As an indication of Dialectic’s ability to think the dilemmas of postmodernity in tension, let me return to a few of the themes raised by Habermas and Foucault and subsequently elaborated in the plays and dialogues, and so bring the book back to its beginnings. Horkheimer and Adorno share Habermas’s concern with communication and the community it makes possible. They are in search of a language adequate to a world indelibly marked by the advent of concentration camps, a language that has not been thoroughly devalued, debased, or replaced by the methodistic logic of a wholly instrumentalized reason fit only to serve blind domination. Exiles themselves, the authors of Dialectic experienced both the literal and metaphysical homelessness of modern society their book describes. Horkheimer and Adorno thus remind us of the tremendous and irreparable damage wrought by modernity, which Habermas recognizes but too often forgets. Dialectic continually invokes the lives that have been damaged, lost, or destroyed, the experiences that have been repressed, subjugated, or smoothed over by the functionalist coherence of a system that must either expand or perish. Like watching Greek tragedy, reading Dialectic is an experience in re-membering.^[3]

Yet in spite of their radically critical stance and heroic intransigence in the face of “damaged life,” Horkheimer and Adorno do not so much offer solutions to cure our ills as they raise new problems and pose new questions. Where Habermas would solve the paradox of enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno deepen it; where Habermas seeks a method that would clarify all that is mysterious, ambiguous, and opaque about our lives and the world, Horkheimer and Adorno search out mystery, discontinuity, and the irruption of the unexpected as so many examples and acts of resistance against increasing systematization. Nor is this merely a matter of substance: it involves rhetorical style as well. Although wary of instrumentalization, Habermas nonetheless favors a technically streamlined language that reflects his preference for transparent analysis and discursive knowledge. Horkheimer and Adorno, on the other hand, embody and honor the poetic image as well as the theoretical concept. In this regard, Dialectic echoes the philosophical poetics of Aeschylus and Sophocles and the poetical philosophy of Plato as much as it anticipates the critical theory of Habermas. Horkheimer and Adorno understand all too well that surface clarity is often purchased at the expense of the richness, diversity, and depth of human experience. The ironic inversions, tragic reversals, and playful juxtapositions that mark Dialectic contrast all too sharply with the prose of a reconstructed critical theory that threatens to bring about the overly administered world the theorist seems to fear.^[4]

Horkheimer and Adorno also share Foucault’s concern with the disciplinary effects of “total” or “global” theory. They equally suspect the rhetoric of “enlightenment” and “liberation” as masks that conceal the workings of power. The authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment fear the advance of systemic thinking, a will to know the whole that contravenes thought’s humane impulse and leads to an administered world. Motivated by fear of the unknown, enlightened thought marginalizes and suppresses all experience that falls outside the charmed circle of its discourse. What it cannot quantify, it writes off as mere literature.^[5] Totalitarian as any system, enlightened thought imagines itself to have mastered nature and men. Yet the concepts of total theory issue in so many “false idols and defective ideas of the absolute” that they help bring about the slavery they intended to abolish. In ascribing truth to the whole, enlightened thought affirms the present, abandons its critical capacity, and seals its fate ever more surely. Horkheimer and Adorno thus suspect theoretical concepts that promise enlightenment, liberation, and progress. Yet they are also convinced that “social freedom is inseparable from enlightened thought.” Dialectic thus pursues a relentless critique of reason that nonetheless refuses to give up the ideas of justice and freedom to further functionalization by the general systems analysts and their managers. Enlightenment may well be fatal, or it may have in it the resources necessary to divert its seemingly inexorable course. Dialectic is in either case an attempt to alter the course of a progressive flood now rushing out of control.

