Dialectic of enlightenment and technology: mediation of social networks in the production of violence ^{1 2 3 4}

Abstract

Based on data by researchers at the University of Warwick (UK), which indicate a positive relationship between Facebook use and the increase in attacks against refugees in Germany, the aim of this article is to establish a reference for understanding the functioning of social networks and their mediation role in the production and intensification of violence relations. This work resumes elements of the works of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse guided by the hypothesis of the existence of an ongoing forgetfulness in the social mediation organization. Instead of defending what would be a fair humanity, principles that keep barbarism as an active order are updated.

Keywords
Critical theory of society; formation; rationality; digital Technologies; production of violence relations

Resumo

Partindo dos dados elaborados por pesquisadores da Universidade de Warwick (UK), que indicam haver uma relação positiva entre o uso do Facebook e o aumento dos casos de ataques contra refugiados na Alemanha, o artigo tem como objetivo estabelecer um referencial para a compreensão da lógica de funcionamento das redes sociais e o seu papel de mediação na produção e intensificação das relações de violência. Para tal, o trabalho retoma elementos da obra de Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer e Herbert Marcuse em uma investigação que se orienta pela hipótese da existência da ação de um esquecimento em curso no modo como se organizam as mediações sociais. No lugar da defesa do que seria uma humanidade justa, são eleitos como fim princípios que se atualizam para manter a barbárie como ordem atuante.

Palavras-chave
Teoria crítica da sociedade; formação; racionalidade; tecnologias digitais; produção de relações de violência

Introduction

A research released by the University of Warwick (UK) provides data that heats the debate on the impacts of the increasing space taken by virtual social networks in the relationships among individuals. According to the researchers, the use of Facebook is related to the escalation of the number of attacks against refugees in Germany. The greater the use of this social network, the higher the incidence of attacks, thus, leading to questions on the contradiction between technological progress and the maintenance of social insecurity. While there is a growth in the capacity to transform how individuals relate with the external world, allowing more freedom and security, we can also perceive the deepening of conditions that threatens this same freedom and security. More than that, such data points towards a relation in which technological transformation serves the repetition of phenomena, which gain new ways and instruments of action.

This way, we understand that material development carries with it a contradiction (Adorno & Horkheimer, 2006), updated and kept as such, characterizing a state of barbarism that follows social transformations and remains despite them. This understanding indicates the need to critically analyze the relationship between violence and the use of virtual social networks as instances mediating these transformations (Lash & Lury, 2007).

Based on the key fundamentals of Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse, which order their formulations from the problem of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, we understand that there is, in the development of humanity, the action of a rationality that engenders movements of progression and regression (Adorno & Horkheimer, 2006; Marcuse, 1979). Barbarism is then identified as the persistence of regressive elements that overlap the potentialities reached by the emancipatory action of reason.

When investigating the history of thought that shapes Western modernity, Adorno and Horkheimer (2006) identified an order that established itself as hegemonic from the entanglement of material forces of production, setting in motion tendencies used to maintain such order. The argument of the authors suggests us that the analysis of the relation between technology and violence, from the mediation of Facebook in the cases of violence against refugees, can mean the understanding that such phenomenon represents the reproduction of historical elements under a new guise, indicating the capacity of appropriation of cultural transformations as a way to maintain typical power relations.

Thereby, the question “why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism?” (Adorno & Horkheimer, 2006, p.11) is renewed when we think about a society of great technological development, marked by the internet, with a considerable capacity to restructure production, the almost instantaneous dissemination of information, and profound changes on how people live. If, on one hand, it means a moment of deep advancements, on the other, the expressive number of violence denounce the predominance of technical instrumentalization and the precariousness of life and human relations.

This analysis points out that what is set in motion in such a moment of a technological society and its relations can only be understood when considering the acting historical tendencies that are reordered from the appropriation of cultural potentialities that, thus, affirm and legitimate themselves. One of the dimensions of this reordering is the formation of the subject (Adorno, 1995b) by the transformation of the mediations that promote such a formation. This dimension is considered key to understanding the character of violence resulting from the relation that individuals establish with social networks, as they point out to how much the technological practices produce effects in the process of subjectivation.

