Long

Critical Theory: Mass Culture, the destruction of reason, Ideology and deception

SOC207 Lecture Five

Dr Jordan Mckenzie

The world wars and the

great depression

•World War one (1914-1918)

•Approximately 16 million deaths (soldiers & civilians)

•France, UK, US, Russia, Germany, Japan (approx. 70 million people involved)

•Great Depression - USA and Europe (1929-1939)

•Global economic collapse beginning in USA and spreading around the world.

•Throughout Europe unemployment doubled or tripled.

•In the US it increased by over 600%

•Effected almost every corner of the economy; agriculture, manufacturing, white collar jobs etc.

•World war two (1939-1945)

•Over 100 million people involved.

•As many as 85 million fatalities (soldiers and civilians)

•Russia, China, US, UK, Germany, Italy, Japan

Post-war America and Europe

•From the end of WWII to early 1970s, North America and Europe experienced an incredible economic boom.

•Technological innovations (many of which came out of the war) resulted in dramatic growth in profits in manufacturing and agriculture.

•Suddenly, unemployment rates dropped dramatically. Living standards grew almost exponentially.

•Arguably the birth of the welfare state as we know it

•The new dominance of consumer culture

•The dramatic growth of the middleclass

•The ‘Space Race’

•For many theorists a new kind of modernity developed in the second half of the 20th century.

So where is the revolution that Marx predicted?

A Very brief history of the Frankfurt school

•Term coined by Horkheimer in early 1930s.

•Adorno became the prominent leader of the Frankfurt School in the 1940s.

•School moved to Geneva in 1933, then NY in 1935 and finally California in order to escape Nazi rule.

•The School returned to Frankfurt in the 1950s and is still operating

What is critical theory?

•If the task of theorists is to improve society, then this can only be done through a critical analysis

•The job is not to affirm the status quo, but to highlight the problems.

•Project in revisionist Marxism

•Critical theory is more of a methodology than a unified theory or perspective

•Critique as an entirely different kind of knowledge.

•Critical of Rationalisation, Critique of Enlightenment

Horkheimer, Instrumental Rationality and Reason

•The modern idea of reason is such that we consider the means to be more important than the ends. We seek to reason How/What more than Why.

•We have precise technical knowledge about how to do things, but lack the ability to understand the purpose or direction of action

•Rationality in modernity is irrational!

•Despite the perceived rationalization of reason, reason itself possess the ability to negotiate and navigate through information in order to avoid being misled.

•Rationalisation is an oppressive process (i.e. Weber’s Iron Cage)

•Reason is the ability to understand ideas without being manipulated by them (i.e. Kant)

•NB: this gets confusing as these terms are not always used consistently in this way.

•Subjective reason is “essentially concerned with means and ends, with the adequacy of procedures for purposes more or less taken for granted and supposedly self-explanatory. It attaches little importance to the question whether the purposes as such are reasonable” (Horkheimer 1947:3).

•Objective reason speaks to the relative value of the ends of action and thus provides a basis for determining what is ethical, right, and just.

Horkheimer cont.

“If by enlightenment and intellectual progress we mean the freeing of man from superstitious belief in evil forces, in demons and fairies, in blind fate – in short, the emancipation from fear – then denunciation of what is currently called reason, is the greatest service reason can render” (1947).

Horkheimer & Adorno:

The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947)

•Horkheimer and Adorno argued that the Enlightenment is a myth.

•It appears to be real, and has real consequences, but it is fiction.

•Individuals are no more enlightened or rational, they simply worship different gods.

•New gods are celebrities, money, consumerism, fame, and capitalism itself.

•The exploitation that Marx identified is now voluntarily adopted in mass culture.

Adorno: The Culture Industry

•For Adorno, the manipulation of individuals occurs (voluntarily) through mass culture.

•While Nazi propaganda utilised film, music, art and celebrities to popularise fascism, capitalist ideology works in similar ways.

•And we love it!

•Artistic ventures have been commodified to the extent that they have no recognisable value beyond their ideological power and their ability to make money.

•“The customer is not king, as the culture industry would like to have us believe, not its subject but its object.” (1975: 12)

•“The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them. It drills them in their attitudes by behaving as if it were itself a customer.” (1951: 200)

•“The phrase, the world wants to be deceived, has become truer than had ever been intended. (1975: 16)

•“They force their eyes shut and voice approval, in a kind of self-loathing, for what is meted out to them, knowing fully the purpose for which it is manufactured. Without admitting it they sense that their lives would be completely intolerable as soon as they no longer clung to satisfactions which are none at all.” (1975: 16)

Marcuse: One

Dimensional Man (1964)

•How do you convince the average American that capitalism is bad for them during an economic Golden age?

•The first world has become comfortable and lazy. Depoliticised. What appears as freedom is the opposite.

•Consumerism is a distraction from terror

•“Independence of thought, autonomy, and the right to political opposition are being deprived of their basic critical function in a society which seems increasingly capable of satisfying the needs of the Individuals through the way in which it is organized.” (1964)

•Repressive Desublimation: the substitute of meaningful and dangerous experiences with safe and controlled consumer experiences

Marcuse and the revival of Freud

•Marcuse used Freudian concepts like repression, the unconscious and the pleasure principle alongside Marxist ideas of exploitation

•During times when things seem to be at their best, we must be most cautious.

•“No matter how much such needs may have become the individual’s own, reproduced and fortified by the conditions of his existence; no matter how much he identifies himself with them and finds himself in their satisfaction, they continue to be what they were from the beginning – products of a society whose dominant interest demands repression.” (1964: 5)

Fromm: Fear of Freedom (1941)

•Modern freedom leads to isolation, loneliness and detachment.

•Freedom has been constructed as breaking free from social restrictions, but it is these restrictions that offer us security, predictability and comfort.

•We are desperate for freedom, but we don’t know what it is.

•For Fromm, the willingness to abandon freedom lead to the popularity of fascism/Nazism.

•So what does freedom mean when we are unable to know the extent of our own manipulation? How can a revolution take place if we are detached from ourselves?

Questions?

•What is the role of critique in social theory? Is all good theory inherently critical?

•Can Marxism be saved by reframing the place of revolution?

•Does Adorno reduce people to ‘dopes’ or are we able to engage with culture on our own terms?