Unit 5 - Frankfurt School

Question 1

culture industry

Answer 1

Horkheimer and Adorno
- those who make the products of culture
- exercise of social power
- giant mosaic of advertising
- operates for profit
- mass production/distribution of cultural products (art, music, etc.) that are used to manipulate society into conformity
- not art, created through a controlled technique
- not mass culture
- populates the inner world of people by making them believe the existing social order can satisfy all their desires and needs, by dictating what those needs are

Question 2

rationalization

Answer 2

Frankfurt School
- instrumental reasoning spreading into all areas of life
- the social order of the Enlightenment was being rationalized in a way that subtly eroded human rights and produced a new kind of alienation
- effect of rationalization spread slowly and gradually took control away in every aspect
- even enlightened democracies had become secretly, quietly totalitarian
- “the system” or “The Machine”

Question 3

instrumental reason

Answer 3

Horkheimer and Adorno
- reason was now seen as a morally neutral tool, an instrument simply for processing and using neutral data (FS’s definition)
- instrumental reason was not concerned about what was right and good, but about what was the efficient way to do things, about increasing science and technology so that we could discover things in nature so we could control nature as an instrument as well
- science = quintessential exemplar of instrumental reason
- the Enlightenment detached reason from larger meanings of human purpose
- social order more efficient

Question 4

totalization

Answer 4

Marcuse
- one of the tools the system uses for totalization (controlling every part of our lives) is mass media
- instruments the system uses for social control
- if true, then there is no neat separation between base and superstructure - media and popular culture are integrated into the system
- totalizing representation of reality which enlightenment prioritizes
- example: infantilization, pseudo-realism

Question 5

affirmative culture

Answer 5

Adorno’s term, Marcuse uses
- aka authentic culture
- certain types of art can be called oppositional, awakening the viewer/listener to consider the real conditions of his life, made them long for something better than what they were given
- John Storey - “it [affirmative culture] carries the key to unlock the prison-house of mass culture”
- culture of the bourgeois epoch - led to segregation from civilization of the mental and spiritual world
- example: Adorno with classical music/abstract painting
- kind of culture that is not a product of the system - makes you see the social conditions that you are being subjected to

Question 6

repressive desublimation

Answer 6

Marcuse
- sublimation takes sexual desire and directs it into other activities
- advanced industrial society does the exact opposite by desublimating all aspects of life, re-eroticizing our social life - this of course includes sex, but also includes pleasure and immediate gratification of desire in all its forms for those who play by the rules of the system
- play by the rules of the system, get rewarded with pleasure and gratification! it keeps you passive, in submission to the system

Question 7

libidinal rationality

Answer 7

Marcuse
- promises a world of individual gratification and fulfillment
- form of social organization, where human desires/energies are integrated with rational planning and organization
- approach social arrangements and the technical control of nature on the basis of an understanding of the potentialities of human beings and natural things
- counterpart for instrumental rationality
- rationality + desire
- dissolves differences in play and work
- sees a utopian future if we can get out of the way that the system depersonalizes us - we reach libidinal rationality
- capitalism and rationalism have messed us over, made us a mechanized technological society that has narrowed our wavelength of human experience
- his term for everything comes together again - a desire filled, reasonable approach
- once we deal with the system, our experience might change reality into something better
- heaven on earth

Question 8

redefining freedom

Answer 8

Marcuse
- contemporary industrial society redefines freedom from meaning one thing (being able to determine the direction of your life) to another thing (having more consumer choices)
- it’s an illusion - there are no real alternatives
- if workers have the same choices as other social classes, then the system produces the illusion of equality, but it’s really only a sign of the control of the system

Question 9

introjection/identification

Answer 9

Marcuse
- identification of the inner person with the outer system
- For M, the inner person had traditionally been the place where resistance to the outer world starts - if the world around us is distorted or wrong, your inner person senses it and puts up a fight
- notice: inner/outer scheme derived from the culture and civilization tradition
- through the creation of false needs, the inner person is pacified and submits to the system
- we find ourselves in the things and pleasures the system offers to us - we become part of the system

Question 10

one-dimensional

Answer 10

Marcuse
1. no consciousness of alienation or oppression - the system controls the inner world, pacifying, making resistance unimaginable
2. there are no longer 2 dimensions - we ourselves have become one-dimensional, for the system
- the flattening of discourse, imagination, culture, and politics into the field of understanding, the perspective of the dominant order
- in a capitalist society, the comprehensive control of technology over industrial society and the suppression of human consciousness have reached their peak intensity