SO427: Modern Social Thought

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These are my notes for SO427 at the London School of Economics for the 2017-2018 school year. I took this module as part of the one-year Inequalities and Social Science MSc program.

The usual disclaimer: all notes are my personal impressions and do not necessarily reflect the view of the lecturer.

This is the critical theory class to take at LSE, covering Adorno, Benjamin, Foucault, and Baudrillard. Highly recommended for theory fans. There's no auditing—you'll have to actually take it, so make sure to submit a good statement to maximise your chances of getting in. It's definitely a lot of work, but it's a very autonomous and creative type of work, with great readings and a free-form essay on a topic of your choice (no group projects).

Essays

I wrote two essays for this class: one formative (not assessed), and one summative (assessed). For the formative, I wrote a 2,500 word response paper to Adorno's Theses Against Occultism (mark: 77). For the summative, I wrote a 5,000 word essay on The Matrix drawing on Adorno and Baudrillard (mark: a slightly disappointing 65, though I don't disagree with the feedback).

Lecture notes

1. Introductory seminar (January 09)
2. Adorno 1 (January 16)
3. Adorno 2 (January 22)
4. Benjamin 1 (January 29)

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Introductory seminar - week 1

I wasn’t signed up for the course at the time so I missed this one, but it was just an introduction to the four thinkers (Adorno, Benjamin, Foucault and Baudrillard). No readings.

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Adorno 1 - week 2

I received my offer for this class ~2 hours before the seminar was scheduled to start, while I was still at home, so I had to speed through the readings which, I must say, is not really a good idea for anything written by Adorno. I finished the last few pages of the second reading on the train. Accordingly, my notes aren’t so great (mostly just quotes). I shudder to imagine what Adorno would think of that.

(Note: although it’s a 3-hour seminar, with no scheduled demarcation between “lecture” and “seminar”, the first half of the seminar consisted of the prof delivering a quasi-lecture (no slides) summarising the readings, with only a bit of class discussion, so I’ve split my notes up accordingly into the standard Lecture and Seminar sections.)

Readings

Society

From 1969. An essay on the concept of ‘society’, building on Durkheim and Weber. There’s a summary of it here.

Some good quotes and notes I thought worth saving (I need to get these into Bookmarker ASAP)

• “[…] while the notion of society may not be deduced from any individual facts, nor on the other hand be apprehended as an individual fact itself, there is nonetheless no social fact which is not determined by society as a whole. Society appears as a whole behind each concrete social situation. Conflicts such as the characteristic ones between manager and employees are not some ultimate reality that is wholly comprehensible without reference to anything outside itself. They are rather the symptoms of deeper antagonisms. Yet one cannot subsume individual conflicts under those larger phenomena as the specific to the general […]” (p145)
• the concept of wage satisfaction depends on a much larger system than what’s visible in a given factory (p145)
• “[…] Behind the reduction of men to agents and bearers of exchange value lies the domination of men over men. […] The form of the total system requires everyone to respect the law of exchange if he does not wish to be destroyed, irrespective of whether profit is his subjective motivation or not.” (p148-149)
• “[…] The older theory of imperialism already pointed out the functional relationship between the economies of the advanced capitalistic countries and those of the non-capitalistic areas, as they were then called. The two were not merely juxtaposed, each maintained the other in existence.[…]” (p149)
• “[…] technical advancement is therefore only a moment in the dialectic between the forces of production and the relations of production, and not some third thing, demonically self-sufficient […]” (p151)
• “Inasmuch as these massive social forces and institutions were once human ones, are essentially the reified work of living human beings […]” (p151)
• “[…] The culture industry sprang from the profit-making tendency of capital. It developed under the law of the market, the obligation to adapt your consumers to your goods, and then, by a dialectical reversal, ended up having the result of solidifying the existing forms of consciousness and the intellectual status quo. […]” (p152)
• “[…] Men must act in order to change the present petrified conditions of existence, but the latter have left their mark so deeply on people, have deprived them of so much of their life and individuation, that they scarcely seem capable of the spontaneity necessary to do so […]” (p153)

Is Marx obsolete?

Originally delivered in 1968 as a conference presentation titled “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?” (PDF). My notes are pretty scattered and I would recommend reading the original if you want the full Adorno experience in any case.