The criticism to violence against minority groups, mediated by virtual social networks is grounded in the understanding of mechanisms to maintain barbarism, highlighting the tension between the abandonment of the possibilities of social transformation, deriving from digital technologies, and the progression of tendencies aligned to the principle of domination. Such tension is understood here as an expression of the process of forgetting, in line with what Adorno and Hokheimer (2006) state: “all reification is forgetting” (p. 190). Thus, we understand how violence connects itself to the process of subject formation and guides social dynamics around the maintenance of hegemonic and excluding interests.

The present article aims to identify elements that allow us to understand the persistence of barbarism, manifested in the entanglement between technology and violence, as an action in a process of forgetting, which points to the question of the own dimension of rationality, resumed from the reflections on the dialectic of enlightenment. We should highlight that the theoretical research is necessary to approach the investigation object, mainly if the purpose is the discussion of conceptual elements developed by the authors gathered here and that allow new diagnoses and analyses of the present time.

Thus, we might ask: how are the new technologies based on data storage and hyper-connection (Morozov, 2018), especially virtual social networks, mainly Facebook, inserted? How this state of things, marked by the forgetting provoked by the digital culture, affect the subjective, to keep the predispositions towards fascism, typical of a generalized context of semi-information (Adorno, 2010)? The answers imply on the analysis developed here about the relation between technology and violence, based on the data of Müller and Schwarz (2018) on the dynamics observed from the use of Facebook and the discussions of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse, so as to revitalize the considerations on the rationality and the technique in its entanglement with subjectivity.

The technological rationality of domination

Criticism to rationality, established as the dialectic of enlightenment (Adorno & Horkheimer, 2006), is a procedure that allows pointing out problems in the forms of social organizations based on the maintenance of violence relations that are articulated in the structure and action of a certain social configuration. The understanding of technology and the sense of adhesion to the violent use of social networks are within this criticism.

As such rationality refers to how the dynamics of production and reproduction between individuals and their environment are ordered, and by this we mean that the ways of communication and the instruments used, as is the case of social networks, already have an internal guidance in its own way, we understand that the logic that keeps the working of these instruments have the capacity to guide their use to certain ends. Violence presents itself then as a potential unfolding of this use and not simply as a detour of its normal operation.

Adorno and Horkheimer (2006) could already see in the 1940s, in the context of the publication of Dialetics of Enlightnment, that the progress of human action in the world produces, at the same time, a state of regression, indicating that there is no unity typical of time. More than allowing a historical opening needed to the experience of being a subject, what would justify the activity of reason, such lack of unity ends up acting as an imprisonment of culture (Adorno, 2010) to the hegemonic order, imposed as domination, on the predominance of tendencies that appropriate the present elements in culture to keep a certain social conformation.

An important contribution of this understanding is the indication of a rationality acting in the social processes that produce violence situations, which no longer focuses on the conditions of freedom, manifesting themselves, on the contrary, as a foment to domination (Adorno & Horkheimer, 2006). The concept of instrumental rationality translates this movement indicating that the thought, in its form and content, materializes itself in forms of domination, to transform the world, conceived as an object of control and manipulation, an instrument. Such a process makes it so that all activities become producers and reproducers of the logic of goods. That is, it operates by decreasing the potentialities contained in the relations that compose social reality to allow a higher efficiency of economic progression.

The dimensions that compose the material existence of the individual are predisposed to conformity with the same end, and from this character emerges the sense that determines the predominance of technical improvement, characterizing western modernity (Marcuse, 1979). From this results the deepening of human reification in the submission to the structure of market development (Horkheimer & Adorno, 2006). With the repetition of the ways of working that guarantees its continuity, such rationality operates then a type of calculation between what should be kept and what should be forgotten, so as to strengthen thoughts and standardized behaviors.

