Plentitude or Plenticide : Janus Manhattan 1945

Manhattan was long regarded as Modernity's 'special' city, home to most of the world's skyscrapers (and centres of eugenic research).

But a Manhattan university campus was also the first home of Adorno & Horkheimer's modest little mimeographed effort entitled "Dialectic of the Enlightenment".

That collection of essays rather went against the grain of 1945's informed opinion, by dissing the Nazi plenticidal killing machine for being, of all things, 'Modernity on Speed'.

Thereby A&H helped birthed our present day era, without quite realizing it, simply by killing off Modernity stone cold.

But it was the Manhattan-led process that enabled natural penicillin to unexpectedly win out over modernity's efforts to create synthetic penicillin that supplied the new kid in town : plentitude, aka post-modernity...