What are you guys thoughts on this theory? I did a paper on it and it's some haunting shit.
Critical theory of Adorno and Horkheimer
Lucas Fisher
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Mason Thomas
Tell us about the paper OP.
Michael Moore
Critical theory violates the time travel paradox.
Narratives are constructed recursively, and are kept when they work, and rejected when they don't, but they are also accepted or rejected due to the criteria of an intent. How then can you come to a conclusion, or pick a different intent post priori, then judge how the recursion progressed?
This is that same as going back in time while knowing what you know. You could be moving through time all the time and never know it because you simply hadn't experienced it yet, and have no memory of the future.
The same is true for any narrative. Deconstruction along different paradigms in the past brings what you know about the future to those choices that are already made.
Therefore, there is no deconstruction, only paradigm shift.
Although critical theory can make up new stories that themselves either work or they don't, they can't rewrite the history of the narrative being analyzed.
Henry Lee
It's a pretty complex theory but i'll try to do a short synopsis of it. It's important to understand that the end goal of Adorno and Horkheimer was the emancipation of man just like Marx.
>The authors exiled in the U.S. in the 40s and the conclusions they drew by analyzing the capitalism are bad.
>They foresaw that advanced capitalism was to influence all life's domain.
>That influence got to culture and arts which are, according to the authors, a necessity for emancipation
>Birth of ''The culture industry'', mass produced ''culture'' which is now a standardized product like others.
>Mass culture and mass media constantly validates capitalism
>Individuals blindly adhere to the system thinking it's the best as media portrays it
>Rise of ''instrumental reason'', the principal reason in captitalist societies. Everything has to have a purpose and that purpose is often profit
>Fall of ''speculative'' social sciences and rise of positivism and empiricism of hard sciences
>According to Adorno, hard sciences and their facts can't comprehend society as a whole and again, are useful to make things easier, technology, etc. to make more profit
>Individuals come to think that after capitalism there has to be chaos
>Fall of traditional family values so individuals rely on mass media and society to guide them
You can then guess the result. It's much much more than that and really complex but man... They wrote that in the 40s and i feel like it's even worst today...
Christopher Scott
The DoE is basically a rip of book 6 of the Phenomenology
Grayson Green
The trick in analysis is to cut out the mare's nest of rhetoric - not just the emotional and instinctual stuff of ethos and pathos, but the trick of logos too.
That mean getting rid of cause and effect, purpose, and statistical inference, and looking at the intent of the narrative, your desire, and whether the narrative is useful to be believed. That's it. Does it work for your desire or not.
What is the intent of capitalism? Of society? What is your desire?
The dread you feel from listening to these guys (like George W. S. Trow) is that they punch instinctual and emotional buttons so that the rhetoric of logos works better.
Swimming in this swamp is easier if you just realize that the intent of the narrative of capitalism was never anything but exploitation. Just because the liberal desire for a fair playing field was what you wanted, doesn't mean the intent of the narrative that fits capitalism or culture in general is anything like your desire.
The narrative either is useful to be believed or it stops. It has obviously stopped many times, and an analysis of what is really going on would show you more than this ethereal ghost story that the critical theory proponents use.
Look, Capitalism isn't a useful story because capital stops being a proxy to trade and becomes a product. This obliterates any argument that capital is a conservative field that represents trade. Add to that that you now use the same capital for the means of production and for the value of the collective action that makes the products, and you can see that all their bullshit about supply and demand setting price, or competition improving product, or the very existence of a marketplace is just a confidence game to get you to bend over with a smile on your face...
There is no story about capitalism that is like the stories of the physical world.
Nothing scary there....
James Flores
>Fall of ''speculative'' social sciences and rise of positivism and empiricism of hard sciences
>Rise of ''instrumental reason'', the principal reason in captitalist societies. Everything has to have a purpose and that purpose is often profit
>According to Adorno, hard sciences and their facts can't comprehend society as a whole and again, are useful to make things easier, technology, etc. to make more profit
>implying this is a bad thing
So basically they believe feels>>>reals and capitalism is BAAD cause it hurts my feels. So that's why we need more taxes and a bigger government and more hate speech laws. Also, let's take money away from producers and distribute it among rapefugeers and unemployed liberal arts grads
Alexander Brooks
What works of theirs did you use? This sounds really interesting and I'd like to read up on it.
James Johnson
I can't tell if this is someone pretending to be someone from /pol/ or if user is in fact this retarded.
Adrian Powell
Good answer. Made me think for a while
Google is your friend. The original work of the authors is called Dialectic of Enlightenment it's pretty complex but theres plenty of free pdfs that you can read which are easier to read
Levi Jenkins
You triggered, Cuck?
Adam Adams
>or
Chase Gray
really made me think
Luke Nguyen
I haven't read DoE yet, but I love Benjamin, one of my favourte philosophers. I strongly recommend you The Task of the Translator, Surrealism: The Last Snapshot..., The Work of Art... and Theses on the Concept of History
Michael Robinson
excellent retort
Cooper Ross
A person who believes this is truly one to be executed on sight.
Kayden Ross
wow this post made me a Nazi frogposter
Deus Vult, white brethren
Kevin Gonzalez
distilled humanities bullshittery. Read: unfalsifiable generalities about "structures"
Henry Carter
>unfalsifiable
Top meme.
