Andrew's Wiki
Dialectic Enlightenment

Quotes

• 94: “Culture today is infecting everything with sameness.”
  • town planning is absurd: “perpetuate individuals as autonomous units in hygienic small apartments, subjugate them only more completely to their adversary, the total power of capital.”
• disappearance of will in the inescapable net of capital
• 95: “All mass culture under monopoly is identical”
  • originally referred to actual need but no longer do
• Technology not itself at fault but the way it works in society, “technical rationality”
• 96: The public was not originally like this: “The mentality of the public, which allegedly and actually favors the system of the culture industry, is part of the system, not an excuse for it.”
  • use of “recipes” for radio shows, films, soap operas
• Culture industry dependent on large industries: electric, banks, and dependence on other branches of media (all uniform: television, radio, film) will lead to “impoverishment of the aesthetic material” 97
• 97: “Something is provided for everyone so that no one can escape…The hierarchy of social qualities purveyed to the public serves only to quantify it more completely.”
  • People are “typed” and the cultural product selected for them
• Leisure
  • Leisure feels like work b/c of the amount of alertness demanded from you: “each one is a model of the gigantic economic machinery, which, from the first, keeps everyone on their toes, both at work and in the leisure time which resembles it.”
  • 98: “Even during their leisure time, consumers must orient themselves according to the unity of production”
    • Leisure matters for Adorno b/c it shouldn’t take away your Kantian powers….
    • Their Kantian powers of reason have been taken from them: “According to Kantian schematism, a secret mechanism within the psyche preformed immediate data to fit them into the system of pure reason. That secret has now been unraveled.” instead of you actively being able to impose Kantian stuff (“relate sensuous multiplicity to fundamental concepts”)
    • “classification has already been preempted” so it is “dreamless art”
    • hence art is reiterative only “rigid invariants” with “interchangeable” details: cliches: the movie is only there to CONFIRM the shcema
• 99: gives “order, not connections” so that “the whole and the detail look alike” which is the “graveyard stillness of dictatorship”
• Why Film is Really Bad
  • When you leave theatre, the world you just saw on the screen perceptually looks kinda like the one you left, so you let what you see on film be a PATTERN for your own experience: life and sound film are the same
  • Thus you can’t exercise imagination freely: you will “lose the thread” and get confused.
  • Cultural products Cripple Imagination 100 and Debars Thinking
    • b/c all the details are running by so fast: you have to just accept it to keep up w/plot: alertness replaces contemplation and imagination
    • “alertly consumed even in a state of distraction”
• “a society irrational despite all its rationalization” 98
• 101: nothing can happen on screen unless it is pre-approved by the shematized system
  • it’s a “jargon” that replaces “naturalness”
  • “explicit and implicit, exoteric and esoteric catalog of what is forbidden and what is tolerated is so extensive that it not only defines the area left free but wholly controls it” 101
  • this stylization (where you have a “technically conditioned idiom” that must be produced “as second nature”) is a new kind of positivism b/c you must test the data: “must be verifiable against everyday speech” 102
    • thus it’s an ideology: “posits the real form of the existing order as absolute”
    • where conformity is expertise, so that “style…is a negation of style” (and this is what the Expressionists and Dadaists were rebelling against)
      • and for Adorno, culture industry has revealed how in the past, “the concept of a genuine style” is “the aesthetic equivalent of power” 103
      • and now style is an anti-style, a conformity, which makes it has a “secret: obedience to the social hierarchy” 104
• avant-garde is the adversary of culture industry 101
• Great Art and Its Ragged Style
  • Great artwork “transcends reality” in a moment: “does not consist in achieved harmony, in the questionable unity of form and content, inner and outer, individual and society, but in those traits in which discrepancy emerges, in the necessary failure of the passionate striving for identity.”
