Anamnesis_post class adorno, horkie, jameson

In class I realized that Horkheimer and Adorno are giving a sort of manifesto like Benjamin's but theirs is much more broad in its focus, reaching into companies, government, the subject, Kant, film, literature, propaganda etc. All of it is conveniently found under the heading "culture industry," a term which gives a dubious outlook to the nature of modern culture. At points they are almost exactly like Benjamin, though, especially in their criticism of film, where they say "Far more strongly than the theatre of illusion, film denies its audience any dimension in which they might roam freely in imagination--contained by the film's framework but unsupervised by its precise actualities. It relates back to Benjamines idea that the original (in this case nature) has to be there, and that its meaning is diluted by film as a medium. the moviegoer "percieves the street outside as a continuation of the film he has just left." But like I said, Horkheimer and Adorno are more broad; for them "the whole world is passed through the filter of the culture industry." Even when consumers are not consuming, they are always being geared toward the next purchase. Kant's active contribution is negated by the culture industry and the schematism which once belonged to the brain and which allowed the subject to integrate great amounts of information (multiplicity) into everyday experience is inverted. Now, production prefigures the multiplicity for the subject and there is as a result no imaginative work to be done on behalf of him/her. A good postmodern example of this would be cell phones with their myriad functions, colors, services, and accessories. It looks as though the possibilites with cell phones are endless, but in reality there are only a limited number of choices. Erroniuously, the consumer takes these choices to be a kind a freedom and so the cell phone becomes as it were a symbol of imagination and adventure with texting, bluetoothing, gaming, tv watching, radio listening, image sharing, skins, holsters, chains, links ad nauseum--a whole world belonging to the cell phone, and yet it is not the world we imagine but that which companies imagine for us.

At one point, patronage supplied the arts with money, so artists were largely outside market influences, after the eighteenth century that changed, though, and works of art were bound up with economy in a way that had not happened before. There starts the the domino effect of art being diluted by reproduction and eventually by capitalism itself. Adnorno uses the example of Beethoven, who recognized a Walter Scoot novel as trash "this man writes for money" and yet Beethoven was apparently very savvy in getting his late string quartets out to the public. The difference, which Adnorno points out, between those works and the works of his time, is that the string quartets were works "representing the extreme repudiation of the market" and the works of 1944 that were taken seriously were those produced by artists who "succumb to ideology" and thus make art into that which is accepted by its sheer popularity rather than it's technical or imaginative merit. This is purposeless art, or even worse "purposiveness without purpose" or a ind of feigning of purpose. Jameson discusses this in another light with "Diamond Dust Shoes," a work which unlike the work before it consciously takes into account the market and makes it into its very aesthetic. Warhol understood fundamentally that today's works of art are "suitably packaged like political slogans and pressed on a reluctant public at reduced prices by the culture industry," so he established THE FACTORY to produce and reproduce his paintings. He had others do his silkscreens for him and often times was not even to be found on the premises. Is it not impossible today to speak with the leader owners of those products which we consume most often? One who eats 200 Macdonalds cheeseburgers in a year would never be able to speak to the owner of macdonalds. The documentary "Supersize Me" aptly points this out.

Overall I think Horkie and Adnorno have an abrasive and chastising tone. They are obviously angry with the conditions of society and highly skeptical of any new thing which might come onto the radar of culture. Ideology earns an especially dubious place within culture. It is troubling that they, in 1944, can talk about the "city center" with such disdain and to think about the precarious "town centers" that have now sprouted up in every major and minor city. These town centers would undoubtedly be th subject of a torrent of criticisms by this duo. I'm sure part of the premise might ask the question "what center?"