• the question he’s considering here: has industrialism, as a mode of production, changed/outmoded the concept of capitalism itself?
• falling rates of profit have led to efforts to stave of the collapse of capitalism on a system-immanent level
• conflict between class definition based on social stratification (lifestyle, income, education) and control over the means of production
• dialectical theory of society: structural laws (historical tendencies), which would include Marxist concepts like value, accumulation, and economic crises
• p2, he uses the term thema probardum which means “fact needing to be proved” (Latin I assume)
• “Reified consciousness does not end where the concept of reification has a place of honour” (p2)
  • an excellent quote on sociology being considered a science in the Soviet Union
• class consciousness has fallen and along with it any clear differences between classes
  • (my take: we’re seeing the rise of class liminality, which is a phrase I just made up and probably makes no sense, through the ever-widening “middle class”)
  • less immiseration; more bourgeois integration
  • less solidarity
  • and it’s obviously worrying because only with enough class consciousness do you have any historical agency (acc to Marx)
• on the difficulty of explaining contemporary society with theoyr
  • “the economic process continues to perpetuate domination over human beings” (p4)
  • describes Nietzsche as being “all herd and no shepherd” lol
• contemporary society is industrial according to the level of productive forces (p5), which extends into the cultural realm
  • the relations of production, on the other hand, are capitalistic
  • humans are appendages of machines
  • “use-values are tending to dissolve” (p5) (me: exchange-value has subsumed use-value?)
  • concealed visibility of poverty in advanced nations, as instead we live in an “affluent society” (I think this term is most obviously associated with Galbraith’s 1958 book but I’m not sure)
• static aspects of contemporary society
  • relations of production are now a property of the administration, not of owners of the means of productions
  • “Inside the dominant relations of production, humanity is virtually its own reserve army” (p6) holy shit
• productive forces and relations are not polar opposites; they’re delimited by each other, but also contain the other
  • productive forces are mediated/governed by relations (me: which leads to artificial scarcity? that’s when they become fetters)
  • economic crises are needed to maintain relations of production (p8)
  • an “inordinate share of the social production” is devoted to producing “means of destruction” (i.e., enforcing scarcity to maintain the distribution of power)
• on the Soviet Union
  • “out of the unfettering of the forces of production emerge renewed fetters”; “production became its own end”
• relations of production dominate human beings, and that itself necessitates new, matured forces of production
  • we can only say the relations are not fetters if the horizon is total annihilation (p8)
• on the contradictory nature of state interference: is it system-immanent or not? (unclear what he’s saying here)
  • “that which is alien to the system reveals itself to be the inner essence” (p9) (there’s also a good use of “telos” on this page)
  • “No truly total subject of society yet exists” (p10) (on the totality, or otherwise, of the exchange principle)
  • “technological veil” (p10). think about who benefits from current relations of production

Lecture

Introduction

• the readings are deliberately open and reflexive, hard to pin down, so don’t be disappointed if you’re not quite sure what they’re saying
  • there’s an intentional confusion and uncertainty in these readings as a result of the nature of these thinkers’ critical (and sometimes contradictory) project
  • don’t be misled by a sense of false finality in secondary sources
  • don’t try to fix things or come to triumphant conclusions too early
• why do we do Adorno first, when he wasn’t necessarily the first chronologically (as Benjamin was born earlier?)
  • Adorno was the more senior figure (director of IFS), whereas Benjamin was an itinerant figure only on the margins of the Frankfurt School
  • and yet, Benjamin asked certain fundamental questions well ahead of Adorno
  • otoh, their projects are very different, and Adorno is more familiar ground for sociology students
• some key concepts for Adorno
  • society (a term he thinks problematic) & social fact
  • social mediation (basically everything is socially mediated)
  • negative dialectics (his approach to philosophy)
  • authoritarianism, especially as it intersects with capitalism (most vividly expressed in his writing on the Holocaust … his writing on astrology fits in here as well)
  • the culture industry (on the mass-production of entertainment, esp film and music. astrology fits in here too, as an example of “occultism”)
• we have to remember that the historical context in which Adorno began writing was irretrievably entwined with the rise of fascism * he had an interesting freudian take on fascist propaganda, on how leaders like hitler and mussolini portray themselves as both very strong and powerful and yet like an ordinary man
  • a lot of his writing was him trying to account for the capitalism around him in the 20s/30s in germany, which seemed like it was becoming increasingly monopolistic

Adorno and Marx

• the sociological aspect that was interesting for adorno was presence of strong authoritarian regime (strong state) as well as a sophisticated advanced media/culture industry (tv, music etc) which was not typically accounted for in standard marxist theory
• theories of the state are somewhat missing in marx (hence why lenin, rosa luxembourg focused on imperialism)
• we should keep in mind the evolution of capitalism between marx’s time and adorno’s time
  • in marx’s time, it was mostly competition-based with very little state involvement
  • as a result, marx predicted increasing centralisation of capital (via monopolistic firms)
  • simultaneously, he predicted, the working class would be more impoverished and homogeneous, as the proletariat became more immiserated and less able to differentiate based on skill due to mechanisation
• the q: is a strong state necessary for this? esp with the imperial aspect (colonising new markets—spatial fix) which marx talks about in communist manifesto
• within the Frankfurt School there was a schism: those who thought capitalism was changing so much you had to throw marx away, vs those who still believed in marx (eg adorno on is marx obsolete today, the second reading above)
• we should remember that adorno is fundamentally a marxist and sociologist, not some kind of “superannuated philosopher”
  • adorno’s worldview derives from a marxian understanding of capitalism, and never really strays from that at least on the level of theory (he wants to add to/amend marx, not disregard him)

