/lit/ - Literature

>>21941727
Pretty funny that the culture industry is quite literally turning on the Frankfurt School at this level of its development, because the popular left has been entirely weened over to this capitalist kind of leftism, and intellectuals are entirely unnecessary to introduce leftist ideas now.

>>21941746
>culture industry
>wherein they proposed that popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods—films, radio programmes, magazines, etc.—that are used to manipulate mass society into passivity. Consumption of the easy pleasures of popular culture, made available by the mass communications media, renders people docile and content, no matter how difficult their economic circumstances. The inherent danger of the culture industry is the cultivation of false psychological needs that can only be met and satisfied by the products of capitalism; thus Adorno and Horkheimer especially perceived mass-produced culture as dangerous to the more technically and intellectually difficult high arts. In contrast, true psychological needs are freedom, creativity, and genuine happiness, which refer to an earlier demarcation of human needs, established by Herbert Marcuse
This sounds like it's directed at me
Is there a problem with being a docile and content cow? Are they asking me to be a revolutionary?

>>21941758
>Are they asking me to be a revolutionary?
they very clearly are

>>21941762
So these guys think that the working classes have been stupefied by the culture industry and therefore the cultural Marxists tried to wage war on the culture industry in order to create the conditions wherein the working classes will rise up against capitalism?
It seems like it makes sense to me if you're a Marxist, what is the real Marxist response to these 'pseudo-Marxist' ideas? Why does Daniel Morley hate it?

>>21941727
Negative dialectic is a good book with little political bs.

>>21941727
Begin with Horkheimer's paper "Traditional and Critical Theory". It might seem slightly banal to you, because its insights have mostly been adopted quite widely, but it is nonetheless necessary that you understand the fundamental antagonism of the Frankfurt school towards positivist ideology, as this fundamental antagonism still plays out today. While many contemporary thinkers influenced by the Frankfurt school are retarded, something so banally obvious that it is being propounded in mediocre youtube video essays, it is supremely important to realize that the positivist adversaries of these contemporary critical theory retards still exist, and are still completely fucking retarded, but that this is overlooked to dunk on the critical theorists instead. It is intellectually lazy and uninteresting to kick a crippled opponent, so do the proper groundwork if you want to be educated in the matter, regardless if you intend to be polemical or charitable towards the subject matter.

This paper is fairly accessible to people with passing familiarity with modern philosophy, i.e. western intellectual tradition post-Descartes.

What is your background? If you are already well-versed and adept in modern philosophy, you can then move on to Dialectic of Enlightenment, but be advised that it is a profoundly dense work that requires intimate knowledge of especially Kant and Hegel to be fully appreciated. It is nonetheless a work of very substantial genius, whether you agree with its fundamental impulses or not.

It deserves to be read more, because it is being completely misused by both its proponents and its adversaries. Nothing pisses me off more than seeing some /pol/nigger saying it is "le bad" because he read that on an infographic, when it is perhaps the most refined, cunning, intelligent and substantial critique of what the very same /pol/nigger will decry as "globohomo" ever penned. Nothing pisses me off when people who work in DEI in multinational corporations will lift a quote from it on their powerpoints on ideal corporate culture. It is profane and vulgar.

Adorno and Horkheimer can almost just as well be read as crypto-conservatives as radical leftists, which, again, is a testament to the substantial genius of the work.

If your background is a layman's, I would not advice Dialectic of Enlightenment. It is too obscure and presupposes too much prior knowledge. Something like Marcuse's "One-Dimensional Man" is the sparknotes version of critical theory, accessible to anyone. But know that this is also a perversion of the fundamental philosophical impulses, and agreement or disagreement with Marcuse says very little about your opinions on Horkheimer and Adorno, who are the ones who deserve the label the most.

>>21941758
>This sounds like it's directed at me
This board is saturated with Adornian ideology. The meme version of what you just quoted is "goyslop makes it acceptable to live in the pod".

Which is why I am so taken aback by the fact that Adorno is so widely derided here, and it really makes me appreciate how seething a hatred Nietzsche had for blind and default antisemitism. It's not even for moral reasons, it's because it's just so fucking stupid.

>>21941775
Good effortpost
Adorno is the man and his unpopularity here is a great example of /lit/ herd mentality

>>21941787
I take comfort in the fact that when most of you march left, I march right. I know I'm correct.

>>21941872
I just don't care for him because he's a crass materialist. not because he's a jew.

