THEODOR
ADORNO
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~k.i.s.s.~
Adorno was a member
of the Frankfurt
School in interwar
Germany. He followed a neoMarxian belief that modern art,
media, etc. were controlled by the ruling elites. Any dissenting
views articulated in art would be co-opted by the all-encompassing
culture industry, which would always prevail.
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I.
Adorno's specific beliefs:
- 1) All the forces of production
are intertwined; a system.
2) Out of capitalism comes the concept of the culture
industry, which itself grew
out of capitalism - a mass culture industry which is non-critical
and debasing.
3) Adorno (being negative) thought that the masses were systematically
manipulated and progressively unable to criticize their society
effectively; the culture industry is central.
4) To Adorno, the only people left who can still critique Enlightenment
ideas, capitalism and the culture industry are the avant-gardes.
5) Imminent Critique (Frankfurt School)
a) Contrasts the best concept of a thing (e.g., capitalism) with
its reality. b) This is a negative dialectic; future reality cannot
be better than its concept.
In the early 1940s, Adorno
and Max
Horkheimer elaborated on these
principles in Dialectic of Enlightenment.
II.
Adorno was more negative, yet more elitist, than
Benjamin about the implications of the culture industry and commodity
fetishism. The confrontation
between Adorno and Horkheimer
on the one hand, and Benjamin on the other, "centered not on modernism
as such, but the historical meanings to be attached to avant-garde
and commercialized "mass" art in capitalist society." (Lunn, p. 150).
Adorno (and Horkheimer)
on the culture
industry:
- 1) Adorno argues
the culture industry commodifies and standardizes all art
(music, fashion, etc.)
then fools you into thinking it's "original" ("pseudo-individuality")
in order to sell it.
2) This prompts a change in reception; in music he calls it "regressive
listening." This turns down the intellectual response to bourgeois
art and regresses the response to that of a child because the form
of the composition forces you to think this way.
3) This is a machine culture which mutates and dampens conciousness,
destroying critical thinking.
III.
Adorno on the music industry (part of the culture
industry):
1) Authentic art (as defined
by bourgeoisie) has difficulty surviving against capitalism; avant
gardes are chewed up by society and become commodities themselves.
2) The bourgeoisie constructs
a dichotomy of classical, "serious" music vs. light, popular music.
Thus, there develops a "flight from banality" (e.g., Schoenberg's
atonal music vs. ever more standardized, imitative forms).
3) The "incomprehensibility
of the serious form" (e.g., Joyce, Lawrence) is in part a reaction
by the avant-gardes to the "inescapability of fashion."
IV.
Criticisms of Adorno:
- 1) He concentrates on the educated
elite.
2) He allows some elements of nostalgia to creep into his work.
3) He gets the relationship between high/mass culture wrong, because
pre-capitalist popular culture (e.g., the oral tradition of story-telling)
was also repetitive in nature.
4) He concentrates on cultivating particular emotions on the part
of these educated elites (e.g., does Beethoven fall in love "better"
than the average man on the street? Adorno seems to think so).
5) High culture does more than react against mass culture; it draws
from it more than Adorno admits.
6) He's pretty negative about our chances of breaking out of this
hegemonic culture industry. Besides, if hegemony is so all-encompassing,
how can he recognize it and stand outside of it.
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~~~~~~~~~~
LOUIS
ALTHUSSER
French Marxist
philosopher.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Marxist thinkers such as Althusser developed
more sophisticated articulations of ideology in base-superstructure
theory, in an attempt to explain why there hadn't been a world revolution
along Marxist lines. Instead of a simple cause-and-effect relationship
between ideology and the economic base of society, where one class
imposes its values on another, Althusser redefined ideology as a continuous
and all-pervasive set of practices in which all groups and classes
participate. Obviously, this makes the task of organizing the overthrow
of the oppressors much more difficult.
This participatory model, where
even the oppressed classes happily accede to their oppression, is
quite similar to Gramsci's
notions of hegemony. However, it differs insofar as it makes social
change appear unlikely. Gramsci's theory, on the other hand, allows
a much greater role for resistance to dominating influences from within
the hegemonized groups, and recognizes the opportunity for social
change within a capitalist system. (Fiske, 176-178).
