Paper
mewlady
CriticalTheory1Autosaved16.pptxFoundation: The institute for social research, university of Frankfurt, Germany
Aka
The Frankfurt school
Critical Theory
The Frankfurt School
A group of intellectuals that studied at the University of Frankfurt (Germany)
Formed the Institute for Social Research in the 1930’s & continued as an intellectual group in the post WWII era.
Critical of the so-called “land of opportunity” that is continually being praised for its ease, convenience, and progress
Science, progress, and advanced industrial capitalism are sources of domination and dehumanization
2
The Frankfurt School
Horkheimer & Adorno—modern music (and easy entertainment) impede our ability to think critically (i.e., analytically)
Marcuse—capitalists create a “culture industry” that focuses the masses on easy entertainment and consumer goods, makes us easy to control
3
Notable Members of the Frankfort School
Max Horkheimer (1895-1973)
Born in Germany to a well-to-do Jewish family
Sympathetic to the plight of the poor; married father’s secretary against father’s wishes
Director of the Frankfort School in 1930
Eclipse of Reason
Notable Members of the Frankfort School
Theodor Adorno (1903-1969)
Born in Germany to a well off Jewish family
Interested in the arts and music
Thought that music and more generally art was capable of transcending the alienated, “soulless” world ushered in my advanced industrial capitalism
Wanted to be a composer and
Concert pianist
Notable Members of the Frankfort School
Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979)
Born in Germany to a well off Jewish family
Also sympathetic to the plight of the poor
Most well known of the three theorist in the United States
Advanced a critical social philosophy that attacked the scientific enterprise as a form of bourgeois ideology
One-Dimensional Man; Eros and Civilization
Notable Members of the Frankfort School
Initially, all three of them worked together in Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt.
Nazis closed the Institute
All were Jewish and fled Nazi Germany
Their differences in ideologies would eventually separate the trio
Notable Members of the Frankfort School
Many Marxists believed that the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression were the final stages of capitalism that would lead to socialism
Instead, Fascism (in Nazy Germany and Italy) and Totalitarian Communism (e.g., Stalinism) spread throughout Europe.
Frankfurt school wants to know why.
Intellectual Influences and Core Idea
Karl Marx
A framework that builds on Marx
Like Marx, critical theorists saw in modern industrial society an oppressive, dehumanizing social order
Like Marx, their intent was not was just to create a theory to explain they way things are but to come up with one that will help “man’s emancipation from slavery”
Departs from Marx
Source of domination of humans and society differed from Marx
--Include science, technology, rationalization, the growth of consumer society
9
Remembering Marx’s Ideas
Marx: the dynamics of historical change are rooted in the opposing class interests that are themselves the product of the distribution of private property.
This uneven distribution of wealth will cause the proletariat to gain class consciousness, realize the gross inequalities caused by capitalism, and thus lead to its demise
Proletariat Revolution
Intellectual Influences and Core Idea
For the critical theorist, economic circumstances alone are incapable of creating a class consciousness of the working class.
They saw this when the stock market crashed, the economy collapsed, and workers, for the most part, did not revolt.
A turn a way from Historical Materialism
Look to culture and ideology
Essentially, critical theorists are trying to explain why the revolution that Marx predicted never occurred.
Proletariat Revolution
Assumptions of the Frankfurt School:
Ontology—reject Marx’s materialism/realism and adopt an idealist ontology (similar to Hegel and Weber)
Epistemology—focus on the way that assumptions and shared beliefs of a rationalized society based on ideas that science, progress, and efficiency are liberating work to enslave us
3. Goal—to create social theory that will help the oppressed emancipate themselves.
Core Ideas
What are the sources of oppression?
Totalitarianism of reason and rationality – forms of thought are responsible for the oppression of humanity
Trust in science as the ultimate form of knowledge; rejection of existentialism (questions about the value of life, the meaning of life) and theism (belief in a supernatural being)
Formal rationality—belief in efficiency, predictability, progress, calculability, perfectibility, reduction of risk and human error
Core Ideas
Source of distorted consciousness is in the “irrationality of rationality”
Reason has been corrupted, leaving the individual unable to negate or develop a critique of the “objective truth” which allows us to resist dominant ideologies.
The power of negative (critical) thinking has been lost.
Note: The use of “negative” thinking refers to the abilty to negate the status quo—to question it.
