...we are all part of and, therefore, influences us time and time again. Persuaded by the famous work of Marx and Weber, critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer coined the culture industry in 1944 (During). This name was agreed upon after much debate, as they considered naming their work “mass culture” but decided it incorrectly assumed culture arises spontaneously from the people (de Peuter). The pair worked out of The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory where they studied the effects of culture in capitalist societies, summing up their concerns into an effective piece of literature entitled “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” (de Peuter). Although seen in a negative light by Adorno and Horkheimer, it is crucial to consider its positive aspects as well. The rise of the culture industry is seen as a positive event for media theorists such as Walter Benjamin because it provides the ability to reproduce art on a mass scale (Laughey 38). This paper will outline Adorno and Horkheimer’s pessimistic view of the culture industry, along with the theory’s limitations and its relevance in today’s society. More specifically, it will discuss three defining characteristics of the culture industry: the ability to mass-produce, the monopolistic market and technological advancements. Adorno and Horkheimer believe the culture industry is comparable to the entertainment industry with respect to its mass production of commodities such as film and music (Laughey 123)...
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...possesses talent; that is an irrefutable fact. As simplified answers like “talent” would be suffice to reveal why she is popular, it is necessary to ask questions that are more focused in defining the relationship Mariah had with the “cultural industry” as coined by Adorno and Horkheimer. To what extent was her work influenced by the culturally industrial views of record companies and as a consequence, how did she deal with the resulting conflict between self-expression and the industrial production of identity? The presence of a dynamic conflict between record companies and mainstream artists has long been acknowledged. Mariah was no exception to this problem. Issues had already arisen in her first album, Mariah Carey (1990). Prior to signing, Mariah had originally written 14 songs and intended her first CD to be produced without any editing of her tracks (Nickson 20). However, her record company insisted on transforming the songs before they were publically released; including her first Number 1 single “Vision of Love” (Nickson 30). “There is an agreement... of all [record company] executive authorities not to produce or sanction anything that in any way differs from their own rules” (Adorno and Horkheimer 32). Mariah’s songs had intentionally been tweaked to conform to the successful formulas of previous female singers like Whitney Houston. If she had refused to compromise her style in accordance to...
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...Critical Theory concerns conflicting logics- a social concern versus a language one. In the pathways of developments in theory, there are two diverging points- one, the obsession with language, communication systems and, two the focus on social construction. On one hand, Critical Theory of society emerged to deal with those aspects of social reality which Marx and his followers downplayed and neglected. It takes a specialized sense, describing the work of the Frankfurt School. On the other hand, it is concerned with the dominance of language to explain all phenomena. The term ‘Critical Theory’ was coined in 1930s. The concept of language and culture being linked has been discussed for a long period. However, in the twentieth century, Critical theory marks a linguistic turn; a whole new approach to language, literature and interpretation. During this period one witnessed the rise of an astonishing number of theories that used language as a basis for thinking about every kind of human experience. There were ‘new’ ways of looking at psychology, sexuality, philosophy, politics, technology— and, of course, literature. The major theories that spawned in critical theory ranged from formalism, structuralism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction, to the responses and critiques posed by race and gender theory, cultural studies, post colonialism, and new media. At the very crux of literary theory is language. Books are made of language; the question 20th century critical theory...
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...differently - Vaudeville theatre was popular before the rise of the culture industry • (Mass, Personal and Popular Media - Vaudeville is closer to popular) The Frankfurt School: Biography and Historical Context (Critical Theory) - Develops within the Institute for Social Research, based in Frankfurt in the 1920s (Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer) - Their perspective was marked by German fascism and American consumer culture - Was interested in the “social contradictions” of capitalism - We are going to focus on their theory of mass media - “The Culture Industry” = the standardized production of cultural goods (that are used to manipulate mass society into passivity) The Enlightenment and its Perversion - The Enlightenment is a way of thinking about the world that emerges in the 18th and 19th centuries - It challenges traditional ways of seeing the world, including those of the Catholic church and monarchies 1 Thursday, October 15, 2015 • Tries to replace religion with humanism and the scientific method - It included an underlying belief in progress for all through science and rationality - However, Adorno & Horkheimer believed the Enlightenment dream had been turned into a nightmare… • The rise of dictatorships but also the rise of the mass media...
