It was a man called Theodor Adorno, of the Frankfurt School, who proposed that: "Myth and the Enlightenment both emerge from the inclination to dominate nature" and he goes on to suggest that "Myth is already enlightenment" before suggesting that "Enlightenment reverts to mythology." Here Myth for Adorno was the archaic equivalent to the Enlightenment. In another way, Myth and the Enlightenment share a dialectic, a backwards and forwards, and in the course of his life (1903 to 1969) Adorno had concluded that as a result of this dialectic the project of enlightenment which was a move toward human liberation and mastery of nature through reason, had tripped, fallen on its face and bang here we are back in the vice of a new form of myth and enlightenment that's as easily called a tyranny now dominating much of western thinking. Which for Adorno, a man who owned a white shirt, a suit and tie, was a kind way of saying "what the hell is the matter with everyone?" For Adorno, most important in this new mythology, was what he called the "fatal" separation of feeling and understanding, a separation that had long been demanded by the history of philosophy which had put a premium on the error of standing outside and looking in. How do we understand Adorno's position? He was inclined to see this peering through the window as a "privileged aesthetic" that prided itself on being master of the "content over form, form over content debate" and the "contemplation over immersion debate" and in many ways endured a sense of guilt because art as well as science was no longer art for art's sake or science for science's sake. In the dubious world of art, aesthetics is a set of principles, devised by people, that concern themselves with the nature of and the appreciation of Beauty. Adorno went whole hog, he addressed these principles through the lens of his critique of a Culture Industry dominated by it's capacity to make money. In his view, the idea of content under mass production, whether it was cinema, paintings, a contained space, a used handkerchief or whatever, was increasingly dominated by generic, simple to digest and easily reproduce genres that sold tickets. Art's truth, it's realness, it's value was in the tension found within the form, and it was this tension that produced an intense engagement with the observer that was neither a purely detached contemplation nor an escape into a thoughtless surrender to spectacle. It was a moving flash of insight into the world's Untruth. It was a man landing on the moon. For Adorno the world's Untruth was a standardized, systematic illusion, almost a form of neurosis that characterized the current iteration of society. "Rock on Theodor!" I hear the call. And yes it does rather redefine cult as a ubiquitous presence. Adorno's quarrel with Idealists were numerous, the abstract was all very well and seemed to be everywhere, but as a materialist what Adorno wanted was concreteness or Concretion which was the word the Idealist Hegel used as the opposite of Abstraction.
