Adorno and Power Relations in relation to mass culture

In The Schema of Mass Culture Adorno writes a searing critique of how mass culture operates in the modern era. In particular he seeks to think human interaction within mass culture as primarily a matter of power relations and other social status-related factors. For example, he states the following: “The curiosity that transforms the world into objects is not objective. It is not concerned with what is known but with the fact of knowing it, with having, with knowledge as a possession…as facts they are arranged in such a way that they can be grasped as quickly and easily as possible” (Adorno 85). This is an interesting critique to me because it makes the projected identities of social media in fact quite negative. Any account of social media as identity-building for its own sake gets destroyed here, as it is put instead in terms of wanting social power over others. This is certainly the case when we see people bragging about books and movies they ‘like’, as they often do it to say “I’m such a cultured and knowledge individual” and by extension “What do you like that’s as interesting as what I like?”. The same can be said of people who brag about how good their weekend was all the time, as they too want to say “I’m having such a good time!” And by extension “What are you doing that equals this good time?”.

Both of these habits I….hate…a….lot. To say the least.

Anyway, Adorno’s critique also gets at the very heart of the academic mission and its authenticity. When knowledge is pursued in the academic realm, ostensibly it is ‘for its own sake’ in the Aristotelian tradition or for its practical utility in the ‘real world’. Never is it supposed to be so you can say “I’m such a knowledgeable person, bow down before my greatness”. What is an interesting question is “how much is this actually the case?”. I truly cannot say, but I think there are certainly certain professors out there who are rather high-and-mighty about their degrees and research interests, and in turn attempt to bestow this high-and-mightiness upon colleagues and student alike. The question then becomes: Do these people belong in academia at all? That I cannot say, though I think it would certainly be a better place that does more good if they were not around. But I digress once more.

Adorno’s critique, in my view, allows for one perspective on the situation. However, the trick with the Frankfurt School (at least for me) is not to treat it as correct in an absolute sense. This is because it becomes a quicksand. The moment you try to get out of the critique, the further you sink into it. It becomes circular, with no clear way out other than to admit they’re right and say you’ll try to become a better person (which in turn leads them to critique you for your hopelessly naïve platitudes about the possibility of better people in our current society). Therefore my advice to anyone who reads these is to remember that Critical Theory is called Critical Theory for a reason. It has no positive vision in mind. So when I read Adorno’s critique of curiosity, I have to agree and disagree. Because undoubtedly he’s right, but he’s also dead wrong (in two different senses of course). It’s a matter of the specific case, and he doesn’t allow for individual differences (nor does much of the Frankfurt School in its mission to vilify ‘modern society’ as one homogenous organism).

On Communicative Capitalism

Jodi Dean in her work Democracy and other Neoliberal Fantasies attempts to come up with a definition of what she calls Communicative Capitalism. She states “Communicative capitalism is a political-economic formation ‘in which there is talk without response, in which the very practices associated with governance by the people consolidate and support the most brutal inequities of corporate-controlled capitalism”. She finds that this has taken hold in the way politics and our modern-day democracy have shaped around the use of the internet as both a political marketing tool and a discussion board. Its nature as a discussion board for her is highly disputable, because it is highly personalized and centered around one’s own interests. In other words it is not ‘democratic’ in the sense that all voices are heard. Rather, it becomes a sounding board, a reflection of one’s own political desires and ideologies, with no access for opposing views or a means for true corporeal action. This for her is anathema, and I would most likely agree with her assessment.

I agree because we seem to be at a point where political marketing has become very individualized. This is mostly because of the advent of tools like Google Analytics that allow you to gauge consumer preferences and see how they might best be marketed to for donations, votes, or other things. This leads to a state of affairs where you are literally only getting advertisements from your point party or other ideological sympathizers. I would also agree because the internet is literally being swarmed with online petitions of various sorts, the vast majority of which really seem to be doing anything. They seem to be an excellent area for venting outrage, but not much else happens as a matter of practicality.

As far as internet activism causing social change is concerned, I remain unconvinced as to its representative efficacy. What I mean is that there have been a few key events that have been spurred by internet activism (e.g. Arab Spring, #blacklivesmatter, and a couple others). While these certainly point to the possibility of internet activism having an effect, I remain unconvinced when I look at the aggregate number of causes on the internet. When I do, I see that the vast majority go nowhere or at best cause an increased awareness. This to me is perfectly indicative of Dean’s hypothesis that talk is occurring with no action.