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...Noha Ghobrial Soc 431 Dr. Ian Morrison Frankfurt School Reaction paper: The Frankfurt school was the most interesting reading and discussion this semester. They were different than the other ideas that we discussed this semester. The school presented ideas in different aspects than politics and economics through their different variety of minds that worked together on understanding how did the man reached the form he exists in now. Summary: The first reading was discussing the concept on enlightenment and how the world deals with ideas and knowledge these days. The writing of that piece was done by Adorno and Horkheimer in a very dark period in the human history which is after the World War 2. What they meant by enlightenment wasn’t a certain period of time or a philosophical movement, they were addressing the way of thinking that existed in Europe. Before that spreading of enlightenment, anything wasn’t scientific, a combination between myths and magic. Then enlightenment arrived to bring knowledge and logic and to make the world more scientific. Not all of the information that excited the man was able to fit it and analysis with it with logic and numbers so it has become not scientific. Then people took that division to be the ultimate truth and ignore any new attempts to question both the scientific and not scientific ideas. For them the enlightenment has created a kind of fear; people are afraid to break the scientific ideas and questioning them. The other reading...
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... This is based on what the book states: Marilyn DeLaure and Moritz Fink (editors), Mark Dery (Foreword) This is what NYU, Google Books and Amazon state: Marilyn DeLaure, Moritz Fink and Mark Dery (editors) Culture Jamming: Activism and the Art of Cultural Resistance New York: New York University Press, 2017; 464 pp.: £24.99 Reviewed by: Elena Fell, Tomsk Polytechnic University, Russia What do Russian samizdat, The Simpsons and the carnivals of the Middle Ages have in common? As readers of Culture Jamming…, we learn that both ‘underground publishing in defiance of official censorship’ (p. 47) in the USSR, the American television show ‘parodying the corporate world’ (p. 254) and the baptizing of pigs during carnivals are all ‘part of a historical continuum’ (p. 47) that involves individuals actively challenging ‘existing structures of power’ (p. 19). Since 1990s, various such tactics used to ‘ “jam” the workings of consumer culture’ (p. 6) have become known as ‘culture jamming’, and DeLaure, Fink and Dery’s book presents a significant number of ‘key texts’ (p. xvii) that unpack the specificity of ‘semiotic defamiliarization’ (p. 6) involved in activists’ ‘interrupt[ing] the flow of mainstream, market-driven communications’ (p. 6). The conversation presented in the book transcends a scholarly discourse, as the contributors to the volume include e.g. experienced culture jammers Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonnano ‘known as Yes Men’ (p. 441); Paolo Cirio, an artist who ‘is regularly...
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...As Patricia Pisters (2003) asserts in her study of Deleuze and film theory The Matrix of Visual Culture, the Wachowski brothers’ film can be read from number of different theoretical perspectives. It invites readings via Lacanian psychoanalysis, Platonic notions of the cave and the disparity between the two strata of perception and also as a “New Age” (Pisters, 2003: 11) quasi-religious evocation of the second coming. However, here I would like to place the film’s visual sense and diegesis into a context of postmodern philosophy; drawing inferences and theoretical connections between the film and the work of Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin and the neo-Marxists of the Frankfurt School, most notably Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1979). The importance of postmodern philosophy and cyber culture to the visual sense of The Matrix is declared from its very opening titles. Random strings of green neon data are scrolled against a black background imbuing the viewer with a sense of the virtual and the cybernetic and this is concretised and given definite focus later on as Neo (Keanu Reeves) hides the two thousand dollars given to him by Anthony in a copy of Simulacra and Simulation by Baudrillard. This reference however is more than a mere visual joke it is a signifier for a number of the film’s sub-textual tropes and motifs. For Baudrillard, the notion of the simulacra was central to an understanding of the modern capitalist society. In his essay “The Precession...
