Techniques of rational mastery over nature eventually destroy the freedom that justified them.

Evidence

Twelve-tone technique is a system of domination over nature within music. It corresponds to a longing present from the beginnings of the bourgeois period: to `grasp’ whatever sounds appear and set them in order, dissolving the magical essence of music in human reason … Conscious disposition over the material provided by nature has two aspects: it is the emancipation of humanity from natural necessity within music, and the subjection of nature to human purposes … However, the oppressive moment of subjugating nature reverses itself and turns against the subjective autonomy and freedom in whose name domination over nature has been achieved. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 327

Categorization

• XREF: This is the core dialectic-of-enlightenment thesis the reader has already flagged in earlier chapters: nature-domination, not capitalism, as culture’s decisive turning point. Revisit alongside Horkheimer and Adorno’s own statement of it.
• DEEPTHINKING: The self-reversal of domination — reason freeing humanity only to enslave it — is arguably the single structuring idea of the whole Critical Theory tradition, and worth sitting with.