Was he right in his criticism of capitalism? I felt like most points were fragile

As horrible as you are I did burst out laughing.

Don't mind him.

How is structural marxism, foucault's power/knowledge identification and adorno related, i didn't understand that

i got made fun of on the 4chans again and it went right under my nose goddamnit

Explicitly speaking they aren't. Althusser is a Marxist philosopher who contends to a form of structuralism for which "capitalism" exists as an "absent cause" of all other empirically visible phenomena. This represents a pretty dramatic break with the view of capitalism favored in the Frankfurt era, where capitalism was, much like class struggle itself, bifurcated into Superstructure (culture, ideology, politics) and Base (means of production, production process "the economic" as such). The standard assumption for a long time was that activity in the Base effects changes in the Superstructure—as an example of this, the Basic move of production to the IT and comp. sci. sphere effects, in the Superstructure, an ideology which valorizes the programmer-elite, a culture of nerd-consumerism, etc. With the Frankfurt school, that changes, in that productions of the Superstructure itself can effect changes in the Base. Adorno et. al. are thinking, for example, of Hollywood, which, by sending out what essentially amounts to propaganda film to the entire country, can encourage the population to "enjoy their job" and "work hard" and other pernicious ideological fragments which smooth out the extraction of surplus-labor from the working class and petit-bourgeoise. With Althusser, this reciprocity—Base affecting Superstructure, Superstructure affecting Base—reaches its zenith, with a total destabilization of the cause-effect relationship, such that every element of both halves of the structure are constantly affecting each other, with no effective distinction between the halves. Thus Althusser calls the whole interlocking web of causes and effects capitalism. Foucault, Althusser's student, simply calls it power, and tries, at every turn, to write out economism, to write out labor, and to therefore justify the bourgeois intellectual who writes her petty critique of man spreading and thinks she's going to change the structure of power relations which she believes are oppressing her.

Basically, Foucault represents the break with Marxism, and therefore the turn toward what is today identified by the alt-right as "cultural Marxism," identitarian politics and "critiques" which are only effective for getting black women into Ghostbusters.

That's my reading of all this, anyway.

wtf how can we kill these cunts and their cultrual marxist degenerates

wtf I hate SJWs now

Destroy capitalism.

>and to therefore justify the bourgeois intellectual who writes her petty critique of man spreading and thinks she's going to change the structure of power relations which she believes are oppressing her.
People like that still make mention of class and capitalism it just doesn't really amount to anything so you get articles about how queerness challenges capitalism.

Any critique which invokes "queerness" as a category which does not conclude by decimating the ideological fabulations inherent to identifying as "queer" and therefore to "identifying" at all, is useless neoliberal humanist bullshit.

wtf how can we kill lgbtetc commies who write stuff and use words like patrickarchy

You wait until they're all adequately represented on TV and then finally realize why "white men" were never interested in representation to begin with.

the hypocrisy and irony in this day and time is worthy of laughter only

Feminism is irrelevant today, there is no discrimination against women in the western world

yeah i don't live in the western world, which probably justifies my perspective

I'm a raging homo: the post

Vegan who hates feminists reporting in
DL is at 460lbs stay mad clogged veins fags

Nothing that you wrote is related to Critical Theory and Adorno. You put a lot of effort into appearing smart but it is visible that you have never read Adornos (or Horkheimers) works or only superficially.

Adorno and the "Frankfurt boys" critisizing a culture of consumerism? The most superficial reading possible. (Re)read The Dialectic of Enlightement.

>Foucault, Althusser's student, simply calls it power, and tries, at every turn, to write out economism, to write out labor, and to therefore justify the bourgeois intellectual who writes her petty critique of man spreading and thinks she's going to change the structure of power relations which she believes are oppressing her.

Really?

Deleuze did it better. Adorno was still complicit (and a racist).

>high-falootin'

I disagree, good sir! Cultural Marxism is what society needs because we'll be able to smash the white cis male patriarchy!

The dialectical relationship between base and superstructure is already in Marx's work. How is this presented a if it took the Frankfurt school to 'discover it'

Not that user, but I think he means that the base of Marx and Engels is more rigid and resistant towards the superstructure than in the Frankfurt school.
It's obviously still a dialectical relationship, and one is a requisite of the other, but, in Das Kapital (vol. one, pt. four, ch. twelve), an example is made of Asia as a region of tumultuous social/political change contrasted with a consistent (or continually re-emerging) economic base: 'Die Struktur der ökonomischen Grundelemente der Gesellschaft bleibt von den Stürmen der politischen Wolkenreligion unberührt.'

to me, he really undermined what was important about Marxism, which was the focus on the economic base - and overthrowing it. In other words, a focus on production. Yet here is Adorno putting his efforts into studying consumption, consumption of the superstructure, and criticizing it.

well so what? who cares about consumption? That just gets us shitty boycott and liberal 'fair trade' movements. Now zero people are trying to overthrow the economic base because of this distraction.