>just ignore Adorno carrying water for managerial bureaucracies because you agree with him on this thing.
Here we go again. If I wanted critical theory for the right, I would read Gottfried and Telos.

>>21941727
cultural war is much more of gramscian thing. i still don't get why people are putting frankfurt school in charge of it

I'd like someone to give me a factual explanation as to why every single german critical theorist from the original Frankfurt school is jewish. Only 0.1% of the german population is jewish and yet Marcuse, Adorno, Benjamin, Fromm, Horkheimer all are and at this point it's just ridiculous

>>21941908
jews are smarter than goyim

>guys he was le based if you ignore half his publications
Others tried this before. I'm not against picking and choosing, but don't act surprised if people here don't trust him.

>>21941908
Well, one contributing factor is the holocaust. Key figures fled to the US, where they found the culture industry in full swing. The dislocation of migration, the outsider's perspective and the sense of a catastrophic modernity all give impetus to key writings.
That's the second chapter. Not so sure about the first one (why so many Jews were part of this movement in Frankfurt in the first place) but it's probably not that hard to figure out.

>>21941914
This is honeslty something I could be led to believe. Jews have shown remarkable collective insight and their collective memeplex dasein is definitely fit to endure continuous existence in a neo-darwinian techno-capital world

>>21941908
>>21941914
>>21941932
>why only jews join anti-white jewish groups?
>it's because jews are le smarter
We can all see Israel's IQ. People compare high-class jewish IQ (European ashkenazi with the average non-jewish IQ. If you fell for this, it's because you're low IQ.

>>21941881
>he's a crass materialist
How on earth did you arrive at that conclusion?

>>21941944
Come on now every single critical theorist is a marxist materialist at heart and there's no denying it at this point. The whole thing is metaphysically compromised and retroactively refuted

>>21941775
thanks gpt

>>21941916
I'm not at all surprised.
As for picking and choosing, the gift of the Frankfurt School is a critical spirit, not any particular critical stance. So I have no problem disposing with half their publications while still finding them valuable and important. It's not like supporting a football team.

>>21941899
>I'm going to ignore great thinkers if I dislike parts of their reception and focus instead on mediocre ones
Good luck, have fun.

>>21941939
Don't know why you included (me) in this rant, I make no claims for Jewish intelligence

>>21941908
Why? What is the implication? Try to articulate a reason beyond jews are fundamentally bad. Try to engage with the thought of these thinkers, and point out how their jewishness permeates the work, and why it is cause for alarm.
"muh jews", it's just so god damn intellectually lazy.

>>21941956
All me, but good job demonstrating that the chatbot passes the Turing test, but you don't.

>>21941944
>>21941951
I'm defending Adorno in this thread, but anon is right that he's a materialist. The question is whether or not this makes him le bad.

>>21941951
>come on now
>there is no denying it
Not very compelling lad.
Adorno's entire shtick is Hegelian, and that crass materialism (whatever that is) is likely one of the primary divergences between Adorno and contemporary critical theory.

>>21941881
What is his materialist analysis of the Holocaust?

>>21941962
Adorno is mediocre, as well.

>>21941787
I feel like we probably wouldn't get along but you're funny so I like you. Cheers anon.
>>21941905
Probably because Adorno wrote retarded shit like the Authoritarian Personality etc., also because the early RW reaction against leftoidism was America-centric and had lot of dumb libertarian baggage, so any critique of capitalism was considered anathema.

>>21941965
Meant to quote the other retard below you, retard

>>21941914
I doubt that’s why most people dislike them. It’s their lack of a concrete moral foundation other than being well, immoral. There’s often a trade off between intelligence and morality. Usually the smarter you are the more of an absolute cretin you are. Usually. Not always. I’d rather be around stupid people who generally treat others with dignity than high IQ dirtbags.

>>21941944
Basically what this guy said > >>21941951

>>21941976
It makes him unable to assess conditions that escape anything verifiable or falsifiable that exist beyond the confines of natural science

>>21942044
Wrong materialism, buster

>>21942066
There aren't multiple types of materialism, you're just confused.

>>21941908
Because their entire "school" of thought is coping and seething due to the holocaust.

>>21941727
Go beyond and read Ellul.