On social mediation and the Holocaust

• there is no epistemology divorced from the society in which one’s knowledge is produced.
  • “there is nothing under the sun, and I mean absolutely nothing, which, in being mediated through human intelligence and human thought, is not also socially mediated” (quote from Introduction to Sociology)
• the Holocaust is thus not an abberation
  • (my thoughts: it’s immanent to the society that produced it? idk if that makes sense here)
  • it can be seen as a product of the enlightenment, whose true promise was aborted due to embroilment in capitalism
  • in other words, the Holocaust was not irrational; it can be wholly consistent with rational thought
• Zygmunt Bauman (a couple of decades older than Adorno) wrote something similar on modernity and the Holocaust
  • for Bauman, it’s the archetypal feat of modernity
  • after all, it was a huge organisational endeavour that depended on modernity (management, lists, machinery, logistics, transport)
• Adorno’s reasoning is in a similar vein but less focused on the mechanics of the Holocaust
  • for Adorno, what’s more important is the “psychosocial configuration” which made genocide feel inevitable, natural, right
  • he points out that genocide was considered scientific and rational (i.e., consistent with our world system) and thus, if we want to avoid it in the future, we have to be vigilant about it, and study other societies (hence his shift to focusing on the US, though you could argue that it was less a “rational” decision and more a product of his social circumstances … there’s something recursive there but I’m not going to belabour that point)
  • (my thoughts: this fits in with of that much-maligned Slavoj Žižek quote on Hitler not being violent enough, which could certainly be interpreted as a really suspect moral judgment, which I interpreted as an entirely reasonable claim that Hitler’s whole plan was reactionary and meant to keep the system working as-is)

On rationarlity

• where Adorno might be considered to break with Marx is in Marx’s embrace of rationality
  • Marx considers his argument to be based on empirical evidence and reason
  • whereas Adorno problematises positivism and the very idea of getting material evidence
  • using reason to see through the veil, as Marx does, is a very normative way of plucking out exploitation by thinking of equality and lack of domination as ideal
  • whereas adorno abandons the rationality implicit in Marx cus it cant be trusted (see section on the Holocaust above)
  • we can’t grasp at axiomatic laws
  • he throws away the teleogical aspect of marx’s theory (the idea that capitalism leads to its own destruction in the log run) since you cant rely on “reason”
• so what you’re left, and what pervades all of Adorno’s work, is a relentless critiqe of present reality (negative dialectics)
  • building on Kant’s idea of a categorical imperative, he instead labours under a negative categorical imperative to prevent something from happening (i.e., genocide—you can see quite clearly how his own social circumstances affected his thinking)
  • copy editors would have terrible time with adorno
    • he uses double negatives all over the place (see the “nothing under the sun” quote)
    • but you can’t collapse that to a positive—it feels too trite and like everything Adorno would have wante dto avoid
    • we can see it as a literary device (essentially reading Adorno as literature, which I hadn’t really considered as a possibility before but which now seems so obvious)
    • the double negative tells us we need to constantly exercise vigilance of our thinking and interrogate what we believe. constant critique
• we’re stuck in a framework of rational thought, which is both our savior and our captor (exit of the cage are the same as the bars)

On sociology

• his definition of sociology (from the Society reading, which was originally a lecture given to a first year undergrad course, no less) is that it’s about understanding what society is vs what it ought to be
  • “It ought to be the task of sociology today to comprehend the incomprehensible, the advance of human beings into the inhuman.” (p147)
  • his view on sociology is a riff on durkheim: a critical look at what society purports to be or thinks of itself as, vs what it actually is
  • thus its job is to interrogate perceived wisdom and question representations of social reality
  • (me: does this link to baudrillard’s idea of a simulacrum, i.e., a copy depicting something that no longer or never had an original?)
• he has a quote “what is the case” (not sure from where), which links to early wittgenstein (Tractatus) and also builds on Kant
  • (site note for the wittgenstein thing that I thought was great: in the end of the preface for Tractacus, Wittgenstein writes that having discovered all the underlying laws etc of philosophy he realises how empty and pointless it all is. paraphrasing here obviously)
• so what does society purport to be?
  • one way to find out is by looking at the categories we use in everyday life, gender race etc (typification, as Simmel might say)
  • there’s an ever-present danger that the categories will become reified, and thus turn into unyielding boxes that become modes of domination/oppression/exclusion
  • Adorno’s criticism of categories is, again, easy to link to his personal historical circumstances: the idea of “the Jew” as a category is what allowed the Holocaust to occur
  • we can think of classification as a form of cognitive violence (me: imposing lines on something fluid, taking a spectrum and converting it into a binary?)
  • categories are never harmless even if they initially try to be
  • (me: they will always drift?)
  • (also me: can you abolish categories by proliferating them, with the multiplicity of categories as a vanishing mediator for the complete absence of categories? idk just a thought)
  • in Minima Moralia he talks about remaindering, symbolic violence (illustrated through horoscopes)
  • he argues we should reject the link between identity and categories—there’s a danger of “identity thinking” whereby we assume the world aligns nicely with the socially-constructed categories we use
• on contradiction and uncertainty within the field of sociology
  • there’s something fundamentally fake about trying to produce a non-contradictory picture of the world when the world itself is contradictory
• on his weird dance wih rational thought
  • adorno says we need it but cant be enlaved by it, have to resist letting it lead us where it wants