The modern British state provides
a good example of a political entity dominated by what Althusser describes
as the 'ideological state apparatuses' - the political system, the
churches, the schools, the family, the legal system, the system of
mass communication, and cultural activities like the arts and sports
- instead of the more blatant "repressive state apparatus" of police,
the armed forces, the prisons, and so on. See Thompson, Ideology
and Modern Culture, 92.
Althusser also originated the
concept of interpellation, aka "hailing."
Once again, this is all about power relations between individuals
and groups in society. He argued that "ideological state apparatuses"
'hailed' persons into certain subject positions
(for example, as "middle class", instead of the more revolutionary
subject position of "working class"; as "black"
instead of "white"; as "girl" instead of "man.").
Hailing is, in this sense, a kind of "invitation" that actually
works to situate people -- specifically, to coerce them (in non-apparent
ways) into seeing themselves in particular ways.
For example,
the "Hey, you there!" of the policeman constitutes
the person addressed as a particular kind of subject (a "suspect",
perhaps) within a particular structure of authority.
Even though the person addressed may be innocent of any crime, he
still may feel guilt, as if he had done something, simply by virtue
of how he is reconstituted by the policeman's hailing within a legal
structure of authority. You only need to compare this to another
form of address the policeman might adopt: "Excuse me, sir (or
ma'am)"; here the subject of the address is being interpellated in
a very different way.
To take the point further:
if a white policeman addressed a black man as "hey,
boy!" the addressee would be placed as a subject in a structure
of authority that was most likely predicated on a white power structure
that placed blacks in an inferior position. If a male policeman
addressed an adult woman as "hey, girlie!" or "Hey,
doll!", that would suggest a patriarchal power structure that
placed women in an inferior position to men. (See Louis Althusser.
1971, Lenin and Philosophy. Trans. by Ben Brewster. London:
Monthly Review Press.)
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~~~~~~~~~~
BENEDICT
ANDERSON
According to Anderson, a nation
"is an imagined political community -- and imagined as both inherently
limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even
the smallest nations will never know most of their fellow-members,
meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives an
image of their community." See Anderson, Imagined Communities,
p. 6.
See
also:
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ARISTOTLE
Ask a person-in-the-street
to name a philosopher off the top of her head -- any philosopher
-- and she'll probably come up with Aristotle. This ancient Greek
lies at the heart of Western philosophical thought, which is why we
have to deal with him in critical theory. Here's what he's about:
Western ideas of objective
definition, classification, naming, and placing have their origin
in Aristotle, Plato's
most famous pupil. Aristotle began the process of sorting out all
our philosophical and scientific endeavors into classifications and
disciplines -- hence we have our mathematics, botany, metaphysics,
biology, ethics, rhetoric, politics, etc., etc. He's responsible
for this, more than anyone else. Just about every modern (and postmodern)
Western philosopher takes something from him.
Aristotle believed that his
former teacher Plato's
conception of reality (the theory of Forms) was fundamentally
flawed. Aristotle thought that reality was contained within the nature
or mechanisms of things themselves, not in their surface forms. He
thought of things not in terms of some transcendent ideal (as Plato
did) but in terms of their function, or its telos. A
chair is not any good insofar as it partakes of some ideal of chairness
but because it works as a chair.
Here's a Not-so-Gratuitous
Quote from my favorite book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
that helps better explain this dichotomy.
I think it was Coleridge who
said everyone is either a Platonist or an Aristotelian. People who
can't stand Aristotle's endless specificity of detail are natural
lovers of Plato's soaring generalities. People who can't stand the
eternal lofty idealism of Plato welcome the down-to-earth facts of
Aristotle. Plato is the eternal Buddha seeker who appears again
and again in each generation, moving onward and upward toward the
"one". Aristotle is the eternal motorcycle mechanic who prefers the
"many". I myself am pretty much Aristotelian in this sense, preferring
to find the Buddha in the quality of facts around me. (Emphasis
added.)
Aristotle is also known for
his views on the positive benefits of government on its citizens.
Like Hobbes, Jeremy Bentham, and others, Aristotle believed that a
strong, benign government - to which the citizens would be tightly
bound - was essential to the effective conduct of human affairs (see
Aristotle's Politics for more on this).
Finally, Plato, with
his dialogues, helped to instigate the very Western
cultural bias for phonocentrism,
or privileging the voice over the written word (to
realize how important this is, think about the
importance traditionally given to debate and rhetoric
in the West.
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