9 - C. K. Ogden, I. A. Richards and ‘Word Magic’: Rethinking the Relation of Language to Myth

Summary

IN THE FINAL essay of their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), ‘Elements of Anti- Semitism: Limits of Enlightenment’, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno bring together the arguments of the essays that precede it to show how a reified enlightenment – one that reduces thought to calculation and computation – has led to the horror of the Holocaust. Central to their overall argument is the assertion that such positivism is in fact a form of myth. While ‘Enlightenment’s program’ ostensibly aims at ‘the disenchantment of the world’, regarding the basis of myth as the ‘projection of subjective properties onto nature’ and wanting to ‘dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with knowledge’ that has been gained through the application of reason to the data of observation, this ‘extirpation of animism’ in its evacuation of thought leads in fact back to myth. Horkheimer and Adorno challenge the assumption that myth – associated with traditional attitudes to the world and with premodern cultures – and positivism occupy positions of extreme opposition in the relations between subject and object, between mind and world. Rather they assert that without the mediation of thought, positivism reproduces exactly the ‘false projection’ of myth.

As is clear throughout Dialectic of Enlightenment, language is key in this. Positivism sees language as an enemy: ‘the latest logic denounces the words of language, which bear the stamp of impressions, as counterfeit coins that would be better replaced by neutral counters.’ Language, under enlightenment, must ‘resign itself to being calculation’. In ‘The Culture Industry’, the penultimate essay of Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno explain how the language of enlightenment too, however, returns to myth:

the more purely and transparently [words] communicate what they designate, the more impenetrable they become. The demythologising of language, as an element of the total process of enlightenment, reverts to magic.

In ‘Elements of Anti-Semitism’, Horkheimer and Adorno describe powerfully the kind of language which is the product of the reified enlightenment which in turn makes dialectical thought impossible: ‘In the age of the “three hundred basic words” [der dreihundert Grundworte] the ability to exercise judgment, and therefore to distinguish between true and false, is vanishing.’