Seminar

A discussion of the readings. The second (Is Marx obsolete?) is the more straightforward one; the first, though less clear, is probably more important to the field of sociology.

Society

• highlights the contrast between a positivist sociology, which objectifies society, and a critical sociolgy which treats it as subject
• he’s building on weber, who gives more credence to an agent-centered approach (individuals can understand the world)
  • whereas Durkheim is more structural? (not sure, haven’t read Durkheim yet)
  • in this piece, Adorno is navigating in between their views
• a sidebar in which we discuss the difficulty of this text (and Adorno’s texts in general)
  • prof: we can think of a text as if it’s a political regime (a fascinating idea to which we can connect an anecdote from Derrida’s Spectres of Marx in which he suggests that the best translation of perestroika is, in fact, deconstruction)
  • Adorno’s texts are hermetic, resist classification, and avoid giving you easy answers or a feeling of satisfaction
  • Adorno would loathes the idea that anyone would read a text simply for insight, attempting to gleam knowledge in an untroubled and pure manner
  • the idea that you can “get” something with any certainty (knowing wink), with a sense of finality and conclusion and comfort in knowing that you’ve gotten to the bottom of something
  • (my thought: he’s saying that with social theory, the only accurate map is the territory?)
• quote from p145: “The whole survives only through the unity of the functions which its members fulfill. Each individual without exception must take some function on himself in order to prolong his existence; indeed, while his function lasts, he is taught to express his gratitude for it.”
  • in other words: you must take on some socially proscribed role in order to just not die, and you must be grateful for it
  • on weber and durkheim: the fact that sociology cant reconcile them is symbolic of irreconciliability immanent to society as a whole
    • it’s not just a scholarly/academic debate
    • relates to structural agency dilemma
    • the theory problem is an epiphemonenon of a problem within society, manifestation of a deeper tension within social existence
• another sidebar on the build-up of sentences within Adorno
  • each individual sentence makes sense but when you consider a set of sentences together, it becomes oblique
  • we can once again read this as literature and treat this phenomenon as reflective of society
  • you can’t just look at the individual sentences in unison; the whole is more than the sum of its parts
  • and what’s more, there is no proferred whole; you have to build it yourself (Adorno’s not just going to give you an easy answer)
  • he frequently omits the expected logical connectors between sentences, which we can read in light of his critique of logic as a principle
  • social reality is fraught with contradictions, tensions, (me: and aporiae! feels apt here), so why resolve that on the page?
  • you end up with a much more profound and meaningful reading experience which may not be time-efficient but it’s good for your soul

Is Marx obsolete?

