Culture and esthetic theory of Frankfurt School:
All four theorists shared same theory of social formations (i.e., theory of culture)
Marx’s theory of social formations: worked out in Grundrisse
movement from community (Gemeinschaft) to society (Gesellschaft) as backbone of modern history
Frankfurt theorists projected their version of historical materialism thru conceptual frameworks of Weber and Lukács
Weber: theory of culture
de-anthropomorphizing tendency of rationalization, but not self-unfolding logic of history (191-2)
rational organization of free labor (hallmark of Western modernity) due to irrationally motivated, yet rationalistic ethic of Calvinism
bureaucracy as most efficient mode of organization of all spheres of life; “Once bureaucratized, the system of modern production could be democratized only at the cost of industrial efficiency” (193)
Lukács: loss of community, decline of individual subject – “crisis of individuality”
theory of reification : destruction of community and linking of people thru things or “thingified” social relations leads to crisis of all esthetics based on communication; reification incorporates rationalization and commodity fetishism
commodity fetishism is “the secret dynamic behind the rationalization of all social spheres ” (196), in other words, reification extends idea (cf) beyond the economic; not subjective illusion: “human relations under capitalism are in fact ‘thinglike’ relations of persons and social relations of things” (195)
world of commodities objectively constitutes a ‘second-nature’ of pseudothings (195)
esthetic alternatives developed in response to theory of social formations developed in dialogue of critiques of one another
From Marx: ideology as normative true but empirically false; objectively and social necessary illusion
transcendent vs. immanent critique
mediation = de-fetishization: “the appearances of reality are first recognized as such, then detached from their immediate context and are finally related to the social whole, the vision of which is fragmented by reification” (198)
“in form of ‘transcendent critique’ is the totalization that locates works [art/phil] in a social totality, economically structured but without a future-oriented dynamic” (199)
“in form of an ‘immanent critique’ that has not forgotten its interest in a future-oriented transformation of the false whole of society is therefore the only possible avenue for a conceptual unfolding that involves a dynamic relation of subject-object in Lukács’ sense” (199)
But no single meaning of dialectical culture critique emerges from Frankfurt works
Benjamin:
history of development always one of domination
only moments that rupture continuity of history have to do with liberation
defense of Brecht’s political theatre
task of critique is to search for truth of works
did w/out concept of mediation
even dialectic could only reveal and express antinomy and not surpass it
attempts to return to golden age were bankrupt and mortally dangerous
emergence of allegory as anti-esthetic principle within art itself: alleg of art = art has become
problematic to itself
theme of decline of community
decline of aura is specific use of Weber’s category of Entzauberung in domain of art
decline of aura in terms of technological but also econ and social tendencies
modern reproduction produces product genres w/out unique authentic works
all art, all culture is necessarily functionalized
commodif: exhibition value replaces cult value, but w/mech reprod. political value or political function
predominates; only answer to fascist challenge is politicization of art
loss of aura: loss of communicable experience and community, destruction of genuine experience which
rests on communication and to its replacement by information (210)
conseq.s of modern technology, urbanism, info convergence, dissolution of community; relocated loss
of aura in this context of crisis of perception and experience (211)
formal char. of a work less impt than liberating possibilities in relationship to collective modes of
production and reception
welcomed techniques that made all individual genius obsolete
stressed subjectivity of the masses (from Lukács) but omitted Lukácsian requirement that reification
of empirical consciousness must be “mediated”
“Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian”:
Fuchs and his work/philosophy as an example of a moment of rupture in the continuity of history that has possibility for liberation; founded archive for history of caricature
on method: “All courting of a work of art must remain a vain endeavor as long as the work’s prosaic historical content is untouched by dialectical knowledge” (228)
history of development always one of domination: “history represents for consciousness the same category of possession which capital represents for economics in terms of the domination over past labor” (231)
criticism of positivism and its relation to technology: “Positivism was only able to see the progress of natural science in the development of technology, but failed to recognized the concomitant retrogression of society…the miscarried reception of technology…consists of a series of energetic, constantly renewed efforts, all attempting to overcome the fact that technology serves this society only by producing commodities” (231)
on concept of culture: “If the concept of culture is problematical for historical materialism, it cannot conceive of the disintegration of culture into goods which become objects of possession for mankind…The concept of culture carries a fetishistic trait. Culture appears in a reified form” (233)
cultural history: “lacks the destructive element which authenticates both dialectical thought and the experience of the dialectical thinker…[it] enlarges the weight of the treasure which accumulates on the back of humanity…[but] does not provide the strength to shake off this burden in order to be able to take control of it” (234);
techniques of reproduction create possibilities to correct for reification which takes place in a work of art (235), e.g., caricature as mass art; “”in satisfying the ‘base’ desire of possession, Fuchs searches through an art in whose products the productive forces and the masses come together in images of historical man” (252)
“The Author as Producer”
“The correct political tendency of a work includes its literary quality because it includes its literary tendency ” (256)
concept of technique: considers the position of the work, how it will invoke revolutionary production: “literary tendency can consist of either progress or of regressive literary technique” (257)
