The Light of Enlightenment

March 25, 2025 ~ OlIver Blackwell ~ Leave a comment

The Symbolism of Modernity and the Expulsion of the Night

Even today, after more than 200 years, we are still blinded by the beautiful glow of the bourgeois enlightenment. The history of modernization revels in metaphors of light. The radiant sun of reason is supposed to penetrate the darkness of superstition and make the disorder of the world visible, in order to finally organize society according to rational criteria. Darkness does not appear as the other side of the truth, but as the negative realm of the devil. Even the humanists of the Renaissance polemicized against their enemies by calling them “obscurantists” [Dunkelmänner, which translates literally to dark men]. “More light!” Goethe is said to have shouted on his deathbed in 1832. As a classicist, he had to go out in style.

The Romantics resisted this cold light of reason and turned back to religion in a synthetic way. Instead of abstract rationality, they propagated a no less abstract irrationalism. Thus, instead of metaphors of light, they indulged in metaphors of darkness. Novalis wrote his “Hymn to the Night.” But this mere reversal of Enlightenment symbolism actually missed the point. The Romantics were unable to overcome the suspicious one-sidedness of the Enlightenment; they merely occupied the other pole of modernization and thus truly became “Dunkelmänner” of a reactionary, clerical way of thinking.

But the symbolism of modernization can also be criticized the other way round: as the paradoxical irrationality of capitalist reason itself. Because strangely enough, the Enlightenment metaphors of light reek of overcooked mysticism. The idea of a glistening supernatural source of light, as suggested by the idea of modern reason, is reminiscent of the descriptions of the realms of angels illuminated by the radiance of God, and we are also familiar with the concept of “enlightenment” from the religious systems of the Far East. Although the light of Enlightenment reason is an earthly one, it has nevertheless taken on a strangely transcendental character. The celestial splendor of an ultimately incomprehensible God has merely been secularized into the monstrous banality of the capitalist end in itself, whose cabalism of earthly matter consists in the senseless accumulation of economic value. This is not reason, but higher madness; and what shines there is the brilliance of absurdity that hurts and blinds the eyes.

The irrational reason of the Enlightenment wants to make the light total. However, this light is by no means merely a symbol in the realm of thought, but has a hard socio-economic meaning. It is precisely in this respect that it is fatal that Marxism and the historical labor movement have seen themselves as the true heirs of the Enlightenment and its social metaphor of light. In the “Internationale,” the anthem of Marxism, it says of the wonderful socialist future: “Then the sun will shine without interruption.” A German caricaturist has taken this line literally and shows sweating people in the “Empire of Freedom” who stare up at the glowing sun and moan: “It has been shining for three years now and never sets.”

This is not just a joke. In a way, modernization has indeed “turned night into day.” In England, which is known to have set the pace for industrialization, gas lighting was introduced in the early 19th century and soon spread throughout Europe. At the end of the 19th century, electric light replaced gas lamps. It has long been medically proven that the inversion of day and night caused by the blanket of cold light from artificial suns disturbs the biological rhythm of humans and leads to psychological and physiological damage. So why the widespread planetary illumination, which today reaches the furthest corners of the Earth?

Karl Marx, himself an heir to the Enlightenment, quite rightly stated that the restless activism of the capitalist mode of production is “boundless.” In principle, however, this boundlessness cannot tolerate a time that remains “dark.” For the time of darkness is also the time of rest, of passivity, of contemplation. Capitalism, on the other hand, demands the expansion of its activity to its extreme physical and biological limits. In terms of time, these limits are determined by the rotation of the earth on its axis, i.e. by the full 24 hours of the astronomical day, which has a light side (facing the sun) and a dark side (facing away from the sun). The tendency of capitalism is to make the active sunny side total and to occupy the entire astronomical day. The night side interferes with this urge. The production, circulation and distribution of commodities should therefore run “around the clock,” because “time is money.” The concept of “abstract labor” in modern commodity production therefore includes not only its absolute extension, but also its astronomical abstraction. This process is analogous to the change in spatial measurements. The metric system was introduced by the regime of the French Revolution in 1795 and spread as quickly as gas lighting. In Germany, the transition to this system took place in 1872. The spatial measures based on the human body (feet, cubits, etc.), which were as varied as human cultures, were replaced by the abstract astronomical measure of the meter, which is said to correspond to a forty-millionth part of the earth’s circumference. This abstract standardization of the measure of space corresponded to the mechanistic world view of Newtonian physics, which in turn became the model for the mechanistic economy of the modern market economy, as analyzed and propagated by Adam Smith (1723-1790), the founder of national economics. The image of the universe and nature as a single great machine coincided with the economic world machine of capital, and astronomical measurements became a common form of the physical and economic world machine. This applies not only to space, but also to time. The astronomical meter, the measure of abstract space, corresponds to the astronomical hour, the measure of abstract time; and these are also the measures of capitalist commodity production.

