Latest / PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy / Pill Pod 16 - Getting Schooled in Frankfurt (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Habermas)

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Pill Pod 16 - Getting Schooled in Frankfurt (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Habermas) · PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy

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I did plopped very well. We today are doing Oh hi. By the
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way, you're listening to Plastic Pills Voice on the Plastic Pills Pill Pod.
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We are talking today about more Frankfurt School. If you were with us last
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week, oh wait, last week was a Patreon episode. If you're on
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the Patreon you heard last week where we began talking about the Frankfurt School.
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And I think the conclusion from that episode was that Hegel caused the Holocaust?
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Am I right in saying that? Yeah? I mean it's a while to
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get there. It was a very dialectically circuitous route, but we all came
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to the right conclusion in the air. Sure, so Hagel caused the Holocaust?
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Maybe Nietzsche had a hand in it to something like that. Today we
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are moving to you know, nazisar are defeated. We don't need to write
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about them anymore. The eclipse of reason is over, or so you thought.
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But no, now we are writing about America and American capitalism. So
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we're turning to Frankfurt School in the fifties and beyond, and you know,
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the terror, the evils of capitalism and the effects it has on the psyche.
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Speaking of psyches, did you guys watch this debate our in the Crumbling
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Empire to the South? I did not. I did. It was probably
1:41
the greatest spectator sport I've ever seen. And I was torn between high levels
1:46
of anxiety about the fall of Rome and what's going to mean for all of
1:49
us and almost overwhelming joy at the share entertainment value of the spectacle. So
1:56
I heard it was like a real failed state kind of vibe going on there.
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I was getting. I was getting king Lear vibes. But it's like
2:04
if king Lear had a boxing match against king Lear from like the third act
2:08
of the play. Oh yeah. Trump was like, I kid you not
2:14
like one insult away from being am I Dick's bigger than yours, bitch,
2:17
like one insaul the way, if like Chris Wallace hadn't stepped in and been
2:23
like, Okay, you've attacked his son, his intelligence drug habits. Enough
2:28
is enough? Right? And we're speaking as as denizens of a city with
2:31
a crack smoking mayor too, and weizens of a city with a crack smoking
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Mayorka, although not all of us are denizens of a city of a crack
2:42
smoking mayor. Today with us as a guest, we have can I call
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you an Adorno scholar? Is that the sure the region of expertise the regime
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cultural historian, okay, cultural historian influenced still part by a Doorno. It's
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Sharon Hi. Shallon Hi. If you're familiar with the plastic pills canon.
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I did a video on the culture industry which was co written or mostly written,
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if we're being honest, mostly written by Shallon, who I've worked with
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before. So we're excited to have her here again to deal with Frank for
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school. Thanks for having me on. Wo oh and Shalon, would you
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like to mention to our listeners if they go to your blog, which I
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will link here, if they go there, what will they find and what
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awaits them? Sure? So my blog is on my website Shallon Vanteyne dot
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com and my blog is second as Farce and anything that I do and related
3:53
to podcast or articles I always throw up there so people can follow my work
3:57
if they want by going there. I should also say Shallon has a very
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good taste in film, and she has a very very long list of all
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the movies that you should ever watch, a very long list. So if
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you're ever sitting there on a date night, yeah, definitely check. You
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should put a thing to go check that out. All right, I haven't
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seen that part of your blog yet. Really I was, I think the
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first thing I ever saw. Anyway, it doesn't matter, I'll have okay,
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Lerk Shannon's Shallon Sorry, Lerk Shallon's blog. We finished. I guess
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where do we leave off? Guys? If you can help me, we
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finished talking about Ben Yamane because he was unfortunately suicided. They're also talking about
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whether or not there's any kind of normative lessons to be drawn from critical theory,
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particularly Frankfort School credit the theory, or if it's only going to ever
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be critical split to a certain extent, between the kind of soft liberals,
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as Victor and I sometimes posed are solved, you know, the more hard
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edged maybes soft socialists, social democrat, liberal socialism, and Selon. I'm
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going to ask you to fill in the names that I forget here, but
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what we've already covered, at least in part, usually during the immediate immediately
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after the Second World War. Now we're moving into nineteen fifties. But Ben,
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you Meine, Adornal Horkheimer, MARKUSA? Who else am I missing in
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there? Eric from Karl Lowenthal and Lowenthal. Yeah, there's another Guyannyman,
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and then we have like the second generation, which includes people like Martin j
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and habermas which pretty significant. And I should probably note that when people think
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about Frankfurt's school, you know, the initial Frankfurt School was explicitly Marxist and
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even though they all had very distinct philosophies, but when you get into the
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later Frankfurt School, like Harber Moss and Honith and those, they tend to
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go more liberal. So yeah, there's a big shift in the thought.