  • Great artwork “expos[es] itself to this failure” 103
• Now, culture is “administered” b/c involves “identifying, cataloging, and classifying” 104
  • culture is industrialized
  • The irony is that culture “mocking fulfill[s] the notion of a unified culture” (the goal of “philosophers of the individual personality held out against mass culture”) b/c it “imposes on the sense of human beings, form the time they leave the factory in the evening to the time they clock on in the morning, the imprint of the work routine which they must sustain throughout the day” 104
• Rebels “can survive only by being incorporated”
  • Before, even under absolutist monarchies, “left them a degree of independence from the power of the market” until 19th c (105)
    • lost this distance when “incessant threat of incorporation into commercial life” 105
    • “In former times they signed their letters, like Kant and Hume, ‘Your most obedient servant,’ while undermining the foundations of throne and altar. Today they call the heads of government by their first names and are subject, in every artist impulse, to the judgment of their illiterate principals.” 105
    • 106 expertise is now called “arrogance”
• 107: “Light art…is the bad social conscience of serious art.”
• 108: “irreconcilable elements of culture, art, and amusement” are now subjected to universal of culture industry
• Leisure As Work Again
  • “Entertainment is the prolongation of work under late capitalism. It is sought by those who want to escape the mechanized labor process so that they can cope with it again. At the same time, however, mechanization has such power over leisure and its happiness, determines so thoroughly the fabrication of entertainment commodities, that the off-duty worker can experience nothing but after-images of the work process itself. The ostensible content is merely a faded foreground: what is imprinted is the automated sequence of standardized tasks. The only escape from the work process in factory and office is through adaptation to it in leisure time. This is the incurable sickness of all entertainment.” 109
  • B/c it requires “no effort,” you just get bored
  • Instead of being active, you just receive “Signals” that tell you what’s going on (not true coherence, but signals that make you think there’s coherence: there’s no logical connex cuz that would lead to thinking)
    • sometimes the schema get too good, too standardized, which almost looks like logic: hence the intervals of nonsense, buffoonery, the moments where the plot doesn’t go where you think it will: “subvert meaning” is the message of cultural products
• 111: “The culture industry endlessly cheats its consumers out of what it endlessly promises. The promissory note of pleasure issued by plot and packaging is indefinitely prolonged.”
  • you may get near sex, but you won’t get it: “things will never go so far:” this is like masochism, he says
• 113: “never releasing its grip on the consumer” “They must make do with what is offered”
• You Can’t Escape
  • “The flight from the everyday world, promised by the culture industry in all its branches, is much like the abduction of the daughter in the American cartoon: the father is holding the ladder in the dark.”
  • So this is the dark interpretation of leisure…
• 115: “To be entertained means to be in agreement… Amusement always means putting things out of mind, forgetting suffering, even when it is on display.” It makes you forget what the REAL social totality is
  • 121: and the sufferers “is a marked man…an outsider” and is guilty
  • and the “heart of gold” is suffering that you think is “so wonderful, so healthy” so that “tragedy…becomes a blessing” 122.
    • the terrible, the suffering becomes a mere way to relieve insipidity of cultural content and make the people believe they’re really into high culture now (“veneer of culture” for “prestige”)
    • and now tragedy is only aimed at the non-conformist (before it was against fate, about your hopeless resistance: now it’s about how resistance itself damns you), so tragedy is a punishment given by bourgeois for non-conformity
      • this is paradoxical: old tragedy, you have a fate and you rebel despite the fact you’re damned anyway; new tragedy, you rebel so you are damned)
    • like a totalitarian state, “registers and plans” the suffering of its people not abolishing it; and it is “truly a house of moral correction” so that “civilization” is only “compulsively rehearsed behavior” 1234
• Chance Disappears
  • B/c the individual doesn’t really matter: “the impression that the web…still leaves room for spontaneous, immediate relationships between human beings”
• Individual Disappears
  • into pseudoindividuality
  • “abolition of the individual” which is shown by “the liquidation of tragedy” 124 (into punishment for non-conformity)
  • individuality is on show, “serially produced like the Yale locks which differ by fractions of a millimeter” 125
• 127: “changing the commodity character of art itself. That character is not new: it is the fact that art now dutifully admits to being a commodity abjures its autonomy, and proudly takes its place among consumer goods.”
  • Art as separate sphere: only like that “in its bourgeois form” b/c “its freedom, as negation of the social utility which is establishing itself through the market, is essentially conditioned by the commodity economy.”
