Beginning with the influential discussion of the dialectic of progress found in Amy Allen’s The End of Progress, this paper outlines some difficulties encountered by critical theories of normative justification drawing on the early Frankfurt School. Characterizing Adorno and Horkheimer’s critical social theory as a dialectical reflection eschewing questions of normative foundations, I relate their well-known treatment of the dialectic of enlightenment reason and myth to their critique of capitalist society as a negative totality. By exploring the concepts of historical (...) development used by Adorno and Horkheimer to describe both the progressive domination of capitalism, and the formation and cultivation of reflective consciousness, I trace the importance of progression and its inseparable relationship to regression in these early versions of critical theory. The dialectical social theory found here recognizes the persistence of social contradictions on both a methodological level and on the level of theory’s development and expression, a connection potentially obscured by a division of historical progress according to its temporal orientation. Particularly in Adorno’s later work, an opposition to the negative social totality requires notions of cultivation and learning which work against the prevailing forms of conceptual thinking, including the concern for the stability of rational foundations. (shrink)

In recent years, documentary formats have entered prominently into the realm of the culture industry, especially since Hollywood and Netflix started to invest in costly productions addressed to the mainstream. Many of these documentaries claim to show reality in its immediacy (“as it really is”), to reveal that which is obscured, or to critically assess societal evils. They use aesthetic strategies that reinforce the appearance of authenticity, while concealing the mediation of what they represent, and the authoritarian stances they presuppose. (...) This turns them into powerful instruments for diffusing authoritarian and populist ideologies. Their political impact on society, their performative power of opinion-shaping, and their subliminal influence on how we perceive and understand reality call urgently for critical assessment. Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of the culture industry, along with their philosophical, sociological, and aesthetic writings, provide a constructive starting point. This essay aims to mobilize their critical theory of society for the problematization of documentary films in terms of their dialectical relation to society. (shrink)

This paper argues that the diagnostic import of Adorno's culture industry writings lie in their psychoanalytically rooted claim that contemporary culture is losing its ability to negate and reconfigure experience, due to the modern subject's instrumentalized relationship to culture. Adorno uses psychoanalytic ideas—namely, modified and historicized versions of Freud's theory of the instincts, ego formation, the reality principle, and the superego—to show that changes in the social organization of the psyche, which track the transition from myth to enlightenment, put the (...) ego in a precarious position, torn between a primal fear of nature that drives it to submit to society, and internalized fear of its own internal nature, as well as of losing itself in society. This explains how culture becomes a resource capable of being mobilized by the ego's defense mechanisms of identification and introjection to shore up its own sense of solidity, thereby negating culture's potential for transcendence or transformation. This paper concludes with a coda that suggests that, while rejecting Adorno's metacritique of the reason is not sufficient grounds for rejecting the culture industry, critical theorists like Habermas and Honneth may have other tools at their disposal for contesting its conclusions. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article articulates the idea of a disclosing critique of society. It starts from the assumption that the curiously organicistic undertones of Adorno’s negative social ontology is part and parcel of a disclosing gesture in his social criticism. It then traces Adorno’s debate with social organicists to the point where the critical theorist’s own concept of society emerges with a claim to be critical in itself. It is argued that this critical claim is enforced by a disclosing gesture. To (...) articulate what is at stake in this gesture of critical disclosure a parallel is drawn, and contrast made, to Emerson’s conception of disclosure as “drawing a circle around a circle”. The relationship between Adorno’s and Emerson’s conceptions of critical disclosure is complex. However, their juxtaposition allows for a distinction between two directions of critical disclosure. It will be argued that disclosing critique of society can be understood as an exemplary dissociation from alienated society by means of a creative association of empirical knowledge, poetic description and philosophical speculation by a critic standing, as it were, with one foot inside and the other outside our form of life. (shrink)

