Critical Theory (Frankfurt School)

Mr. Rig

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Hi, the subforum tittle reminded me Frankfurt School, and if I understood this site, the place of this thread is here.

Had you read Dialectic of Enlightenment, from Horkheimer and Adorno? And, by the same theorical line, The Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord? I've just finished the first of those books a few months ago, and I'm reading now the second one.

I agree with Horkheimer and Adorno, the concept for Reason that appeared at 19th and 20th centuries in countries where their bourgeoisie, in a period of boom (France, Germany, England...) replaced the previous dogmas, and take the form of myths throughout society, taking their place. And knowledge acquired a quantitative value, becoming a synonym of power:

"Formal logic was the high school of unification. It offered Enlightenment thinkers a schema for making the world calculable. The mythologizing equation of Forms with numbers in Plato’s last writings expresses the longing of all demythologizing: number became enlightenment’s canon. The same equations govern bourgeois justice and commodity exchange. “Is not the rule, ‘Si inaequalibus aequalia addas, omnia erunt inaequalia,’ [If you add like to unlike you will always end up with unlike] an axiom of justice as well as of mathematics? And is there not a true coincidence between commutative and distributive justice, and arithmetical and geometrical proportion?”9 Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes dissimilar things comparable by reducing them to abstract quantities. "

But the nexus is the definition of the Culture Industry, or in other words, the way in which the culture is adapted to the criteria of production in capitalism (and in fascist regimes specifically). There's a solid explanation in the Critical Theory, but for the moment I don't find it in Debord.

In any case, the fetishization and commodification of mass culture is a deep and complex phase in Art's History. What do you think about it?
 

ColoradoGuy

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Thanks for this post. I haven't read Adorno in a long time but recall finding him fascinating. As I recall the notion of commodifying mass culture makes it a sort of "opiate of the masses" thing. But I do think regarding culture, even mass culture, as a single thing can lead to overgeneralization. I suppose it partly depends upon if one is a lumper or a splitter by nature. I think people like Andy Warhol were pointing out that distinguishing high culture from mass culture is not a useful distinction.
 

Mr. Rig

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What does lumper mean? (Sorry, my native language is Spanish)

Andy Warhol is not one of my favorite... people, but if he really said that, I agree with him (for first time, far as I know). The atomization of the arts is a way of dividing them only according to their profitability.
 

ColoradoGuy

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Lumper vs spliter is a distinction between points of view that emphasize underlying unity, similarities, as opposed to those who emphasize fine distinctions between things that appear similar.
 

Mr. Rig

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Thank you very much for the explanation :)

I think about the division between culture (or arts) and mass culture, as a form of developement from the dialectic. I mean, those facts are a dialectical unity, two opposing elements on way to their synthesis, or "overcoming". And I also think that this is only going to happen with the abolition of the Culture Industry, and working on the conception of the arts as a form of expression by the people and for the people.
 

GOTHOS

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Disagree with Adorno in every possible way. Here's a section I blogged years ago in which I dissected a passage from DIALECTICS. Don't read it if you only want agreement.

_________

[FONT=&quot]From THE DIALECTICS OF ENLIGHTMENT:[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]
[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]"Not only are the hit songs, stars, and soap operas cyclically recurrent and rigidly invariable types, but the specific content of the entertainment itself is derived from them and only appears to change. The details are interchangeable. The short interval sequence which was effective in a hit song, the hero’s momentary fall from grace (which he accepts as good sport), the rough treatment which the beloved gets from the male star, the latter’s rugged defiance of the spoilt heiress, are, like all the other details, ready-made clichés to be slotted in anywhere; they never do anything more than fulfil the purpose allotted them in the overall plan. Their whole raison d’être is to confirm it by being its constituent parts."[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]
[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]I've devoted no small effort to demonstrating the untruth of this statement: of showing how some popular works are indeed purely functional and represent little more than an assemblage of cliches, while others are clearly "superfunctional" in terms of not only how they function under the critic's microscope but in their public reception. That Adorno and Horkeimer could actually believe that the "cliches" could be "slotted in anywhere" speaks to their inability to grapple with the question as to why one popular work, be it song or soap opera, should be more popular than another one.

