Beyond the Dialectic of Enlightenment: Renewing the Program of a Critical Theory of Society

Adorno and Horkheimer’s sketch The Dialectic of Enlightenment adumbrated the reorientation of critical social theory away from its founding research programme and explicated the antithetical character of the modern project of emancipation. Adorno subsequently contended that the critique of systematic domination should be undertaken as a negative dialectics, due to the inversions of the ideals of reason and autonomy into their opposites, the violence of the logic of identity that underpins conceptualisation, and the implications of the total integration of administered capitalist society. Adorno detailed persisting tensions and contradictions, but the alleged aporias of his critique and its distance from the practical agency of social struggles motivated later changes in critical social theory. Despite the profound implications of Habermas’ introduction of the intersubjective paradigm of communication, including its reconstruction of the connections between rationality and democratization, the limitations of Habermas’ perspective and analyses with respect to power, conflict, social struggles, material reproduction and divergent trajectories of modernity precipitated various reformulations and alternative proposals. Given these failings and the later proposals’ deficiencies, my argument is that critical social theory needs to develop a new synthesis, which nevertheless incorporates elements of later intersubjective critical social theories and Adorno’s critique of capitalist modernity. My analysis will suggest that the notion of the dialectic of control contains the nucleus for a genuine synthesis and that its insights can be used to underpin an interdisciplinary research programme concerned with the metamorphoses of ideology, the dynamics of social conflict, the experience of reification, the transformation of the capitalist production, and aspects of subjectivity. The theory of the dialectic of control aims to explain in a single framework both social-historical progression and regression, present a diagnosis of the times, and restore the linkages between theory and practice.