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...KARL MARX Karl Heinrich Marx (5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, sociologist, historian, political economist, political theorist and revolutionary socialist, who developed the socio-political theory of Marxism. His ideas play a significant role in both the development of social science and also in the socialist political movement. Marx's theories about society, economics and politics, which are collectively known as Marxism, hold that all society progresses through class struggle. He was heavily critical of the current form of society, capitalism, which he called the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie", believing it to be run by the wealthy middle and upper classes purely for their own benefit, and predicted that, like previous socioeconomic systems, it would inevitably produce internal tensions which would lead to its self-destruction and replacement by a new system, socialism. Marx polemic with other thinkers often occurred through critique, and thus he has been called "the first great user of critical method in social sciences. Fundamentally, Marx assumed that human history involves transforming human nature, which encompasses both human beings and material objects. Humans recognise that they possess both actual and potential selves. Marx had a special concern with how people relate to that most fundamental resource of all, their own labour power.[120] He wrote extensively about this in terms of the problem of alienation. Refers to the separation...
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...In Homer’s Odyssey the Sirens, offering false promises of joy through seductive song, challenge Odysseus’s position of power in the Ithacan hierarchy by attempting to evoke the sense of unrestrained joy. Sealing his crew’s ears with wax, Odysseus mutes the crew’s senses and skews their perception of truth, contributing towards a reinforcement of social stability; Odysseus maintains his dominant status among the crew through his denial of complete submission to pleasure by binding himself to the ship mast; Ultimately, the measures Odysseus takes to sail past the Sirens serve to reinforce his seat of authority. Odysseus, on his quest to restore his throne over the Ithacans, encounters the irresistible call of the Sirens, hoping to plunge Odysseus’s...
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...of both these scholars’ diverse studies, the identification of multiple similarities and differences between the two schools can be easily identified. The observations gathered by both the Frankfurt and the Birmingham school “prove complementary to each other”, as they work in harmony to help us to further understand what culture really is. Firstly, the Frankfurt school scholars of note, who expressed similar viewpoints on this matter are Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Max Horkheimer. These scholars developed powerful analyses of the changes in Western capitalist societies that occurred since the classical theory of Marx. The Frankfurt school originated in Germany, by a young Marxist philosopher. His Marxist beliefs became one of the biggest impacts and influences on the Frankfurt school and remained an integral part of the schools ideologies. It wasn’t until 1930, when Max Horkheimer became head of the organisation, that cultural theory was fully established in the Frankfurt School. Max Horkheimer decided to recruit other philosophers, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and Walter Benjamin, working together led to the Frankfurt school theories to be born. “They produced...
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...This paper analyzes the opening argument of Dialectics of Enlightenment. According to Horkheimer and Adorno enlightenment is the “demystification (dissolution of myth) of the world”, the replacement of a pre-rational worldview by a more rational through criticism. Moreover, they state, that enlightenment levered itself out, which led to self-destruction. This through its totalitarian character because nothing changed in the formula of ruling people. In comparison myth stands for imagination, tradition and superstition. It seems that the enlightened world-view is superior over the mythical, because of the combination of enlightenment with the heritage of Platon and Aristoteles. The belief that superstition was equal with truth is canceled and replaced by the metaphysics. No more influence of nature through magic rituals and fear. As...
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...In today’s time and age, mass society and mass media is a massive cultural wave that more or less plays a large role in society. Like it or not, mass society and mass media is largely intertwined with one another. In this essay, it will be discussed whether mass media is influenced by the presence of mass society. Mass society is a social system that is determined by mindless standardisation, the weakening of religion, a sense of alienation and moral emptiness, strained family and community ties, political indifference and the replacement of refined and high culture such as art and literacy with low culture which gives way to bland and unsophisticated tastes. The society concerned in this context is born from the modern, industrialised era where factory-produced, mass consumer goods precede home-grown goods which are produced on a smaller scale. The Industrial Revolution that took place in the 19th century contributed to the ‘soulless’ uniformity of the society and paved a way for the decline of traditional and aristocratic ways of past societies. Mass society is largely related to mass culture in which consumerism tendencies play a dominant role. It can also be defined as the young society which has been transformed from having individualistic, communal and pluralist characteristics to one which are of the total opposite of these values. Mass society is often seen as a threat to the American social, cultural and political life because it has changed American mass culture from...