Weber’s Influence
Rationality
Formal rationality: rule bounded by matter-of-fact calculation
(From Weber: Efficiency, predictability, calculability, reduction of risk and human error, replacement of humans with machines; results in irrationality and encourages unethical behavior)
This is common under Fascism
Substantive rationality: provides ethical or value principles to actions
(From Weber: Means and goals are subjectively meaningful; ethical behavior is encouraged)
Types of Reason
Subjective Reason: concerned with means and ends, with the adequacy of procedures or goals more or less taken for granted and supposedly self-explanatory
No question if the goal or task is reasonable
Most efficient way to do something with no ethical or reasonable concern
Technocrats and bureaucrats
Like Weber’s zweckrational thinking
Leads to unethical and immoral behavior and to irrational consequences
Types of Reason
Objective Reason: Considers the relative value of the ends/goals of action and thus provides basis for determining what is ethical, right and just
More concerned about doing what is ‘right’ or just and as opposed to productivity and efficiency
(like Weber’s wertrational action)
Rationality
Individualistic Rationality: critical and oppositional attitude that derived freedom of action from the unrestricted liberty of thought and conscience and measured all social standards and relations by the individual’s rational self interest.
Allows for negating established social norms, beliefs, ideologies
Fosters questioning of what is (i.e., “question authority”)
18
Rationality
Technological Rationality: scientific approach to all human affairs.
Social relations as well as human relationships to nature as now understood as problems to be solved efficiently
“Individuals are stripped of their individuality, not by external compulsion but by the very rationality under which they live”
Scientific-technological progress had become the god of modern society
Science – the bastion of reason – has at the same time promoted the destruction of humanity
Positivism
Based in traditional theory and positivism, science mistook the world of appearances or “facts” for the world of essences. However, “the so-called facts ascertained by quantitative methods, which the positivists are inclined to regard as the only scientific ones, are often surface phenomena that obscure rather then disclose the underlying reality”
--Positivism—a philosophy of science in the natural and social sciences that holds that the truth can be discovered through empirical data gathered systematically and analyzed logically and mathematically. Assumes this is the only authoritative form of knowledge.
Asks what is, not whether it is ethical or moral or meaningful
Objectivity
Critical Theorists argue that the notion of a free-floating intellectual, who somehow stands above or apart from the object of his investigation, is a self-aggrandizing myth.
They maintain that the objectivity espoused by positivists is impossible – everything contains a value judgment
Loss of Objectivity
Critical theorists abandoned all pretenses to objectivity and instead sought to develop a theoretical system morally committed to the emancipation of humanity.
They rely on reason, for it alone can clear the path to the ultimate value: individual freedom.
Loss of Objectivity
Critical theorists argue that science is the foundation for advanced industrial capitalism.
At one time, capitalists and workers had some autonomy and could attain species-being.
Today, capitalism (as a rationalized system) is an economic and bureaucratic force that governs all of human life
Capitalism isn’t the only problem. Science, technology, and rationalization are sources of control or “unfreedom”
Loss of Objectivity
Manufacturers mass produce more goods than are needed to alleviate misery throughout the world
Goods are not used to alleviate misery and need, but to generate profits
Technology and mass production could make it so that we worked fewer hours and enjoyed greater freedom from toil
The Culture Industry
Instead, we work long hours buying things we don’t really need, thinking that the products will provide meaning and connections in our lives that are otherwise missing.
Why? Because the “culture industry” has created false needs
The “Culture Industry” is a system of mass production, advertisement, and marketing.
The Culture Industry
This “culture industry” encompasses all those sectors involved in the creation and distribution of mass-culture products: television, film, radio, music, magazines, newspapers, books and advertisements that sell them. Geared toward entertaining and pacifying the masses, the culture industry administers “mass deception” by churning out a never ending supply of massed-produced standardized commodities.
The Culture Industry
Adorno argues that true art has the ability to promote negative (critical) thinking because it violates the rules of its production
I
t’s not “easy listening” or “pretty,” but instead compels us to think and go against the status quo.
The Culture Industry
A. Adorno distinguishes between “high art” in the form of modernism and the “low art” that is mass produced by “the culture industry.”
