Adorno

- not a school and not for the most part in F
- Frankfurt school - Adorno and Horkheimer (1923)
- meeting place to discuss new capitalist culture, mass society,
- contemporary philo, art, psych and psychoanalysis i.e. what conventional marxist didn't write about
- critics -
- A and H don't talk about class, but mass, revision about observations
- extends Marxism
- Nazi rise to power in 30s, these writers make their way to the US (Rockerfeller foundation)
- equating A and H to F School - critique of the Enlightenment - 1944
- the Schema article - encapsulation of argument of A and H's typified in writing style and appraoch
- other F School critics: L. Loenthal, W. Benjamin, Fromm, Habermas, Brecth, etc
- A - epigrammatic, inversions - pts us to the ways in which certain forms of rationality lead us to irrationality
- examples: variety act (live performance), architecture, opera, sports, advertising, dancing, jazz, classical, radio, broacast, recorded music, novels, epic theatre, etc.
- what does her do with these? describes, judges, ranks, and assesses
- polemical writing
- moral
- failure - of rationality (to irrationality); the canon
- fascism - underscoring the entire writing - investment in solving the issues around fascism - how humanity failed?
- conditions of capitalism, grooming, obedience, modes of bahaviour,
- individual as easily manipulated, false consciousness, conformist, merely responds in an affirmative fashion
- information - not consuming entertainment, rather information about entertainment
- value - in the way you are connected by others to the things you consume
- links to "cultural capital" (Bourdieu) but A says it's out of fear of loosing prestige
- parallelism (examples) blocking what is "real"? A has an idea of what "real" is - but there is no explicit statement about it
- the fake? the pseudo-anything
- imitation, self-reflection, mechanization,
- jazz - analogy with factory - each movement is prescribed/mediated - keeps you alienated from your work
- imitation arriving from elsewhere - other from the one in which you live - adding to layers of mediation - distance (geo)
- proximity and distance - we touch everything, nothing is untouched - argument about abundance yet we are alienated (so much so there is nothing!)
- things of the body - fake sensuality
- Like the Greek - work or praxis (dirty)/art (holy) - the art made the work tolerable but now according to A, all things are praxis
- how does taste function? education? class?
- historicity of such claims? where can culture go from here?
- epochal argument - time stops?
- nostalgic permeation in text

Transparencies of film

- post war environment - break with the past through radical will - response to capitalism
- this was written yrs later but is similar - totalizing view - a unity - drawing out generalizable patterns about mass culture
- Hall, Bennett - complex, diff effects, communities, etc - sorting through the provisional and dynamic while A has the opposite view, it all adds up as in pieces to the machine
- patterns identifiable - solidifies this monster