Hence I agree with her overall hypothesis, but do think she is a little bit cranky. When you look at the evidence right now, she seems to be right. I do hope, however, that she is not.

Thinking Reputation in terms of the Big Other

During the guest lecture on Monday Crandall advocated the transition to a gift economy on the grounds that it would better provide a means to have the needs of all met in a world where the market economy is no longer doing so. He defined the gift economy as an economy wherein people freely give to each other without any expectation of reciprocity (something completely foreign to a capitalistic model) though said reciprocity can and in many cases will be given freely. He defends this model against the claim that such a system would allow people to be screwed more freely in situations where borrowing has occurred because there would be no means of ensuring that item was returned by stating that this system would allow more qualitative means of analysis such as reputation would legislate the returning of borrowed items, and other things in general. I disagree with this analysis.

I disagree because while public opinion of a person certainly has a large role to play, it only has efficacy up to a certain point. Thinking in terms of Zizek’s ‘Big Other’, social norms do not play this role in quite the same way as a procedural system of property rights. In terms of public opinion, one can care or not care about what people think of them and be relatively safe. That is, they will not go to jail just because people think badly of them. A law against theft on the grounds of individual property rights, on the other hand, has real tangible consequences that are far more salient. There are many cases, for example, where a wheelbarrow will never be returned unless the police are called due to the person not caring about what the person who originally owned said wheelbarrow thinks of them. In this way the ‘Big Other’ in terms of social norms only has efficacy insofar as the individual person’s subjective interpretation of and relationship to social norms. The tangible Big Other (i.e. procedural law) has efficacy beyond this point, because it controls for sociopaths (in the sense of those who do not care about social norms). And this is why I think his analysis of that situation is flawed.

All of this is not to say, however, that the legal system could not be changed to facilitate more kinds of sharing. You could, for example, institute legal borrowing procedures and set time limits on borrowing periods, etc. However, Crandall seems to think (at least from my point of view) that none of this is necessary because reputation (for him) plays such a huge role. I tend to disagree, but do you?

The Matrix, Ghost in the Shell, and the Liberatory Horizon of Virtuality

In The Matrix, a virtual world exists that everyone believes to be real. It is exactly like the real world in that it is shared and that you have limited freedom but freedom nonetheless. Furthermore, no one is aware of the fact that it is virtual. For all intents and purposes, it is the shared phenomenological reality. But in fact it is not, rather it is a world designed by machines who are in fact keeping the humans prisoner. They conceal true ‘reality’ from the humans they use as a power source, and as such keep them locked in a virtual lie.

Cypher decides to go back to this false world. He becomes disillusioned with its harshness, and decides that going back to the Matrix would represent for him a “more real” life. At the end of the film Neo decides to stay in this false world, saying “I’ll show your prisoners a world where anything is possible”. These two examples are extremely interesting to me because in both cases they represent a profound philosophical break with the primacy of the ‘real world’ in favor of a kind of projected authenticity (or created self) based on one’s own experience and one’s own vision of reality. Furthermore, they get to a ‘liberation of consciousness’ and a transcendence of limitations that that is at the top of the transhumanist agenda.

This notion of transcendence gets to the heart of what I find most interesting about the potential of the internet (and of virtual reality more generally) as a potential liberatory pathway for human consciousness from the body. Ghost in the Shell (the anime film by Mamoru Oshii) best shows this, as the main character literally fused with a program and ventured out onto the “boundless ‘net”. She characterizes the ‘net as “truly vast and infinite”, and saw it as something that would liberate her from her machinic body that caused her to not even know for sure if she was really ‘human’. Furthermore, she wished to be freed from what she worded as her “freedom only to expand within boundaries”. To add another element, the program she fused with literally characterized the transition from physical reality to the ‘net as “elevating our consciousness to a higher plane”.

Liberation through virtuality in these instances did occur, but in an idealized fashion. I would ask the following: how can virtual reality in our present circumstance be a kind of liberation? If the ‘net (or the virtual world of the Matrix) is a vast and infinite place where “anything is possible”, then can our internet similarly be by definition a place where we can redefine ourselves? How can it have a liberatory potential (or not), and how can we get there? Is there a liberation of human consciousness (or the human body) on the horizon? And if so, would it truly be a ‘liberation’, or just another enslavement or freedom within set boundaries?