Dialectic’s ability to hold in tension the contradictions of modernity (prose and poetry, system and individual, reason and revelation, and so on) lies, in part, in the distinctive form of immanent criticism it shares with Greek tragedy and political theory. In the case of tragedy, this meant first that the playwright expressed a positive debt to the largely effaced mythic tradition that nourished him, even as he distanced himself from that tradition. Second, it meant that tragedy celebrated the city’s cultural, religious, and political accomplishments with a dramatic performance that radically questioned those accomplishments. For Socratic philosophy, it meant adopting much of the structure and many of the themes of tragedy to philosophy, although Socratic elenchus, unlike its tragic counterpart, repudiated the political institutions that occasioned it and brought the practice of critical inquiry to each individual Athenian citizen. In the Republic, Plato expressed a philosophical debt to Socrates while distancing himself from Socratic philosophy. Dialectic stands in a similar relation to enlightenment: it forwards a radical and uncompromising critique of enlightenment, yet acknowledges a positive debt to enlightened thought. As they formulate it, Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of enlightenment “is intended to prepare the way for a positive notion of enlightenment which will release it from entanglement in blind domination.”^[6] As a critique of philosophy, critical theory refuses to abandon philosophy. It pursues this task by seeking out the reflective components in the Western philosophical tradition and encouraging that tradition to consider itself. Dialectic thus locates itself squarely within an intellectual tradition and uses its resources to recall that tradition to its forgotten, suppressed, or ignored principles in a way that seeks to go beyond them.

There are also good thematic reasons for concluding a book about ancient tragedy and philosophical dialogue with a chapter on this seminal work of critical theory. Dialectic resumes key themes developed in the discussions on Sophocles, Socrates, Plato, and Aeschylus and transposes them to a modern register in which the powers of an administrative state, global capitalism, and an increasingly commodified culture replace (and replicate) the archaic powers of fate, nature, and the gods. For instance, the discussion in chapter 2 of Sophocles’ Ode to Man introduced a basic antinomy between knowledge and power, between the seemingly unlimited capacity of our shaping intelligence and our inability fully to control nature, other men and women, and ourselves. The Ode describes man as deinos: as both wonderful, mighty, clever, and skillful and awful, terrible, dangerous, and savage. Horkheimer and Adorno recognize the similarly ambiguous nature of human skill and intelligence and the inherent connection between civilization and savagery. Dialectic dramatizes the tragic fate of enlightened thought, from its genesis in archaic myth through the successive stages of philosophy and science to its final reversion to barbarism. Although enlightenment had always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty, Horkheimer and Adorno find that “the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.” The authors of Dialectic had set themselves no less a task than the “discovery of why mankind, instead of entering into a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism.”^[7] An Athenian audience, watching Sophocles’ Oedipus for the first time, might similarly have asked, “How could such an intelligent and noble man commit such blind acts of bestiality?”

Dialectic shares even more striking parallels with Sophocles’ Oedipus. In its choice of themes, its sensibility, and its aims, Dialectic invites a sustained comparison with Sophocles’ play. The dialectic between identity and difference, Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s analysis of systems thinking, and the reversion of civilization into savagery all recall themes familiar from Oedipus: the metaphor of incest that dominates the play; Oedipus’s peculiar ability to solve riddles, save for those that pertain to himself; and the reversal of his status from highest to lowest in the city, from king to scapegoat. Since I discuss these themes at length in the present chapter, I do not want to say any more than necessary here, save to observe that Horkheimer and Adorno are appropriately compared to Sophocles because their work complexly embodies a heroic steadfastness, coupled with respect and honor for an infinitely complex world.

Insofar as Dialectic urges enlightened thought to reflect on its own contradictions and consider its recidivist element, Horkheimer and Adorno emulate Socrates’ philosophical practice. Socrates persistently admonished his fellow citizens to think about what they were doing both in and to Athens. Dialectic shares this commitment to thought and aims to nourish the “theoretical faculty,” a faculty threatened with extinction. The problem with enlightenment is that it gives itself over to a method that is inimical to thought as such. If, as the authors say, in the correct application of method, the answer is already decided from the start, then there is no mystery and no desire to reveal mystery. Enlightenment ruthlessly extinguishes the awe and wonder that accompanies multifaceted experience and prompts a Socrates to become philosophical in the first place. Dialectic is thus Socratic, not only in its admonishment to self-reflection, but also in its surprise at, and interest in, the multiplicity and multivocity of the world.

