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Nosce Teipsum (Read Thyself) As the sub-title explains, The Disposition of the Subject: Reading Adorno's Dialectic of Technology is a study of Adorno's concept of technology. The topic is well selected, since it would be hard to locate a more crucial idea in the whole of his oeuvre. Anyone interested in Adorno's thought would want to welcome the project.
The author—Erik Krakauer —proceeds in four chapters, with an epilogue. The first is a discussion of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, and claims that in this volume Adorno “discovered a dark side to the Enlightenment;” the technological mastery of nature has “proven to be both pernicious as well as salubrious;” the second chapter argues that technological rationality is not only an epistemological conundrum but “a social and political problem as well;” the third chapter shows that technological rationality is disrupted by Adorno's negative dialectics. This thesis is especially developed in the fourth chapter, in which Krakauer extracts from Adorno's texts the surprising admission—for anyone who has so much as mowed a lawn—that “technology is primarily a language.” Once Krakauer has established this idea, he segues directly into boiler plating about the metaphysics of representation, and how the self and its autarchic claims are an effect of this metaphysical tendency inherent in all language. However familiar these ideas, what catches the eye here is that it is Adorno, the philosopher of a dialectical reasoning generally held anathema to post-structuralism, who is now said to provide a type of destabilizing rhetoric that “has much in common with Paul de Man's deconstructive reading” (13-14). Krakauer especially discerns de Manian practice in Adorno's much reputed use of foreign—Greek, Latin, French and English—words in his German texts. Their foreignness destroys significiative textual closure and—says Krakauer—heals the wounds first inflicted on nature by the metaphysical self. It is in enthusiasm for these foreign wo