Some 60 years separate us from Theodor W. Adorno’s “Theory of pseudo-culture.” Yet Adorno’s analysis might never have been as pertinent and as compelling as it is in the present moment. The dawn of the “post-truth” era, and the persistent impact of the culture industry on human sensibility and capacity for critical self-reflection, call for a return to Adorno’s critical theorisation of pseudo-culture. This paper revisits Adorno’s assessment of pseudo-culture and proposes a reconstruction of some of his most compelling arguments (...) on the subject in light of the present socio-historical circumstances. The paper starts with a concise discussion of the notions of Kultur, Bildung and Halbbildung in relation to Adorno’s thought. It then discusses the effects of pseudo-culture on human experience by looking into the role of opinions—in particular, what Adorno terms “delusional” opinions—in contemporary late capitalist reality. Finally, the paper ends with a juxtaposition of the barbarism of the banal and neoteric barbarism. I argue that, whereas the former stuns culture and impels it to regress to a state of pseudo-culture, the latter gives it new impetus by opening up new theoretical and practical paths. (shrink)

The theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Theodor Adorno both conceive culture as legitimating the inequalities of modern societies. But they postulate different mechanisms of legitimation. For Bourdieu, modern culture is a class culture, characterized by socially ranked symbolic differences among classes that make some seem superior to others. For Adorno, modern culture is a mass culture, characterized by a socially imposed symbolic unity that obscures class differences behind a facade of leveled democracy. In his later writings, however, Bourdieu’s theory converges (...) with that of Adorno. He too begins to privilege the high culture of intellectuals over mass culture by employing the universal standard of autonomy from economic interests. But there remains one vital difference between these theories. Bourdieu grounds the origins of a critical, autonomous culture in specific social structures, while Adorno grounds it in technology. (shrink)

This paper critically evaluates what it identifies as ‘the institutional theory of freedom’ developed within recent neo-Hegelian philosophy. While acknowledging the gains made against the Kantian theory of autonomy as detachment it is argued that the institutional theory ultimately undermines the very meaning of practical agency. By tying agency to institutionally sustained recognition it effectively excludes the exercise of practical reason geared toward emancipation from a settled normative order. Adorno's notion of autonomy as resistance is enlisted to develop an account (...) of practical reason that is neither institutionally constrained nor without appropriate consideration of the historical location of the practical agent. (shrink)

The early Twentieth Century satirist, Karl Kraus, set himself the goal of exposing all journalistic language and advertising for what they are: essential links in the social reproduction of the imperialist epoch. Charlie Brooker, creator of the television program Black Mirror and the documentary series How TV Ruined your Life, is virtually the only contemporary critic who takes up the task of Kraus’s destructive judgment against the impoverishment of language and experience. Taking its formal and analytic cue from Walter Benjamin’s (...) famous essay on Kraus, this essay traces the affinity and difference between the form and content of Kraus’s and Brooker’s social criticism and art. In presenting, for example, their respective methods of quotation, as well as the relationship between the “entertainment” of the twenty-four hour “news” stream and the false promise of participation in the bourgeois public sphere, the present form of domination comes to the fore in a new light. In order to grasp this form, that is, the completed or perfected illusion of the present composition of capital, Guy Debord’s conception of the “spectacle economy” is thought alongside T.W. Adorno’s conception of the “culture industry.”. (shrink)

We naturally tend to think of our own opinions as akin to the coins we carry around in our pockets, transferable and yet inalienable. We may share or alter them, yet in form they remain fundamentally our own, sacrosanct as registers of our very sense of self. Hegel was aware of this relationship between opinion and subjectivity, and regarded such a bond as one of the great accomplishments of modernity itself. Yet for Hegel, excessive estimation of inwardness comes at a (...) dangerous price. Truth reducible to subjective and arbitrary will, to caprice and without philosophical reflection, sets, in his view, a corrosive standard for ethics, politics and thinking itself. This essay will excavate from Hegel's corpus the conceptual groundwork for a critical theory of opinion relevant for the twenty-first century. The overall aim is to offer a holistic reading of Hegel's critique of opinion by drawing on both his early and late writings, tracking its appearance as an initial critique of subjectivism but subsequently developed in his political philosophy. We begin with Hegel's polemics during the Jena years and unearth opinion as an index for self-certitude. Second, we proceed to a focused analysis of Elements of the Philosophy of Right, paying particular attention to what Hegel describes as the contradiction of public opinion. Thirdly, Hegel's epistemological critique of opinion will be synthesized with his political critique of public opinion by returning to the category of certainty, not as a certainty found in an individual opinion, but a certainty in one's own subjective standpoint, while employing elements from Adorno's critique of epistemology. We will conclude by examining the contradiction of public opinion specifically in accordance with the historical conditions of civil society and therewith begin to situate the socio-epistemological problem of opinion as historically specific to capitalist society. (shrink)