    • they might follow their own laws, thereby negating commodities, but they are still commodities
    • “unity of the opposites of market and autonomy in bourgeois art,” which is always in bourgeois art, seen by example of Beethoven who used his own supposedly rebellious art which repudiated the market to SELL his works, throwing away a book from Walter Scott saying that “The fellow writes for money”
    • the way to deal with it is not to conceal this contradiction, but to “assimilat[e] it into the consciousness of their own production” 127
    • instead of Kantian “purposiveness without purpose,” you have “purposelessness for the purposes dictated by the market” 128
      • it “defrauds…in advance” b/c it promises liberation from the workaday world but already was determined by everything else (for example in its emphasis on its own production: technology, reproduction of images; and also in its content which is like mass-production; and because the culture industry produces a consumer, just like production produces commodities)
• Fascism and Bourgeois Similarity Via Language
  • Both devolve into “arbitrary, manipulative designations” where “Signification…is consummated in the sign” b/c of “universal repetition of the term” makes words like advertisements, like “increased sales” 134-5
  • “the layer of experience which made words human like those who spoke them has been stripped away” so expressions are like “trademarks” only 128
    • with “turns of phrase” like those used in fascism’s aestheticized politics, “last bond between sedimented experience and language…is severed”
    • language now becoming a culture industry 135 w/formulae
• Even your conception of yourself is reified: as a mixture of “vulgarized depth psychology” and “dazzling white teeth and freedom from body odor and emotions”
  • the way a girl dates now is just a reproduction of the culture industry’s images
  • You are turned into an “apparatus meeting the requirements of success:” a machine
  • advertising ends up in making: “the compulsive imitation by consumers of cultural commodities which, at the same time, they recognize as false.” 136
    • purpose has “consumed the realm of the purposeless” through entertainment and relaxation
• Culture industry replacing use value with exchange value: culture is done not b/c you enjoy it (use includes pleasure for all the P E), but instead to gain prestige (that is you exchange it for something else) 128
  • Culture industry really just produces consumers.

Schulte-Sasse’s summary in his intro to Burger

• his view of art infl by “his view of the development of liberal high capitalism…exchange values came to dominate society; all qualities had been reduced to quantitative equivalences.
  • NOT as a history of the 19th century but actually as the entirety of human development: “inheres in man’s drive for self-preservation and in the ambivalent character of reason resulting from and accompanying this drive.” xvi
• Reason
  • “the difficulties of the concepts of reason” in that “signifies on the one hand the general interest of man and ‘the idea of a free, human, social life’ and is on the other had ‘the court of judgment of calculation,’ ‘ratio of capital,’ instrument of domination, and means for the most rational exploitation of nature.”
  • instrumental reason: “which adjusts the worlds for the ends of self-preservation and recognizes no function other than the preparation of the object from mere sensory material in order to make it that material of subjugation” (qtd from Adorno and Hork)
    • that is instrumental reason translates objects according to their being used, manipulated, applied to ends
  • So, reason starts off sounding okay because it preserves your life and the life of others, but then is “necessarily ossified” and “takes two forms: as technological reason developed for purposes of dominating nature and as social reason directed at the means of domination aimed at exercising social power” xvii
• Nature
  • “the stripping of external nature of all qualities…to use nature in technical and manipulative ways, instrumental reason comes to regard nature as the ‘other,’ as controllable, and subjects it to a conceptual scheme in which relations are reduced to being purely quantitative.” xvii
  • quote from A and H: “Enlightenment recognizes as being and occurrence only what can be apprehended in unity: its ideal is the system from which all and everything follows.”
    • is this why there’s a danger in all that ordering done by modernism? b/c it replicates instrumental reason?
• Self-Preservation Dominates
  • Comes to dominate all “spheres of human life, including the organization of society (in which the relationships of individuals to each other are determined by the power mentality) and the quantification of inner nature for the purposes of commercially exploiting standardized needs.”
  • During bourgeois high liberal capitalism, “this exploitation became the universal principle of a society:” in A and H’s words, “Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence.”
