Transcript “The dialectics of Enlightenment” (1947)

By
Viktoriia Neifeld
Mariam Pataraya
Max Horkheimer (1895-1973)
Representatives of Frankfurt school
1923 – Institute for Social Research was founded
They are focused on critical theory
Traditional 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)
Theodor Adorno (1903-1969)
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.
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.
Horkheimer 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.
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.”
• Number of cylinders,
• Cubic capacity,
• Details of parented capacity…
•
•
•
•
Number of stars,
Extravagant use of technology,
Labor,
Equipment…
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.
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.
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