SO427 - week 3

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These are my notes from January 22 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.

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Adorno 2

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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