High art provides meaning in life and is capable of raising us up and emancipating us by making us listen attentively and think
e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEY9lmCZbIc
Schoenberg’s use of the 12 note scale
The 12 note scale is not “rationalized”—this piece has no time signature (a rationalized system of music);
It plays the notes between what we normally consider to be notes in a very rationalized and mathematical system of music
It violates all the rules of rationalized music
The Culture Industry
Compare Schoenberg’s music to any piece of popular music (I’ve put one here from the 1940s)
Popular music is rationalized—has a time signature, a key, and adheres to standardized (i.e., rationalized) ways of producing music
Producers often have formulas for producing hits
Low art lacks meaning, is not uplifting, and blocks our integral freedom, even though it’s easy to listen to. It’s background music, easy to dance to, does not compel us to question the rationalization of life or anything else
(Glenn Miller’s Chattanooga ChooChoo)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3gsPBTmbRo
The Culture Industry
In critiquing “low” art, Adorno argues that it is mass-produced, rationalized, does not require thought to enjoy.
It’s easy listening or nice to look at
It’s pleasant and appeasing, fostering what Marcuse calls “one-dimensional” thinking that goes along with the crowd and does not question the status quo
Result for Marcuse is that we lose political consciousness and the ability to think negatively/critically (We’d rather listen to the music on our iPods than watch a presidential debate, read newspapers, etc.)
The Culture Industry
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uyOwxMysxw(Liao Changyong)
Vs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYEGaKumL_A
(Prince Poppycock)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYP4KnZJmyk
(Bugs Bunny)
The Culture Industry
Here is the “parade of progress”, the world of the “new and improved” that masks an eternal sameness.
The culture industry advertises its products with the promise of an “escape from reality but it really offers escape from the last thought of resisting that reality”
The Culture Industry
Car advertisements that pitch their mass-produced product to a mass audience with the slogan, “Engineered for those who never applaud conformity” (Saab’s 9-7 X SUV, 2005)
The music industry in which your favorite band’s anti-establishment message can be bought for a mere $17.
The Culture Industry
Yet, none of the offerings of the culture industry actually fulfills its promise. In fact, they are not designed to, and although we know this, we are unable to envision an alternative. And this, above all else, marks the power the culture industry possesses.
The Culture Industry
The Culture Industry encourages us to buy things with the idea that we will express our individualism and become fulfilled.
The standardization of goods (e.g., clothing, cars, music, houses, movies) leads us to “pseud0-individualism”—the sense that we are exercising free choice and are free when in fact we are doing exactly what we are being manipulated to do.
The Culture Industry
If we buy the right soda, we’ll have more friends:
The Culture Industry
Another false promise:
We’ll break out of a rationalized society and find freedom and true individuality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oE8swB_O3mk
Note how individuality is expressed in a large group where people are dressed very similarly. This is what Maffesoli (1988, The Time of the Tribes, Sage) calls a “consumer tribe” –People whose community and identities are based on the stuff they buy.
The Culture Industry
We’ll achieve true individualism if we just buy the right stuff:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IocCC1-jeTY
(Bob Seger)
The Culture Industry
High art, which Adorno equates with modern art because it violates rationalized rules of tonality, rhythm, color, perspective, etc., maintains its oppositional character
That oppositional character is absent in the low art of the culture industry
The Culture Industry
Picasso’s Guernica—a mural depicting the cost of war
for innocent civilians after German and Italians bombed a Basque village at the behest of Spanish Nationalists during Spanish Civil War. An anti-war symbol.
The Culture Industry
Modern art forces us to look, question, and think.
It breaks
rationalized
Rules about
Color,
Perspective
Dimension,
etc
The Culture Industry
Surrealism (Salvador Dali)—His later work breaks the rules and forces us to think
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2A7aHPgEjdo&feature=fvwrel
The Culture Industry
Artist Andy Warhol, whose
was produced in what he called
“The Factory” where most work
was done by his followers,
Developed “pop art,” which
Seems to
Satirize
Commercial
Art
The Culture Industry
The Culture Industry
Works such as this and ones above sell for millions of dollars
The Culture Industry
The Culture Industry
The Culture Industry
Principles
Marcuse was highly influenced by Freud’s psychological principles
Principles
Pleasure Principle: the individual’s instinctual drive for the immediate and painless gratification of desires.
This unconscious impulse is inimical to the development of civilization, because civilization demands cooperation between individuals in order to achieve social (as opposed to personal) aims, and cooperation entails the delay, if not denial, of self-gratification
Principles
Reality Principle: the preconditions for entering into associations with others that alone are able to secure basics needs.
