Why Do The Sirens Sing?: Figuring the Feminine in Dialectic of Enlightenment

“[Music] is a language, but a language without concepts”

Theodor Adorno

Women are strangely absent in much of the recent literature on Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment , despite our obvious presence in the text. Rolf Wiggershaus’s otherwise excellent interpretation serves as an example. ² He identifies Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s two major themes as: 1) the rationalization of western civilization, and; 2) the relationship between humanity and nature. A “self-destructive Enlightenment,” he argues, involves a “false emancipation from nature.” Wiggershaus also reads the text on two levels: it includes a manifest dialectic of “reason-as-domination” and subterranean histories of “genuine Enlightenment,” exemplified by aspects of Judaism and liberalism. Genuine enlightenment, Wiggershaus argues, involves resisting and softening the demands of reason-as-domination. He quotes Horkheimer: “We have to understand this development [the irresistible process of enlightenment] and we can understand it only if there is something in us which does not submit to it....” ³

In this article, I argue that women figure prominently in both of the themes and at both of the levels which Wiggershaus discusses. Patriarchy, as well as capitalism, represents reason-as-domination and “woman,” like the Jews, evokes animal/spiritual powers which civilization has not yet obliterated. However, “woman’s” association with genuine Enlightenment is figured, not stated; it appears in the constellations of the text, not its arguments. ⁴ I focus here on the first excursus, “Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment,” but I hope my interpretation of it as a constellation encourages similar analyses of other sections. My approach to Dialectic of Enlightenment is at odds with James Schmidt’s claim that “to at least some degree the book is fragmentary by default rather than design.” ⁵ Schmidt has serious doubts about readings of a book which was originally entitled and later subtitled, Philosophical Fragments , as a comprehensive history of the dialectic of enlightenment. I make a more modest claim: the first excursus, at least, is a carefully constructed “philosophy in fragments.”

Adorno and Horkheimer construct constellations in order to avoid producing texts in which criticism reverts to affirmation. Following Shane Phelan, I understand constellations as riddles. They are “compact clusters of elements; solving one “lights it up suddenly and momentarily.” Her example is, “What’s black and white and re(a)d all over?”—to which children respond with delight, “the newspaper!” “The delight,” she says, “comes from the shifting organization of conceptual elements that makes sudden sense out of an apparent conundrum.” ⁶ Like riddles, constellations are constructed and, like riddles, they reveal neither deep structure nor grand theory, but “small, ordinary details of life.” ⁷ Benjamin’s metaphor—“ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars”—captures the relational aspect of constellations. But it is too abstract, too formal, too eternal, ultimately, too Platonic, for Adorno. His constellations instead “illuminate a particular historical configuration of elements.” ⁸

According to Phelan, this difference may reflect Jewish influences on Adorno’s thought. For Adorno, constellations resemble the Hebrew notion of “configurations.” In Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek , Thorlief Bohman argues that configurations should not be seen as the boundaries, outlines—or forms—of objects. Instead, they illustrate the inseparability of form and content, including language and matter, in concrete experience. In Hebrew, Bohman claims, there is no word that can be properly translated as “thing.” Instead, the same term, dabhar or davar means “‘matter,’ but also ‘thing’ and ‘word,’” that is, “‘the word in spoken form,’” as “‘efficacious fact.’” ⁹ What is discussed cannot be separated—or abstracted— from the discussion of it. In the same way, Phelan claims, “the constellation is not formed by, cannot be described by, its outline or shape, its boundaries, [a sort of connect the dots version] but by its contents, by its elements and their relations.” ¹⁰ It exists, it has reality, in and through our relations with it.

Adorno’s configurations might be better understood through another metaphor, one which emphasizes sound over sight. They are, I would suggest, more like compositions than constellations. Adorno might recast Benjamin’s analogy as follows...