty, Horkheimer and Adorno suggest, resides in our attempt to come to terms with those aspects of our past via language.