>>21942181
Right, which is why I penned a short essay on poetry regarding them

>>21941968
>Why? What is the implication?
That it is not a coincidence that all these Frankfurt "intellectuals" were jews, for the same reason the German Revolution of 1919 was all Jewish (pic rel). Or that many of these movements and schools of thought that have been -- if you hold certain values -- incredibly harmful to European societies have almost always been hugely disproportionately or even majority Jewish.
>and point out how their jewishness permeates the work, and why it is cause for alarm
This was thoroughly done in Culture of Critique. Covering Marxism, Frankfurt School, Boas School of Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, even immigration policy etc.
>"muh jews"...
Animosity towards Jews, which comes to fruition in every single case there is a sizeable jewish population in a place, is not just pure coincidence. On top of what I said earlier, there is also their domination of the institutions of a nation, their sheer power and ethnic cohesion (through organizations like AIPAC and ADL). The Chosen People by Richard Lynn documents such domination of institutions such as media (though the book is meant more as praise, hence the title), with numbers historically ranging from 40-60%+ of major media institutions being Jewish across the West. Obviously Hollywood has always been overwhelmingly Jewish, but I am sure even you know that. Or for example lets look at Jewish power in elections within America (which runs the world by proxy, though that power is declining thankfully).
continued...

>>21941968
>>21942544
This sums it up nicely:
>Since the 1930s American Jews have been woven into the fabric of the American political landscape. From civil rights to women's rights, Jews have been on the frontier of liberal political movements, spearheading social reforms and shaping American policies from within. Jews in America are disproportionately wealthy, charitable and politically engaged, making them critical donors standing out both among wealthy donors and among more modest mass donors. In the 2016 presidential race the Jewish financial vote remains disproportionately important – with estimates that Jewish donors contribute 50 percent of the funds to the Democratic Party and 25 percent to the Republican Party.
https://rudermanfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Jewish-Vote-Ruderman-Program.pdf
There are many other reasons, but here is an appetizer. So behind "muh jews" is substance.

You only need Baudrillard, even if he's not a part of the school.

>>21942547
All of this is due to jews being over-represented in intellectual life in general, so that their jewishness supposedly becomes a noteworthy factor when it appears, since the antisemite has in advance singled them out. In truth, you could comprise a list of anglos or germans with untraditional ideas and litter it with "muh coincidence". Like, look at magick revival, a very antiwestern movement: it's all anglos. Or critical philosophy: that's actually Germans. You can say things about Jewish culture only inasmuch you retain perspective that you could point to various nefarious things with other powerful cultures as well, otherwise it becomes perceptually distorted, dumb antisemitism.

>>21941758
That just sounds like bread and circuses of old. Keep in mind that bread and circuses were a literal thing in ancient Rome. Emperors got suspsidised bread and or gran dole (Cura Annonae) for the plebs and of course could fund various games.

>>21942585
Yes, they are. But the default hypothesis, which is that, does not fully explain it. Using just IQ numbers (though ashkenazi jewish IQ has not been precisely nailed down, it is reasonable to estimate something around 110) one would expect them to be overrepresented in America by about 4-8x. In other words 10-18% of these professions where say 130 IQ was a filter. East Asians are also high IQ (and there are 1.6 billion of them, about 2x as many in America as there are Jews), and they don't behave in nearly the same way. Jews are subversive and destructive. And again Jewish ethnic cohesion is another element you are ignoring.
Then, simply, suppose IQ DID explain this overrepresntation, why should a nation allow themselves to be dominated by an alien peoples?

>>21941727
>>21942559
I can use this excerpt then, from a larger post.

adorno
>fuck jazz and movies the enlightenment is cringe AHHHHH NOT BOOBS IM GOING INSANEEEE
debord
>everything is fake bro (except communism lmao)
foucalt
>everything is a prison bro *dies of AIDS*
baudrilliard
>everything is a simulation created by capitalism bro except me I'm real lmao but not you
deleuze
>hierarchies bad rhizomes good just become-tranny to fight capitalism bro also schizos are actually based and freud is cringe
derrida
>this small flaw in language means nothing is real and all philosophy and science is cringe and fake pshhh nothin personell western civilization

>>21942613
I never said IQ, since IQ doesn't equal to intellectual engagement, which in turn doesn't equal destruction. It seems the message between the lines is that if you're not majority, you should not engage in intellectual debate and discussion and if you do, everything you say will be held against you much more than if the members of default group explore any sort of bold ideas. If the minority is to engage, they must not be bold and leave that to the majority. With such a requirement of humiliation and domination, you are hardly in a position to judge anyone.