Only this abstract time made it possible to push the day of “abstract labor” into the night and eat up the time typically used for rest and relaxation. Abstract time could be detached from concrete things and relationships. Most old timekeepers, e.g. sand or water clocks, did not indicate “what time it is,” but were calibrated to concrete processes in order to show their “measured time.” They could perhaps be compared to an egg timer, which emits a buzzing sound to indicate when an egg is hard or soft boiled. The quantity of time here is not abstract, but is oriented towards a certain quality. The astronomical time of “abstract labor,” on the other hand, is detached from any quality. The difference also becomes clear when we read in medieval documents, for example, that the working hours of servants on large estates were to last “from sunrise to noon.” This means that working hours were not only shorter in absolute terms than today, but also in relative terms, varying according to the season and being shorter in winter than in summer. The abstract astronomical hour, on the other hand, made it possible to set the start of work “at 6 o’clock” regardless of the season and physical rhythms.

That is why the era of capitalism is also the era of the “alarm clock,” the clocks that woke people from their sleep with a shrill signal tone in order to drive them to their artificially lit “workplaces.” And once the start of work had been brought forward into the night, the end of work could also be pushed back into the night. This change also has an aesthetic side. Just as the environment is to a certain extent “dematerialized” by abstract economic rationality, in that matter and its interrelations have to submit to the criteria of profitability, it is also de-dimensioned and de-proportionalized by the same rationality. If old buildings sometimes seem somehow more beautiful and cozy than modern ones, and if we then notice that at the same time they seem somehow irregular in comparison to today’s “functionalist” buildings, then this is due to the fact that their dimensions are adapted to the body and their forms are often adapted to the landscape. Modern architecture, on the other hand, uses astronomical spatial dimensions and “decontextualized” forms, “detached” from the surroundings. But this also applies to time. The modern architecture of time is also de-proportionalized and decontextualized. It is not just space that has become ugly, but time as well.

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, both the absolute and relative extension of working hours through the introduction of the abstract astronomical hour were still perceived as torture. For a long time, people desperately resisted the night work associated with industrialization. Working before sunrise and after sunset was considered downright immoral. In the Middle Ages, if craftsmen had to work at night for scheduling reasons, they had to be fed lavishly and paid princely wages. Night work was a rare exception. And it is one of the “great” achievements of capitalism that it succeeded in making torture by time the norm in human activity.

The reduction in absolute working hours since early capitalism has done nothing to change this. On the contrary, so-called shift work has become more and more widespread in the 20th century. Two or even three-shift operation means that machines should run as continuously as possible, interrupted only by short breaks for setup, maintenance and cleaning. The opening hours of stores and department stores should also be pushed as close as possible to the 24-hour limit. In Germany, we had a dispute this year about the statutory closing time for stores, which was previously set at 6:30 p.m. and has been extended to 8 p.m. since November 1, 1996. In many countries, such as the U.S., there is no statutory closing time at all and many stores display the sign: “Open 24 hours a day.” Since microelectronic communication technology has globalized the flow of money, the financial day of one half of the world has seamlessly merged with that of the other. “The financial markets never sleep,” says the advertisement of a Japanese bank.

The light of Enlightenment reason is the illumination of the night shift. To the same extent that competition becomes total, the external, social imperative is also transformed into an inner compulsion of the individual. Sleep becomes as much an enemy as the night, for as long as one sleeps, one misses opportunities and is helplessly exposed to the attacks of others. The sleep of the market-economy man therefore becomes as short and shallow as that of a wild animal, and all the more so the more “successful” this man wants to be. The externally determined work torture of the mechanical night shift appears at the management level as a “voluntary” renunciation of sleep. There are even management seminars where sleep minimization techniques can be practiced. Today, schools of self-management claim in all seriousness: “The ideal businessman never sleeps,” just like the financial markets!