• he differentiates between industrialism (at the level of productive forces) and capitalism (referring to the relations of production)
• he was writing at at time when class consciousness was low
  • it’s worse now, but even at the time of writing, people were starting to identify more as consumers than as labourers
• technology would produce affluence for everyone through producing more material goods, beyond subsistence level (Marcuse says this, kinda contrasts with adorno)
• recall the subtext of this piece: it was written at a time of massive student protests in Germany which Adorno deliberately eschewed association with; here, he’s basically saying that he’s still an orthodox marxist etc
• what we should take away from adorno: why he thought it was dangerous to reach a positive solution, conclusion about what we should do
• what is so bad about capitalism? why is it such a misery?
  • (me: the “means of destruction” quote is part of it, it’s inefficient and wasteful)
  • perhaps more importantly to adorno: it leaves you powerless and dependent on the structures that reinforce that
    • not only are we victims of a society that forces us to do things we dont want to do, but we’ve been persuaded into thinking that we consent, willing slaves
    • (me: the prof used the term “willing slaves”, which I mostly know as part of the title for Frédéric Lordon’s book Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire. not sure if “willing slaves” is a common phrase that I just don’t know the source for or if Spinoza is actually relevant to Adorno’s thinking. didn’t get a chance to ask unfortunately).
    • we use things like horoscopes to convince ourselves that there’s a greater world, false hope (I always find the thing about horoscopes funny, given the outsized place they occupy in his thinking—another instance of socially mediated epistemology I guess, since he was in LA at the time)
• another thing to remember: adorno has no faith in social revolution
  • if he believes that capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction, it’s only on the level of productive forces
  • protests, sit-ins etc, which may make you feel good—and they do—dont actually make a difference, according to Adorno
  • this is where he veers away from Marx
  • remember that he’s writing at a time when the shadow of the Soviet Union is hanging over the Marxist academic world
  • in that context, his constant mention of “left fascism” etc makes more sense
  • quote from adorno: the culture industry works like psychoanalysis in reverse?? not sure what this is supposed to mean. inculculating psychological hang-ups and beliefs into us?
• the overwhelming bleakness and lack of optimism within Adorno
  • there are moments when the spell (of society) can be broken, when we are shown glimpses of a baser reality, but these are only ever fleeting moments
  • and the prof would not characterise those as optimism

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Adorno 2 - week 3

Readings

The Stars Down to Earth

It’s a book mostly about the LA Times astrology & written when Adorno was in LA. The passages we needed to read are:

• The Stars Down to Earth: The Los Angeles Times Astrology Column (select sections)
  • Introduction (p46-56)
  • The Bi-Phasic Approach (p89-97)
  • Work and Pleasure (p97-105)
  • Adjustment and Individuality (p105-128)
  • Ruggedness and Dependence (p128-133)
• Theses against Occultism (p172-180)

My notes are in Bookmarker.

The Culture Industry (PDF)

From Dialectic of Enlightenment. Additional reading.

Lecture and seminar

• on the occultism text, by the end you feel like you’re being smothered by a hegelian blanket
  • there’s no easy way around this text
  • you’ve got to suffer, if you’re not suffering you’re not really reading
• this week: on adorno as preoccupied by culture industry, and ideas of authoritarian irrationalism
  • when he writes about astrology and occultism he is, on some level, writing about hegel as well in a vitriolic way
  • philosophy as both tool and target of his critique
  • on one level he’s trivialising hegel; on another, using hegel as a ballast to capitalist society and reification

On the Frankfurt School generally

• on frankfurt school, if there’s a division
  • orthodox marxists like adorno vs others (psychologists like fromm)
  • but in general, capitalism, political processes, psychoanalysis (lots of freud, all over frankfurt school “like a rash”)
  • freud gives them a way to talk about consciousness but also the unconscious
  • one of the ways we can understand why the marxist project didn’t bear fruit is by looking at freudian concepts like repression, pschological blockage (on the level of workers i guess? not capitalism itself)
  • capitalism sustains itself by generating artificial “needs” among workers which prevent them fulfilling potential “sublimation” (so FS thinkers use lang of psychotherapy)

On the culture industry

• the culture industry as the psychological arm of capitalism
  • authoritarian capitalism requires and inculcates infantilism in its workers
  • connection between adorno and baudrillard here, need as artificially instilled, empty signifier, there is no base “need” only artificial ones
    • which makes marx’s theory of value fall apart (or at least it has to be modified)
  • occultism plays a role in the reification of society (what society purports to be) whereas “what is the case” refers to underlying stuff that’s going on
  • post-industrialism etc is an epiphenomenon, just surface level, still a manifestation of capitalism

On rationality

• adorno is not antirational
  • there is something about rationality itself which is a product of capitalism
  • authoritarian capitalism is a miscarriage of rationality and promise of enlightenment
  • but he is not saying that rationality is the enemy (which is closer to what you’d find in benjamin, with his mysticism)
  • on weberian rationality, which marcuse draws on, enables a sort of fatalism when you look at history
  • they want to deepen our understanding of rationality and also detach it from a telos (a project that habermas builds on in his communicative rationality thing)

On critical theory

• horkheimer essay “traditional or critical theory”
  • leverage, theorist trying to open up a gap between reality in its appearance & the mechanisms actually going on behind it
  • recall that FS thinkers mostly drop the teleological aspect of Marx (to varying degrees)
    • marcuse: replaces it with FALC basically, technological progress unleashes drives that are repressed
    • benjamin: progression not as a logical sequential thing but instead as an anomaly, a capital-e Event, infused with jewish mysticism
    • nothing like that in adorno though

On commodity fetishism

giving something power it does not possess, the idea that commodities have immanent value as opposed to only being valuable because of this system of exchange (originating from labour, acc to Marx), within social relations

On Civilisation and Its Discontents

• on freud’s most sociological text (civ and its discontents), this idea of collective repression
• “popper would go crazy at this” the more we protest the more we prove it “true”
• his ideas of collective repression & pursuing false needs are both crucial to critical theory

On knowing

• on how we know that we’re being sold to
  • we treat it with an air of ironic detchent
  • but adorno would say that even if you know it you still buy into it
  • people know they’re getting conned but somehow they get pleasure out of it
  • quote from Slavoj Žižek (mentined in Capitalist Realism): “[…] today’s society must appear post-ideological: the prevailing ideology is that of cynicism; people no longer believe in ideological truth; they do not take ideological propositions seriously. […] the structural power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them.”

