History 427: Modern German Intellectual History (McCole)
THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL IN EXILE
I German Intellectuals in Exile
II The Western Marxist project
III The Frankfurt Institute for Social Research
IV The Demise of the Individual
V Art and the Culture Industry
VI A Dissenting View: Walter Benjamin
Columbia University
New School for Social Research
Hollywood / Santa Monica
Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (1923)
Max Horkheimer / Theodor W. Adorno / Friedrich Pollock / Herbert Marcuse / Erich
Fromm / Leo Löwenthal
Jürgen Habermas
Critical Theory / Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory” (1937)
interdisciplinary materialism
Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung
Dialectic of Enlightenment (composed 1941-1944, published 1947)
Franz Neumann, Behemoth (1942) (on National Socialism)
new primacy of politics / state capitalism
The Authoritarian Personality (1950) / the “F scale”
Together
with the family there passes away…not only the most effective agency of
the bourgeoisie, but also the resistance which, though repressing the individual,
also strengthened,
perhaps even produced him. The end of the family paralyzes the forces of
opposition. The rising collectivist order is a mockery of a classless one.
•Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia (1951)
In the [capitalist] economy man
was being reduced to a mere function of one or the other economic factor…The same
process of reduction to subpersonal status was going on within the family in
so far as the father was becoming the money-earner, the woman a sexual object
or a domestic servant…Within the family, however, unlike public life, relationships
were not mediated through the market and the individual members were not competing
with one another. Consequently the individual always had the possibility there
of living not as a mere function but as a human being.
•Max Horkheimer, “Authority and the Family” (1936)
autonomous art / avant-garde art
“culture industry”
Adorno, “On Jazz” (1936); “On the Fetish Character of Music
and the Regression of Hearing” (1938)
mass culture as “psychoanalysis in reverse” (Löwenthal)--it
induces regression (Freud: "where id is, there ego shall be")
Walter Benjamin
“The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (1936)
aura / auratic mode of perception
reproductions / photography / film
montage / perceptual tests / estrangement effect
Bertolt Brecht
the aestheticization of politics (fascism)
Our bars and city streets, our
offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories seemed
to close relentlessly around us. Then came film and exploded this prison-world
with the dynamite of the split second, so that now we can set off calmly
on journeys of adventure among its far-flung debris…Clearly, it is
another nature which speaks to the camera as compared to the eye…It
is through the camera that we first uncover the optical unconscious, just
as we discover the instinctual
unconscious through psychoanalysis.
•Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility"
(1936)