It is also the analysis of this rationality, in its subjective and objective aspects, that allows Adorno (1995b) to understand a division between the subject, who is active in the articulation of the relation with the world, and the individual, who is subjugated to the organization of this world and subjected to the conditions of violence imposed by human organization itself. The framework worsens when highlighting situations in which individuals attempt against their own more immediate interests or against the life of other individuals, as is the case of racist manifestations.

The process of subjugation of the individual to the instrumental rationality, which predominates in the social relations, imposes a logic of domination over human relations that makes other forms of existence impractical and attackable (Adorno & Horkheimer, 2006). It is the annihilation of the subject as a historical being through a process of conformation to a reality that operates the exclusion of the different by violent acts that materializes itself in the social context. The criticism towards the use of social networks, which transform itself in a space to disseminate hate speech converted into attacks outside the networks (Müller & Schwarz, 2018), is supported, therefore, by the criticism to rationality itself, which carries dialectic with itself.

The hypervisibility of the individual, characteristic of an excited society (Türcke, 2010), paves the time and the space of social networks and the isolation of individuals. Weakened in the possibility of realizing themselves as subjects of their action (Adorno, 2015), individuals end up reproducing the captivity imposed to them. That is why in a reality that denies the condition for the emergence and maintenance of the subject, which only exists as a subject when guaranteed the possibility of carrying out differentiation (Adorno, 1995b), the individual is led to succumb to everything that imposes itself and prevents any type of differentiation to the system, as if only allowing the existence of what acts according to the progression of value. Rationality then starts to be used in the calculation of subordination demanded by society.

This is the framework that Marcuse (1979) calls a society of total mobilization, in which there is a difference on what can be identified as opposition and what will be used to the maintenance of hegemonic and dominant principles. In an institutional level, there is a unification of forces, considering the weakening of the possibility of opposition in everyday social relations. When the subjects are not recognized by the system and society in general, the conflict constantly imposes itself.

According to Marcuse (1979) and Adorno (1995b) a paradox emerges according to which the objective and quantified world becomes increasingly more dependent on the subject, due to the predominance of abstraction and technique, as its accomplishment, over material processes. The qualities of the world are reduced to the apprehension of the method, while the neutrality attributed to the objectivity of such a method results from the operation of a specific historical subject.

In this sense Marcuse (1979) affirms that “the technological a priori is a political a priori” (p. 150), because it is the result of human operations, situated in a set of relations that impose their necessities. The technique and the practices are not separated from the conception that produced them. And as rationality is itself an operation, we understand that it has an end that, within the conformation of social forces in Western modern tradition, is domination. That is, the technology that establishes itself as a way of control and social domination. In the words of Adorno and Horkheimer (2006),

Under the given circumstances the gifts of fortune themselves become elements of misfortune. If, in the absence of the social subject, the volume of goods took the form of so-called overproduction in domestic economic crises in the preceding period, today, thanks to the enthronement of powerful groups as that social subject, it is producing the international threat of fascism

(p.14).

In this context, the attempts of human freedom do not find ways to accomplish and maintan themselves, because they carry the imperative of domination that grounds the rationality of the managed world and, frequently, returns to the place of domination from where it started, as there is no rupture with the imposition of the need to keep the progression of the capital. The result is the production of a society, not only politically, but “rationally totalitarian” (Marcuse, 1979, p. 154). Thus, we can say that the existence of a social project, previous to the application of technologies that conforms itself within the realization of the own concept.

Domination, as a unique and unifying principle, while paralyzing, allows the action of individuals in the world, orders their movements and enables violence. This is shown in the relation among those with different social positions, in which some have the permission and the instruments to attack, while others try to defend themselves from violence.

This reinforces the idea that one cannot claim for neutrality or for a pure form, neither in the concept nor in the method. Behind both, there is a producing subject, established by historical content, that ‘presentifies’ itself as theory and practice (Adorno, 1995b). Thus, technology, as the objectification of a social project, guarantees the exercise of particular interests contained in it and justifies certain types of action. If such an exercise reaffirms the maintenance of barbarism, violence is, therefore, the visible mark of a forgetting that, while pointing to an absence, produces excluding and authoritarian social relations.