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Yeah, they diverge in various ways, don't they. We kind of spoke
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about how Horkheimer, after that first guy, I forget his name, who
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fuck cares about him? After Horkheimer sort of like laid down the research program
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that kind of lasted pretty much all the way. Habermausse was really the first
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guy to kind of break away from that, like really explicitly. Like,
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of course, there were different positions within the Frankfurt School, and World War
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Two kind of split them up and sent them all over the place, but
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Habermouse was the one to sort of explicitly diverge from Horkheimer's research program. From
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the thirties. I guess Eric Haines, if you're listening, this one's for
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you. Thanks, bra I was wanted a fan boy for a second and
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say that I was really happy Eric Farrahm was brought up, since he's usually
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the person I see least referred to as a prominent member of the Frankfurt school,
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and I actually have always found his work extremely informative and interesting, since
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of all of the major figures, he's the only one I could think of
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who actually really was able to successfully pull off, at least marginally a synthesis
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of Freud and Marxism and something like the same society. I actually find that
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book a lot more coaching than even something like Eros and Civilization. So here's
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the from maybe do our best to actually resuscitate his reputation. Well, I
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mean, I don't know if i'd be that person. I mean from you
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know, in many ways differed from MARCUSA and adorn On Horkheimer, and they
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sort of rejected a lot of his ideas because he strayed from Freudian theory.
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He you know, rejected a lot of the core Freudian concepts about the psyche
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and instead sort of shifted more towards the existentialist thinkers Sartre in those, So
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he he's more of a melding of existentialism and Marxism than I would say a
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melding of Freud and Marx. I was trater, I would certainly agree,
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although I don't think that he's ever. He ever, actually was shied away
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from that because he acknowledged it a number of points that he thought Marx was
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a far more important particular than somebody like Freud, right, and the kind
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of analytic that he took from Freud was more about this idea from my like
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in my imagination, that the psyche he always is distorted, and it tends
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to act out his distortions and symptoms and sometimes extraordinarily and social ways via the
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auth orientarian personality and stuff. But we should probably wait to get into that.
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There's also a few curveballs out there with the actual publication history of Marx's
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texts, so stay with me, listeners. But like the Grundrisa, like
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Marx's other sort of major late work, and those eighteen forty four humanist manuscripts,
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they were done a bit earlier in Marx's life eighteen forty four. In
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fact, those were not published until the nineteen thirties. So you also have
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this like dynamic where like different texts by Marx are becoming available at different points
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in the twentieth century as well, which makes it really confusing to sort of
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follow the critical theory and the development of the way they use Marx because these
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texts are popping up. And this is just in German too, Like the
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Grundrissa wasn't even translated into English what like the nineteen sixties or seventies, and
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the eighteen forty four manuscripts weren't available in English until much later as well.
