GENERAL NOTES

Victorian

Realism

• David Lodge in The Modes of Modern Writing: “the representation of experience in a manner which approximates closely to descriptions of similar experience in nonliterary texts of the same culture.”
  • Quoted Eysteinnson 195, who says that we could translated Lodge to say that literary discourse is “constantly nourished” by language of “dominant modes of cultural representation”
  • ie, literary language approaches that of nonliterary language
    • Thus, culture is “unified sphere,” says Ey, where meaning is shared even if power isn’t
  • Approximates Habermas’ “communicative rationality,” shows realism as part of unified “public sphere”
• “First, a period term for the dominant trend of nineteenth century literature, especially narrative fiction; second, a certain type of mimetic (and usually narrative) processing of objective reality, and third, a fictional or literary embodiment of the communicative language acknowledged by the ‘public sphere’” (Eysteinnson 192)
  • Eysteinnson’s careful nuancing: although realism isn’t strictly relegated just to 19th century, our ideas about realism predominately reflect 19th century version of it
  • What does he mean by the latter trait? Shared reality must be communicated through shared language
• Rene Wellek: “the objective representation of contemporary social reality” (Concepts of Criticism 240)
  • I don’t agree with his later assertion that realism “rejects the fantastic, the fairy-tale-like, the allegorical and the symbolic, the highly stylized, the purely abstract and decorative”
    • What about the Brontes? Eliot?
    • Eysteinnson would counter me here (196), saying that sometimes the shared language aspect is so powerful that realism doesn’t necessarily have to hold true to the mimetic aspect we normally expect it to have: just the common language secures our belief in the novel’s reality, despite however fantastic it might sound.
• Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel
  • Growth of realism intimately tied up with the Enlightenment and with philosophical realism
  • Not simply a reaction to classicism or romanticism or idealism
• Verisimilitude
  • “correspondence between the literary work and the reality which it imitates” (Watt)
  • Balance of particularity (rather than universal) and the historical background (Watt)
    • “closeness to the texture of daily existence,” yet “individual life in its larger perspective as a historical process” (Watt)
• Barthes’ “Reality effect” (“The Reality Effect”)
  • Redundant richness of detail to create illusion of total social whole
  • But not too much! Says Zola almost destroyed the reality effect because it “initiat[ed] the modernist tearing of details out of the unified fabric of the realist text”
• Social whole is presented as “common ground” for reader and author
  • “World of shared reality” (Stern 150)
  • Reader shares the world presented in the novel
• Formalized relations
  • J P Stern On Realism (1973)
  • Realism is at its best “where human relationships are formalized and protected against the caprice of solipsism, in the social institutions of a given age” (91)
  • Eysteinnson gives a good list (194): family, politics, bureaucracy, schools, churches, newspapers, judiciary
• Holistic character (Watt’s phrase again)
• Use of types (Lukacs)
• Requires suspension of disbelief (readers must believe in the reality of the story)
• Emphasis on current social and cultural events and issues
  • Seen as more pragmatic and about clear communication
  • Not so much about art pour l’art
  • Seems more the art of the people: “democratizes the language of literature” (Eysteinnson 186)
  • Literary language now about its pragmatic purpose of communication (having a point, a lesson)
  • Hence, modernists revolt
    • They therefore ally realism with tradition, esp because of realism’ claim to show all of society and share it with everyone
• Peter Demetz, translated by Eysteinnson (194)
  • Traits of realism:
  • “the possibility of an inclusive narrative [Eysteinnson explains: “creation and ‘encircling’ of a sphere of reality that is thus under unified ‘control’”]
  • “the question of the typical, which replaces the heroic,
  • “the development of man, of the image of man, in the determining network of material forces [Ey: “secularized and systematized bourgeois society”], and
  • “the problem of a mode of representation in which the ‘I’ serves a world which preserves its validity independent of creative sensibility.”
• Jameson, “Beyond the Cave”
  • Realism is commodity produced by bourgeois culture
    • Realism and its counterpart (“that desacralized, post-magical, common-sense, everyday, secular reality” that realism depicts) both “intimately linked to the bourgeoisie as its product and its commodity”
  • Capitalist modernization and concomitant philosophical systems (Enlightenment project) tied to destruction of traditional hierarchies
  • Realism develops as the “mapping” agent of this new world
• Eysteinnson, The Concept of Modernism
  • Even when realists try to critique the world they depict, it nonetheless “reproduces the narrative structures and the symbolic order” of the secular modern world
  • Ouch, Astradur!