Jose Johnson
you're an idiot and have obviously not read Dialectic of Enlightenment, in which A&K acknowledge several times that their critique is pertinent only to the general time and place in which it is written and will eventually be phased out as the zeitgeist changes.
Levi Thompson
someone's got an axe to grind
Leo Gutierrez
>Implying the instrumentalization of reason in capitalism, and its inevitable corollary, the instrumentalization of human beans isn't inherently undignifying.
Rousseauian republicanism when?
Bentley Moore
400 years ago when artisanal production was in its prime
Tyler Lee
what background (their previous works or other authors, etc) do i need to read adorno/horkheimer?
Carson Ortiz
hegel marx freud
nietzsche and weber don't hurt
Blake Cooper
Explain
Blake Russell
Why the fuck do far-right activists/pundits think that political correctness, liberals, 'safe spaces come from the Frankfurt School (or what they also consider to be 'cultural marxists'). Most, if not all, of the Frankfurt school scholars hated liberalism and would mostly likely reject the 'political correctness' caricature that saturates a lot of the US media.
Bentley Gonzalez
I like how this started out small and now every thread has like eight people harping on this like they're the first person to do it.
I wonder how many of these people have actually read Adorno et al. and how many of them just saw reasonably concise descriptions of them in the very posts they're copying.
You should actually read them. They talk about stuff like this.
Brandon Baker
Are you saying Adorno is a safe-space liberal or the opposite?
Mason Wilson
Somebody made an infographic about the Frankfurt school and the rest is history. So few people actually read those philosophers that it barely matters
Tyler Gutierrez
This. It's a testament to just how archaic, dull, and irrelevant the Frankfurt school is that a group of stormfaggots could create this all-powerful bogeyman
Brody Kelly
Like the other user, I am completely confused as to who you're accusing. I will admit that I am not a Frankfurt School specialist nor do I think I am the only person who has pointed it out, but I'm just confused as to how they can be so disgustingly warped in the way that they are (see: youtube.com
Levi Rodriguez
I'm saying that
>ugh, I hate how /pol/ thinks Adorno wants to ______ when really he wants to _____! Typical /pol/ not even knowing what they're talking about!
has become a mindlessly-circulated cliche and an excuse to show off meagre knowledge, regardless of what is or isn't true about Adorno or online racists' opinions of him.
No one who says it has read Adorno or cares about the Frankfurt School. It just circulates memetically because it's a pleasant vehicle for oneupmanship.
It's like if you saw people naively criticizing the electoral college, and then some politically savvy person going "ACTUALLY.." and schooling them all on it, and your brain just unconsciously absorbed that this is an effective vehicle for becoming the "ACTUALLY...." guy yourself. And so on and so on until everybody's fucking doing it.
It's like "Machiavelli is satire" or "uh, Hegel never said thesis-antithesis-synthesis." It's brainless. It's horizontal conceptual drift.
I agree with the content, I'm just annoyed by seeing it performed like a ritualized shibboleth in every goddamn thread that mentions these people. You've actually read the shit so I was mistakenly venting at you. Or maybe mistakenly venting altogether. Sorry.
Jordan Gonzalez
Rootless cosmopolitan counter revolutionary petty-bourgeois garbage
Eli Reyes
It really seems like you're saying here "If lots of people all agree something and I don't like it I can say it's memes!" without the usual irony of the
>meme meme
meme. You should also work on that perseverance, you only got 4 sentences in before you sort of segued into a topic you obviously prefer.
Liam Gonzalez
If you've read Adorno I'm surprised you don't recognise what I'm saying as part of his thought. Authenticity is a major factor in these things. You're just exchanging sclerotic pre-fab (cf. Adorno, "predestined", or zuhanden, or whatever) massified tropes. You're engaging in behaviour because you saw your horizontal herd friend engaging in it and wanted to "join" him, conform to his superior ability to experience meaningless pleasure. Without even remembering who he is, the process of assimilation is so contiguous and automated.
I didn't understand your point about topics I prefer. It's an Adorno thread and I'm trying to explain shit behaviour in terms of false consciousness.
Aiden Brown
>I'm surprised you don't recognise what I'm saying as part of his thought
Well, yes, I suppose you thought it was obscurantist or nobody really read anything and you could get by with bullshitting like you're doing again.
As for what you don't understand, it's like if maman made pancakes, but she'd made them yesterday when you wanted them today. And now they're all cold and rubbery so you feed them to your golden retriever. I'm surprised you don't recognize this in his thought, it's very ab fab or something.
Nicholas James
I accused someone of something; someone asked for clarification; I explained further and provided an example.
You're taking issue with the example as non sequitur (I guess? Or just bad? I'm fine with the latter critique at least, bizarre examples are a symptom of autism). But it was literally sequitur.
>I suppose you thought it was obscurantist or nobody really read anything
I said the latter almost verbatim, as what I suspect to be the case for the majority of people circulating the meme. The former not really.
You still don't seem to really get what I'm saying, as far as I can tell. Not that it matters. This is now like a 9-reply chain of two retards not talking to each other. So let's call it quits.