On authoritarian personalities

• recall that adorno tho theoretically a sociologist is v skeptical of the whole sociological project but especially empirical research
• so it’s kinda weird that he does this authoritarian project with even questionnaires (putting people on a couch and playing gotcha with them)
• and the astrology stuff is weird too cus of all the qualitative textual analysis
• look at the set of social structures with interact with personality traits, closest thing they can get to why fascism ascended in germany & try to understand if it can happen elsewhere (and what you can do about it)
• the big q is whether authoritarian cap is an anomaly or a stage of the world-spirit’s path, you cant answer that without looking at personality

On immanent critique

• on adorno being constantly negative, eg stravinsky
• it’s always an immanent critique
• and yet the question we have to ask is: does he ever get outside? how is he speaking from a position of authority
• there’s no idea of death of the author here (where the author is adorno? idk) all of his stuff is personal responses

On occultism

• occultism etymologically: hidden meanings
• so the putting of the “ism” at the end is emphasising how ideological it is (in a very tendentious way)
• secondary superstition: ignoring the natural world and instead receiving wisdom from above
• on the alignment of planets determining your inner being, me: why planets? cus they seem so big, physically important and trustworthy
• a little like psychoanalysis, telling you how you’re repressed etc
• where is the occultism? where is the ideology that he rails against in these theses?
  • on the biphasic approach, allowing you to be two things at the same time by staggering them
  • ideological maneauver to tease out contradictions in our lives
  • pleasure itself becomes work (think situationists living for holidays but that holiday is itself part of work)
  • management books as astrology for business people as a way of avoiding ultimate questions about why you should do it in the first place

Theses on Occultism

• in the first few sentences: unconditional/conditional? conditional being the misery of everyday life, unconditional being the truth, outside, the world beyond
• why are people interested in higher powers and bigger answers? giving away to a higher power, abdicating the self, wanting to be connected to a greater cosmos despite your miserable little life
  • dodd says adorno says this need for (essentially theodicy) is not immanent, it’s instilled in us by society
  • if we’ve lost the power, then when did we have it? what’s the diff between earlier religion etc
  • adorno sees earlier religion as actually having a function, a purpose, whereas astrology has no meaning, just empty at its core (me: connect to postmodernism lack of grand narrative). they were connected in some way to science, understanding the world around us
  • whereas astrology has no such purpose; it’s artificial, not conected to anything else, that’s why it’s so monstrous, now we have alternatives but astrology is discarding it, plus it’s associated with all these charts (paraphernalia, scientificty about it)
  • ultimately it’s about fear of insignificant death, not mattering in the grand scheme of things
• 2: and part of the reason we turn to astrology is cus of commodification, surrounded by reified commodities “world congealed into products” so good
  • both natural and supernatural, natural cus it’s been reified feels like part of nature, supernatural cus it’s totalising?
• 3: magic is the only escape, and yet it’s pathetic because we dont realise that’s what it is
  • the toy models, talking about those who run the global capitalist order obvs cus it connects to the official directives thing. microcosm of capitalism itself. more specifically, key people in the culture industry
  • otoh these key people aren’t acting with any agency, dont care about the mentality of these people, it’s about the function they fulfil
  • subtext here is that horoscopes are not so outlandish after all, just another piece in the capitalist engine, as mundane as double-entry bookkeeping
  • me: capitalism is so totalising that this form of escape putative form of escape, is just another tool, absorbed. revealing nothing of what is outside, maybe there is no outside, or at least we can’t get to it
  • he’s not just dismissing occultism as irrational or silly, he’s saying it’s core to society
• 4: desire to abracadabra is consequence of alienation other same of the same coin, trying to find meaning in something that has deliberately been stripped of meaning and you know that, so we find it instead in BS ceremonies, assuming there’s some hidden magic behind them
  • mundus intellegibis is about rendering the world sensible, meaningful, understanding how it all works
  • we are dominating ourselves, we are doing this to ourselves
• 5: “transferring that whole to something similar but external”
  • blaming the other similar to antisemitism, that’s one of those sentences that can apply equally well to fascism as astrology. fascism is always premised on finding an other that can explain everything, hidden meaning (link back to occultism)
  • on how reading adorno eventually starts to feel like conspiracy theories, whereas the diff is that we at least are aware of it, plus it’s immanent, unlike hitler/trump there’s no other to blame it’s literally us
  • at the same time, that’s kinda just how it is, it’s one of the most basic things in sociology, that there are hidden mechanisms and we dont understand all of that which is going on and never could cus it’s deliberately obscured
  • can complement this with arendt’s explanation on totalitarianism, subject framed by violence, whereas for adorno it’s commodities, which may be a weakness in adorno cus he assumes a homogeneous subject
• 9: occultism takes everything in hegelian philosophy and exaggerates it, maybe distorts it? weird argument, he’s kinda critiquing hegel at the same time