Decadence

• Sense of apocalypse amid hustle of modernity
  • Millenarianism (Christian eschatology)
  • We like progress, but the effects of progress are bad
• Sense of decay, fatigue, disease
  • Sense of races decaying depends on Darwin: to see a race of people as somhow alive, as part of narrative
    • Constructs become organisms
• Placing self in historical progressin/periodizing
• Disappearance of humanist constructs (Darwin, atheism)
• Turning away from existing moral codes: amoral
  • Social forms, community values giving way to individualism (cf Calinescu 170, Bourget quote)
• Decadent culture and decadent style not always the same
  • Decadent culture: autonomy
  • Decadent style: classicism, intertextuality
  • Decadent culture: decay
  • Decadent style: neologism, rebirth of language

Aestheticism

• Rejects means-ends rationality for communication that is demanded by bourgeois world
• Talia Schaffer on male aesthetes: they are socially controversial because they take on women’s fields of expertise: “home decoration, fashion design, cookery, and flowers,” thus showing these areas to be important, intellectual, and skilled: female duties are now art (qtd Rosner 27)
• Lack of common sense and practicality (head in the clouds)
• Rejection of normal capitalist practice, such as procreation
• Emphasis on interpersonal and subjectivity (internal state)
• Ethereal, unearthly, immaterial
• Not about content, but about form and experience
• Strange/perverse uses fo the body
• Flamboyance in public (performance invades public sphere)

Victorian Stuff

• I see Victorian philosophy and social structures as partaking of capitalist production strucutres because of the use of reproduction as the basis for good scholarship (science: experiments must be reproducible) and also a very Victorian habit of projecting Enlightenment standards of science onto humans (such as Victorian class manners that locate you on a map of people, making you an interchangeable part, a mere example).
  • Hence, like a factory
  • Economy not only determines life when the demands of moneyed interests determine the structure, but also echo it epistemologically