From this tendency, we can understand current technology, intensely individualized. The mediation between the fulfillment of particular interests and the interests of each individual takes place in a way that the result is the control that directly falls into the individual (Antunes & Maia, 2018). The mass resulting from the imposition of interests is produced by the voluntary action of each person instrumentalized by the possession of his/her device to access, for instance, the social networks. Individuals are instrumentalized to control themselves through technology.

This indicates that violence has a conservative role, but it is a conservation established by the destruction of what could enact real progress; and that the procedures of exclusion, annihilation, and death are not a detour, but a constant that even prevents any detour to take place. What appears, from time to time, is the radicalization of this working, whose elements should then be understood as a historical trajectory, as well as in its current social conformation.

The mediation role of social networks

In a context of digital technologies predominance, which convert the online interactions on communication platforms into data (Kosinski et al., 2013), the commodification of individuality, pointed out by Adorno (2015) and Marcuse (1998) when reflecting on the effects of the advancement of industrial societies over subjectivity, is played at a large scale. For this reason, it is not possible to consider that the relationship of individuals with social networks is immediately a relation able to expand their spaces of freedom, as such networks are also inserted in the laws of production and market circulation, now through algorithmic operation (Morozov, 2018).

The dialectic of enlightenment, here used to elaborate the understanding on the use of technology in the reproduction of violences, can be concretely observed in the determination of social relations that culminate in excluding dynamics, in which some lives gain relevance, while others are extermination targets. Barbarism, resulting from the predominance of instrumental rationality over life, evokes violence and death. It is a process of annihilation, as there is the faking of identities which are reached by exclusion of alterity indicators.

In this sense, the understanding of the category mediation is essential, mainly through its ability to imprison human potentialities. Approximating to Adorno’s (2010) concept of semi-formation, we could say that social networks are mediating instances between the individual and the objects of culture. In this case, they play a role of deformation, of the objects and the individual. It is a process of inserting both (objects and individuals) in the logic of domination, in which social production forces are urged to strengthen the hegemonic tendencies of organization and social integration.

The violence disseminated through social networks, as part of a set of determinants that prolong themselves according to the characteristics of each historical time, brings with it important notes and unfoldings. When considering that the effects result from the use of a certain instrument, such as virtual social networks, would be due to its appropriation by destructive or constructive interests, we can lose sight that there are structuring elements able to overlap the efforts and movements of a conjuncture, capturing such efforts to affirm tendencies (Kosinski et al., 2013).

That is, social networks, as results of the transformation of communication technologies, carry with them the interests of the historical subjects who hold the means of production and determine the ends of the products. Such ends, i.e., the increasingly commodification of the forms and ways of living, which overdetermine the uses of technology, as well as the violence related to it. Even if this process is not insurmountable, the advancement of the logic that composes it aggravates the need to understand the elements perceived as the objects of criticism and overcoming.

The deepening of the space dedicated to the individual and the evidence that the communication relations end up radicalizing the process of oblivion under its manifestation. The individual that has increased its space of freedom within the virtual world does not find a similar freedom in materiality (Morozov, 2019). This means that the present culture moves towards an increasing precariousness, through the appearance of flexibilization and enlargement of spaces of individual freedom, maintaining structuring social problems.

The obstruction of the manifestation of the diverse and the multiplicity and, therefore, the accomplishment of the condition of the subject, leads to the subordination of society to the interests of a class is only supported by domination. This domination, as approached by Adorno in Minima Moralia (1993), is not immediately enacted by authority, but repetitively imposes itself in the manifestation of the individual, in a continuous restriction that shapes the necessary forms to maintain the working of this society.

Violence is, then, inevitably produced by this social organization because the provoked forgetfulness does not leave a void, but carries an incessant production of contents and social forms. Cultural industry (Adorno & Horkheimer, 2006), when controlling the manifestation and realization of subjectivity, accomplishes a forgetfulness that produces ways of life and existence, maintaining a type of social unity. Therefore, there is not a peaceful erasing of tendencies that could oppose itself against the imposed regression. The active face of forgetfulness is violence.

