class: title, smokescreen, shelf, no-footer background-image: url(davide-ragusa-gcDwzUGuUoI-unsplash.jpg) # The Culture Industry ## October 24, 2022 --- <br><br> > Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth radiates under the sign of disaster triumphant. > — Horkheimer & Adorno, _Dialectic of Enlightenment_ ??? How can this be, the authors ask. How can the progress of modern science and medicine and industry promise to liberate people from ignorance, disease, and brutal, mind-numbing work, yet help create a world where people willingly swallow fascist ideology, knowingly practice deliberate genocide, and energetically develop lethal weapons of mass destruction? Reason, they answer, has become irrational. --- class: title, center, shelf, fogscreen background-image: url(frankfurt_school.jpg) # The Frankfurt School ## Institut für Sozialforschung<br>University of Frankfurt (Est. 1923) --- class: roomy # "Critical Theory" Key Figures, Institute for Social Research: * Max Horkheimer (1895-1973) * Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) * Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) * Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) * Friedrich Pollock (1894-1970) * Leo Lowenthal (1900-1993) * Eric Fromm (1900-1980) ??? The Institute was founded in 1923 thanks to a donation by Felix Weil with the aim of developing Marxist studies in Germany. In 1933, due to the Nazi takeover and forced closure of the Institute, the Institute was temporarily transferred, first to Geneva and then in 1935 to Columbia University, New York. Advancing both marxist critical theory and Freudian psychoanalysis. In 1941, Horkheimer moved to Pacific Palisades, near Los Angeles. He built himself a bungalow near other German intellectuals, among whom were Bertold Brecht and Thomas Mann as well as with other people interested in working for the film industry (Wiggershaus 1995, p. 292). Other fellows like Marcuse, Pollock and Adorno followed shortly, whereas some remained in New York. Only Benjamin refused to leave Europe and in 1940, while attempting to cross the border between France and Spain, committed suicide. --- class: compact # Critical Theory > <q>Critical Theory</q> in the narrow sense designates several generations of German philosophers and social theorists in the Western European Marxist tradition known as the Frankfurt School. According to these theorists, a <q>critical</q> theory may be distinguished from a <q>traditional</q> theory according to a specific practical purpose: a theory is critical to the extent that it seeks human <q>emancipation from slavery</q>, acts as a <q>liberating … influence</q>, and works <q>to create a world which satisfies the needs and powers</q> of human beings (Horkheimer 1972, 246) … a critical theory provides the descriptive and normative bases for social inquiry aimed at decreasing domination and increasing freedom in all their forms. > Source: [_Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy_](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/critical-theory/) --- class: center # Mass = Sameness <br><br> <q>Culture now impresses the same stamp on everything.</q> <br><br> _Alternative translation:_<br><q>Culture today is infecting everything with sameness.</q> — _The Culture Industry_, p. 120 ??? sameness of content sameness of ends — profit Products: "the difference between the Chrysler range and General Motors products is basically illusory", p. 123 what was the media landscape of late 1940s? radio: democraticly makes everyone equally into listeners, in order to expose them in authoritarian fashion to the same programs put out by different stations --- # Vertical Integration > Everything is so tightly clustered that the concentration of intellect reaches a level where it overflows the demarcations between company names and technical sectors. The relentless unity of the culture industry bears witness to the emergent unity of politics. > — _The Culture Industry_, p. 123 ??? same ceos vertical integration media consolidation --- class: center, compact  <br>Network diagram showing interlocks between various U.S. corporations and institutions and the Council on Foreign Relations, in 2004 ??? Virtually all large U.S. corporations are linked together in a network of interlocks.[22] Most corporations are within 3 or 4 "steps" from each other within this network.[19] Approximately 15–20% of all directors sit on two or more boards.[10] The largest corporations tend to have the most interlocks, and also tend to have interlocks with each other, placing them at the center of the network.[23] Major banks, in particular, tend to be at the center of the network and have large numbers of interlocks.[24][25][26] With the globalization of financial capital following World War II, multinational interlocks have become progressively more common.[27] As the Cold War escalated, well-connected members of the CIA harnessed these interconnections to launder money through front foundations, as well as more substantial institutions such as the Ford Foundation.[28] A relatively small number of individuals—a few dozen—bind this multinational network together by participating in transnational interlocks and sitting on the boards of multiple global policy groups (such as the Council on Foreign Relations).[29] --- class: compact # 2016<br> ??? As of 2019, 90% of the United States's media is controlled by five media conglomerates: Comcast (via NBCUniversal), Disney, Viacom & CBS (both controlled by National Amusements), and AT&T (via WarnerMedia). --- class: img-full, fit-h1, center # Evan Shapiro 2020 - https://twitter.com/eshap/status/1289638100508053506  ??? 