Instinctual pleasures are exchanged for less satisfying, sublimated pleasures that, nevertheless make social life possible.
Domination of Instincts
For Freud, the domination of instincts is bound to the development of civilization.
“discontent of civilization”: the evolution of society is based on the redirection of instinctual energies from unrestrained, immediate pleasure to the burden of socially useful labor that refuses instinctual desires.
Domination of Instincts
Freud: “What we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery.”
The result is not only the conversion of the organism into an instrument of unpleasurable labor but also and above all, devaluations of happiness and pleasure as ends in themselves, the subordination of happiness and gratification to social productivity without which there is no progress in civilization
Instincts and a Freer Society
While Freud thought that repression was an inescapable part of civilization, Marcuse thought otherwise…
The real mark of progress is measured by the extent to which the historically conditioned capacity to satisfy human needs in used to advance individual happiness or to meet technological demands for productivity.
Thus, minimizing the instinctual repression of individual and societal needs has the potential to lead to a freer society
Surplus Repression:
Surplus Repression--the portion of repression which is the result of specific societal conditions sustained in the specific interest of domination and that unnecessarily impedes the gratification of instinctual desires.
The pleasure principle and reality principle are intrinsically opposed, the method of social domination, usually in the form of social institutions, norms and values, determine the individual’s instincts.
The level of surplus repression can be used to gauge level of the overall repression of society.
The Paradox
Technological progress has all but eliminated, at least potentially, scarcity and want as a necessary fate of the human condition.
Consequently, advanced societies are objectively able to reduce the amount of time individuals spend on burdensome, alienated labor without compromising the ability to provide the population with a rational level of comfort. Yet, advanced societies remain needlessly competitive, antagonistic, and enslaved to continued expansion.
Free Time
Leisure is controlled and determined by the length of the working day
Too tired from the day’s labor, the individual has only enough energy to passively consume mindless “entertainment” in preparation for the next day’s work.
Free Time
If the status quo is to remain the same, free time must serve no other purpose than rest - where the mind is too tired to think about perils of their condition. For if left alone, the individual may begin to think freely and realize the potential for liberation and furthermore, may begin to challenge the legitimacy of the established social order.
Repressive Desublimation
The conflict between the Pleasure Principle and the Reality Principle produces a state of repressive sublimation.
Example: Sexuality – it is argued that people are instinctually sexual but society represses that instinct and turns that instinct into means of social control and profits.
Repressive Desublimation
Society sublimates sexuality (pleasure) and we feel guilty
In contemporary society, sexuality is more liberal
The culture industry then desublimates sexuality and sells it back to us—a form of control and profits
E.g., Pornography, sex industry, advertising
Repressive Desublimation
Sex Sells:
Water--
Repressive Desublimation
Sex Sells computers
Repressive Desublimation
Sex Sells
vegetarianism:
Repressive Desublimation
Sex Sells cars (Volvo):
Sex sells ice cream: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y99KEVTTyck&feature=player_embedded#t=3s
Repressive Desublimation
Sex is no longer for the simple pleasure of it self but for the reproduction of society
“controlled libration” and “repression itself is repressed”
Eclipse of Reason
Modern Society is a “totality” that subjects all to its dehumanizing effects; the working class and elite alike are unable to escape the decline of individuality.
This decline is most apparent in the modern form of consciousness that is unwilling and more than likely unable to imagine an alternative way of things – of life.
If a thought or idea is not directly related to productivity or business it is superfluous – irrelevant.
Eclipse of Reason
Due to the loss of individuality and spontaneous free thought people look to the advance industrial society to guide their life. “It is survival achieved by the oldest biological means of survival, namely, mimicry.”
68
Eclipse of Reason
“The idea of happiness has similarly been reduced to the banality to coincide with leading the kind of normal life.”
Eclipse of Reason
“ …the idolization of progress leads to the opposite of progress.”
“As for the idea of productivity, it must observed that economic significance today is measured in terms of usefulness with respect to the structure of power, not with respect to the needs of all.”
Eclipse of Reason
“The hypnotic spell that such counterfeit supermen as Hitler have exercised derives not so much from what they think or say or do as from their antics, which set a style of behavior for men who, stripped of their spontaneity by the industrial processing, need to be told how make friends and influence people.”
