Bronner on Dialectic of Enlightenment

[Ralph Dumain]

I'm confident that the essay Stephen Eric Bronner referred to at the 
Socialist Scholars conference is in his book IMAGINING THE POSSIBLE: "The 
Limits of Metatheory: Political Reflections on Dialectic of Enlightenment" 
(pp. 103-110).  Though commencing with naming Horkeimer and Adorno's D/E a 
seminal work (inter alia for introducing the notion of the culture 
industry), Bronner essentially condemns it.  Marx has been abandoned in 
favor of Nietzsche.  The book neglects concrete institutions and 
qualitative distinctions.  Instead, there is an abstract dynamic in play by 
which enlightenment reinstitutes myth (that it submerged) through 
instrumental reason.  There are no distinctions or qualifications in this 
analysis; it overlooks actual movements as well as the 
Counter-Enlightenment. What we get is an anthropological fog: "the 
metapolitical obliterates the political."  (E.g. analysis of 
Odysseus.)  Also simplistic and wrong assertions such as liberal theory is 
de facto apologia for the existing order.  Sade, Schopenhauer, Bergson, 
Nietzsche, should not be counted as Enlightenment thinkers.  Adorno thought 
he could use right-wing thinkers for left-wing purposes.  A D/E sequel 
never materialized.  Why?  Probably because the authors had nothing 
"positive" to say.  D/E was based on a metapolitical and metahistorical 
approach, viewing social organization as a seamless administrative 
totality, reified, without qualification.  Here were the roots of negative 
dialectic, aversion to the student movement.  "1968" could be viewed as the 
inversion of D/E: anti-consumerist, anti-instrumental-reason, and too 
metapolitical itself in its conception of revolution.

I loved some of the stuff in Bronner's OF CRITICAL THEORY AND THEORISTS.  I 
shall keep this in mind when I can find time for D/E.  Even more, I shall 
keep in mind Lukacs' THE DESTRUCTION OF REASON as a possible alternative.