History 427: Modern German Intellectual History (McCole)
Reading Questions: The
Frankfurt School
Horkheimer and Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as
Mass Deception”
1 Exactly what forces are responsible for “the relentless unity in the
culture industry” (96)?
2 Horkheimer and Adorno point to “the withering of imagination and spontaneity
in the consumer of culture today” (100). Why do they regard the effects
of the new media so differently than Benjamin?
3 Later in the essay, Horkheimer and Adorno refer to “the abolition of
the individual” and complain that “pseudoindividuality reigns” (124ff).
What are they getting at?
4 “The great artists were never those whose works embodied style in its
least fractured, most perfect form but those who adopted style as a rigor to
set against the chaotic expression of suffering, as a negative truth” (103).
What view of art are they implying here? What is their view of European “high” culture?
Can it be an alternative to the culture industry? Why or why not?
5 “’Light’ art as such, entertainment, is not a form of decadence.
Those who deplore it as a betrayal of the ideal of pure expression harbor illusions
about society. The purity of bourgeois art…was bought from the outset with
the exclusion of the lower class; and art keeps faith with the cause of that
class, the true universal, precisely by freeing itself from the purposes of the
false…Light art has accompanied autonomous art as its shadow. It is the
social bad conscience of serious art…The split between them is itself the
truth: it expresses at least the negativity of the culture which is the sum of
both spheres” (107-108). What are Horkheimer and Adorno trying to say
here about the relation between serious art and light art?
6 “[T]he secret of aesthetic sublimation [is]: to present fulfillment in
its brokenness. The culture industry does not sublimate; it suppresses” (111).
Ponder.
Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”
1 According to Benjamin, a general change in the “mode of perception” is
taking place (104). How does he characterize this change? What was the old
mode, and what is the emerging, new one?
2 Benjamin uses the term “aura” to get at the changes taking place
in the mode of perception and in culture. Read carefully! How does he describe
the “aura” of a natural object? of a work of art? What new forces
are tending to destroy it? What is being lost in the process? What is gained?
3 One of the shifts taking place is a revolution in “the whole social function
of art…Instead of being founded on ritual, it is based on a different practice:
politics” (106). What is he getting at?
4 How does Benjamin describe the mode of perception involved when audiences
watch films? He argues that this new mode of perception is “progressive.” Which
of its features make it so, for Benjamin? (Hint: try making a list as you come
to them when reading the piece.)
5 “Architecture has always offered the prototype of an artwork that is
received in a state of distraction and through the collective. The laws of architecture’s
reception are highly instructive” (119-120). Think about this in relationship
to the Bauhaus documents we have read.
6 How does Benjamin describe the political implications of the changes that
he’s
analyzing? How does “fascism” propose to harness the forces he points
to? What does he mean by the “aestheticizing of political life” (121-122)?
What is the alternative he holds out?