Thus, we understand the mechanism to manage the feelings of hate that lives in social networks, emerged in the production process towards the organization of society. Not only by allowing the dissemination of hate speech, but, mainly, by the motivation of concrete action, from which it is possible to understand social networks as a space of discursive strengthening, in the sense of psychological and cognitive entanglement of the individual with the social structure.

Based on the maintenance of a totalitarian system supported by a rationalized ordering (Marcuse, 1998), we can understand the violence disseminated by the use of social networks as related to the reduction process of the spaces to the manifestation and existence of the diverse, of the other. Users, who later engage in violent behaviors, appropriate themselves from a set of references and rules offered by the logic of the networks, based on the exaltation of unique and individual experiences, as perfected forms of standardizing social processes (Lash & Lury, 2007).

In social network interactions, individuals isolate themselves in their individual actions and end up acting in conformity with a social order, without the express imposition of rules and punishments. The mechanisms of control reflect, then, directly over the individuals due to their specialized character of mediation that refines themselves until they are not perceived as such (Morozov, 2018). As pointed out by Adorno (2009), what presents itself as the most immediate is, on the contrary, immersed in mediations.

While exciting and mobilizing, social networks disarms and weakens, creating a favorable environment to increase discriminatory behaviors and attitudes, depending on a possible political and economic use. When Müller and Schwarz (2018) find that drops in the number of Facebook access are followed by drops in the number of attacks against refugees, it is clear that the platforms are responsible for organizing individual actions. The networks, as enactments of rationality which develop together with productive forces, have an important role in determining the social phenomena that follows this development.

Thus, when considered that, historically, the role of hate speech and discriminatory behavior has been to maintain excluding and oppressive economic interests, it is clearer to understand the role played by Facebook in the violence against refugees. Even if social networks are not the sole determinant of the violence it manifests, that is, it is not only Facebook use that causes the attacks, it is relevant to consider how the stimuli that lead to violence are reorganized from the structure of these networks, mainly due to the exhibition format of punctual and personalized content, and the easiness and speed they are disseminated (Recuero, 2005). These characteristics are supported by the fact that such contents aim, more than to inform, to produce new content and interactions and, therefore, more data (Morozov, 2018).

As seen, the contradiction expressed in the massification that takes place from the affirmation of the individual is grounded in an individuality that is not able to understand the difference, which implies the annihilation of this difference also in the materiality, in the concrete (Adorno, 1995). The hate discourses are manifested into acts of violence because the online processes are also material ones. The discontent towards the otherness is enacted as attacks against refugees, who are the embodiment of diversity. Violence establishes itself as forgetfulness.

Managing individuality

In this continuum history of domination through the progression of the process of forgetfulness, what is forgotten is the manifestation of domination itself, when the potentialities contained in culture are not enacted, or even when the individual resources and the productive forces are organized to enact particular ends, which result in the maintenance of social insecurity. Current technology, based on data processing (Boyd & Ellison, 2018), gives to individuals the conditions to operate this principle of domination. It places itself as an obstacle and threat, depending on the political and geographical position of the individual.

Online actions and motivations take place and are perceived as voluntary, even resulting from polls and calculations (Lambiotte & Kosinski, 2014), in which the mechanism to produce massification is displaced and decentralized, thus the center is not occupied by its mode of operation, though the “subject” seems to be autonomous. This way, together with the permission of anyone to instrumentalize oneself and to be able to participate, a fascist character is produced, spreading through the crowds (Sancho, 2018), enacting processes of exclusion and extermination.

Hence, the specificity of social networks is its character of forgotten mediation that, when promoting the approximation between the maintenance of the social structure and the individual action, appears as lacking a motivation beyond its own self-interest or deviation. The objects that circulate through these means suffer not only from the imposition of industry logic to adjust themselves, but also impose such a logic to themselves (Lash & Lury, 2007). Once the individual is reified, the alignment of life in its most daily elements to the logic of industry happens almost naturally. It is then possible to perceive that the mechanism, pointed out by Adorno and Horkheimer (2006) as acting in the cultural industry, reaches a power in which the space for differentiation, as an instance to establish the autonomy of the subject through the action of consciousness, is captured as an element that produces value.