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There's some weird textual history going on there. You have to look it up
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the English usually they're very pious, so they had a problem, problems with
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publishing research notes. It's my hype, yeah, and I think that you
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know, Marcuso was one of the early people to start commenting. I believe
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he reviewed the Economic Manuscripts when they were published, and he was one of
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the first people to really start to use that early those early Marx writings,
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and they're really important for critical theory generally, because those are writings where they're
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talking a lot about alienation and they're talking a lot about Marx is talking a
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lot about the effect of culture on our material existence. And so those are
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key ideas that you see with the early Frankfurt school at least, which is
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that you know, instead of just focusing on a sort of vulgar Marxism where
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it's purely economic, they are dealing now with the ways that culture affects our
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material life, those public that publication history is important, like Eric said,
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yeah, and you get these later guys too that come to Marx, like
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Altaser and Ettien Baalibar and I'm not sure if this goes for Etien Ballabar as
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well, but but but alphas Air really just rejected the earlier Marxist works,
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like he just did not like Marxist humanism at all. He just divided Marx
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up into like three stages, said the late stage was the best and most
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mature and most like comprehensive stage, fuck the other ones. And he was
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just hardcore structural Marxists. So I guess the point is like big disagreements within
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everyone who's looking at Marx and reading Marx. Nobody can nobody can get along,
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nobody can really. I mean, that's it's a good thing in a
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way, because you have all these different perspectives and takes and there's no unified
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front really. And then at the whole time you had the more politically engaged
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Marxists and the Leninist Marxists, and then you had the sort of old school
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idealist he Gaelien Marxists. I mean, it's a mess. We'll work it
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out a little bit today, Okay, let me let me try to establish
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a little bit of a plan. The boys here have divided up the texts,
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Eric having read a Dork, I read MARCUSA, and Matt having done
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Habermas. If I'm not mistaken, Shellon, you're the heavyweight, sorry,
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the intellectual heavyweight here. So we didn't give you. We didn't give you
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an assignment. So you can be the glue that weaves are disparate narratives together.
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But continuing from last week again, this is where psychoanalysis, psychoanalysis and
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Marxism are very much fused. And generally the reason for that in our narrative
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here is that, you know, so much of Europe was poised it seemed
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to turn to Marxism in the nineteen thirties America as well, with organized labor
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movements, and yet they turned to fascism, and then later during the fifties
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during this Marshall Plan reconstruction very much into state capitalism with the Marshall Plan and
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Kinesian economics. So I think the purpose of recruiting Freud in here is to
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try to explain why people opt into market relationships that don't benefit them and even
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that harm them in the case of fascism, and also to understand the psychological
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effects of saying, in Odorno's case, the culture industry on the people who
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are sort of captured by it, right, Like there's that sort of deep
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psychological level that Freud provided some resources or tools to sort of describe the idea
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of the super ego, for example, as like internalizing rules and regulations,
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and just just various ideas about depth psychology and how to describe society with and
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also filled out sort of psychological theory as well. I would also say,
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like the text Civilization and his Discontents right in the aftermath of the First World
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War was probably the most important formative influence on the Frankfort school, because I
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mean proud even in that tax achnology is that this is very speculative, what's
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coming from Froyd really means something right. But oddly enough, I actually find
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it one of his more imaginative texts. Ands he's really taking a stab at
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social psychology and some of the ruminations he comes up with are shopping and provocative
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in the best possible. I agree with that too. I think it's one
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of the a great text and uh, that is a really influential one on
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the on the Frankfurt School, and it, like you said, Matt,
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it's also where Freud kind of becomes more of a philosopher of culture rather than
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strictly a psycho analyst. But to what Eric was saying with you know,
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the culture industry, I mean, I think that the inclusion of Freud is
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important at this point in time for the Frankfurt School because you have both the
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culture industry, which is gaining dominance and control over society in new ways,
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but also you have the Frankfurt School looking at the psychological effects of fascism.
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So you have people like Willem Reich or Reich and who is exploring fascism from
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a psychological angle, and you know where you have people who have analyzed fascism
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from you know, know, even that we talked about earlier looked at fascism
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in his book Behemoth, where he looked at more of the political side of
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fascism. And you have Marxist who have looked at fascism from a Marxist economic
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perspective. But the Frankfurt School were really kind of the first people to look
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at fascism and see, you know, what kind of makes up the psyche
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of someone who becomes a fascist. Now they're not, of course saying that
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these are the only reasons, but it is supplemental. It's a compliment to
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the already existing Marxist theories about the rise of fascism. So I'll just plug
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in for that too. That there's a lot of misunderstanding about the way that
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they use Freud. I came across some quotes actually Havebermass being a little condescending
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towards the earlier Frankfurt school, just saying that all Freud was was just he
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just allowed them to use this mechanism of internalization from Freud, and that's all
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he was good for in these earlier what he calls freudo Marxists, But really,
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really they they have a theory about the way that capitalism shapes subjectivity.