The present social-historical moment is marked by a sharp divide, a harrowing ‘communication breakdown’ between subject and object, between humanity and nature, between humanity and itself. This state of affairs pleads for the (re-)elaboration of a consciousness that resonates critically with the social, political and cultural realities of its time. This paper studies the lessons that can be drawn in this regard from the intersection between, on the one hand, Theodor W. Adorno’s ‘philosophical interpretation’ and his idea of an historically (...) adequate consciousness, and, on the other, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s ‘philosophical hermeneutics’ and his conception of the historically effected consciousness. The paper opens with a concise reconstruction of Adorno’s ‘philosophical interpretation’ as a critical response to instrumental rationality that borrows insights from radical historicism. The focus then shifts to Gadamer’s ‘philosophical hermeneutics’ which is read as a similar type of protest against instrumental reason that privileges dialogical forms of enculturation. Finally, the paper closes with some suggestive yet inconclusive reflections on some important elements of convergence/divergence between the two thinkers, notably, their theorisations of immanent and transcended critique, the role they ascribe to tradition and language vis-à-vis experience, and the special place of ‘mimesis’ in it. Overall, the argument is made that a ‘negative hermeneutics’ may be what is needed to fashion new interpretations of the world, to foster alternative ways of thinking about and being in it, which, pace Marx, go hand in hand with its transformation – or, perhaps more aptly nowadays, the mere feat of sparing it. (shrink)

This paper examines the loss of culture as a possible effect of the neoliberalisation of education, especially higher education. The paper opens with a brief comparison between the humanistic education founded on the idea of culture and its modern-day neoliberal form, with the help of José Ortega y Gasset’s reflections on the mission of higher education. It then discusses certain aspects of the historical development of libraries and of the figure of the public intellectual with a view to bringing into (...) relief some negative repercussions that can, and already do affect the university. The paper also explores aspects of John Dewey’s and Theodor W. Adorno’s thoughts to draw lessons with respect to how experience and culture are not only essential components of education as a whole, but also elements of resilience amidst a series of contemporary challenges that threaten its purpose and meaning. The paper draws to a close with some suggestive yet inconclusive remarks on the promises inherent in existing and possible alternatives to the neoliberalised university. (shrink)

В статті здійснено корпусне, міждисциплінарне, емпіричне соціально-філософське дослідження можливостей актуалізації поняття та практики класової свідомості в метамодернізмі на основі чотирьох джерел: праць видатних західних філософів 1900-2023 рр. (5064 англомовних книжок і статей), праць Карла Маркса та Фрідріха Енгельса (43 томи), української соціологіні Олени Сімончук і дописів у Facebook-групі громадського руху українських медикінь «#БудьякНіна». Перші два джерела дозволили зрозуміти первинну логіку цього поняття, а також його філософську логіку та суперечливість на фоні історичного досвіду ХХ ст., тобто пов’язаних з ним трансформацій в (...) західному суспільстві та пролетарських революцій. Виявилося, що розум, однорідність і цілеспрямованість, які очікувалися в теорії від практики робітничого, революційного руху, проявив панівний клас, інтегрувавши робітничий клас на Заході, а на Сході, замість автентично пролетарських революцій, відродилися тиранія та відчуження від широких народних мас з боку професійних революціонерів, а згодом, й державно-партійної бюрократії. Втім, поняття класової свідомості лише частково можна вважати деактуалізованим, оскільки це поняття передбачає стадії розвитку класової свідомості. Два останніх джерела в нашому дослідженні дозволили продемонструвати, що в сучасних українських умовах можна говорити про сформованість 2-х стадій розвитку класової свідомості: розуміння власних інтересів і нерівності. Це створює можливості стверджувати, що метамодерністське перевідкриття історії, зокрема має відношення й до поняття та практики класової свідомості сучасних робітників, що дає надію на більш вдалий римейк емансипативного потенціалу марксистських ідей для розв’язання сучасної кризи капіталістичного людства у XXI cт. Підкреслимо, що дослідження було зроблено за допомогою використання корпусної лінгвістики, завдяки якій були проаналізовані великі обсяги текстів, як філософів, так й учасників руху «#БудьякНіна», що дозволило виділити головні контексти та фокус їхніх текстів, а також поставило усе дослідження на міцну емпіричну базу. (shrink)