THEODOR ADORNO
|
~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. |
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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