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So one of the key things about Marxism in the Frankfurt School is that they
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felt it lacked the theory of the subject, and Freud also sort of helped
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give birth to this theory of the subject and the way that individuals are already
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shaped by capitalist ideology is it's also a psychological system that produces a certain kind
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of subjectivity. And they're not just talking about the ways that certain things become
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internalized, although that's part of it, I guess, But that's a very
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simplistic reading of the way that the early Frankfurt School guys used Freud courtesy of
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Habermass, who's great, but he also isn't right about everything just because us
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the second generation leader, although he's very bright. Yeah, yeah, there's
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no doubt about that. I just want to interject and say one thing in
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response to that, not to defend Habermaus, because I think he's actually wrong
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on this point. Yeah, I agree with the Jesus criticism of him on
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this, But long story short, what Harber Moss is doing is actually insisting
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that the problem with appealing to Freud was precisely the fact that he grants his
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theory of subjectivity and reintegrates the philosophy of the subject into Marxist theory, when
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what he's trying to do is move away from the philosophy of the subject towards
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a communicative, pragmatic orientation. And he feels that Freud was sometimes, you
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know, a good contribution to that, but also tended to recalcify certain part
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and expectations that the Frankfurt schoolers would have been better off moving away from.
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Right, So it is more than just consension, right, there's actually a
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kind of philosophical disagreement about whether subjectivity should be placed at the epicenter of critical
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theory. And we're talking about how they're using Freud and using Freud's subjectivity.
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But if we could just specify this a little bit, I'll start because I
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have at least one way, and that's with the concept of repression. So
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repression for Freud is you have a desire. As soon as that desire is
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repressed, for example, in the oedical complex, as soon as it's repressed,
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it's going to act out in different ways. It's going to be a
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symptom for neuroses or violence or disassociation in some way or projection. And one
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way that at least Marcusa, who I read today, uses this is saying
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that your creativity is repressed in your leisure time because capitalism isn't just happy taking
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your work time and taking that from you. It also wants to shove a
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bunch of products into your leisure time, so that your actual ability to be
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creative is then repressed throughout your whole life. Is there any others specific concepts
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from Freud that get deployed here, Yeah, So I mean two things on
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that one. This is also where Marcusa. Just to note, this is
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also where Marcusa begins to sort of differ from people like Adorno and Horkheimer,
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at least early Hornheimer, because when you look at Adorno's critiques of the culture
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industry, those use more marx than Freud. I would argue, the culture
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industry essentially creates these sorts of forms of catharsis that make us sort of passive
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and we won't want to revolt against the system. So there's very much a
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Marxist critique of the culture industry from Adorno. When you get to Marcusa and