[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]I think part of the reason is that these Frankfurters had no real idea of the creative process: they simply worshiped a concept of "art" that was so wonderfully hermetic that it could be easily divorced from the sort of "cliches" that pleased the hoi polloi. I'd be surprised if either Adorno or Horkeimer, steeped in their doctrinaire Marxism, showed any cognizance of the human faculty that Jung calls "fantasy-thinking:" the faculty which accounts for the capacity of both storytellers and their audiences to enjoy stories for their own sake, apart from their status as "art"-- even though, in the inclusive sense of the word, Donald Duck is ever bit as much "art" as Adorno's beloved Kafka.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]
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[FONT=&quot]It's significant that Jung, who was not a literary critic but who probably shared much the same highbrow education of the Frankfurters, was able to "step outside the box" of High Culture to such good effect. Jung wrote very little on popular culture but his intuitions about how creativity takes place, whether in high art or low, have stood the test of time through the explorations of lit-critics like Leslie Fiedler and Raymond Durgnat. In contrast, Marxist critics today, appropriately enough, are the ones who are ceaselessly repeating a "rigidly invariable" form of criticism.[/FONT]
 

GOTHOS

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You're welcome, Colorado Guy. Sorry if I sound a little prickly at the outset. I'd be interested in discussing the topic more fully. but I felt I ought to take issue with some of the key Frankfurter concepts.
 

Alan Aspie

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Do you understand that you are talking about totalitarian ideology that has killed much more innocent people than national socialism + fascism together?

Do you understand that the totalitarian nature of nazism comes from the same ideology than totalitarian nature of cultural marxism? (=Marxism, socialism)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_march_through_the_institutions

All that was to get a totalitarian tyranny via civil wars and wars.

The word "revolution" means killing and/or enslaving those who have different political wievs.

Please, watch this. It tells you what critical theory = cultural marxism = frankfurt school is in practice.

Do you really like this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3qkf3bajd4

And this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago

And this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin

And this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II

And this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge

Because all this is what Frankfurt School and Cultural Marxism is about. Cultural Marxism is a tool for that. It is designed for that to get that.
 

GOTHOS

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Though I don't agree with Marxism, I think it's important to keep in mind that many people believe that it can be used for good purposes, despite some of its uses for totalitarianism.
 

Alan Aspie

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Though I don't agree with Marxism, I think it's important to keep in mind that many people believe that it can be used for good purposes, despite some of its uses for totalitarianism.

Though I don't agree with loose use of nuclear weapons, I think it's important to keep in mind that many people believe that they can be used for good purposes, despite some of it's uses that are not so fun.

Many people believing in something and reality... They dance is so fascinating.

People need to wake up and see that "civilised" totalitarianism is not civilised and will work just like all it's predecessors.

There is no good nazism and a one that Hitler ruined. There is only nazism and it's evil thing.

There is no good marxism and ones that Lenin and Stalin and Mengisto and Pol Pot and Mao and everyone else ruined. There is this one evil marxism. And even roots of nazism - National Socialism - are there.
 
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AW Admin

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This forum is about critical theory; critical theories provides tools for analyzing and interpreting texts (and sometimes other works of art).

Do NOT lump critical theory and politics and history into the same boat and dump them all.

While I personally am not a fan of critical theory for its own sake,* taking Marxist critical theory (which has useful observations to make about many literary works) and jumping from that to the Gulag and Stalin is not going to fly.

I'm locking this thread until Colorado Guy is back to deal with it. Meanwhile, go read some Terry Eagleton books. You'll be better for it.
 

ColoradoGuy

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This forum is about critical theory; critical theories provides tools for analyzing and interpreting texts (and sometimes other works of art).

Do NOT lump critical theory and politics and history into the same boat and dump them all.

While I personally am not a fan of critical theory for its own sake,* taking Marxist critical theory (which has useful observations to make about many literary works) and jumping from that to the Gulag and Stalin is not going to fly.

I'm locking this thread until Colorado Guy is back to deal with it. Meanwhile, go read some Terry Eagleton books. You'll be better for it.