I didn't think the base and superstructure were dialectical, because the base isn't thesis/anti-thesis to the superstructure. Instead the superstructure just came out of the base and therefore has all the contradictions of the base within it, and completely opposite to the anti-thesis of the base, the superstructure serves to maintain the base so it is the opposite of a dialectical relationship.

you have it precisely backwards. the static "thesis anti thesis" pair proffered by wikipedia is the least dialectical conception of a duality like base and superstructure. on the other hand, it is the transformation of dualities in the basic production process into different, and singularly unique dualities in the superstructure, that characterizes something of the motion we mean when we talk about dialectics.

obviously there's a lot more to it than that, but this is Veeky Forums

see above, but in any case the frankfurt school are ground zero of debord's critique of the image. and it's hard to see how, if you have an understanding of the commodity and the reification of its forms, you could deny that theory has in general moved "upwards" from the economism poor readers of Marx accuse him of. nice try one upping me though, but try reading what a wrote; after all, a negation is nothing but a genuinely positive description of the phenomenon to be negated.

The future of leftism is a rich black lesbian forcefully taking the microphone away from a low-class white boy, forever.

Adorno closely followed the structure of Capital, taking the theory of value as a theory of alienated objectivity with a real existence contra individual subjects and the structure of commodity exchange as those elements which together formally determine bourgeois society.

Adorno's project represents one moment within the total process of bourgeois society coming to self-consciousness, one pole characterized by a focus upon individual factions, classes, and subjects and their intentions and interests within capital as political forces and the other which recognizes that subjectivity is itself pre-figured by objective relations that though produced by individual actions, subsist beyond individuals and dominate its constitutive subject. Both moments are essential, each revealing a moment of truth to the total movement of bourgeois society.

The key insight is a recognition of capital as a totality, as a universal that differentiates itself into "independent" spheres (the economic, the political, the social, etc.) that conceal the inner unity between each of its moments. At a high level of abstraction, this totality is again, characterized by the universal extension of exchange and the fetish of value (human social activity taking on an objective, natural form existing outside of its origination in human action).

Blaming the frankfurt school or academia for the erosion of proletarian resistance is backwards. Capital's reconfiguration and the restructuring of class and labor-relations within the past several decades can account for that much more than trends in academic discourse can.

Dialectics has nothing to do with formal laws of motion or (empty) notions of dynamics.

Dialectics is the movement of the concept and being, of human action/objectivity and the surplus of consciousness that overtakes that objectivity and reconfigures both in the encounter.

Any idea of a dialectical conceptualization of capital as simply a quasi-natural object defined by negation/inversion/etc. is a reversion to a dialectics of nature (of which their is none, dialectics only incorporating nature in the process of consciousness relating itself and attempting to find itself in nature).

t. only person on this board that actually knows what they're talking about

>leftist thought degrades into incomprehensible academic jargon
>the only people who can participate anymore are rich lifestylists who adopt the language for their identity politics

Don't blame academia, guys! It's all the fault of those lazy poors who don't want to learn about critical theory!

>Dialectics has nothing to do with formal laws of motion or (empty) notions of dynamics.

never proposed they did, but go ahead and mention dialectics of nature to straw man my position. nothing i said is incompatible with your "correction" thereof.

>Don't blame academia, guys! It's all the fault of those lazy poors who don't want to learn about critical theory!

No, it's the fault of FBI repression of radical groups, union leadership breaking down the rebel rank and file, and the global reconfiguration of production inaugurated by the entrance of East Asian industrial capital and developments in logistical technologies that have allowed production to become globally diffuse and more able to resist proletarian actions.

Sure, it's always someone else's fault. Somehow, this makes it OK to call your dialectic word salad "class struggle".

>never proposed they did
read your post, you did

Um, no. There is not a thing in Difference and Repetition that was not covered by Adorno more clearly and with more logical consistently.

>but muh rhizome!

Get fucked, loser.

Not him but at least he's giving an explanation that shows the complexity of capitalist society and attempts to connect is many variables into a cohesive system. At least there is cause and effect. People would be more inclined to adopt your standpoint of "those bad guys do bad things and ruin the world for everyone because they're bad" if it were ever expressed in a similar way or led anywhere at all.