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he starts to sort of differ in his interpretation of Freud, he is dealing
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more with repression at the more individual level, so that whereas the Freudians before
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would seek to balance out the ego, MARCUSA is wanting to sort of boost
21:25
up the id, boost up our animal instincts, the things that we want
21:30
to do but were repressed because of whatever reasons, you know, societal reasons,
21:36
psychological reasons, whatever. And this is why Marcusa ended up being a
21:41
key figure for the New Left in the nineteen sixties, because the New Left
21:47
started to sort of shift away from an old form of Marxism that focused mostly
21:52
on mass organizing, mass organization of the working class, towards a kind of
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live of the self, which we always remember in the sixties, but actually
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came out especially more so in the seventies, and Marcuso was sort of their
22:10
hero because he was trying to get people to get rid of these this sense
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of repression so that they can free up their id. This is why he
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became a very big influence on people like Norman O. Brown and some of
22:27
these other psychoanalysts and cultural critics later on. But this is also where he
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kind of differs from a Dorno, where Adorno is making a much more Marxist
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critique of the culture industry. Marcus is making a more Freudian critique of the
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culture industry, I would argue, Yeah, that's true. Can I just
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ask a quick question, just because like we have to Scoss Nietzche and Heideger
22:55
at some length before, and we haven't really dived very deeply into Howger's theory
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of authenticity and its association with fascism and so on. Could you explain,
23:03
like what differentiates Marcuse's idea of liberating the id from Hidigerian ideas of authenticity or
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being your true self if you want to use the more colloquial term. And
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I say this also because for historical reasons it's pretty controversial, since of course
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Haidiger was a formative influence on the earl of Marcus's Yeah, you know,
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I don't know. I'm kind of that would be a question for somebody else,
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because I don't know too much about Heideger in that regard. I know
23:30
that Markusa, you know, studied Hidiger and tried to like sort of meld
23:34
Heideger in Marx, But I don't know much about that, Okay, I
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can wager to answer that in terms of one of the sort of controversial things
23:45
about about Heidigger is his sense of rootedness and also the sense of getting away
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from the of technological, sort of cosmopolitan life. And I think that comes
24:00
out in marcusa because marcusa very is very preoccupied with leisure time and what you
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do with your leisure time. So whereas a lot of Marxist theory deals with
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labor time and how labor itself is alienated, and leisure time is part of
24:19
Marxist theory as well, because he says, like, in leisure you only
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become an animal basically because you're tired of having worked all day. And this
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this lines up with Heidegger's sort of retreat phase because he was banned from teaching,
24:36
but his retreat phase and saying like the authentic is to create spaces for
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thinking. And one of the things you have to do to think is be
24:47
bored, not have a bunch of products to consume, a bunch of media
24:49
to consume constantly. So this is like the cabin, the cabin in the
24:55
woods. Heidegger fits up very well with Marcus's thoughts about using your leisure time
25:00
to be creative, but for it to be creative, you have to not
25:04
be in a rat race the rest of the day trying to increase your profit
25:10
and get get product. Basically, yeah, I don't want to take a
25:15
swing at that. I don't know, Like Heidiger has his own version of
25:18
alienation, right, which has to do with with being alienated from authentic being
25:26
and being sort of captured by the crowd or DOSMN Right. So we're all
25:32
radically in this like radically fallen state. And yeah, that's like I have
25:37
nothing prepared to talk about Heideger in this context because I mean, he's like
25:44
a Dorno criticizes Heidegger like he he just seems radically incompatible with what we're going
25:49
to be talking about in a way. Well, well that's the reason I
25:52
brought him up. And I mean, we don't have to pursue this line
25:55
