a temporal kernel, instead of juxtaposing it as immutable to the movement of history.' ³⁹ Yet they insist that the transformation of Enlightenment into positivism, 'into the mythology of what the facts are', as well as the thoroughgoing identity of intellect with hostility to spirit, continues to be overwhelmingly the case. They conclude that 'the development towards total integration, acknowledged in this book, has been interrupted but not terminated'. ⁴⁰ The concept of 'total integration' already echoes Adorno's diagnosis of the 'wholly administered society' and Marcuse's 'one-dimensionality' thesis. ⁴¹ The critique of the Enlightenment becomes as totalizing as the false totality it seeks to criticize.

This 'totalizing critique', of the Enlightenment initiates a radical break with the 1937 conception of critical theory. The history of humanity's relation to nature does not unfold an emancipatory dynamic, as Marx would have us believe. The development of the forces of production, humanity's increased mastery over nature, is not accompanied by a diminishing of interpersonal domination; to the contrary, the more rationalized the domination of nature, the more sophisticated and hard to recognize does societal domination become. Labouring activity, the act in which man uses nature for his ends by acting as a force of nature ( Marx), is indeed an instance of human cunning. As the interpretation of Odysseus reveals, however, this effort to master nature by becoming like it is paid for by the internalization of sacrifice. Labour is indeed the sublimation of desire; but the act of objectification in which desire is transformed into a product is not an act of self-actualization, but an act of fear which leads to control of the nature within oneself. Objectification is not selfactualization but self-denial disguised as self-affirmation.

These two theses - labour as the domination of nature and as self-denial - taken together mean that the Marxian view of the humanization of the species through social labour must be rejected. Social labour, which for Horkheimer even in 1937 contained an emancipatory moment as well as a kernel of rationality, is no longer the locus of either. Both emancipation and reason have to be sought in another instance. The totalizing diagnosis of Dialectic of Enlightenment does not tell us where. This transformation of the activity of labour, from one of self-actualization to one of sublimation and repression, creates a vacuum in the logic of critical theory. It is unclear which activities, if any, contribute to the humanization of the species in the course of its evolution, and furthermore, which activities, if any, critique itself speaks in the name of

[. . .]

According to Adorno and Horkheimer, the task of culture is to

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