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Angela Davis: The Massachusetts Review: “Reflections on the Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves”a. White master reduces her to the level of her biological being, aspiring with his sexual assaults to establish her as a female animal b. Du Bois could not forgive the south’s continued and persistent insulting of the black womanhood which is sought and seeks to prostitute to its lust c. Matriarch concept is an open weapon of ideological warfare, black men and women alike remain its potential victims. Myth must be consciously repudiated as myth and the black woman in her true historical contours must be resurrected
Marcuse: One-Dimensional Mana. Paralysis of criticism, society without opposition. People are comfortable, hard to draw out the critical forces b. Unification of opposites (production and destruction of planet), no split between rational and irrational, the whole of society is irrational c. Kant said people had to obey because they were immature; this is no longer the case i. Repression operates not from a place of natural and technical immaturity but rather from a position of strength. Our society distinguishes itself by conquering the centrifugal social forces with technology rather than terror, on the dual basis of an overwhelming efficiency and an increasing standard of living
Marcuse: One Dimensional Mana. The choice of societal members results from the play of the dominant interests, it anticipates specific modes of transforming and utilizing man and nature and rejects other modes (surveillance, targeted ads, algorithms, echo bubbles) b. Loss of real possibilities, comfortably unfree – technological advancements doesn’t lead to more exploited classes, but leads them to identify with the ruling class
Marcuse One Dimensional Mana. Comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom as a token of technological progress. Once our base “freedoms” were institutionalized, they shared the fate of the society of which they had become an integral part, the achievement cancels the premises (Freedom to work is also the freedom to live paycheck to paycheck) i. Liberty as a powerful instrument of domination b. Technology should save us labor, but we only work more
Marcuse One Dimensional Man$ a. New modes of freedom can only be indicated in negative terms, economic freedom would mean freedom from the economy b. We’ve been conditioned from day 1 to be consumers, so how can we decide between true and false needs, the conditions of freedom i. We don’t see ourself as alienated because we identify with our objects, industrial civilization is irrational, it has produced new false needs ii. Once you identify with your society, the space for any change / progress collapses, only one dimension
Marcuse One Dimensional Mana. Efforts that could allow space for reflection like spirituality are the harmless negation of society, and are quickly digested by the status quo b. We need a new notion of progress, technical progress as transcending the realm of necessity, subject to the free play of faculties in the struggle for the pacification of nature and of society. Technology is the problem, but also the potential way out
1. Adorno: The Stars Down to Earth: “Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda”a. Winning people over by playing upon their unconscious mechanism rather than by presenting ideas and arguments. Concrete political ideas play a minor role compared with the psychological stimuli applied to the audience, it is from these stimuli that we can identify them as fascist b. Personalized propaganda, non-objective. Agitators spend a large part of their time speaking either about themselves or their audience. Presenting themselves as lone wolves, sound Americans, and their audience as poor but honest, common sense but non-intellectual, identifying with them i. They talk about a “great movement,” but not about what it would entail
1. Adorno: The Stars Down to Earth: “Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda”a. People are let in on an inside scoop, treated as elite who deserve to know the truth b. They put on a show for their audiences, they are entertaining and have no inhibitions in expressing themselves (I was thinking that all along, was too scared to say it myself) i. The clown is appealing
1. Adorno: The Essential Frankfurt School Reader: “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda”a. Problem of mass psychology is closely related to the new type of psychological affliction so characteristic of the era which for socioeconomic reasons witnesses the decline of the individual and his subsequent weaknesses b. Fascist demagogue has to win the support of millions of people for aims largely incompatible with their own rational self-interest, can do so only by creating a bond i. Threatening father figure, the primal father is the group idea, which governs the ego in place of the ego ideal ii. It is one of the basic tenets to fascist leadership to keep primary libidinal energy on an unconscious level so as to divert its manifestations in a way suitable to political ends
1. Adorno: The Essential Frankfurt School Reader: “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda”a. As a rebellion against civilization, fascism is not simply the reoccurrence of the archaic but its reproduction in and by civilization itself, not a reversion but a bubbling up b. Idealization: object is being treated in same way as our own ego, so that when we are in love a considerable amount of narcissistic libido overflows on the object, object serves as a substitute for some unattained ego idea of our own i. Conflict between rational, self-preserving ego agency and the continuous failure to satisfy their own ego demands
1. Adorno: The Essential Frankfurt School Reader: “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda”$ a. The fascist community of the people corresponds to definition of a group as a number of individuals who have substituted one and the same object for their ego idea and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego b. The leader image gratifies the follower’s twofold wish to submit to authority and to be the authority himself i. The tendency to treat on those below, which manifests itself so disastrously in the persecution of weak and helpless minorities, is as outspoken as the hatred against those outside ii. Any attach on the group or leader is a personal attack