The social problems that affect the individuals’ lives are experienced online, in discussion forums, and are materialized in hate speeches that chose an enemy to be confronted. The offline behavior returns, then, in an inversion, as a type of online extension (Lévy, 1996), and hate speech emerge as violent behaviors that attack the physical integrity of those seen as a source of threat. While the social structure elects such violence as a norm, because its ordering principle is domination, the technology allows this norm to be enacted.

The imposed forgetfulness implies the denial of the possibilities contained in the non-massified existence, a massification shaped exactly by the imposition of writing and rewriting a single story, captive to the logic of exclusion of diversity and that, therefore, only supports a type of human being as able to recognition and dignity (Benjamin, 2012). Forgetfulness does not take place by a saturation on the number of data grouped by the monopolies of information that, on the contrary, it gives the appearance of impossibility of forgetting, because what circulates online has the ability to be registered by an undetermined time and can be recovered anytime. Forgetfulness here is the result of a successful processing of these data and the materiality they carry, producing a constant adaptation.

Forgetfulness refers to a flaw in the elaboration of the past (Adorno, 1995a), in which elements necessary to the experience of the subject are lost, giving way to the affirmation of tendencies that keep the subjection to the conditions given and take shape of an individual self-management allowed by the algorithm regulation, which dictates rhythms, contents, and interactions. What personalizes the individual is, at the same time, what is instrumentalized and what is particular, converted in a personalized adaptation, enacting the totalitarian potential of social networks that revitalize the massification mechanism of cultural industry.

The social impotence of action and critical thought have, as the main influence, “the growth of the industrial apparatus and of its all-embracing control over all spheres of life.” (Marcuse, 1999, p. 86). This apparatus has as the main result an adjustment to maintain a social order that is structurally oppressive and excluding, in which individuals must assimilate themselves as a condition to keep their lives, that is, they end up becoming objects of this structure. From that, there is a deformation of the emancipation possibilities, detoured to enact private interests and leading individuals to act against their peers, so that the result of this dynamic is the creation of violence.

From the idea of Marcuse (1999) that “safety and order are, to a large extent, guaranteed by the fact that man has learned to adjust his behavior to the other fellow’s down to the most minute detail.” (p.86), we understand how social networks can play a role in the conformation of such standardization, imposing to the individual the conditions for survival, in the need for adaptation enacted by the dynamic of online working. To produce this order, situations that are reduced in the offline space acquire online the amplitude of quantity and scope, mobilizing tendencies able to maintain the so-called engagement (Recuero, 2005). The ability to keep the interactions on the platform converts itself into rentable assets (Morozov, 2018), and the contents that meet such logic are, then, kept in evidence.

On the other hand, when investigating the place of violence in the condition of “technological advancements”, beyond questioning the relation between barbarism and technological rationality, which clarifies a position on the role of social networks, the understanding of why refugees, in the case analyzed here, are object of this violence is in the resurgence of the question on the relation between subject and object (Adorno, 1995b). It is under the domain of instrumental rationality (Marcuse, 1979) that the diverse becomes a threat to be dominated and exterminated, so as to keep the configuration and the integration of social forces.

This way, it is not the possibility of experiencing alterity that connects the subject with the object, but violence, in the conformation of such a meeting to maintain the acting logic. Thus, it reinforces an idea of a subject based in the exclusion of the object, able to break away with this logic, establishing a relation predisposed to violence.

Thus, social networks become an important medium to maintain this dynamic. What starts as an action from a racist minority ends up finding a fruitful space to echo itself and flourishes. Together with the massive effects of reason, the service of private interests, the bubble, or, the pit that surrounds individuals, for example in Facebook, prevents them to get in contact with different thoughts and intensifies the weight of their opinion that repetitively appear in their feed (Recuero, 2005). The individual’s impression is reinforced by the large number of people favorable to violence, strengthening the impulse for violent action. Thus, Facebook has the favorable conditions to order affections and ideas, easing its transformation into action (Adorno, 2015). Working as a type of mediation of behaviors that should be overcome, the network assumes a regressive role when allowing this return, becoming increasingly more evident, according to Adorno and Horkheimer (2016), the maintenance of the activity that conserves the myth in the recent forms of what is shown as progress.