of inquiry because I'm sure that there's more interesting things to talk about. It's
25:57
just that there was a big controversy I think in the nineteen thirties since Marcuse
26:03
acknowledge the fact that it was highly influenced by Haidiger, and then Heidiger was
26:07
a Nazi, And i'mlike Adorno, who was almost immediately unscathingly critical of the
26:12
whole Hatigarian apparatus. Marcuse ever after displayed some kind of sympathy to the project
26:19
of existential analysis, which is why you know there's controversies and inquiries and to
26:27
the extent of this influence, right all right, Before we took this divergence,
26:33
I was asking about Freud and no one brought it up, so I'll
26:36
throw it to you after I bring it up. But the concept of ideology
26:41
and not the concept that people use today. Actually I have an anecdote about
26:45
this, and that one of my committee members I was writing my dissertation pretty
26:49
much said outright, I am not allowed to use the word ideology because it's
26:55
too confused and I would have to spend too much time defining it. I
27:00
did anyway, But ideology does not just mean the political beliefs that you choose,
27:06
Especially for the Frankfurt School, it means the political beliefs that you don't
27:10
choose. So, in reference to Marcusa, the ideology that he focuses on
27:18
is that we already do enough work that we could stop working. Like if
27:22
everyone worked two hours a day in an economy that has this much money,
27:29
we'd all be fine. You wouldn't have all the goods to consume, you
27:32
wouldn't have all the luxury goods and products. But if everyone just did their
27:36
two hours, you'd pretty much have enough. And the ideology for him is
27:40
that you always have to be growing profit and increasing profit. And yeah,
27:47
that's a fetish like he thinks we should just like draw a line almost and
27:52
stop working at a certain point. So in terms of ideology, where you
27:55
add fetishes in Marx or Freud's terms, this is one of the words on
28:02
which they both align. If you add fetishes to your actions, then how
28:06
does that play out in like political life ideologically? I was just going to
28:11
bring up that that when we talk about fetish with Marx, we're talking about
28:18
commodity fetishism. So in the way we forget that everyday products like our clothing
28:26
or you can go you can This was actually touched on in Pills as Marx
28:32
and Alienation video, But it's fetishism is kind of the way we forget that
28:36
there's like a modicum of labor that goes into everything that we use, all
28:40
the products that we buy, and everything that that is all say objectified labor
28:48
by the laboring class who are being exploited under capitalism, right, and when
28:52
we fall under the spell of commodity fetishism, we we sort of forget that
29:00
is what is happening all around us. Everything, everything is built by somebody,
29:04
Everything is made by somebody. Everything is invested, whereas invested in by
29:11
people's labor and time, whereas with the Freuden version of fetishism. I don't
29:18
know if this word helps, but cathexis it's it's kind of it means kind
29:22
of the investment of libidinal energy, like when you have like a keepsake or
29:26
something you just don't want to throw away because it has too much sentimental value.
29:32
Like that's that's a cathexis. That's that's the investment of some kind of
29:36
psychic energy into something. And I think that has to do with fetishism.
29:40
But also it has a sexual meaning too, like if you want to explain
29:44
like a foot fetish like that, that is also a kind of investment of
29:48
libidinal energy and it's displaced onto a certain object. So supposedly, at some
29:53
point in your life you had some kind of developmental issue, maybe you didn't
29:59
really come complete the anal phase properly or something like that, and you you
30:04
displace all of this sexual psychic energy onto some objects that well, in the
30:11
terms of not completing the anal phase, it means you become anal retentive.
30:15
I guess I'm probably doing some kind of horrible stereotype here, but you become
30:18
anal retentive. You become a fucking prude, right, That's how outworks.
30:25
Kind of. Yeah, this is going to cash it in the in the
30:26
culture industry stuff as well. But basically a fetish in both cases, a
30:30
fetish has to do with a partial object and the rest of that object is
30:33
supplemented by your desire. So there's a surplus desire for the object that doesn't
30:38
actually have to do with it. And we could talk about you know,
30:41
branding and you know, I don't know luxury goods as fetishized objects, but
30:47
the fetish just means you desire it more than there's any use in the actual
30:52
object, whether that's sexual or just like and of course you know, a
30:56
status of all vital of course also anthropological too. Is where both of them
31:07
are getting that that phrase. But I would say that the culture industry is
31:12
probably the you know, I know this is what I always go back to,
31:15
but it is such a good example of you know this this kind of
31:21
idea because you have well, you know, in Marcuse's point of view,
31:29
you have this kind of objectification that Marx talks about under capitalism, where people
31:38
sort of begin to see themselves as like extensions of the objects that they're producing.