Modernism

Some Philosophers

• Kant
  • Critique of Pure Reason (1781): the first critique
    • Rejects empiricism (Hume)
      • Hume said that ideas are only based in sensory experience
      • Kant wants a priori concepts: do not rely on experience (his examples: physics, geometry)
  • His “Copernican revolution” showed that humans are now placed at the center of knowledge production
    • You can’t really know anything outside of the knower; you only have your mind: epistemologist
      • Give up trying to understand things-in-themselves; you never will
      • Instead of trying to reach outside realm of human knowledge, understand more about the limits of that knowledge (understand understanding)
    • This is where Copernican revolution is: knowledge doesn’t conform to objects, but instead you must take account of the observer’s mind and position
    • Transcendental idealism (his position): appearances of things are “mere representations” not about things-in-themselves
      • Whereas Berkeley’s idealism had said things-in-themselves don’t exist
      • Whereas “transcendental realism” assumes that space and time are truly categories that apply to things-in-themselves
    • Pure reason can’t really get to know what it says it can (esp. positing a divine being, freedom, immortality) (goes too far, steps outside its boundaries)
      • If you try to prove their existence, you use categories which turn out to be dependent on human knowledge
  • Critique of Practical Reason (1788) the second critique
    • About ethics/morals
    • You should not base your ethics on meeting your desires (that is “practical reason”)
    • You should base it on pure practical reason
    • Categorical imperative: “the ultimate commandment of reason…absolute and unconditional,” justified “as an end in itself” (see Wikipedia) you should determine your behavior according to the desirability of it being universal law
    • Supposed to transcend individual conditions (subjective conditions)
  • Critique of Judgment (1790): the third critique
    • Sets up modern aesthetics
    • Continues position that space and time aren’t actually objects but instead concepts (ie, way the mind organizes world)
    • Critiques two forms of causality
      • Causal determinism: empiricism will reveal all
      • Spontaneous causality: the type of individual morality people normally follow
    • Judgment needs both sides: needs Understanding (ie, empiricism, determinism) and Reason (freedom)
    • Four Aesthetic Judgments, where Good is opposite of Agreeable and the other two are in the middle (and could point to actual free will, or, as Arendt argued, to a new politics)
      • Agreeable: Based on positive sensory input; subjective
      • Beautiful: “form of finality,” made w/purpose but not a practical one; “subjective universal” (ie, it’s subjective, but you think people ought to agree w/it)
      • Sublime: beyond comprehension, thus invokes fear but can’t truly be threatening; “subjective universal”
      • Good: Based on ethical, objective criteria (conforms to moral); absolute
    • Genius creates beautiful and sublime
    • Here is where the Dialectic of Enlightenment comes in:
      • There “will never be a Newton for a blade of grass.”
      • You must believe that the organic world exists for man: nature exists for its relationship to man
      • Reason, particularly practical reason (morality), separates man from rest of nature
      • Culture expresses this freedom from the rest of nature
    • Critique of it: Bourdieu says that Kant’s ideas about aesthetics are limited by his position as a scholar with leisure
  • “What is Enlightenment?” (1784)
    • freedom of thought: independent judgment free from authority; using your reason without anyone else’s guidance
    • “Dare to know,” he says: it’s about courage, not about innate intelligence or amount of education
    • Precondition: enlightened leaders who won’t try to interfere w/subject’s thoughts
  • “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose” (1784)
    • Enlightened despotism okay b/c freedom is only about thinking freely
  • People are ends, not means; his ideas prompted German Idealism (although Hegel thought Kant was ahistorical, needed context, esp for morality)
  • He reconciled the empiricists (knowledge through experience) and rationalists (Cartesian belief that all knowledge comes through reason): we need both
  • Kant’s noumenon (pl. noumena): the thing-in-itself (Ding an sich)
    • Noumenon: the object of inquiry, but outside of human mind (the table when you’re not there)
      • Separated from phenomena (what we observe through senses).
      • Phenomena (raw data) are understood (organized) in human understanding through innate concepts (a priori)
      • So we really are talking about phenomena when we think we understand noumena
  • Transcending means to understand phenomena through these concepts (never getting to know thing-in-itself, noumena, but only understanding correlations between real and observed)
  • Definitely against Bergsonian intuition
  • Against Berkeley
    • Whereas Kant is pretty sure about existence of noumena, Berkeley says you can’t even think that matter exists because it is merely a product of mind; B. calls this idea “immaterialism”
  • Schopenhauer against Kant
    • Kant ruined the word “noumena,” which before Kant had meant “the object in thought,” not “object-in-itself”
  • Nietzsche against Kant
    • Because you can’t know anything about noumenon (it’s indeterminate), you can’t possibly say anything about it, in particular is causal relations.
    • In Kant’s world, the noumenon couldn’t react or affect anything, so it isn’t really relevant.
    • Beyond Good and Evil: Kant’s ideas create “soul-atomism,”
      • “the soul as something indestructible, eternal, indivisible, as a monad”
      • So you must believe in judgments even if they are false “for the preservation of creatures like ourselves.”
      • And indeed, the false has its own consolation: “It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable; it is precisely thereby that it attracts the more subtle minds.”
  • Transcendental idealism: we only know things through our mind, not as they actually are in and of themselves
• Hegel
  • Phenomenology of Spirit 1807, a bildungsroman of the development of Spirit (consciousness), an explanation of Hegel’s method
  • Story of the relationship between the mind and its objects of thought reveals a dynamic picture of consciousness becoming self-conscious
    • What seemed like fixed, stable entities all of the sudden collapse into a dynamic relationship of the mind’s action: “pure looking at,” in Hegel’s terms
    • Philosophy needs to pay attention to consciousness
      • Phenomenology: paying attention to mind’s processes, rather than epistemology, which assumes that you get to knowledge once you get the mind
    • Upon reflection, the mind becomes more and more complex and structured, integrated
    • Judge consciousness by the previous stages of consciousness, not by any circular, tautological belief that you can set criteria whereby you can validate/approve of a certain judgment
      • Criteria are based on consciousness itself
  • Kojeve: it is a “Platonic dialogue” between systems of history
  • Dialectics: preservation and changing of a system of oppositions into something higher
  • History moves dialectically, through the clashing of opposites
    • Cf Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, where Napoleon represented the synthesis between the conflicting monarchy and republicans
  • Reason also comes to fruition through dialectics: man’s clash with nature leads him to see himself in nature: through labor, you make nature home, and you see man inside nature