Conclusions

The study presented here makes a reflexive approximation to the impact of the effects of the increase use of social networks in the social ordering. The predominance of instrumental rationality, with mercantile characteristics, impose a totalitarian adhesion, even before claiming the need to dispute its use. The individual, object of the dispute, can either be co-opted by the authoritarian character of fascism, or reach a status of resistance. The analysis of the meaning of social networks, as a space of production and mediation of multiple forms of violence, should consider the form and the specific content that are disseminated in the network, such as the political configuration that amalgamate society.

Any alternative implies the need to transform the bases that order society, until then focused on the production of more efficient forms of expropriation of work and, thus, of human life. Then, it is not enough to consider that the internet, big data, and social networks threaten institutions, as the logic that follows their working is also an immanent part of institutions (Marcuse, 1999). Digital apps have the capability of producing real mobilization and transform hate speech into violent behaviors when supported by dynamics that determine such mobilization.

Understanding barbarism as a mark of an internal tension to rationality is similar to saying that there is something that questions social organization itself, an actively kept tension, which exists not only as a detour, but as an organic project. It is important to include in the analysis the historical movement of culture, articulated in the scope of productive force, in which are inserted the relations among individuals and that ultimately allow the identification of the subject as a locus of reflection and resistance in the commitment with emancipation.

When claiming human freedom as a right that should be expanded to all, it is necessary to point out the ways through which such freedom is enacted, safeguarding the radical demand of emancipation as a way to overcome barbarism. As its control mechanisms are well-distributed and defined, the isolated transformations are not enough and have an even higher risk of being converted into more domination.

In the context of rationality criticism and the ways to organize the world, the necessary radicalism consists on pointing out, as much as possible, what presents itself as an instrument of domination. Thus, resistance is connected to the need to distinguish what should be overcome, even if under new guises and discourses, and what is, in fact, new, understood here as what should be part of the construction of the future.

Therefore, the expectation is to reinforce the need to reestablish the grounds to the development of a rationality that is able to unfold and support a type of social organization based on the accomplishment of human emancipation. Such grounds should be supported in overcoming the forces that impose the isolation among individuals and weaken the collective forms of social ordering. It is a form of action able to establish contacts among people, in which the experiences of individuals disappear, and not only as a challenge to the current development in the present society of domination (Adorno & Horkheimer, 2006).

Such understanding, allowed by the contributions of authors from the first generation of the Critical Theory of Frankfurt School, reinforce the actuality of the dialectic of enlightenment and the meeting with the formulation of authors from the issues that mobilize the present, pointing out to the double effort that characterizes theoretical research: the understanding of the work itself, in its temporal dimension, and the elaboration of this understanding in the sense of determining how much it is able to revitalize the interpretation of the questions of our time.

Following such contradiction, the enlightenment in the shape of rationality impacting the capacity to allow transformation or the imprisonment of reality, the article aimed to shed light on the problem of violence and its ways of manifestation, as a way to call attention to the risks in the technologies of social networks. We have simultaneously tried to promote a connection between the elaborations produced from the questions that are no longer presented immediately and the questions that emerged from elements of the historical moment, with the understanding that such elements date back to an extension of forces that it keeps, determining the ways of a history based on domination and violence.

As an answer to the forgetfulness that organizes the maintenance of barbarism in the dialectic of enlightenment, the articulation of such prolongations is necessary, so as to understand and identify prisons and rescue the potential of resistance. The final observation is the same as Adorno’s (1995b): to carry on attempts to overcome the dominant order, to be watchful to the immediate interests of individuals, capturing what most intensely touches them, from where can emerge the possibility to think on the threats and possibilities present in social entanglements.