Since Horkheimer and Adorno warn against reason’s imperialism—its desire both to know all and command all—they implicitly adopt the Delphic injunctions “Know thyself” and “Nothing in excess.” Like the poets, politicians, and craftsmen examined by Socrates, enlightened thought deceives itself into thinking it possesses a knowledge of the whole that in fact it does not. Horkheimer and Adorno warn against mistaking partial for complete knowledge and thus excluding from view what falls outside of a “system.” They encourage their readers to reflect on the course of enlightenment as both intellectual operation and historical actuality. They are convinced that salvation lies only in our ability to reflect on the implicit patterns, structures, and assumptions that inform what we are doing to ourselves and to the world. Yet even as Horkheimer and Adorno ask enlightened thought to “enlighten” itself about its own identity, methods, motives, and intentions, they remain aware that “enlightenment” can be as dangerous as the mythic forces it seeks to dispel. When they insist that “false clarity is only another name for myth; and myth has always been obscure and enlightening at the same time,”^[8] the authors of the Dialectic share the Socratic insight that all communication necessarily involves deception and self-deception as the condition of its possibility and the motivation for its activity. Nor do Horkheimer and Adorno confuse thought with enlightenment; rather, they try to redefine the meaning of enlightenment and rescue it from self-destruction, much as Socrates attempted to redefine the meanings of citizenship, piety, and wisdom throughout his life.

Lastly, a tone of deep political and theoretical pessimism pervades Dialectic, recalling Socrates’ own heroic, yet pessimistic, allegiance to, and defiance of, Athens. World events had forced Horkheimer and Adorno to abandon hope in revolutionary theory and praxis.^[9] In response to a contemporary crisis, Dialectic rejected the proletariat’s transformative mission and the theory that elaborated it. Henceforth, Horkheimer and Adorno would address themselves to “an imaginary witness.” Moreover, recent developments had revealed, not the revolutionizing potential of scientific and technological advances, but the integrative and repressive power of a reason that too readily became the obverse side of domination. Horkheimer and Adorno concluded that “in the present collapse of bourgeois civilization not only the pursuit but the meaning of science has become problematical.”^[10] In the face of totalitarianism on the left as well as the right, the authors of Dialectic nonetheless remained steadfastly committed to the tradition of enlightened thought by means of their critique of enlightenment. Dialectic heroically attempts to incite thinking and preserve those qualities in things and people that make distinctions, and hence judgments, possible in an era that would liquidate all thought and thinking individuals alike. Like the condemned Socrates before his judges, the authors of Dialectic stood before the tribunal of history, condemned as anachronisms that could only impede “progress.” Later, Adorno would reflect on just such a “failure” of philosophy: “Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed.”^[11] The heroic steadfastness of Horkheimer and Adorno in the face of defeat by the seemingly anonymous administration of men and things made their philosophy tragic philosophy.

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates holds out the hope of a reconciliation between knowledge and power, an epistemological and practical unity in which either philosophers become kings or kings philosophize (473d). Horkheimer and Adorno project a similar desire for a utopian moment of reconciliation between reason and reality. That moment they found present as unfulfilled longing in the fundamental document of Western civilization, Homer’s Odyssey, and symbolized in the lure of the Sirens’ song. The need for freedom and home, however, proved stronger than the desire for eternal happiness, a desire Odysseus fulfilled by renouncing it. Nevertheless, the authors suggest that freedom from domination requires universal reconciliation with nature: “By virtue of the remembrance of nature in the subject, in whose fulfillment the unacknowledged truth of all culture lies hidden, enlightenment is universally opposed to domination.” The reconciliation of reason and nature that eradicates domination is no less fleeting and offers no more of a final resting point, respite, or closure than the momentary reconciliation between politics and philosophy projected in the Republic. Moreover, a final reconciliation would signify a unity no less totalitarian than the social and cultural uniformity enlightenment itself aims to bring about. Suspecting its own desire for a reconciled totality, Dialectic “issued no reassuring proclamation that Ithaca had been sighted,” Christian Lenhardt observes. In a time when thought can dissolve domination, Horkheimer and Adorno say, “enlightenment becomes wholesale deception of the masses.”^[12]