I agree with the perceptive and reasonable AW Admin. Marxist literary critical approaches have little to nothing to do with Marxism as a political system. Many useful approaches to literary criticism have come from those efforts. If you want to speak to that issue go ahead. But this room is not about politics. So I'll unlock this thread but keep a close eye on it. If you return with your ranting I'll toss you right out.
 

Max Vaehling

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Thanks for clearing that up, AW Admin and ColoradoGuy. The so-called socialist systems are so far removed from Marxism as a means of societal critique that they're just eintirely off-topic here. (Actually, if anybody wants to explore how a system inspired by Marxist ideas could deviate from Marx so thoroughly, I recommend Leszek Kolakowski's essays on Totalitarianism - I looked briefly and couldn't find where they are collected in English but he wrote some pretty sharp citiques of the Polish system before they kicked him out. ) (Oh, or try Adorno and Horkheimer themselves. Their whole thing was about how to best adapt Marxist thinking to modern times without perverting it. Mostly after the shock of seeing the same social structures Marx described turn not towards workers' empowerment but into fascism. The concept of Critical Theory itself is to make critical thinking more vigilant against complacency but also against totalitarian exploitation.)
 
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GOTHOS

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I still don't think the Marxist idea of "commodification" makes any sense, except as a club used by Marxist thinkers against whatever they don't like.

Upton Sinclair's THE JUNGLE became a best-seller, less for its Socialist message than for its shock value. Still, as soon as it sold in bookstores, it became a "commodity," as are any of the books of Karl Marx.

How do Marxist thinkers suppose that even "good books" avoid the stigma of commodification?
 

Max Vaehling

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How do Marxist thinkers suppose that even "good books" avoid the stigma of commodification?

I don't know about Marxist thinkers, but Critical Theory thinkers don't suppose that at all. They try to stay ahead of it by avoiding mass accessability, not so much by being too intellectual for the masses (although that's the common cliché) but by amping up the analysis. Critique, in Critical Theory, always includes self-critique and anticipating the pitfalls of working within the ideas market. It also includes the awareness that, in the long run, you inevitably fail at that.

It's actually one of their core ideas: The reflection never ends. You've critiqued and analysed and deconstructed a subject, now you go and deconstruct your deconstruction of it and most of all your role as a social actor in deconstructing it. It's fun!
 

GOTHOS

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I don't know about Marxist thinkers, but Critical Theory thinkers don't suppose that at all. They try to stay ahead of it by avoiding mass accessability, not so much by being too intellectual for the masses (although that's the common cliché) but by amping up the analysis. Critique, in Critical Theory, always includes self-critique and anticipating the pitfalls of working within the ideas market. It also includes the awareness that, in the long run, you inevitably fail at that.

It's actually one of their core ideas: The reflection never ends. You've critiqued and analysed and deconstructed a subject, now you go and deconstruct your deconstruction of it and most of all your role as a social actor in deconstructing it. It's fun!

I'm not following why you're making this distinction between Marxism and Critical Theory, because in your previous post you said:

try Adorno and Horkheimer themselves. Their whole thing was about how to best adapt Marxist thinking to modern times without perverting it. Mostly after the shock of seeing the same social structures Marx described turn not towards workers' empowerment but into fascism. The concept of Critical Theory itself is to make critical thinking more vigilant against complacency but also against totalitarian exploitation
.
Adorno and Horkeimer are as Marxist as the day is long, and even if it's true that they *thought* their project was all about being vigilant against complacency et al, I don't think they succeeded in the least. When I read Adorno railing against the productions of Hollywood, I see a man who's just disguising his own prejudices with a lot of circumlocution rather than reasoned argument.
 

Xelebes

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Commdification is a meaningful term in the business realm: the process whereby one's product or service is identified by the customer as something that is regular, mean and banal and can therefore be expected to be interchangeable with another supplier. The definition used by critical thinkers is. . . perhaps not well-applied. The way Vaehling puts it, the usage ensures that it is made a commodity of the most unfortunate sort.
 

Diomedes

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Eh, I think that book just steps into and inverts in many ways the old logos-mythos dichotomy. I prefer Derrida.
 

MindfulInquirer

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oh dear, there's a thread about critical theory and the Frankfurt school on here... yikes. Better stay out of this one.
dah dee dum dadummm *whistles away*