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Benjamin 1 - week 4

Readings

Theological-Political Fragment

Best lines

Therefore the Kingdom of God is not the telos of the historical dynamic: it cannot be set as a goal.

but just as a force can, through acting, increase another that is acting in the opposite direction, so the order of the profane assists, through being profane, the coming of the Messianic Kingdom.

this totally feels accelerationist but maybe that’s just cus i have an accelerationist hammer so everything looks like a nail etc

The Arcades Project (p456-488)

On the theory of knowledge, theory of progress

Theses on the Philosophy of History

from illuminations

• links to the force-opposite-force thing in the first reading. historical materialism as a counter-agent (making fun of it?)
• empathy with the victors
• “There has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism.” (7)
• 8: emergency situation is the norm
• 9: progress and the angel
• 14: “leap into the open sky of history”

Lecture/seminar

• on benjamin as critic, gap between knowledge (as a pursuit) and truth (as a revelation, not attainable in the episteme in which we’re operating, cannot be “pursued” as such, outside our control)
• alienation experienced as fragmentation esp linguistically
• reaches for theological ideas to understand language which seems to be fundamental in his work
• with the arcades project, there’s a perfect moment where you perceive a sense of completeness, wholeness and unity
  • making something out of the fragments (of debris, quotes etc) reminds me of Salvage
  • same thing he’s doing with the mourning plays, break down to build up a more truthful whole?
  • arcades project is 19th ct history, but really pre-history (in an epistemological sense), debris to link to greater whole
  • gives us the opportunity to see things in a different way
• on his fascination with images
  • if he were to present his biography it would be as a series of postcards
  • quotes in the arcades project meant as image citations
• benjamin’s perspective on history: if we were to think of it through heroes, victors etc it’s problmeatic
  • contributes to a mistaken understanding of it as sequential and additive and progressive
  • (strongly connects with foucault here)
  • lets us think we’re at the pinnacle, gives us a certain status/role in relation to history
  • links to goethe’s understanding of nature: cant break it down, look at it holistically instead
  • in the arcades project, benjamin is doing to history what the cameraman does to reality (cutting it up)
  • some systematic arrangement, not arbitrary order; instead, a montage
  • meant to affirm our connection to the past which has been lost in contemporary capitalism
  • remember that on the concept of history was written in response to the hitler-stalin pact, in a rage
  • they are citations not quotations
    • what does it mean to cite?
    • quote from on the concept of history: “The French revolution thought of itself as a latter day Rome. It cited ancient Rome exactly the way fashion cites a past costume.”
    • also: “Said another way: only for a resurrected humanity would its past, in each of its moments, be citable.”
    • to reference, to redeem
    • in a legal sense: when you’re being accused of something (called to judgement)
    • so when you’re citing history you’re both referencing it and calling it to judgment, the last judgment
    • ripping out of context another important sense. in one-way street, he likens citation to robbery, mugging, destructive
  • so the arcades project is a montage of time itself, subjecting it to the gaze of the cameraman in order to judge it
  • he’s attacking the future-orientation aspect of various ways of looking at history (marxist, hegelian, etc)
    • our debt is to the past not to the future
    • specifically, germans accomodating hitler cus they were looking toward the future
    • “There is nothing which has corrupted the German working-class so much as the opinion that they were swimming with the tide”
  • on the concept of history written at a moment of despair/anger/hopelessness, but there’s a link between this and the arcades, similar methodological undercurrents
• on remembrance
  • connection to jewish idea of breaking of vessels, light of god put into vessels which broke cus they couldnt contain it
  • resulting fragmentation, which you rearrange? put them back together in a different way
  • we know this influenced him cus of conversations with scholem
  • also linked to his essay on proust, the way proust tries to uncover deep memory, not just about the past but now
  • his reading of proust: proust had the right idea but wrong aim (proust was despairing of the present, buried himself in the past)
    • whereas benjamin says that a deep connection wtih the past can reignite the present
    • basically there’s a strong connection between the present and the past (think robespierre and rome)
    • and yet we live in a perpetual present so we’ve lost idea of sense of role in history?
    • benjamin looking for connection to very distant past
    • so when he talks about remembrance it’s not just about memory but marking a connection between now and past
    • especially interested in ideas of days of remembrance (anniversaries, commemorations etc) which specifically connect now and a particular moment in the past
• on the concept of history
• 1: mechanical turk imagery
  • is he being sarcastic here? (yes seems like it)