>>21942637
It's not just intellectual engagement.
You ignored what I said about their power and influence for example through domination of cultural institutions, media, or financial clout in elections.

>>21942658
Again, why is their jewishness relevant here, since you can find anglos and other peoples dominating many cultural institutions too? All this shows that Jewish people are active in all areas of life, exceptionally for a minority. Nobody's trying to uphold an image of Jewry as a collective of saints, as the antisemite's dream opponent would: the question is, rather, why only in the case of Jews it must be formed into an overarching theory that includes everything any Jewish person will ever do, and which means intellectual engagement by jews will be interpreted only as conspiracy, but German philosophy or English pragmatism do not imply anything about ALL of them.

>>21941727
>>21941758
>Frankfurt School alleges that leftism has been largely absorbed into the hegemonic culture of capitalist countries and is no longer effective in externally producing change
>modern leftists don’t care about the Frankfurt School anymore because they’re all just libshits in denial in prominent positions of cultural power
Interesting

>>21941775
Great post.

Adorno was a brilliant thinker and perceptive incisive critic of modernity. His philosophies and critiques foresaw a lot of the challenges that we face today. He offers an innovative worldview and framework that seeks to move beyond the limits of Anglo positivism and empiricism and challenges the notion that they represent an objective truth based upon facts.

His negative dialectics applied Hegelian thought about the progression of history, evolution of ideas, contradictions and conflicts coming to a resolution which leads towards a pursuit of a higher truth and level of spiritual/social development, in a way that aimed to expose the limits and contradictions of Enlightenment concepts of rationality and show how they are used to justify oppression in societal systems. Similar to Marx he turned the Hegelian dialectic on its head to analyze society and history from a differing perspective. He claimed that the Enlightenment’s faith in reason and progress was an example of a negative dialectic had turned into its opposite: a form of irrationality and barbarism that subordinated nature, culture, and humanity to the logic of efficiency, calculation, and control.

*and it had turned into its opposite
>>21942848

>>21942848
>>21942852
It only seems irrational to an effeminate jew.

VGH, the Faustian spirit...

>>21942690
>>21942690
disproportionate representation. the population of germans and jews is much greater, while jews are a small population but have an unusually high amount of leftist thinkers and activists

>>21942690
disproportionate representation. the population of germans and anglos is much greater, while jews are a small population but have an unusually high amount of leftist thinkers

>>21942860
>It only seems irrational to an effeminate jew.
He is literally describing consoom-style globohomo you absolute troglodyte

>>21942871
>the far-right literally wants to kill them all and already tried
>the moderate right would let them if the far-right was in power
>why are jews such leftists?

>>21942902
The culture industry concept in particular applies directly to this

>>21942862
Firstly, Jews are disproportionately represented in many intellectual fields. From philosophy, one example aside from critical theory is phenomenology. Secondly, Germans are disproportionately represented in critical philosophy, which you could say shook up all western metaphysics, turned it on its head, bungled, whatever. Yet it would feel impossibly stupid for me, upon encountering a German person with some challenging ideas, like an edgelord like Ulrich Horstmann, to go
>uuhwf (((German))), every time amirite??!?
and then start blabbering about a chain of causes extending from protestantism to Kant to Hitler to Klaus Schwab, by way of Adam Weishaupt. It's just a stupid way to approach thinking and life, and is almost as degrading to the one doing it as to persons victimized by it.

Point being, minority members have no responsibility to refrain from bold and subversive ideas just because of someone else's attitude problem: what should Adorno have done, ultimately, to avoid the fact that in the current year some would seehim as a as a figurehead of anti western conspiracy, a part of an unrelenting chain encompassing Moses, Saul Kripke, Lawrence Krauss, Adorno and Marcus Goldman? The unavoidable implication is that supposedly he should've only expressed as mild views as possible so that this accusation would not arise. This is obviously an intolerable implication.

>>21942939
*encompassing such diverse figures as

minima moralia is excellent. its not really a strictly dry academic text but a collection of various musings about different topics ranging from culture and politics to art and psychology. also has some memey parts

>They are laid out on the model of Noah’s ark, for ever since they have existed, the bourgeois class has been waiting for the Biblical flood. The use of zoos for entertainment and instruction seems to be a thin pretext. They are allegories of the possibility that a specimen or a pair can defy the doom which befalls the species as a species. That is why the all too richly outfitted zoological gardens of major European cities seem like signs of decline: anything more than two elephants, two giraffes, and a hippopotamus is a bad sign. The more invisible the boundaries become, the more completely the freedom of the creatures is repudiated, whose gaze could be ignited by the longing for the wide distance. They relate to proper zoos what botanical gardens are to palm leaf gardens. The more that civilization preserves and transplants unspoiled nature, the more implacably the latter is controlled

> Zoological gardens in their authentic form are products of 19th century colonial imperialism. They blossomed following the opening up of the wild regions of Africa and Central Asia, which paid symbolic tribute in the form of animals.