1. Adorno: The Essential Frankfurt School Reader: “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda”a. Unity trick: we are all in the same boat, nobody should be better off, malicious egalitarianism, brotherhood of all-encompassing humiliation b. Leader can guess the psychological wants and needs of those susceptible to his propaganda because he resembles them psychologically, and is distinguished from them by a capacity to express without inhibition
1. Adorno: The Essential Frankfurt School Reader: “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda”a. Secret of fascist propaganda is that it simply takes men for what they are: the true children of today’s standardized mass culture largely robbed of autonomy, reproducing the existent mentality for its own purposes b. They do not really identify themselves with leader but act this identification, perform their own enthusiasm, and thus participate in their leader’s performance. If they would stop to reason for a second, the whole performance would fall apart
1. Kracauer: “Mass Ornament”a. Pop culture is more telling of the state of society because it’s unaware of itself, surface level expressions provide unmediated access to the fundamental substance of the state of things b. Tiller girls: only as parts of a mass, not as individuals who believe themselves to be formed from within, do people become fractions of a whole c. The ornament is an end in itself, not trying to express anything, no content. Masses give rise to the ornament, but they are not involved in thinking it through
1. Kracauer: “Mass Ornament”a. Structure of mass ornament reflects that of the entire contemporary situation: community and personality perish, system oblivious to differences in form leads to the blurring of national characteristics and the production of worker masses that can be employed equally well at any point on the globe. The capitalist production process is an end in itself b. Everyone does his or her task on the “conveyor belt,” performing a partial function without grasping the totality
1. Kracauer: “Mass Ornament”a. Take pop culture seriously, the aesthetic pleasure gained from ornamental mass movements is legitimate. When significant components of reality become invisible in our world, art but make do with what is left, for an aesthetic presentation is all the more real the less it dispenses with the reality outside the aesthetic sphere b. The capitalist epoch is a stage in the process of demystification. The tyle of thinking that corresponds to the present economic system has, to an unprecedented degree, made possible the domination and use of nature as a self-contained entity c. Capitalism’s core defect is that it rationalizes too little, the highest form of reason would be structured around the needs of humanity, not capital
1. Kracauer: “The Cult of Distraction”a. The large picture houses in Berlin are places of distraction; to call them movie theaters would be disrespectful. This total artwork of effects assaults all the senses using every possible means. They raise distraction to the level of culture; they are aimed at the masses. b. Addiction to distraction (entertainment) is a problem, but as a result of this distraction, the working masses are subjected to a great, tangible tension. It’s an essentially formal tension, which fills their day fully without making it fulfilling
1. Kracauer: “The Cult of Distraction”i. These shows convey precisely and openly to thousands the disorder of society, which is precisely what would enable them to evoke and maintain the tension that must precede the inevitable and radical change ii. The audience encounters itself; its own reality is revealed in the fragmented sequence of splendid sense impressions; its disclosure in distraction is of moral significance b. Movie theaters should aim radically towards a kind of distraction that exposes disintegration instead of masking it. It could be done in berlin, home of the masses, who so easily allow themselves to be stupefied only because they are so close to the truth
1. Kracauer: “Boredom”a. People whose duties occasionally make them yawn may be less boring than those who do their business by inclination, pushed deeper into hustle, and as a result, the extraordinary, radical boredom that might be able to reunite them with their heads remains eternal distant for them b. One is banished from one’s own emptiness by the alien advertisement, the movie theater cranks away the individual’s self, one forgets oneself in the process of gawking, and the huge dark hole is animated with the illusion of a life that belongs to no one and exhausts everyone
1. Kracauer: “Boredom”a. One becomes a playground for worldwide noises that, regardless of their own potentially objective boredom, do not even grant one’s modest right to personal boredom b. If one were never bored, one would presumably not really be present at all and would thus be merely one more object of boredom c. Good boredom: eventually one become content to do nothing more than be with oneself. One experiences a kind of bliss, soul swells up, and in ecstasy you name what you have always lacked: the great passion
1. Marcuse: “Liberation from the Affluent Society”a. Liberation involving the mind and the body, liberation involving entire human existence, liberation from the repressive, from a bad, false system i. We have to be liberated from a relatively well functioning, rich, powerful society to develop and satisfy material and cultural needs better than before ii. Leap into the realm of freedom requires a total rupture of history and society, a total negation of the established society, socialism as leap iii. Dialectic of liberation is construction of a free society, a construction which depends in the first place on the prevalence of the need to abolishing the established systems of servitude, and secondly, it depends on the commitment, the striving, for the qualitatively different values of a free human existence.