  • also aligns with Hobsbawm’s critique of marxism (too mechanistic, like a machine)
  • but also links to opposite reaction thing (maybe he’s saying it doesn’t work except in a theological way)
  • puppet called “historical materialism” does he mean stalin’s version of it? attacking it here
• 2: something weird going on with the use of “happiness”
  • the “absence of envy” quote, turning us away from a future-oriented attitude?
  • basically saying that our acts now have an effect on the past retroactively?
• 3: “Indeed, the past would fully befall only a resurrected humanity” or alternatively “only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past”
  • ie an unalienated one, prelapsarian, theological element
  • past as monad?
  • is this a circular understanding of time? do we have to go back? my q. his answer: 14, “Origin is the goal” from karl krauss
    • links to the angel in 9 and also to the force opposite direction thing in the first reading
    • taps into a classic debate in jewish theology, whether it’s a circle, whether paradise is something we can go back to
    • also marxist ideas of communism have a resonance with christian ideas of paradise
  • link to judaic eschatology?
• 4: connection between material history and ideological/theological history
  • the rulers representing themselves as universal
  • benjmain criticising the idea of there being one people who are the deliverers of humanity
• 5: when he talks about recognisability does he mean our ability to recognise ourselves?
• 6: is there a real history, or is it always a tool
  • attacking the idea that you understand history by reconstructing the past, the moments, and also an empathetic understanding of what it was like to be a roman etc
  • interesting dichotomy between language and image, articulating the past, turning image into language, that’s when history becomes a tool of the ruling classes
• 7: historical materialist against the grain, empathy with the victor, also “sprawled underfoot”
  • “There has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism”
• 8: when nigel reads this he sees benjamin as an anarchist?
  • referring to martial law etc
  • resonance with adorno and schmitt’s state of exception
  • “The astonishment that the things we are experiencing in the 20th century are “still” possible is by no means philosophical. It is not the beginning of knowledge, unless it would be the knowledge that the conception of history on which it rests is untenable.” -> what does by “no means philosophical” mean?
  • one interpretation: against the progress-oriented view of the present
  • astonishment that arises is that our understanding of history is flawed
    • possibly another translation of astonishment (amazement in the other translation) is not right
    • maybe should link to plato, which he attributes to socrates, of awe/wonder as the origin of thinking
    • so maybe benjamin here is saying we need to move past wonder, cus it’s a tool of ruling classes
• 9: angel of history one, everyone loves this (maybe mistakenly so, lol; nigel caricatures this here)
  • “He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed.” -> reference to redemption here
  • angel comes from talmudic myth
  • an interesting take which is obvs not something benjamin knew about at the time: bombing of dresden angels?
• 10/11: critique of socdems, prepared to accomodate
• 12: echoes of lenin here who said that revolution cannot just be driven by sacrifice and looking toward the future
  • you also need hatred, pure hatred, which can only come from looking at the past
• 14: “homogenous and empty time” ->
  • cus disconnected from past?
  • empty vessel where you just fill it with your own meaning
  • or empty cus secular, lacking theological element, or acts of remembrance
  • think about the fashion thing more. is it a dig?
• 15: time-lapse camera, calendar associated with regularity of remembering historical moments compared to homogenous empty time of clocks (equalisation)
  • monuments of historical awareness
  • links to revolutionaries shooting clocks, not just stopping time but moving away from what they represent: an empty sense of time
• 16: “The historical materialist cannot do without the concept of a present which is not a transition, in which time originates and has come to a standstill”
  • what benjamin’s doing here has been described as “dialectics at a standstill”
  • time as a perpetual cycle links to baudrillard
• 17: “Historicism justifiably culminates in universal history.” -> links to what i was saying about objective history? (obvs benjamin is saying this is bad)
  • no dialectical method here, just adding facts etc to fill up this empty clock-based time
  • whereas by contrast HM offers a constructive principle, results in a fullness
  • from this you can derive the way he wants you to read the arcades project
  • bridge between theology and struggle: “the sign of a messianic zero-hour” aka “a revolutionary chance in the struggle for the suppressed past”
  • line: “He perceives it, in order to explode a specific epoch out of the homogenous course of history; thus exploding a specific life out of the epoch, or a specific work out of the life-work” -> up until here he treats history as social relations but here he treats it almost as artwork
• 18: translation issues over illuminations using cancelled (aufheben) instead of sublated
• A: history is posthumous

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