• 2
  References correction and bibliographic normalization services: Maria Thereza Sampaio Lucinio - [e-mail]
• 3
  Funding: Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior
• 4
  English version: Viviane Ramos - [e-mail]

Referências

• Adorno, T. W. (2009). Dialética negativa Zahar.
• Adorno, T. W. (2015). Ensaios sobre psicologia social e psicanálise Editora Unesp.
• Adorno, T. W. (1993). Minima moralia: Reflexões a partir da vida danificada Ática.
• Adorno, T. W. (1995a). O que significa elaborar o passado. In T. W. Adorno. Educação e emancipação (pp. 29-49). Paz e Terra.
• Adorno, T. W. (1995b). Palavras e Sinais: Modelos críticos Vozes.
• Adorno, T. W. (2010). Teoria da semiformação. In Bruno Pucci, Antonio A. S. Zuin, & Luiz A. Calmon Nabuco Lastória, Teoria Crítica e inconformismo: Novas perspectivas de pesquisa (pp. 7-40). Autores Associados.
• Adorno, T. W., & Horkheimer, M. (2006). Dialética do esclarecimento Zahar.
• Antunes, D., & Maia, A. (2018). Big data, exploração ubíqua e propaganda dirigida: novas facetas da indústria cultural. Psicologia USP, 29(2), 189-199. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/0103-656420170156
  » https://doi.org/10.1590/0103-656420170156
• Benjamin, W. (2012). Magia e técnica, arte e política: Ensaios sobre literatura e história da cultura Brasiliense.
• Boyd, D. M., & Ellison, N. B. (2018). Social Network Sites: definition, history and scholarship. Journal of computer-mediated communication, 13, 210-230. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00393.x
  » https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00393.x
• Kosinski, M., Stillwel, D., & Graepel, T. (2013). Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior. PNAS, 110(15), 5802-5805. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1218772110
  » http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1218772110
• Lambiotte, R., & Kosinski, M. (2014). Tracking the digital footprints of personality. Proceedings of the IEEE, 102(12), 1934-1939. https://doi.org/10.1109/JPROC.014.2359054
  » https://doi.org/10.1109/JPROC.014.2359054
• Lash, S., & Lury, C. (2007) Global culture industry: The mediation of things Polity.
• Lévy, P. (1996). O Que é Virtual? Editora 34.
• Marcuse, H. (1979). A ideologia da sociedade industrial Zahar.
• Marcuse, H. (1998). Industrialização e capitalismo na obra de Max Weber. In H. Marcuse, Cultura e sociedade (pp. 113-136). Paz e Terra.
• Marcuse, H. (1999). Tecnologia, guerra e fascismo Editora Unesp.
• Morozov, E. (2018). Big Tech: a ascensão dos dados e a morte da política Ubu, 2018.
• Morozov, E. (2019). Capitalism’s New Clothes. The Bafler. https://thebaffler.com/latest/capitalisms-new-clothes-morozov
  » https://thebaffler.com/latest/capitalisms-new-clothes-morozov
• Müller, K., & Schwarz, C. (2018). Fanning the flames of hate: Social media and hate crime SSRN Electronic Journal http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3082972
  » https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3082972
• Recuero, R. C. (2005). Comunidades virtuais em redes sociais na internet: uma proposta de estudo. E-Compós, 4 https://doi.org/10.30962/ec.57
  » https://doi.org/10.30962/ec.57
• Sancho, G. R. (2018). Multidões conectadas e movimentos sociais: dos zapatistas e do hacktivismo à tomada das ruas e das redes. In F. Bruno, B. Cardoso, M. Kanashiro, L. Guilhon, & L. Melgaço, Tecnopolíticas da vigilância: Perspectivas da margem (pp. 355- 375). Boitempo.
• Türcke, C. (2010). Sociedade excitada: Filosofia da sensação Editora Unicamp.

Edited by

1

Responsible editor: Alexandre Filordi de Carvalho. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4510-9440

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  17 June 2022
• Date of issue
  2022

History

• Received
  02 Nov 2020
• Reviewed
  08 Jan 2021
• Accepted
  25 Mar 2021