1. Marcuse: “Liberation from the Affluent Society”1. Without the emergence of new needs and satisfactions, then one system of servitude would only be replaced by another system of servitude ii. We are looking for point where quantitative change in conditions and institutions can become a qualitative change affecting all human existence 1. I think we’re at a point where society can change quantitative change into qualitative change, authentic liberation, and it is precisely against this truly fatal possibility that the affluent society, advanced capitalism, is mobilized and organized on all fronts, at home as well as abroad
1. Marcuse: “Liberation from the Affluent Society”i. Syndrome of late capitalism: the subjugation of man to the apparatus, and the inseparable unity of rational and irrational 1. Only the insistence of pursuing the real possibilities of a free society (which is blocked by the affluent society) is the only thing that still stands in the way of the degradation of man to a subject / object, etc. 2. The result is a human existence that is violently defending its own servitude
1. Marcuse: “Liberation from the Affluent Society”$ i. Radical social change is objectively necessary to save possibility of human freedom, and the technical and material resources for freedom are available. Although the objective need is there, the subjective need for a change does not prevail among the people in population that are traditionally considered the agents of historical change. This is because needs are satisfied, and there is a massive scientific manipulation and administration of needs by society / individual unconsciousness
1. Marcuse: “Liberation from the Affluent Society”i. Intellectuals can prepare the population. By itself it is not and cannot be a revolutionary class, but it can become the catalyst. They must go beyond the university; otherwise, they will remain powerless. What we want is a counter policy against the established policy, we must confront indoctrination in servitude with indoctrination in freedom. We must generate in ourselves and others the instinctual need for a life without fear, brutality, and stupidity
1. Adorno: The Stars Down to Earth: “The Culture Industry Reconsidered”a. The culture industry intentionally integrates its consumers from above. It forced together high and low art, which destroys both. Although the culture industry speculated on the state of millions towards which it is directed, the masses are not primary, but secondary, they are an object of calculation, an appendage of the machinery b. Old, high culture: raised a protest against the petrified relations under which they lived i. New culture: cultural industries are no longer also commodities; they are commodities through and through ii. It has turned into public relations, the manufacturing of goodwill, each product of the culture industry becomes its own advertisement
1. Adorno: The Stars Down to Earth: “The Culture Industry Reconsidered”a. What parades as progress in the culture industry remains the disguise for an eternal sameness, profit motive still pervasive, dominant over culture b. Culture industry is to be taken seriously, without cultured snobbism c. Culture industry prescribed fun which they supply, and they sense that their lives would be completely intolerable as soon as they no longer clung to satisfactions which are none at all
1. Adorno: The Stars Down to Earth: “The Culture Industry Reconsidered”a. What its defenders imagine is preserved by the culture industry is in fact all the more destroyed by it – it doesn’t maintain a grasp on the idea of the good life, it just represents that which already exists / has existed $ b. The total effect of the culture industry is one of anti-enlightenment. Enlightenment becomes mass deception and is turned into a means for fettering consciousness. It impedes the development of autonomous, independent individuals who judge and decide consciously for themselves
Marcuse One Dimensional Mana. The characters of literature and movies now are no longer images of another way of life (disruptive characters of the past), they are rather types of the same life, serving as an affirmation rather than negation of the established order b. What has been invalidated of old art is its subversive force, its destructive content, its truth. They are now classics instead of protests. Now, the most contradictory works and truths peacefully coexist in indifference c. Art should be a space of unrealized possibilities. Art as alienation, sustaining and protecting the contradiction. Art’s power is negation, but now that opposition to society is lost
