DIALECTICS OF ENLIGHTENMENT

ByViktoriia NeifeldMariam Pataraya

Max Horkheimer (1895-1973)

Theodor Adorno (1903-1969)

Representatives of Frankfurt school1923 – Institute for Social Research was founded

They are focused on critical theoryTraditional theory – describes,Critical theory – is focused on transformation.

How to transform a social structure that changes the society?

Answer: Book “The dialectics of Enlightenment” (1947)

They describe how “culture industry” is destroying the Culture.

“When art and entertainment are commodified for the mass market in concentrated, rationalized businesses, culture becomes formolaic, commercialized, imaginatively limited, and critically stunted, and audience become passive, conformist, and uncritical.”

True individuality is absorbed,True human needs are repressed,And even intimacy is reified.

“TOTALLY ADMINISTRATED SOCIETY”Critical theory which consists in “the determining negation of whatever is directly at hand”.

Negation is used in special sense – to negate something means rather to transform it into something else.Negation – determining.

The potential question is the possibility of human freedom, a fully emancipated society, which is also the goal of the Enlightenment that attracts Horkheimer and Adorno.

“To grasp existing things as such, not merely to note their abstract spatial-temporal relationships, by which they can be seized, but, on the contrary, to think of them as surface, as mediated conceptual moments which are only fulfilled by revealing their social, historical, and human meanings”.

Horkheimer and Adorno claim that the culture industry, where culture is “produced” in accordance with formulae, illustrates the triumph of instrumental reason over traditional ideas about the nature and significance of art.

According to the Enlightenment, art should be a realm of freedom, free to develop in accordance with its own logic, without being subordinated to the imperatives of church and state.

Realm of freedomIs not subordinated to church and state

CULTURE INDUSTRY

IN DIALECTICS OF ENLIGHTENMENTHorkheimer and Adorno are primarily concerned with three spheres of activity and inquery of modernity: science, morality and art. They stress how the greatest works of art resisted the ideological servitude by incorporating a tragic dimension that drew attention to their own insufficiency.

• Science

• Morality (or justice and politics)

• Art The so-called “products” of the culture industry eliminate the utopian character of art, by fusing it with the everyday and reducing it to sheer entertainment.

CONSUMERISM

$$ $$$$Income groups of consumers:

“How formalized the procedure is can be see when the mechanically differentiated products prove to be all alike in the end.”

vs.

vs.

• Number of cylinders,• Cubic capacity,• Details of parented capacity…

• Number of stars,• Extravagant use of technology,• Labor,• Equipment…

CONCLUSIONS:1. The varying budgets in the culture industry do not bear the slightest relation on the

factual values, to the meaning of the products themselves…

2. There is nothing left for the consumer to classify. Producers have done it for him.

3. As soon as film begins, it is quite clear how it will end, and who will be rewarded, punished or forgotten.

4. In light music, once the trained ear has heard the first notes of the hit song, it can guess what is coming and feel flattered when it does come.

The development of the culture industry has led to the predominance of the effect, the obvious touch, and the technical detail over the work itself – which once expressed the

idea.

Or disadvantages…

CONCLUSIONS:1. The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture.

2. The culture industry remains the entertainment business.

3. Business is the ideology.

4. No independent thinking must be expected from the audience. Product prescribes every reaction, not by its natural structure, but by signals.

5. The culture industry does not sublimate, it represses.

The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers fell compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.

More disadvantages…

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