Friends

In his essay “Terror’s Atomization of Man,” Horkheimer and Adorno’s associate Leo Löwenthal offers a phenomenology of terror as affective in the concentration camp and in society in the wake of the Holocaust. Löwenthal notes operative similarities in its effects between the two domains, long before digital social media when news traveled fastest through the vocal grapevine. He plainly begins that terror has deep roots “in the trends of modern civilization, and especially in the pattern of modern economy.” He distinguishes an “interruption of the causal relation between what a person does and what happens to him” as key in an operation which seeks “dehumanization through the total integration of the population into collectivities, then depriving them of the psychological means of direct communication in spite of — rather because of — the tremendous communications apparatus to which they are exposed.” By manipulating social interaction, severely influencing one’s subjective experience by disrupting the traditional expectations and operations of interpersonal communication, he believes, the Nazis were able to transform “a human being … into a unit of atomized reactions.” This function, however, operated on both victims and the perpetrators, shaping the latter’s mentality to stoke, justify, and enable the performance of psychological and physical violence behind camp walls, and provoke a phenomenal assumption that their complicit manufacturing of terror would mine their own “self-perpetuation.” Löwenthal identifies this as a type of “cultural monopoly,” an industrialization that equates human beings to raw goods or merchandise. Outside of the concentration camp confines, he sees cultural monopolization and the steady improvement of technology together increasingly transforming human beings to be “largely superfluous,” which he views as another “pre-condition of terror.” Thus, separating individuals by disrupting communication and categorically generalizing them, simply like groups of objects inside resulting cultural monopolies, prepares them “to accept the most insane ideologies and patterns of domination and persecution” as it provides those entities bearing totalitarian desires “a road to power and an object for its exercise.” This effort of emotional control, “the systematic modification of the ideas and feelings of the masses,” Löwenthal points out, was Adolf Hitler’s operative bedrock.