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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 Platos last writings expresses the longing of all demythologizing: number became enlightenments 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?
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 Platos last writings expresses the longing of all demythologizing: number became enlightenments 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?