  • Movement of consciousness
    • Experiences thought as conflict and misunderstanding, constant revisions
  • Terms
    • Thesis, antithesis, and synthesis are really Kant’s terms, not Hegel’s
    • Hegel uses two different sets of words
      • Abstract-negative-concrete (first idea is too abstract, deserves to be contradicted, leading to better knowledge)
      • Immediate-mediate-concrete (for example, Pure Being, then the Encyclopedia building up all, leading to Absolute Spirit)
  • Dialectic
    • Before Hegel
      • Originally a term in Greek philosophy for the system of argumentation to lead to better knowledge (ie, dialogues)
      • Medieval: seen as one of the liberal arts: resolve disagreement
    • Example from his Logic of Science
      • Pure Being
      • Nothingness (antithesis is that you see that pure being is nothing)
      • Becoming (recognition that being is also a form of becoming nothing)
    • Its End
      • Aufhebung: sublation/ovecoming: you reserve the interesting points of positions even while finding a better idea to deal with the topic
      • You realize that there were contradictions in your thought patterns all along
  • Dialectic as History
    • History also works in the same way that consciousness does
    • Slavery = alienation
    • Constitutional state = freedom, reason
  • Contradiction
    • Don’t understand contradiction as the logical negative of the proposition
    • Instead, real-life contradictions are chosen from/arise out of subjective experience
    • Thus, the contradictions turn out to be rhetorical, not logical, thus showing you the workings of your own mind
    • Contradictions are thus inherent in everything, not somehow “outside” of them” (he gets this from Heraclitus)
  • Measure
    • The movement from quality to quantity
    • As soon as you have too little or too much of something, that quantity becomes the quality
    • Its characteristics are subsumed under number, which then seems like a quality unto itself
    • Examples: temperature of water changing, eventually leading to steam or ice; how many grains of what does it take to make a pile?
  • Negation
    • Identity only occurs within a relationship with its opposite
    • With negation of negation, “Something becomes an other,” it incorporates the other into itself, like a hall of mirrors
    • It is “self-related,” not just pure itself
    • Being goes into nothing, but will come into something else
• Marx
  • Even though he considers himself a student of Hegel, says Hegel is back on his head and will put him back onto his feet
    • For Hegel, the world is just a projection of Idea
      • For Hegel, “real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea.” (Capital)
    • But for Marx, idea is a product of the world
      • The Ideal is only the material world reflected in the human mind
  • Applied dialectics to history: historical materialism
    • Contradiction drives historical development
    • Every social state must get destroyed: will produce contradictions that will destroy it, lead to new society
• Labor theory of value
  • History
    • Late 17th century
      • William Petty, Treatise of Taxes (1662) (said labor is greatest source of wealth for a kingdom; before political economy was really codified; British MP; surveyor, Royal Academician, entrepreneur, inventor; credited with first applying laissez-faire to the government’s involvement w/economics b/c it’s like too much medicine killing patient, so no monopolies and not too much interference w/international trade; supported division of labor; said everyone should work, even if it’s silly work, rather than have unemployment; “political arithmetic” = purely quantitative work, infl. by rationality of Bacon and Hobbes; well-read in 1690s; helped gov to codify taxes; “for Money is but the Fat of the Body-Politic” so shouldn’t have too much of it; divided wealth into Land and Labor; said interest should be at the rate of what land would have produced for you if you’d bought land with the money instead; influenced Cantillon, Smith, Marx, Keynes)
      • John Locke, Second Treatise on Government (1689) (saying civil government was created to protect property, by which he means “life, liberty, and estate,” which his only about private interests (not communal ones), people gain material items by mixing their labor in with the “common store of goods” as long as you don’t take the best or more than others and don’t take more than you could use before it spoils—except when money is involved, in which case spoilage is taken out of the question; believes that an economic system could exist before government; seen by Marxists as founder of “bourgeois capitalism”
      • A note on the word bourgeois: roots in the medieval towns (artisans and tradesmen who were rich but not politically powerful), which gradually entered into power as nation-states are developed. Until 19th century, refers to traders/merchants and means middle class; when nobility lose power, the word refers to the upper class. In industrialized countries, gradually takes place of aristocratic class. For Marx, the bourgeois are the ones who either have capital assets (whether invested or in production) or who are involved in the trade thereof or are in service, so that it owns bulk of capital and means of production, which allows them to exploit working class, and have political and judiciary power (control over armies, police, etc). Reprehensible because sale of goods produced by working class is controlled by them, who seize products of surplus labor (ie, the stuff produced over and above cost of keeping everyone alive and keeping production going), called surplus or profit
  • Basics: an object is worth the “toil” expended to acquire it: the annoyance, the trouble, not a pleasure to labor
    • When you just say “value,” this is what you mean: labor inside object
    • It is intrinsic, before and beyond exchange value
    • Also known as “absolute value” or “real cost” (in Smith, Ricardo, etc)
    • Magnitude: how much labor in it, depending on time and intensity (how long did you work? how hard did you work?)
  • Value in use: utility
    • Yet look how water which is most useful isn’t that expensive, while a diamond which hasn’t any use at all is terribly expensive: paradox
  • Value in exchange: relative power of purchasing: its price
    • If you don’t mean to use the object yourself
    • Truly equal to labor: how much labor can you purchase?
  • Of course, the means of labor also make part of value
    • Labor + means of labor (machinery, air/light, materials) = total value
    • Means of labor called “constant capital” and also includes depreciation
    • But then you must add wages, called “variable capital” because it’s not alway the same (ie, they might work harder)
      • Any labor above the cost of buying the labor (ie, wages) is surplus
    • Labor calculated at average skill and speed of worker (avg productivity)
  • Why use labor?
    • Marx: to have exchange, there must be some common factor, and the common factor can only be labor
  • Difference between labor value and price: “the transformation problem”
    • Marx: follows Smith in admitting power of supply and demand as the reason for deviation from “natural price” of cost of production (labor)
• Joseph Dietzgen
  • Socialist philosopher
  • Met Marx in 1848 Rev in Germany (he was 20 at the time); and later Marx and Eleanor visited him
    • He’s praised in Capital
  • Influenced by Feuerbach, he independently developed dialectical materialism
  • He influenced Lenin and Bolshevik Rev
  • A tanner who visited US and Russia (eventually moved to Chicago)
  • Published 1870s-80s
  • Tried to reconcile communists and anarchists