Marcuse One Dimensional Man$ a. The neo conservative critics of leftist critics of mass culture say that the it’s good that art has become classic, that people are educated. True, but in coming to life as classics, they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth. The contradiction is flattened b. Old art provided a protective realm in which the tabooed truths could survive in abstract integrity, remote from society. It was a realm of freedom, the refusal to behave. Now art has collapsed into society / the lower sphere c. One of the final steps of art is to no longer communicate anything at all, breakdown of syntax / language. The most sublime poetry and the lowest prose shared the same language. Avant-garde works break this i. Modern art has a harder time finding a space of refusal because all our problems are managed by society
Marcuse One Dimensional Mana. Artistic alienation is sublimation. Desublimation is when art gets commercialized, immediate gratification b. Sublimated form of erotic. Outcome is demise, i.e. Anna Karenina. Tension defines these works between the taboo work and the repressed society. Now, sexuality is so normal, commodified, desublimated. It doesn’t oppose society, it’s normal
1. Kafka: “Before the Law”a. Doorkeeper that won’t let the man enter the sphere of law b. There are individual aspects to the law, it’s not universal like we think c. Biblical narrative but about modern bureaucracy d. Tells us that the law isn’t accessible, but it should be e. We have no idea what the law is, but it determines his entire life f. The law requires that the masses are ignorant to work
1. Kafka: “Imperial Message”a. String of contradictions, narrative shattered at end b. Parable to teach a moral lesson, message is that the message never comes c. Hoping for recognition from a system you’ll never be given access to d. Law is never revealed but it defines everything
1. Kafka: “Silence of the Sirens”a. Blocks his ears with wax, trying to outwit the sirens b. Reversal of aesthetic object, he becomes the allure c. Maybe they were stunned into silence by his stupidity d. We may think we’re progressing, but it’s a false reality, we haven’t won
1. Benjamin: Illuminations: “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death” and “Some Reflections on Kafka”a. Potemkin story, holders of power as fallen, vegetated men, lowest and seediest, doorkeepers and decrepit officials, may abruptly and strikingly appear in the fullness of the power b. Kafka says that there is an infinite amount of hope, but not for us; pessimism about humanity, idea of a different god after this life that redeems c. Kafka’s parables unfold into blossoms, not flat sheets of papers like other parables
1. Benjamin: Illuminations: “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death” and “Some Reflections on Kafka”a. The doctrine that his parables interpret do not exist, all we can say is that here or there we have an allusion to it b. Kafka’s world is a world theater, every man is on the stage from the very beginning, everyone is accepted at the Nature Theater of Oklahoma. All that is expected is the ability to play yourself c. What sets Kafka apart is his attentiveness, which lets him reflect on possibilities / impossibilities of wisdom / truth / tradition in the modern age as an alienated individual in mass society
1. Benjamin: Illuminations: “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death” and “Some Reflections on Kafka”i. Listening demands such effort is because only the most indistinct sounds reach the listener, Kafka’s work presents a sickness of tradition. His real genius was that he tried something entirely new, he sacrificed truth for the sake of clinging to its transmissibility b. Kafka’s work is an ellipse with foci, mystical experience, modern city dweller. He lives in a complementary world i. This most recent world of experience was conveyed to him precisely by this mystical tradition ii. Only the products of tradition / wisdom’s decay remain c. The experience which corresponds to that of Kafka, the private individual, will not become accessible to the masses until such time as they are being done away with
1. Brecht: “The Measures Taken”a. Entire play is a reconstruction of what already happened to assess their actions, asks spectators what the proper course of action would have been b. Agitators brought nothing but knowledge, not the physical materials for revolutions i. Kant what is enlightenment, ABCs of communism. Class consciousness as a pre requisite to revolution, need that base of knowledge c. Total mobility needed to fight for communism, efface your identity to enter China, only fights for communism and nothing else