Dialectics: not even once

if you're adamant that motion means physical phenomena and movement refers to the phantom objectivity of social relations, then find, i used the wrong process word. but if you would assume that the transformations i talked about occurred at the level of theorization about those conceptual loci—as someone who didn't think he was the only one who's read a little marxism would—then it becomes clear that these were so many useful figurations to liquify the turgid empirical thought implied in the "triadic" conception of the dialectic i was replying to. is figuration not precisely the "movement of concept and being" which we're both groping for

What's the point? Once you have a true and thorough critique of capitalism, the heavens open up and somehow leftism becomes relevant again outside academia? In case you haven't noticed, this entire exercise is just rich academics circle jerking each other over how enlightened they are compared to the stupid proles. It doesn't lead anywhere.

no an argument

> Difference and Repetition

Try A Thousand Plateaus and Anti-Oedipus.

youtube.com/watch?v=an0cHg51De0

I think the opening 18th Brumaire shows a clear acknowledgement of the dialectic of base and superstructure. I mean the whole nature of the dialectic of history as conceived by Marx is the dialectic of base and superstructure. The French revolution is of course the obvious example

This. thesis antithesis is a meme that needs to die, it is not helpful in understanding dialectics

You tried

*sniffs profoundly*

i was responding b/c they said base and superstructure has a dialectical relationship, which of course it doesn't at all have a dialectical relationship. maybe im too structuralist marxian for you?

to be fair academica, adorno, the university, public intellecturals are all parts of the ISA in their methods and relations to productions and production process and labour process, it's just revisionism to support any of this.

cause and effect is 100% mistaken if you want to be a marxist, it isn't how capitalism works

yes. Judith Butler pointed this out here:

"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."

personally I think Adorno types just babysit the children of the petite-bourgeoisie

is there really a unity of subject and object in capital aka a totality?

no, there are plenty of media in which such contradictions are given room to breathe and antagonize each other, though.

structuralism is just marxism in slow-motion.

i agree that the relationship between those structures is "undialectical" in that sense, but not *because* the one is not "antithetical" to the other. simply because the one is a very stratified mediation of the other.

im starting to fall down such an awful marxist hole right now. and I can't help but think I don't value what any of these marxists, adorno, badiou, gramsci, lenin etc value: things like species-being, work, escaping bourgeois culture, struggle, the future, the past and so on.

Who is the philosopher for me? Baudrillard? Althusser? Lyotard? I want to just float above society in a state or irony, detached, never earnest, where politics is embarrassing and things were always impossible.

>I want to just float above society in a state or irony, detached, never earnest, where politics is embarrassing and things were always impossible
>I've been hurt before...

Sounds like a pretty cowardly way to live 2bh

>Blaming the frankfurt school or academia for the erosion of proletarian resistance is backwards.

That was their literal job.

Deleuze & Guattari

or become Aristotelian

Have you actually read Adorno? Critical Theory isn't very historic-materialistic. It's very much so a somewhat defeatist, detached, open-ended school of theory.

Is this some kind of conspiracy theory? Critical Theory was a direct response to fascism, which showed that the erosion of "proletarian resistance" had already progressed to a point of no return.

not caring about what people are doing with their garbage society is cowardly? why don't they free themselves or something.

Have you read Capital?

sort of, volume 1

whydo you ask?

because i'm in the middle of reading it now, after a few months bouncing around various philosophers you mentioned and feeling the same kind of ennui, what's the point of all this bickering about the theoretical dimensions of interpretation if the US has no marxist party, you know? but capital kind of banishes it, restores life to all that stuff. I'd recommend Althusser and Jameson, their attention to ideology really adds teeth to regular old kulturkritik

wtf is Adorno even trying to say? That satire lose sight of the benefits of the things it mocks? That satire inspires decay and liberates unseen forces by attacking the overarching lifestyle?

i havent read much Jameson and will see how it goes :-)

I eat a lot of red meat and my digestive system only deteriorates with drinking, and my cholesterol is under average. I'm beginning to think you're just inferior.

idk man this dude hated everything people enjoyed
hell is his utopia

wild guess: it means that satire is powerless against certain political systems

it might, actually, serve to strengthen the ruling ideology

imagine oppressed people in soviet Russia getting their enjoyment from satire and political jokes, it serving as a sort of way to vent out frustration in a safe way and then continue on without true rebellion

or imagine a modern liberal believing that his society is free and wonderful because he can even mock the rulers in shitty comic strips

note: I do not actually know the source of that quote

does he really take it to everything like that? that sort of extreme accelerationism i thought only existed right after marx.

i mean would adorno even be against negro spirituals that slaves sang?

I guess Adorno would hate memes :( as they just reproduce capitalism

No. He's saying that satire, by situating itself in reaction against decay, ignores everything which strives past it. Satire is a sort of moody brooding against the prevailing ideology (in comedic form) and so becomes absorbed by it. Satire cannot strive beyond decay because it derives its value from decay.