Janet’s Introduction

• Approached via an understanding of modernity: a product of modernity and a response to modernity
• When?
  • Explosion of trade routes after the Middle Ages: 1650
  • Growth of political self-determination, w/ 18th century revolutions (France, America, Haiti): 18th c
  • Industrial Revolution and growth of modern capitalism: gaining stride during last half of 18th century
• What?
  • Shifts of political/religious government to self-determination: grwoth of republicanism and democracy
  • Sped up by Kant’s view of enlightenment bringing progress
  • Shift from feudalism to capitalism (closed, self-sustaining communities to markets and surplus)
  • Technological revolutions
  • Uneven economic development
  • Environmental devastation
  • Need for colonies/empire
• Intellectual developments
  • Logical positivism
    • One method for all fields of investigations
    • Natural sciences as the model methodology
    • Search for general explanatory laws
  • Scientific empiricism
  • Growth of the humanities and social sciences, early 19th century
    • Studying man
    • Hermeneutics (interpretation) instead of explanation (proof, positivism)
    • See this change in action in race dialectics
  • Taxonomical systems
    • Dewey decimal system
    • Museums (cataloging, not just collecting)
    • Census/population studies
    • Criminology (fingerprinting)
    • Phrenology (mixing up quantity w/quality)
• Race Theory
  • Gobineau, late 18th c: zoological understanding
  • Monogenesis v polygenesis (did we all come from Africa?)
  • Linnaeus: his taxonomy quite in line with scientific racism (called father of scientific racism)
    • Five-fold scheme: five different races all w/certain temperament: Native Americans are combative, Asians avaricious, Africans negligent, Europeans clever….ugh
    • One site of origin, but plus migratory patterns
  • Gottfried von Herder
    • Did say that we shouldn’t value one group over another (each had its own standards of perfection)
    • Better than the predecessors, but not so awesome: still classified
• End of Progress
  • By end of 19th century, progress of modernity seen as a mixed bag
  • Critics: Marx (systematized exploitation), Freud (our morality causes huge problems), Nietzsche (we are all followers), Du Bois? (Enlightenment not distributed fairly), Gandhi (civilization is a disease), Simmel (cities have their taxes), Weber (iron cage of commodities; disenchantment of modern culture with anti-mystery of empiricism)
• Metropoles
  • Immigration and movements makes cultural exchange possible
  • Lack of rootedness allows experimentation (freedom)
• Antinormativity: no center from which to judge, subversion of traditioanl ethics
• Themes: individuality, Nietzsche, repudiation of realism, new forms; anti-bourgeois; form over content; deferment (less certainty), dismissal of truth

Themes

• What is the chaos? Crises in capitalism, communist revolutions, rise of fascism, world war, changes in science and technology, imperialism
• Purposes of Focus on Consciousness
  • “as a reaction against realism, as an expression of hyper-individuality, as the basis for a new formalism, as a strategic retreat from the shock of reality, as symptom, as aestheticism, as play” (Rosner 12)

