183According to the authors, the culture industry derives its power from managing to
bring the leisure time of individuals under the same rules as their working time. To
respond without thinking and to be entertained without having to make an effort—
these are the logical consequences of a social development of which every aspect is
completely governed by the laws of rationalization.
With this chapter about the culture industry, Horkheimer and Adorno have
written a classic that has set the tone for the whole postwar discussion about mass
culture. The somewhat rigid premises and the strict dichotomies that they apply are
not received with much sympathy nowadays, but their ideas continue to play a vital
role in representing a radical-critical position.
It is not here, however, that the relevance of the Dialectic of Enlightenmentfor
our discussion is to be found. What I find still fascinating about this book has rather
to do with the ambivalent attitude that the authors maintain toward modernity. They
link their idea that Enlightenment is totalitarian and monolithic with the conviction
that there is nevertheless no other course that can be followed:We are wholly convinced—and therein lies our petitio principii—that
social freedom is inseparable from enlightened thought. Nevertheless,
we believe that we have just as clearly recognized that the notion of this
very way of thinking, no less than the actual historic forms—the social
institutions—with which it is interwoven, already contain the seed of
the reversal universally apparent today.^60Thus they continue to adhere to the necessity of Enlightenment—that is, to a pro-
grammatic conception of modernity—despite the distorting logic that they perceive
in it. They are aware that the logical structure of this position is aporetic. The aporia
lies in their using the means of enlightened thought to expose the destructive ten-
dencies that are inherent in this very thought. They are unable—and unwilling—to
escape from this vicious circle.
It is here that one can see how their position differs from that of the so-called
postmodernists. Horkheimer and Adorno emphatically acknowledge their debt to the
tradition of Enlightenment and they aim, as it were, to carry out a sort of enlighten-
ing of the Enlightenment. An author such as Lyotard goes one step further, taking his
leave from Enlightenment altogether. While Lyotard states that there is no reason-
able excuse for the confusion of reason,^61 it is precisely this “reasonable excuse”
that Horkheimer and Adorno are trying to find in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Their
quest results in a position that holds two points of view that are not entirely com-
patible: belief in enlightenment on the one hand and a rejection of the distorting
mechanism inherent in it on the other.
A similar tension between incompatible conceptions recurs in Adorno’s inter-
pretation of the new. In Minima Moralia, a book that was written at almost the same182