However, the subjugation of people to “abstract labor” and its astronomical measure of time is not possible without equally total control. All-round control, in turn, requires equally all-round observation, and observation is only possible in the light: in much the same way as the police direct a blinding lamp onto the face of the delinquent during interrogation. It is not for nothing that the word “reconnaissance” [Aufklärung, the same word used to refer to the Enlightenment] has a military connotation in German, namely “scouting out the enemy.” And a society in which everyone becomes the enemy of others and of themselves, because everyone has to serve the same secularized god of capital, logically becomes a system of total observation and self-observation.

In a mechanical universe, man must also be a machine and be processed by machines. The light of the Enlightenment has prepared him for this and made him “transparent.” In his book Discipline and Punish (1975), the French philosopher Michel Foucault shows how this total “visibility” has become a historical trap. At the beginning of the 19th century, capitalism still practiced total observation through a “pedagogy of the penitentiary,” as developed by the liberal “utilitarian philosopher” Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) as an elaborate system of organization, punishment and even architecture for prisons, factories, offices, hospitals, schools and reformatories.

The market economy public sphere is not a sphere of free communication, but a sphere of observation and control. This is reminiscent of George Orwell’s negative utopia 1984. Whereas in the totalitarian dictatorships this control was external, exercised by the bureaucratic state and police apparatus, in democracy it has become internalized self-control, supplemented by the commercial media, in which the spotlights of the concentration camps have been transformed into the lights of a monstrous fairground. Here there is no free discussion, but merciless illumination. In commercial democracy, this system has become so refined that individuals obey capitalist imperatives all by themselves and habitually follow the well-worn path like programmed robots.

Contrary to its own social aspirations, Marxism became a protagonist of “abstract labor” by falling prey to the mechanistic thinking of the Enlightenment and its perfidious symbolism of light. Everything that was despotic about Marxism came from Enlightenment liberalism. Conversely, the Romantics, who wanted to give the dark side of truth its due, allied themselves not with social emancipation but with political reaction. Only when night, sleep and dreams are freed from this reactionary captivity can they become slogans of an emancipatory social critique. Resistance to the total market perhaps begins where people ruthlessly take the right to get a good night’s sleep.

Originally published in Folha de São Paulo on 01/12/1997

The Biologization of the Social

December 26, 2024December 26, 2024 ~ OlIver Blackwell ~ Leave a comment

The world undergoes a new kind of “disenchantment”

Robert Kurz

The modern world defines ancient societies’ relationship with nature as irrational. The notion that mountains and rivers, animals and plants have souls seems to modern consciousness as ugly as the idea that someone can be bewitched by magic. Max Weber, as we know, spoke of the “disenchantment of the world” by Enlightenment reason, by the rationality of science and technology.

However, this contrast between modern rationality and pre-modern irrationality in dealing with nature is far too simplistic. Firstly, ancient societies were not at all irrational in their “process of metabolism with nature” (Marx), as they had to provide for themselves. In addition, they created admirable artifacts and bequeathed knowledge that modern people still use. Secondly, modern society is not guided by strict rationality in relation to natural objects. The scale on which the current mode of production destroys its own natural foundations of life leaves us in doubt about Max Weber’s statement.

Rather, we should be referring to a “second disenchantment” of the world by modern society. This disenchantment, in fact, surpasses all the previous ones, because its magical pretension is total and unconsidered. The splitting up of feelings, sensitive experiences and dreams by abstract reason has given rise to a sphere of “irrationalism” divorced from rational ends and ideas – and this both in individuals and in society in general. Autonomized abstract reason itself is only rational in its means, not in its end.

That end is the “economization” of man and nature under the dictates of money, which in turn has no rational origin, only a magical one. Not only are the social relations of modernity permeated by the modern magic of money and its irrational end in itself, but also modern science and technology as well. The instrumental rationality of economized consciousness is therefore in eternal danger of turning into irrational affections.

This modern irrationalism doesn’t just make itself known in the guise of religious movements. Just as often, it can be seen in the rational guise of political ideas and even supposed scientific knowledge. This correlation is expressed most clearly when human society and history are reduced to semi-natural objects. Now, if nature is in itself more than it appears to be to the objectifying gaze of the natural scientist, man is also more than just nature, otherwise he would be incapable of conceiving of it. The reductionism of the natural sciences can only know nature unilaterally; human society, however, is entirely ignored. The apparent objectivity of scientific rationality comes across as wild irrationalism as soon as it tries to dissolve social relations into semi-physical or semi-biological factors.