>Only the irrationality of culture itself, the nooks and crannies of the city, in which the walls, towers and bastions of zoos are crammed, are capable of preserving nature. The rationalization of culture, which opens a window to nature, thereby completely absorbs it and abolishes along with difference also the principle of culture, the possibility of reconciliation.

ZOOS = FASCIST

>>21942860
The flaw of positivism is that it believes that thought can be reduced to purely what we can observe and an obsession with cold rationalism above pursuit of higher spiritual or human development. It doesn’t want people to think creatively or critically and does not see the value in imagination. You cannot truly understand the nature of reality if you are not willing to step back from conventional wisdom and purely what you see on the surface.

>>21941881
adornos entire thing is to cultivate different modes of thought than the materialist, utilitarian, means-end reasoning of modernity. that he also very much does not want people to eat the bugs and live in the pod, or be subjected to netflix prolefeed to pacify them, but rather to live free lives and engage with high culture, is that what qualifies him as a crass materialist? that he, in a meme, is against everything bugman? what even is a crass materialist?

>>21942975
>ZOOS = FASCIST
I unironically agree with this.

>>21941908
either read Culture of Critique or, at least,
>watch
>Culture of Critique for Normies

>>21942924
>the far-left literally wants to kill them all and already tried
>the moderate left would let them if the far-left was in power
>why are jews such leftists?
FTFY

>>21942975

"Marge, have you ever actually sat down and read this thing? Technically even going to the bathroom is fascism"

>>21941727
You're fucking lame

How do marxists reconcile the contradiction between post-WW2 marxist theoreticians almost all coming from the academic network with this conception they have of themselves which claims that they are the greatest threat to the system as marxists. Wouldn't marxists get witch hunted out of existence in academia if that was the case and wouldn't academia be full of fascists who are the most faithful lapdogs of the system according to marxists? I probably didn't read enough Theory but all this posturing of being le dangerous subversive intellectuals when they have tenures out the ass and aren't persecuted at all for their beliefs seems silly to me.

>>21944388
Yeah good point actually. Although on the other hand anon is always describing them as the greatest threat to Western civilisation so idk

>>21941727
>Adorno/Horkheimer
>maybe Marcuse
It's unremarkable otherwise.

>literally who vanity degree 'intellectuals'
how the fuck are you retards still getting scammed by these pseuds?
where are their theories with predictive power?
why are they not creating trillion dollar industries such as semiconductors?
why are you invested in random word generator pseud word games?

you had people literally writing gibberish and submitting it to humanities journals, or hitler speeches where you replace jew with white man and aryan with black woman getting published
interest in this garbage is just low iq signalling
you are not gonna make it
absolutely never gonna make it

you belong in the intellectual ghetto, its no wonder random electricians and welders make 5 times more cash than humanities pseuds

>>21945116
>where are their theories with predictive power?
Explanatory power is of greater use in all human affairs, as the vast majority of science that attempts to predict anything more complex than the dumbest parts of matter tend to fail spectacularly. Apart from that, predictive power isn't even a criteria for science, and Karl Popper and his unreflected apotheosis of physics as the king of science that all others should emulate has been a disaster for the retarded opinions of midwits such as yourself.
>why are they not creating trillion dollar industries such as semiconductors?
See here, I could post an entire essay on ends-in-themselves and the vacuity of utilitarian means-end reasoning, but I can't be assed because you are too stupid for it, so instead, why are you such a relentless bugman faggot?
>you had people literally writing gibberish and submitting it to humanities journals, or hitler speeches where you replace jew with white man and aryan with black woman getting published
Yes yes, and I am sure you do not think that the Bogdanov affair should have the same implications for the hard sciences, because you are a midwit retard bugman.
>you are not gonna make it
Already did.
>you belong in the intellectual ghetto, its no wonder random electricians and welders make 5 times more cash than humanities pseuds
Who the fuck cares?