Introduction. Other Globes: Past and Peripheral Imaginations of Globalization

Abstract

In the incendiary opening lines of their Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno observe how although "the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty," "the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant" (2002 [1944], 3). We begin this Introduction with this stark statement on the outcome of the enlightenment, not because we adhere to Horkheimer and Adorno's gloomy teleologies, which now seem all too transparently overdetermined by the backdrop of exile, genocide, and global war. What interests us, in introducing this volume, is rather how the Dialectic's grand narrative begins with an image of the earth. Through this image, we approach the disasters of "enlightenment," which, for Horkheimer and Adorno, describes not just the eighteenth-century hegemony of positivist experimental science, but a deep history of instrumental rationality, culminating in capitalist regimes