1. Brecht: “The Measures Taken”a. The stone: band-aid over bullet hole, stones decrease the tension that the communists are trying to create, must not fall prey to pity i. Promote complaining instead of remedying the struggle, the person who pities actually is helping to keep the structure the same b. Comrade blows it, doesn’t get weapons after calling merchant racist, in reality it’s about the long-term goal i. It’s about the misery of the employed and the unemployed c. When he reveals his identity, he betrays the party because he becomes a vulnerable individual, so they had to kill him, inflexible will to change the world
1. Brecht: “He who says ‘Yes’” and “He who says ‘No’”a. Boy needs to go get medicine for his sick mother i. One story ends with him agreeing to be thrown down chasm because he got sick ii. Other story ends with him refusing to be thrown, they brought him back home, made a new law b. About awakening your critical reflective capacities, difference in the two stories is crucial to creating this critical gap
1. Brecht on Epic Theater$ a. Dramatic theater’s spectator says yes, I have felt like that too, just like me, it’ll never change, this man’s suffering is inescapable, I weep when they weep, I laugh when they laugh, art is obvious i. No gap b. Epic theater’s spectator says no, I’ve never thought of it like that, that’s not the way, that’s not believable, it’s got to stop, this man’s suffering is unnecessary, I laugh when they week, I weep when they laugh, art is not obvious i. Critical gap, positive alienation that makes you challenge the world
1. Adorno: “Commitment”a. A work of art that is committed strips the magic from a work of art that is content to be a fetish, an idle past time for those who would like to sleep through the deluge that threatens them. for the committed, such works are a distraction from the battle of real interests, in which none are any longer exempt from the conflict b. Committed art, necessarily detached as art from reality, cancels the distance between the two. Art for art’s sake denies by its absolute claims that ineradicable connection with reality which contradicts the attempt to make art autonomous from the real. Thus, the tension in which art has lived is dissolved
Adorno Commitmenta. Art that forces you to slow down and understand meaning has a greater political effect, makes you arrive at the gap b. Committed art is not intended to generate ameliorative measures, policies, etc. rather it is meant to work at the level of fundamental attitudes $ c. Sartre’s plays are bad because they teach a lesson of unfreedom, his theater of ideas sabotages the aims of his categories. Instead, art should resist by its form alone the course of the world, not to spotlight alternatives i. Brecht is the better version of Sartre. Art is not about choosing between bad options in a bad world. art should turn the world on its back, completely rejecting it
1. Adorno: “Commitment”a. Problem with Brecht is that he’s too direct, the message is too clear. He sought to translate the true hideousness of a society into theatrical appearance, by removing its camouflage. However, this process of aesthetic reduction that he pursues for the sake of political truth gets in the way i. He’s saying that Brecht is trying to encapsulate the totality of capitalism in images, but it doesn’t work, you can’t simplify b. Problem of suffering: if lyric poetry can’t exist after holocaust, it would determine our entire existence, too much dictating force. Suffering demands expression through art. Suffering demands the continued existence of art. i. Problem would be in depiction of graphic images, trauma porn, etc.
1. Marcuse-Adorno Letters on German Student Movement (NLR)a. Adorno does not stand w the student movement, but Marcuse does. He says that if the alternative is the police, he will always pick the students. We cannot abolish from the world the fact that these students are influenced by us. I would not call to my aid worse, more awful weapons against their bad ones. b. Adorno says that the barren and brutal protests have nothing to do with theory, and that no situation exists in which theory is pushed further by practice c. Marcuse says that even intact theory is not immune to the effects of reality, inhuman to say that people shouldn’t protest against agony of imperialism. Student movement as strongest catalyst for the internal collapse of the system of domination today, it’s desperately seeking a theory and a practice d. Marcuse: democracy is isolated, sealed off from its real content, the form of domination of late capitalism. Better for whom? The students know the objective limits of their protest, perhaps they need us to help them get beyond these limits e. Adorno says can’t simplify. Marcuse is proud of simplifying critical theory, but Adorno says at no cost should one simplify, because you always risk doing damage to both the theory and the simplification. unlikely that Adorno could ever get beyond theory