Summary: Horkheimer an Adorno begin to explain the relationship between language and power. During the Enlightenment, meaning is described as having been externalized from man, controlled and empiricized in a totalitarian system. The empirical reasoning that began after the Enlightenment, in positing universal meaning as being revealed through positivism, created a system where those in positions of power could use the agreed upon social construct of empirical reason to justify mistreating particular subgroups of society and maintain their positions of power. Thus, the disciplinization of knowledge leads to imbueing particular kinds of knowledge with particular uses and values, ultimately leading to the hierarchization of power. H & A stress that this manifestation of Enlightenment is a bastardization of Bacon's original vision. Bacon believed that in order to be enlightened, one must use an many methodologies for the construction of knowledge as possible. In order to discuss the role of meaning's relationship to language during the period of civil unrest to which they belonged, H & A explain that the readers must acknowledge and understand what the principles of the Enlightenment were and how they have been manipulated.
Response:
When I think of the enlightenment,
I think of the dawn of reason. I had never thought of the idea of the enlightenment as Totalitarianism -- it does not allow for the unknown.
Everything must be controlled and empiricized, which creates fear of the unknown, but also reinforces the power of the unknown
through this fear. If meaning is externalized from mankind and this is seen as progress, then we ignore any forms of knowledge
that arise internally -- emotional knowledge or experiential knowledge:
"On the road to moder science, men renounce any claim to meaning..." (5).
I find this particularly troubling, in a similar way to how I'm sure Horkheimer and Adorno found the matter troubling.
If we agree socially that only empirical reasoning should count (that knowledge derived from a fixed process of reasoning),
then those who create the system of reason control the minds of the masses.
This system of reasoning also vilifies systems of knowledge that don't conform to the norm, and in doing so, others individuals
who don't conform to the system are othered by the system.
Connections/Questions:
Is universal meaning is the one thing that post-modernism rails against? Positivism poses that meaning exists and has to be revealed through positivistic study, which turns the locus of control from how we engage with meaning to focusing on a "universal will." Who creates this "universal will"? Focoult later talks about how "will" develops through disciplines. I guess we could say that polisitivism is a discipline that creates a "universal will" and reinforces it through the language practices of the individual.