• “Pessimistic” in relation to subjecthood
  • “Since the general subject ‘humankind’ has in the course of history subjugated itself to the universal rule of quantifying thought and behavior, the subjects are already caught in the vicious circle of quantified domination.” xvii
  • Negative Dialectics: “overall condition [of person] moves towards apersonality, in the sense of anonymity,” as the person is replaced by the universal subject
    • you are the “overall condition of living human beings”
    • and this universal subject is the “functional context preceding” you, so you can’t get out of it
    • capitalism thus has “increasingly integrative trend,” a centrifugal force, a black hold absorbing the individual
• How does it absorb the individual? The culture industry
  • Back to Dialectic of Enlightenment
  • “complete quantification” in their words “of the public
  • A and H: “Under monopoly all mass culture is identical, and the lines of its artificial framework begin to show through.”
  • Nonetheless, it’s more successful: “the unity of the system grows ever stronger…circle of manipulation and retroactive need.”
• Art, for Adorno
  • “endangered medium that resists the general tendency, but lacks any social influence derived from a communicable content” xviii
  • does believe Hegel’s “art must be related to social totality” just like Lukacs does
  • but in a diff way: art and reality relationship: “not longer as one of discerning critique, but one of absolute negation”
    • pure art “Cleansed of all practical interests, in which…the individual can negate the ossified linguistic and mental cliches that are the results of instrumental rationality.”
  • Aesthetic Theory: art has “medium of hibernation in bad times,” in Jochen Schulte-Sasse’s words
    • “The asocial in art is the definite negation of the definite society…. What art contributes to society is not communication with society, rather something very indirect, resistance.”
    • not b/c he doesn’t want revolution, but b/c he sees no social agent that will do it (ie 1930s: working class will not longer secure revolution)
    • modernism beginning around mid 19th c; modernism “mistrust for the word as bearer of meaning…directs its entire energy toward the negation of ossified language and thought forms.”
      • modernism: “an artistic strategy of protest against society” xix
• Adorno on Surrealism (which he sees as kind of modernism: “The subject, freely controlling himself, free of all concern for the empirical world and having become absolute, exposes himself as lacking animation, virtually as dead in the face of the total reification which throws him back entirely on himself and his protest. The dialectical images of surrealism are those of a dialectic of subjective freedom in a state of objective unfreedom” this is what you get by your “consciousness of denial”

Huyssen on Adorno and Culture Industry

• Adorno: “theorist par excellence of the Great Divide” ix, the “insurmountable barrier” between high modernist art and popular culture, during 1930s
  • saying similar stuff as Clement Greenburg
  • why they had good reason to at this historical moment: b/c protecting art from “fascist mass spectacles, socialist realism” as well as “degraded mass culture” which were “totalitarian” in 30s
    • where “avantgarde’s dream of leading art back into life and creating a revolutionary art had become a nightmarish reality in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union.” x
    • for example his critique of Wagner b/c of the “fascist Wagner cult” sets stage for his later theories
  • 42: his framework for critiquing American mass culture already in place before he arrived in California
  • “Culture industry is the result of a fundamental transformation in the ‘superstructure’ of capitalist societies.”
    • “transformation completed with the stage of monopoly capitalism”
    • this is diff from the limited autonomy Marx gave art b/c he was working w/in 19th c liberal capitalism (believed in free market, cultural autonomy)
    • see, now the 20thc is more about unity: cultural “subsumed” under economic now 21
      • “by reorganizing the body of cultural meanings and symbolic significations to fit the logic of the commodity”
      • helped by technological advances in reproduction and dissemination: standardization
      • “swallow up” and “homogenized” so that culture acts “as an instrument of social control” 21
• Older popular cultures, local forms or discourses all homogenized
• “abolishing the dialectic of affirmation and critique which characterized high bourgeois art of the liberal age” 31
  • “Cultural entities typical of the style of the culture industry are not longer also commodities, they are commodities through and through”
• How they promise enjoyment
  • “The more inexorably the principle of exchange value cheats human beings out of use values, the more successfully it manages to disguise itself as the ultimate object of enjoyment” 21
  • “Commodity… has become image, representation, spectacle. Use value has been replaced by packaging and advertising. The commodification of art ends up in the aestheticization of the commodity.”