To the extent that Horkheimer and Adorno occupy themselves with the suffering of the individual in what they call the “system” (understood both conceptually and socially), Dialectic of Enlightenment reintroduces Aeschylus’s concern with the fate of the other in a putatively democratic society. Rooted in a radical fear of the unknown, systems thinking turns difference into hierarchy, while simultaneously excluding whatever does not conform to its own ideal.^[13] Horkheimer and Adorno thus wrestle with the problem of the individual as social other, who, in the midst of the uniform collectivity, suffers from the false identity of society and individual. It is the task of critical theory (at least as that is understood in the Dialectic) to permit this “other” to speak, to lend a voice to suffering, and so to truth. To be sure, ancient playwright and critical theorists place their accents differently: where Aeschylus’s legendary heroes and heroines challenge the norms of the democratic order from the center of the city and during its most important religious festival, Horkheimer and Adorno give voice to the other from a place of “permanent exile,”^[14] disrupting the hegemonic system from its boundaries and margins. And where the heroine of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon remains a liminal figure, paradoxically defining the norms of her society even as she defies them, modern mass democracy attempts to banish the other (and tragedy) by integrating it into the architecture of its own uniformity (although Horkheimer and Adorno themselves stand apart from, even as they are a part of, the tradition they criticize). Finally, where Greek tragedy had ultimate and assuring recourse to the bounded world of stage, orchestra, and theater, the critical theorists pursue a dialectical high-wire act in their attempt to maintain the tension between an increasingly uniform collectivity and “the development of autonomous, independent individuals who judge and decide consciously for themselves,” these being the “precondition for a democratic society.”^[15]

Horkheimer and Adorno never tire of insisting that social freedom is inseparable from enlightened thought, but they consistently resist the “temptation to transparency” that characterizes all enlightenment, especially in its modern, positivistic incarnation. We must render modern relations of domination visible and legible, for the workings of power must not, and—given the available technologies of surveillance, discipline, and control—cannot, remain impenetrably obscure. Yet the zealous quest for complete transparency as a response to fear of the unknown other becomes a further means for reducing the complexity of the world and the irony of action in it, elements that democratic politics cannot do without. That is one reason why, in the Eumenides, although Apollo’s arguments apparently “win” the case for Orestes, the Olympians, and the male, Aeschylus leaves no doubt that the “solution” is achieved arbitrarily and not without a measure of violence, and that the newly won order is a fragile and precarious achievement, susceptible to pressures that will irreparably fracture it. This temptation to transparency is also why Horkheimer and Adorno refused to theorize (and so objectify) a concept of rationality. In their refusal, however, they succeed quite well in articulating the ambiguity, irony, and complexity of language that lends a civic discourse its life in the first place. If there is such a thing as a poetics for a democratic politics, Dialectic, despite its almost willful obscurity, approaches that goal somewhat like Aeschylus’s Oresteia.

Finally, Horkheimer and Adorno’s deployment of “effective history,” their “untimely” use of the past, recapitulates the way in which Greek tragedy used its own archaic past to illuminate and redefine the contours of the present. Critical theory can teach us how we might similarly “use” the classical texts of tragedy and philosophy to do the same. The authors of Dialectic appropriate the style and sensibility of classical literature and philosophy in order to make the unprecedented aspects of modernity intelligible, yet in so doing they retain their distinctively modern concerns and purposes. By juxtaposing the mythical past with the enlightened present, archaic barbarism with the most recent phenomena, Dialectic embodies and imitates all the tensions and ambiguities that characterize a tragic performance, a philosophical dialogue, and a modernity at odds with itself. When Horkheimer and Adorno insist upon the necessity of moral language and responsible action in the face of linguistic devaluation and the anonymous administration of men and women as things, they appeal to a fundamental teaching of the tragic theater that still informs political thinking today:^[16] we are forced to speak and act in a world we never made, and to bear responsibility for our words and deeds.

All this suggests that Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic exemplifies how the themes, style, and language of Greek tragedy can provide a point of reference and a source of inspiration for theorizing in and about the present. As I have indicated, this means reading a work of contemporary theory in terms provided by Greek tragedy, and as a modern tragedy, a tragedy of enlightenment. To do so, I shall elaborate a number of affinities, first in structure, then in content, and finally in aim, between Greek tragedy (as represented by Sophocles’ Oedipus) and Dialectic, seeking to give substance to my claim that the thought of the classical polis can nourish the contemporary theoretical imagination in a way that will help us think with and through the perplexities and contradictions of postmodernity.