But it is precisely towards this reductionism that modern science tends. Unable to solve “metaphysical” questions, it has thrown philosophy into the dustbin of the history of ideas. The philosophical and revolutionary 18th century still devised reckless critical thinking in order to give a certain legitimacy to the nascent capitalist society. The 19th century, as the “century of the natural sciences,” sought to trim the claws of social theory and placate its mordacity with pseudo-scientific doctrines. At a time of relentless and widespread misery, it was urgent to lend capitalism the dignity of natural laws in order to make it invulnerable and snatch it out of its historical context. Thus, economics became the “physics” of the total market and its supposedly eternal laws, and sociology began to conceive of itself as the “biology” of social relations, in order to cover up the social contradictions of modernity under the cloak of natural necessities.

The universal competition between individuals, social groups and nations, that existed because of capitalism, was increasingly given a biological interpretation backed up by these “scientific” ideologies. Count de Gobineau, a French diplomat, created the so-called “races” of humanity and elaborated a theory about their “natural” inequalities – evidently a pseudo-scientific legitimization of European colonialism, whose empire over the colored population was to be founded on the alleged biological superiority of the “white race.”

When Darwin discovered the history of biological evolution, his theory of natural selection in the “struggle for existence” was immediately transposed to human society. Darwin himself did not fail to take sides. In some of his letters, he criticized the then incipient trade union movement, since its demands for solidarity hindered the process of natural selection and burdened society with specimens unfit for competition.

This social Darwinism maintained an obscene link with the “physics” of the market. At the end of the 19th century, they were joined by what was known as eugenics or “racial hygiene,” which advocated the hereditary transmission of social qualities. The lower classes of criminals and disqualified people were labeled as “hereditarily inferior” men who should be prevented from reproducing. On the other side of the coin was the acclaimed “victorious type” of the beautiful, strong man with a “healthy heritage.”

At eugenics exhibitions held in Germany, England and the United States, entire families were paraded like farm animals as specimens of good stock and “pure blood.” Not even the workers’ movement escaped such madness. Karl Kautsky, the social-democratic theoretician, wrote with all candor in favor of “social hygiene,” and the already well-off specialized workers based their repudiation of the “sloppy lumpen-proletariat” on biological and eugenic arguments.

In this pseudo-scientific imbroglio of ideologies that permeated the whole of Western society around the turn of the century, two distinct sociobiological images gradually gained prominence. On the one hand, a social racism developed that labeled people of color, the sick, criminals, the disabled, the ragged, etc. as “inferior men.” The construction of industrial society fell exclusively to strong white workers, and all superfluous “ballast” had to be thrown away. This malevolent irrationalism went hand in hand with the contempt and degradation of women, who were accused of a certain “physiological imbecility.”

On the other hand, a new anti-Semitism began to spread, without any religious basis. “The Jew” was imagined as the “negative superman,” as a kind of prince of darkness and the antipode of the nouveau prince of labor. This Manichean conception reduced the perniciousness and catastrophes of the monetary economy to the biological constitution of “Jewish finance capital,” which the “good” money of venerable white labor had to confront. The anonymous and non-subjective laws of the expanding world market were therefore translated into the folly of the alleged global conjuring of a “foreign race.”

As everyone knows, National Socialism took the dual biological ideology of the “inferior man” and the “negative superman” to the extreme consequence of annihilation on an industrial scale. After the horrors of Auschwitz, no one wanted to commit themselves to such ideas, which then slipped into the historical background. In the period of great prosperity that followed the Second World War, they flickered only as specters of an inauspicious past that was believed to be banished forever. The economic and social sciences, however, were in fact only superficially cleansed of the conceptual dross of biologism and social Darwinism. More than ever, political economy used a type of social science that was averse to “dim lights,” setting itself up as a “rigorous” semi-natural science.