Modern Poetry

• Heyday: 1920s; Over: by 1950s
• Variety of styles, from Hopkins’ and Yeats’ mannered rhymes to Pound’s and Eliot’s speaking rhythms to Larkins’ vernacular
• Characteristics
  • Disinheritance of past
  • Complexity
  • Irony
  • Allusiveness
  • Obscurity
  • Elitist
  • Formalist
    • Attention to structure and design
  • Mythical
    • Myths as organizing factor
  • Reflexive
    • Concerned with its own writing
  • Experimentation
  • Urbanism
• Inward turn

Key Themes

• Labor
• Order
• Autonomy
• Organic/Nonorganic Work of Art
  • Is it related to context or divorced from it?

Marxism

Introduction to Marx

• Problem with philosophy: it only interprets: we need action
  • Implied denunciation of ideas
• Hegel
  • Progressive development of consciousness as responsible for development of history
  • History as concretization of geist
  • Hegel’s dialectic
    • Gradually, the positive attributes begin to look negative
      • US having light missiles worked for awhile against USSR, but when it turned out that their heavier missiles allowed them to get man into space first, this disadvantage turned out to be an advantage
    • System of opposites, wherein synthesis of thesis and antithesis becomes new thesis (Phenomenology of Spirit)
    • Master/slave dialectic: master has the leisure, independence, and enjoyment, whereas the slave has only fear and subjection, but on a higher level, the master depends on the slave, who has “higher freedom”
  • Critique: but nothing has changed outside of your perspective
    • How could history work as a change of mind?
• Marx’s Critique of Hegel
  • This is all about consciousness, says nothing about material
  • History is not consciousness! it’s material
    • Life is essentially material, bound in stuff
    • Ideas—politics, religion, morality, philosophy—come from material conditions, in the need to reproduce them
    • Thus, dialectical materialism
      • Life itself produces ideas: consciousness is a product of your situation shows how Marx can be accused of determinism, even though he actually believes in human freedom
  • Motor of change is the revolution of social formations
    • As the system’s contradictions become more obvious, it gets closer to ending
  • Marx keeps the ideal of progress: classless labor and justice will create the perfect material society
    • Class struggle has though been the fundamental part of life because we are economic beings
    • Our perceptions of ourselves come from our conditions: we are defined by our need to provide for ourselves to survive
• Alienation
  • Because capitalist controls means of production
    • Surplus: what mark-up the middle-man puts on the goods, over and above the cost of labor: his middle-man position makes exploitation possible
  • Worker is devalued as value is placed on the plane of the object itself
    • You make something, but it is taken away from you
    • Shoppers do not understand the conditions of production
  • True values comes from labor, but because of the domination of exchange value, people too often believe that the object has intrinsic value: commodity fetishism
    • Laborer has true connections to material conditions, yet this person is not seen to contribute to history, which becomes history of capitalists (cf the Victorian mania for biographies of entrepreneurs and financiers)
    • Labor is valued less than the product: not right
• Commodities
  • Commodity: product of human labor, abstracted
  • Mystic b/c value determined by exchange value
    • Money is seen as the end of production, rather than satisfying needs
    • Production occurs for someone to profit, not to secure life
  • Enigmatic because somehow, all of the differences have been abstracted
  • Merely about quantity of labor, not its character
    • Which is why sweatshops can exist: we think about the commodity, not its production
  • We equate wildly different things in the money economy: everything has value through price, through common language of money
• Ideas are “superstructure” that make the economic base look natural, inevitable
  • Of course, they both affect each other, not just one-way
  • Still, ideology is a set of imperatives that reinforce the subjection of the laborer
• 1930s: Domination of liberal societies, dotted by pockets of fascism
  • Creation of Frankfurt School: Marcuse, Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer
  • Marxist but eclectic: they do “critical theory”
  • Consumers have a choice, but they must make that choice within the options given to them already
    • Consumption itself modeled after factory production: it’s a factory to make the so-called “individual”
  • Culture dependent on money, so limited on means of production
  • Doesn’t matter if you can say, “I’m different!”
    • That’s consciousness, but it’s not going to change material conditions, is it?
• Instrumental Reason
  • Quality turns in to quantity
  • Value comes from securing life, but the base line of survival is kind of the lowest part of man
  • Flattens difference: you just secure physical life, and you lose your specificity
  • Exchange value: equates different things; instrumental reason: equates different people