• “gravitational pull of the culture industry leaves no meaning, no signification unscathed.” 22
  • but at Huyssen remarks, the culture object still has to be the site of contested meanings so that it can play them out and solve them and “homogenize” them so you still have “the field of contest and struggle”
    • and Huyssen wonders, “never asks himself whether perhaps there are also limits to the reification of the cultural commodities themselves” which will become clear if you investigate these commodities’ “signifying strategies”
• Adorno actually SAW modernism as a “reaction formation to mass culture and commodification” (in his writings about Wagner and Schoenberg): Adorno said it is “symptom and a result of cultural crisis rather than as a new ‘solution’ in its own right” and b/c “the commodity is the prior form in terms of which alone modernism can be structurally grasped”
• Adorno and Realism
  • Adorno’s canon excludes “realism, naturalism, reportage literature and political art”
  • “All forms of representation fall under the verdict of reification which had been pronounced over the culture industry” that is, as “duplication and advertising”
  • Representational art “dismissed as a reified reproduction of a false reality”
• Whereas Lukacs looks at working class, Adorno looks at culture.
• Adorno: “autonomy was a relational phenomenon, not a mechanism to justify formalist amnesia” 57 b/c modernism “s “reaction formation which operated on the level of form and artistic material” 57

Felski’s summary

• Influences: Marx, Weber, Nietzsche
• “self-destructive logic of Western society…fundamental irrationality of modern reason”
• modernity’s image: Odysseus and the sirens: repression: Odysseus (in Douglas Keller’s words) “overcomes primitive natural forces (immersion in pleasure, sexuality, animal aggressivity and violence, brutal tribalism, and so forth) and asserts his domination over the mythic/natural world. In his use of cunning and deceit, his drive toward self-preservation and refusal to accept mythic fate, his entrepreneurial control over his men and his patriarchal control over his wife and other women,” he is the bourgeois man “who reveals the connections between self-preservation, the domination of nature and the entanglement of myth and enlightenment” qtd 5
  • woman, the female, the siren associated with pleasure, hedonism, regressive pleasure
• A and H: “myth is already enlightenment; and enlightenment reverts to mythology”
• Reason is “transformed into its opposite” “through its blind exercise of mastery over nature” via instrumental reason and commodity fetishism, where modern culture becomes barbarous, irrational
• Culture Industry
  • “its mythical dreamworlds, seductive commodities, and promises of endless fun are one of the key means through which individuals are reconciled to the prospect of a totally administered society ruled by a logic of profit and standardization”
    • ME: this is where leisure comes in (also me: maybe leisure spaces are the new domestic space, that is, the new sphere for avoiding the demands of work even while you’re immersed in commodities)
    • however, for your complicity in the system, you only get pseudo-happiness
    • return of the repressed: “feminine” side comes back, the aesthetic and the libidinal come back, via “the engulfing, regressive lures of modern mass culture and consumer society” (me: ie anti enlightenment used as a carrot by the stick of enlightenment)
  • hence the masculine and the feminine sides of modernity aren’t coincidental but instead part of the same process where you achieve domination
• The arguments against A and H
  • too complete, too pessimistic
    • “denies the ambiguous and multidimensional aspects of modern development and allows little room for the possibility of contradiction, resistance, or emancipatory change within what is presented as a closed system” 6
    • where it pretends to care about culture but then culture turns out to be a the subsidiary of “pre-existing economic, technological, and administrative logics”
  • forgets that symbolic forms can be “productive, interactive, and intersubjective” as well as endlessly diverse (ie “polysemic richness”)
    • hence they actually REPRODUCE the enlightenment logic of mastery in their analysis. (Whoa, Felski! awesome!) 6 b/c they create “representation of modern individuals as passive, homogeneous, and alienated mass”
      • passive…hmm…maybe I should argue that passivity is what becomes more interesting in the inward turn (mediumship?)
    • of course Felski you are elevating the symbolic form to the status of an agent