While growth and evolution beckoned with a global perspective of well-being, the lemurs of social biologism remained locked away in the netherworld. From this perspective, the flowering of critical sociology and neo-Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s was illusory, as it merely repeated the emancipatory ideas of the past and found itself unable to survive periods of economic boom. When the economic crisis made its comeback, left-wing social critique disappeared significantly from the big public stages in Western countries. At that time, the theory of post-modern deconstructivism based on Foucault, which suited the casino capitalism speculation of the Reagan and Thatcher era, was all the rage. The world – including the market system – seemed to dissolve into “discourse” that could be played with at will.

But in the refuge of the jovial and neurasthenic “risk society,” as German sociologist Ulrich Beck called it – referring to the development of the 1980s – the turbulence of a new racism erupted. Since then, racist power has spread around the world in a torrent of bloody excesses. In Germany too, immigrants and refugees have been coldly killed by mobs of right-wing radicals in arson attacks. To this day, the public sphere downplays such crimes as the work of a few disaffected youths. In reality, however, the racist power loose in the streets is the harbinger of a turnaround in the world’s atmospheric conditions.

In the factories of ideas themselves, other winds are blowing. The last decade has seen the biologism of a new “natural science” creep wolfishly into academic discourse, which increasingly mirrors the legacy of the playful, “post-sociological” fashion of deconstructivism. At first glance, it seemed that genetic research would be able to debunk racist nonsense with scientific arguments. Researchers such as the Swedish molecular geneticist Svante Pããbo proved that men from the most diverse nations, by virtue of their DNA sequences, can be genetically more “related” to each other than to their closest neighbors. But these findings are now increasingly strained under the weight of a new “biologization” of social conduct, for which, incidentally, the geneticists themselves are ready to provide the ammunition. American neurologist Steven Pinker claims that language is “congenital to man like an elephant’s trunk,” and that there must therefore be a certain “grammar gene.” For Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick, from San Diego, free will itself is nothing more than “neurological reactions.” Scientists at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin say they have found a virus that supposedly triggers melancholy and is transmitted by domestic cats. And Dean Hammer, an American molecular biologist, attributes homosexuality to the Xq28 gene, located at the end of the X chromosome.

As is always the case, these are unproven hypotheses that say less about nature than they do about the ideological preferences of scientists. These scholars are often naïve from a social point of view and so perhaps don’t realize how their “purely objective” research is influenced by ideological currents that undermine society. It goes without saying that the reduction of human culture and sociability to the standard of molecular biology provides arguments for the legitimization of a renewed barbarism. The American social scientists Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, in their study entitled The Bell Curve, had already created a correlation between “race, genes and IQ” that excluded black Americans from the “cognitive elite” in a pseudo-biological way. Soon, the ill-fated scientists will provide us with a “crime gene” or a “poverty gene.”

The discovery of genetic underpinnings to people’s social destiny fits the neoliberal policy of cutting costs like a glove. The new academic discipline of “medical economics” is gradually providing carte blanche for the poor, sick and disabled in Western countries to be given “aid in dying” for cost reasons. Debates on the subject are taking place in broad daylight in Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia. The Australian philosopher Peter Singer, whose grandparents died in German concentration camps, now advocates the National Socialist thesis that defective newborns should be immolated for being “unworthy of life.” In China today, a bill is being passed to legalize euthanasia.

This social-Darwinian brutalization on a global scale is matched by a new wave of anti-Semitism in all corners of the globe. Half a century after Auschwitz, synagogues are once again being burnt down in Germany; from the Atlantic to the Urals and even in Japan, the smear campaign against Jewish communities is flourishing; and to top it all off, Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the “Black Muslims” in the United States, is exercising his defamation in anti-Semitic tirades. All social groups, including civil rights movements, are succumbing more and more to biological arguments in the fierce battle of competition, in order to differentiate themselves from humanity. Under the influence of the globalization of capital and based on the academic arguments of geneticists, we may be facing the threat of a “universalist” biologism that considers all people inept at competing within monetary society to be “inferior individuals” and that, at the same time, wants to blame the future catastrophes of the market economy on a “Jewish conspiracy.”

Neoliberalism, with its ideological pseudo-physics of market laws, has loosened the shackles of all the demons of modern barbarism and thus harked back to the irrationality of 19th century “social scientism.” The naturalization of the economy, however, has the logical consequence of bestializing social relations. Neoliberal thought leaders are not only responsible for the advent of fundamentalism, but also for the current return to social Darwinism and anti-Semitism.

Originally published on 07/07/96