2020 --- class: img-full, fit-h1, center # Evan Shapiro 2022 - https://eshap.substack.com/p/the-media-2020-2022  --- class: img-full, center  [DOJ Press Release](https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/directors-resign-boards-five-companies-response-justice-department-concerns-about-potentially), October 19, 2022 ??? Section 8 of the Clayton Act (1)No person shall, at the same time, serve as a director or officer in any two corporations (other than banks, banking associations, and trust companies) that are— (A)engaged in whole or in part in commerce; and (B)by virtue of their business and location of operation, competitors, so that the elimination of competition by agreement between them would constitute a violation of any of the antitrust laws; if each of the corporations has capital, surplus, and undivided profits aggregating more than $10,000,000 as adjusted pursuant to paragraph (5) of this subsection. --- # Sameness * The culture industry makes mass culture <q>subserve the formula, which replaces the work.</q> (p. 126)<br><br> -- * <q>What is new about the phase of mass culture compared with the late liberal stage is the exclusion of the new. The machine rotates on the same spot.</q> (p. 134) <br><br> -- * <q>Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies.</q> (p. 126) --- class: title # Why is sameness such a terrible thing for Horkheimer & Adorno? ??? discuss --- class: img-right, compact # Reification?  Short-circuiting the <span style="text-decoration: underline;">**Hegelian Dialectic**?</span> --- * Thesis * Antithesis * New Synthesis -- --- # Negative Dialectics no _telos_ ??? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/apr/01/negative-dialectics-frankfurt-school-adorno In Hegel the dialectic is widely seen as the means by which, through contradiction and tension, human history represents the unfolding of human freedom as the expression of the Weltgeist, or world spirit. "becoming", was Hegel's password and history was simply the process of becoming. The dialectic was thus the way to understand an old idea first put forward by Heraclitus that everything is constantly in flux, that the basic condition of the world is change and not stability. But change towards what? In Hegel it is the absolute and in Hegel's most famous follower, Marx, it becomes the liberation of humanity in some form of communist society achieved by the conscious action of the proletariat in overcoming the final dialectical hurdle by abolishing the ruling class and thereby, logically, itself. The Marxist dialectic replaces the idealist Geist of a period working in mysterious ways with the concrete materialist class struggle as the engine of history, constantly present and constituting history as such. NO TELOS Adorno writes "As early as Plato, dialectics meant to achieve something positive by means of negation; the thought figure of the 'negation of the negation' later became the succinct term. This book seeks to free dialectics from such affirmative traits without reducing its determinacy." In other words, he asks us to reject the idea that the outcome of the dialectic will always be positive but that we do so without leaving the dialectic behind as an explanatory model. We simply have to make it an open rather than a closed process. In negative dialectics there is no necessity for things to turn out in a certain way, and the future-orientated teleology that Adorno claimed Hegel followed is replaced with retrospective teleology in which we can only see that what has happened to get us to where we are had to happen to get us there, but that there was no necessity for it happen in that way. Human beings are a product of evolution but evolution is not there to create human beings. Walter Benjamin famously expressed this as the angel of history moving backwards into the future with the debris of history piling up around his feet. Negative dialectics are, in the end then, open dialectics conditioned by contingent events and not by a pre-given endpoint. --- class: center # <br />The Dialectic of the<br />Universal and the Particular<br /><br />versus<br /><br />Negative Dialectics and the "Non-Identical" ??? In his Negative Dialectics (1966), Adorno tries to give a philosophical account of the kind of thinking that is constitutive of critical theory: a form of substantive reason which is however purely negative. Both everyday thinking and science, he claims, proceed by subsuming particulars under general concepts. By doing this, however – by claiming that this (tree) is a tree and that that (tree) is (also) a tree – we are tacitly asserting an identity between the two individuals and between each individual and the concept. To engage in such ‘identity thinking’ is to be tacitly trying to make identical what is in fact in some sense different – no two trees are exactly alike. Using an identifying concept is a way of trying to crush or suppress difference (fascism/otalitarianism). The appropriate form of resistance to this project is to remain aware of ‘non-identity’; that is, of the ways in which instances are not identical with the concepts under which they are subsumed (and with each other). ‘Negative dialectics’ tacks back and forth between universal concept and particular instances, continually pointing out in what concrete ways they are not identical. Such a negative dialectics is a kind of cognition of the non-identical, although the process of moving back and forth negatively between concept and instance has no natural stopping point and will not ever result in some positive, detachable conclusion or new, more adequate concept. --- class: title # Responses to Benjamin and Horkheimer & Adorno? --- # Going Forward: * If culture (superstructure) lags behind changes in the economy (base), are we witnessing new forms of culture in the context of late capitalism? * Post-Fordism / De-industrialization * Rise of (speculative) financial capital * Growing gap between rich and poor / precarity and the gig economy * Neoliberalism ??? PostFordism: Growth of labor processes and workflows relying on information and communication technologies and digital labor. what forms of culture? --- # For Wednesday Read: * _Practices of Looking_, Chapter 5 (pp. 198-218)