PS: It is worth noting that the Wachowskis have stated publicly that they owe a ‘profound debt’ to Oshii and his work, and that along with Simulation and Simulcra, Ghost in the Shell was assigned viewing for all cast and crew.

Robots and Otherness

In Chapter 2 of Shelly Turkle’s Alone Together, she talks at length about robots and technology more broadly as having this ‘alive’ quality. In particular, the fact that like us robots, like us, make decisions based on ‘data’. The difference between us and robots however, is that this data can be uploaded and does not have to be ‘experienced’ in a conventional sense. In particular she talks about people who would honestly rather confide in a robot than a human being in a romantic situation. She brings up the example of Howard, who would rather confide in a robot than his own father about a prospective dating situation (50-51). She quotes Howard as saying “People are risky. Robots are safe”.

This use of the language of ‘risky’ and safe’ is interesting to me. This is because it implies that humans are unpredictable, whereas robots are. In this instance it would mean that the robot would not give ‘bad advice’, but this inherently means that it is predictable in this way. This language to me could also be used to describe the situation between Theodore and the OS as described by his ex-wife in the film Her. She accuses him of being in a relationship with an OS because he ‘can’t handle real emotions’.

These two situations for me feed into the claim that robots (and technology more broadly) create a kind of narcissism. This is because by creating predictability you eliminate what French thinker Emmanuel Levinas calls in his work Totality and Infinity the “Otherness of the Other”, or that which makes humans human: that is their inherent spontaneity and unpredictability. Levinas says that you cannot know the Other, because you cannot know that which is not you or within your ‘world’ as yourself. He goes on to say that humans have an impulse to attempt to make the Other the Same (that is within their ‘world’) because it is easier to predict what the ‘Same’ will do, and it feeds a very similar kind of narcissism. It is this that creates lack of respect for other humans, colonization of indigenous peoples, and other practices that result from this lack of reciprocity. It also creates an impulse to create likenesses of yourself or find likenesses of yourself in others.

My question leading from all this is: Can these two aforementioned situations (Howard in Turkle and Theodore in Her) be likened to the human impulse to create predictability? What I mean is that these two situations seem to have an inherent impulse to not encounter an unpredictable Other, with a preference for a predictable Same. Do robots feed our desire to create the Same? And if so, what are the ethical implications of this phenomenon? Does this desire to create predictable robots reflect an increasingly inability to encounter the Other on its own terms?

Citation for Totality and Infinity:

Lévinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity; an Essay on Exteriority. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969. Print.

Heidegger and Technological/Calculative Thinking

One of Martin Heidegger’s key points in “The Question Concerning Technology” is that what lies in the essence of modern technology is a Gestell or standing-reserve. What he means by this is that what lies in modern technology is not only a means to an end, but a whole mode of existence, centered around a gathering, or an ordering of information in a set way. Where this leads for him is an understanding of nature as an object that can be examined, something from which you can distance yourself and make your object, your instrument, and in the end the slave over which you are master. He states that “The modern physical theory of nature prepares the way first not simply for technology but for the essence of modern technology” (Heidegger “Question” 10), that is this ordering and gathering of information from the point of objective observation. This is what he means when he says that behind technology lies an “enframing”: a whole mode of existence centered around ‘objectivity’ and exact calculative ends.

The question I would like to raise here is “What does this truly mean for us?” The issue here seems to be that we’ve lost the ability to think in terms other than instrumentality. Heidegger says as much in his piece Memorial Address”, stating that modern technology has in essence reduced our ability to think meditatively, that is to step back and examine our situation and the truth behind elements in our life. He states that “The world now appears as an object open to the attacks of calculative thought…Nature becomes a gigantic gasoline station, an energy source for modern technology and industry” (Heidegger “Memorial” 50). This would say for me that technology’s ‘enframing’ has led to a kind of extractivism that views nature as simply a means to an end. It may be a stretch to say that it is all modern technology that is the problem, but it is fair to say (I think ) that it is the way of relating it creates that is at issue here.

Given all this, my questions are as follows:

1. Is there a way of reconciling our use of modern technology with a view of nature that isn’t merely calculative?”

2. Have we truly lost our capacity for what Heidegger calls “meditative thinking”? If so, how can we get it back? Or is it even necessary to?

Citation for “Memorial Address”: ­­

Heidegger, Martin. “Memorial Address.” Discourse on Thinking. Trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. 43-57. Print.