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...File Sharing and the Revenue of the Creative Industries Introduction File sharing hosts, who provide online storage to share various files ripped from media like recorded music, films, and books, have been considered as a type of internet piracy that threatens the creative industries, including films, music, software, and books. (Van Eijk, 2011) However, after the shutdown of Megaupload, one of the most popular file hosting site, a series of ripple effect happened, causing several other file sharing hosts either deleted their files, or set up an access restriction. (Peukert and Claussen, 2012) It appeared to be an impact on the internet piracy and the revenue of the creative industries would go up — But it didn’t. According to Peukert and Claussen (2012), for example, the revenue of the film industry have decrease ever since Megaupload’s shutdown. The purpose of the essay is trying to analyze the relationship between the internet piracy via file sharing hosts and the revenue of the creative industries — how does the former interact with the latter — and a solution to resolve the declined revenue of the creative industries. Internet Piracy and File Sharing As its name suggests, “Internet Piracy” refers to manufacturing and distributing unauthorized copies, ie. “pirate copies”, on the Internet. (Panethiere, 2005) While the term “File Sharing” means to share a file with another person physically, such as storing and distributing a file in a CD, DVD, or a drive, or via uploading...
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...Habermas auf fünf Seiten von Egbert Scheunemann 2 1 Aktualisierte Version August 2008 Habermas‘ inzwischen in über dreißig Bänden entfaltetes philosophisches und gesellschaftstheoretisches Denken auf wenigen Seiten zusammenzufassen, ist kein leichtes Unterfangen. Gleichwohl möchte ich im Folgenden kurz zusammenfassen, worum es bei Habermas grundsätzlich geht und wie ‚alles‘ grundsätzlich zusammenhängt, weil mir ein ähnlicher Versuch, Habermas’ Gesamtwerk für die schnelle Lektüre auf wenige Seiten zu komprimieren, nicht bekannt ist – sehr wohl aber das Bedürfnis vieler Freundinnen und Freunde aus Philosophie und Politik, aber auch ‚nur’ aus dem interessierten Privatkreis, ein solches Kurzkompendium zur Verfügung zu haben. Also: Habermas‘ Philosophie ist der Versuch, das Projekt der Moderne, also die Entwicklung der modernen Zivilisation, als – in der Tradition Kants – dreigestaltige Rationalitätsentfaltung zu begreifen: als Prozess der Differenzierung der kognitiv-instrumentellen, der normativ-praktischen und der ästhetisch-praktischen Vernunftsdimension sowie der immer weiteren Ausdifferenzierung dieser Dimensionen quasi nach innen, also entsprechend immanenter Logik.3 Diese (mehr die Logik betreffende) Rationalitätstheorie ist dabei zum Einen als (mehr die Empirie berücksichtigende) Gesellschaftstheorie zu begreifen: Die Entfaltung der genannten Rationalitätsdimensionen läuft analog zu einer adäquaten Entfaltung der gesellschaftsanalytisch zu erfassenden Dimensionen der...
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...years have passed since our country’s independence from Britain, and many things have changed; but if there is one thing that will always stay the same it’s the fact that this country is all about money money money- and how to get more of it. Over time we also learn another thing; that class warfare is controlled not only by economics, but by culture as well. Years ago, French sociologist Pierre Bordieu argued, "culture is a way of distinguishing between positions in the cultural hierarchy." I believe this to be true because the "social system tends to reproduce itself through culture and through schooling." Throughout our lives, we go about ourselves based on upbringing and predominantly what we are taught in school. Authors Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno use culture as a way to portray our capitalist system in writing. Art has become transformed into a money-making business versus…art. They discuss how the cultural industry creates “predetermined ideologies and messages” through radio, tv, music etc. This means that the media tries to socially control and condition mass audiences to obey the established social structure, which maintains a capitalist economy for those at the top of Marx's hierarchical superstructure. In my eyes all these things are just another way to target and control the lower class. Another author Walter Benjamin discusses how mass culture has basically broken down the true meaning of art through mechanical reproduction. All of these are ways of controlling...
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