Brecht’s term umfunktionierung: “for the transformation of the forms and instruments of production in the way desired by a progressive intelligentsia –that is, one interested in freeing the means of production and serving the class struggle” (261)
“Only by transcending the specialization in the process of production which, in the bourgeois view, constitutes its order, is this production made politically valuable; and the limits imposed by specialization must be breached jointly by both the productive forces that they were set up to divide”; e.g., task of making concert political depends on collaboration of words
“A political tendency is the necessary, never the sufficient condition of the organizing function of a work. This further requires a directing, instructing stance on the part of the writer…An author who teaches writers nothing, teaches no one”; what matter is getting other to produce and to put forth a better apparatus to do so; e.g., Brecht’s epic theatre (principle of interruption)
Adorno:
technological veil
“second nature”
knowledge thru micrology: intensive exam of single work in art / phil
Lukacsian project of mediation (de-fetishization) in which revol theory is met by self-mediation
collapses
insisted on cognitive function of great works of art
sympathies with immanent critique
seeks to discover thru critique the hidden interest structure behind irrational ‘ideologies’ and the
‘anthropological’ changes in human beings that leads to the instrumental efficiency of ideas” (212); but his critical phil was antinomic b/c he lost hope of discovering behind present social
facts dynamic objective possibilities in manner of Marx and Lukacs
dialectic critique of culture or ideology is uneasy antinomic synthesis of immanent and transcendent
critique; demonstrated inadequacy of either critiqe and necessity of maintain both in uneasy
opposition
culture possible only in post-esthetic works of avant garde
new media open to a fake and manufactured aura which capitalist culture industry could develop for
sales, ads, merchandise, fascist regimes
critiqued Benjamin for his omitting the requirement of mediation in his stress of subj. of masses
Criticisms of Benjamin:
of B’s “nondialectical” reception of Marxism; opposed his technologically determinist reading of the relat. of culture and econ base
of what he took to be the anarchist romanticism of Benjamin and Brecht (“blind confidence in spontaneous power of proletariat in the historical process” 216)
denies “even the negatively, destructively progressive function of the film, radio, etc” 216; artificial aura of films reveals the commodification of the forms themselves, reduces audiences to mere consumers of cultural commodities
accepted Weber’s use of “de-magicization” but was afraid of critique that de-magicizes too much, “that all too willingly consents to the false abolition of art by the culture industry” (217)
attacks technical devices which Benjamin considered critical in mobilizing a mass audience unless used in most rigorous, advanced esthetic totality (as in Kafka and Schonberg); linking of social contents (social realism) with a political line (manipulation) was disastrous
All objections summed up by: “Your dialectic lacks one thing: mediation”
“On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening”
standardization of the banal extends over society and affects all music: “The illusion of a social preference for light music as against serious is based on that passivity of the masses which makes the consumption of light music contradict the objective interest of those who consume it” (275); serious music “succumbs to commodity listening” (276); world of musical life is one of fetishes
musical fetishism; all of contemporary musical life is dominated by commodity form: “Music…serves in America today as an advertisement for commodities which one must acquire in order to hear music” (278); fetish character: “the consumer is really worshipping the money that he himself paid for the ticket to the Toscanni concert” (278); “the appearance of exchange-value in commodities has taken on a specific cohesive function. The woman who has money with which to buy is intoxicated by the act of buying” (279)
reification in music is an “immaculate performance,” “complete from the very first note,” there is no necessarily dialectical tension: “The performance sounds like its own phonograph record. The dynamic is so predetermined that there are no longer any tensions at all. The contradictions of the musical material are so inexorably resolved from the moment of sound that it never arrives at the synthesis, the self-production of the work which reveals the meaning of every Beethoven symphony” (284)
Regressive listening as counterpart to fetishism of music: “arrested at infantile stage,” “forcibly retarded,” (286); doesn’t play to imagination, affects oppressors themselves, de-politicizes, is non productive correlate to life in office or factory; only demands inattention and serves to distract from hum-drum of life;
socio-psychological function of mass music is to aid adjustment to life under capitalism; strain from work leads people to avoid effort in their leisure
“Commitment”
distinguishes btw. Benjamin’s “tendency” and Sartre’s “commitment”: latter is to focus on free choice of agent rather than neutrality of spectator; BUT only autonomous avant-garde art is capable of producing the tension or ideal of committed art
expresses skepticism of Sartre’s plays: “the theses they illustrate, or where possible state, misuse the emotions which Sartre’s own drama aims to express, by making them examples” and disavowing themselves (305); skepticism of Brecht’s didactic method: “to render immediately apparent events into phenomena newly alien to the spectator, was also medium of formal construction rather than a contribution to practical efficacy” (309);
Autonomy of art: (314); “works of art which by their existence take the side of the victims of a rationality that subjugates nature are even in their protest constitutively implicated in the process of rationalization itself. Were they to disown it, they would become both esthetically and socially powerless” (315)
mediation: “Art, when even in its opposition to society remains part of it...cannot escape the shadow of irrationality. But when it appeals to this unreason, making it a raison d’être , it converts its own malediction into a theodicy. Even in the most sublimated work of art there is a hidden “it should be otherwise...the moment of true volition, however, is mediated through nothing other than the form of the work itself, whose crystallization becomes an analogy of that other condition which should be.........(317-8)