Social integration and adaptation in the diagnosis of the administered world of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer

Author(s)

Raphael Eduardo Alves Concli

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas
• Defense date: 2016-03-14

Examining board members

Marcos Nobre; Felipe Gonçalves Silva; Sílvio César Camargo

• Advisor: Marcos Nobre

Abstract

Max Horkheimer¿s and Theodor Adorno¿s writings from 1940, mainly represented by works such as Dialectic of Enlightenment and Eclipse of Reason are widely known due to their critique of instrumental reason and western rationality¿s development. Although this label is not imprecise it could deviate us from the fact that this theoretical procedure is part of a more general framework, that of the diagnosis of the administered world. This dissertation intends to go back to this diagnosis aiming to search for its inception and how the procedure of a critique of reason and rationality is actually oriented towards understating the condition of life of individuals in modern western societies of its time. I consider that this investigation is put forward through the notion of social integration and what Horkheimer and Adorno identify as its progressive convergence towards the need of adaptation to the existing reality. The achievement of this convergence is at the core of this diagnosis. Therefore, I will start from Friedrich Pollock¿s thesis of the state capitalism in order to see how Horkheimer appropriated and was influenced by it in his understanding of new forms of domination and integration. Afterwards I will get back to Horkheimer¿s writings from the end of 1930s and the beginning of 1940s considering them as process of transition to a social critique in the form of a critique of reason. In the third chapter I will analyze closely the diagnosis of the administered world from the denounce presented by Horkheimer and Adorno of the tendency towards total integration, that is the possibility that integration occurs as nothing more than adaptation. Here I will try to understand how the critique of reason and rationality accomplishes this denounce by pointing to the contradictory realization of the principle of self-preservation. In the end I will discuss how the theory of the culture industry is also framed in this diagnosis, being mobilized by Horkheimer and Adorno to explain how the consume of cultural goods also takes part in the adaptive logic of social reality by promoting the conformity and acceptance of it. I will try, however, not only to grasp how it happens, but also to retrieve Horkheimer and Adorno¿s reflection about how this same consumption process transforms individuals¿ perception and form of communication in order to evaluate if it is possible to this this phenomenon beyond this adaptive logic that these authors bring to the fore (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 14/00964-2 - Adaptation and selfpreservation in a freudian key: returning to the critique of instrumental reason of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer
• Grantee: Raphael Eduardo Alves Concli
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master