Liberation
“Industrial discipline, technological progress, and scientific enlightenment, the very economic and cultural processes that are bringing about the obliteration of individuality, promise…to usher in a new era in which individuality may remerge as an element in a less ideological and more human form of existence.”
The Culture Industry Reconsider
In advanced industrial society, like the one we live in now, culture has become synonymous with industry and hence subject to the rule of efficient production and standardization that it its hallmark.
The Culture Industry Reconsider
Individuals, themselves objects of production, are left to consume mass –produced, prepackaged ideas that instill an uncritical consensus that strengthens established authority.
“The power of the culture industry is that conformity has replaced consciousness.”
The Culture Industry Revisited
So while we are repeatedly instructed to “Just Do It”, what “it” is – is never truthfully revealed: BUY
“In so far as the culture industry arouses a feeling of well-being that the world is precisely in that order suggested by the culture industry, the substitute gratification which it prepares for human beings cheats them out of the same happiness which deceit fully projects.”
One-Dimensional Man
New Forms of Social Control
Independent thought, autonomy, and political opposition are being deprived
No one seems to notice because to go against the status quo is unthinkable
To go against the status quo could cause economic or political turmoil
The ‘vested interest’ could not allow this to happen
Technological Rationality
It has the power to liberate the people but it does the opposite
It increases work time
Pushes economic boundaries
Now on a 24 hour a day work schedule
Yet people view this expansion as a form of freedom. Of rational?
Form of rationality inherently irrational?
Totalitarian
“…is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of the vested interests.”
What do you think? Do we live in a totalitarian society?
Social control is becoming more dominate without many noticing it…
Is this why there was no proletariat revolution?
“false” needs
“…are those which are superimposed upon the individual by a particular social interest in his repression: the needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice.”
We are told what to love, hate, and consume
These “needs” are dictated by society
What are true needs?
Society’s dominate interest demands repression
“false” needs
“The distinguishing factor of advanced industrial society is its effective suffocation of those needs which demand liberation.” (p. 400)
Needs must be decided by individuals but as long as they remain indoctrinated by society they can no longer decide what their true needs are.
False needs become their true needs!
Power of the “media
Mass communication works as one of them most effective indoctrinators of society
For example: the nightly news a form of information or form of entertainment?
We have free press that censors itself…
Materialism
Mass media tells society what to like and what to buy
Society now finds itself in its material possessions
i.e. cars, houses, clothes etc
All status symbols, all attempt to define the person they are by the possessions they own
There is a new form of connection to society to the production process.
Because people find themselves in their “things” they are now reliant on totalitarian market controlled by the ‘vested interest’
Alienation
Mass media invades “private space” – the mind- and again tells people what to love, hate, and buy. Tells them to go with the flow.
There is loss of negativity, there is a loss of critical thinking because it now goes against the status quo
There is a loss of Reason
This new form of alienation becomes so complete that people no long feel alienated, they find themselves in alienation
Their “false consciousness” becomes their true consciousness
Positivism and total empiricism
In order to measure or quantify something there needs to be concept of what is being measured and a concept of the measurement.
These concepts are limited
These concepts are limited by what empiricism can measure
i.e. love: there is a metaphysical aspect to love that most everyone knows about or can feel. But when we measure love it is based on positivist (empirical things based on evidence) concepts.
So, because we cannot measure a metaphysical concept it does not exist?
Positivism cont
According to positivism and empirical thinking the answer is NO. If we cannot measure it empirical it does not exist!
This leads to entire concepts being “scientifically” debunked because as of yet, we are our limited concepts we cannot measure it empirically.
Again, it leads to a one-dimensional strain of thought, to a one dimensional man
Domination
“Advanced industrial society makes scientific and technological progress in an institution of domination.” (p. 404)
Society is based on self perpetuating oppression.
Total Domination
“When this point is reached, domination – in the guise of affluence and liberty – extends to all spheres of private and public existence, integrates all authentic oppositions, absorbs all alternative. Technological rationality reveals its political character as it becomes the great vehicle of better domination, creating a truly totalitarian universe…”
Marcuse’s Answer
The Proletariat Revolution never occurred because the forms of social control
Advanced industrial society
Technical rationality (irrationality)
“false” needs” and “false” consciousness
Positivist and total empiricism
All lead to a One-Dimensional society that demands repression and has no ability to think about the need for revolt or liberation. Society is liberated in its chains.