31:48
Like they they sort of see themselves as the objects that they've been sort
31:53
of forced to produce, and it and capitalism sort of creates this sense of
32:00
false needs, you know. And this of course plays into the culture industry
32:05
as well, so that you feel like you have to have all these things
32:09
that the culture industry provides you. I mean, this is kind of the
32:15
phenomenon. To give an example, you know, when you see all these
32:19
people who get excited about like every new shitty Marvel movie or whatever, you
32:23
know, and people even know that they're shit, you know, but they
32:27
like have to watch them, they like have to consume because it's like they
32:32
they feel like they have to even if they don't even like them. So
32:38
you get this sort of sense that there are these needs that people feel that
32:45
need to be met. And this is again where the psychology of it comes
32:49
into play and how the culture industry manipulates our psychology because it always supports capitalism
32:55
in the end. And this is another aspect of the culture industry that I
33:00
think people sort of miss because they'll say, oh, you know, like,
33:05
can't some good art squeeze through the culture industry, And well, sure,
33:10
like there can be good stuff that squeezes through, but that's sort of
33:15
missing the point. The point is that the culture industry has one goal,
33:22
not a main goal, but one goal, which is profit. And if
33:27
your main goal is profit again put in another way to prop up capitalism,
33:34
then you're you're always going to be limited in you know, how how good
33:39
the art can be, and you're always going to be manipulated by the industry
33:45
to make you think that you need the things that you don't but you feel
33:47
like you do. I'm just going to switch things around for two seconds to
33:52
talk about the production side of things in true Marxist fashion, right, since
33:55
we should always talk about the deductive processes, by suggesting this isn't some kind
33:59
of conspirat royal effort on the part of the capitalist class to brainwash or delude
34:05
the lower classes by up in the full of hockey and lottery like lottery games
34:09
and Marvel films, right, you know, these people may very sincerely feel
34:15
that they're invested in producing a product, and this will produce a certain degree
34:17
of happiness. But nonetheless it has this structural effect of diminishing desire for reform
34:25
by satisfying true human needs. But sometimes this is misinterpreted this way, right,
34:30
in the sense that there's this giant cultural industry organized by Walt Disney and
34:36
they meet in some kind of dark tassel in Transylvania and they say, this
34:39
is how we're going to loud the lower classes. And that's not what this
34:43
is about. Yeah, it's an accidental confluence of we could call this like
34:46
a systems theory pretty much. It's an accidental confluence of a million little decisions
34:52
being made for the sake of profit that eventually turns into a situation where is
35:00
almost the most unimaginable consequence of this, right, because needs that you don't
35:05
even know you've ever had are being met before you even have them, and
35:08
then you're too exhausted to ever, you know, pick up your placard and
35:14
storm the best steel. Yeah. One example that I really liked was the
35:19
commodification technology in the early twenty first century. So people would sometimes ask like,
35:24
well, why is it that there's an iPhone five and iPhone six and
35:28
iPhone seven, and what are actually the differences between each of these And if
35:31
you actually were to interrogate it, there's not really a substantial difference between each
35:36
of these generations. But what somebody like Steve Jobs is very successfully able to
35:39
do was create a need to be at the cutting edge of a technological revolution.
35:45
As you quay, you don't want to miss an episode, you can't
35:46
you can't binge a showde And of course, you know, if a donor
35:50
were here, it's say, well, being at the cutting edge of this
35:52
quote technological revolution means of course that you'll never actually engage in genuinely revolutionary activity,
35:58
which would mean changing the mode of production to establish a more egalitarian society
36:02
where real needs are able to be met. Right, Yeah, So just
36:07
ting to say I don't like the iPhone. You know, if Apple is
36:10
listening, right, I do take endorsements. Yeah. So that's basically there's
36:16
there's a couple of different there's two different kinds of there's human needs. First
36:21
of all, there's that kind of need where what you need to survive.
36:23
So when the capitalist class is running their factories, they know exactly how much
36:30
money their workers need to survive and support their family and get enough calories per
36:35
day to live on. But within the culture industry, it seems like to
36:39
me that it's the creation of this new like area of need where it's the
36:45
need for consumption. Because what the capital industry does is it turns us into
36:50
consumers. We're not just workers anymore making a living. We're now also consumers.
36:57
They make us into almost like employees. I mean Edorno talks about talent
37:02
scouts in the way that the culture industry absorbs talent, but we also are
37:07
made into consumers, which Marx points out is actually one of the areas of
37:12
production. There's like three areas of production, right there's the sort of extraction
37:17
and manufacturing, there's distribution, and there's consumption. Those are the sorts of
37:22
three areas of production. So it's kind of weird to think about consumption as
37:25
production. But that's the end of the life cycle, right before the garbage
37:31
can I guess, of any product. So we are turned into consumers.
37:37
And then on that basis, they need to create needs which we need to
37:43
compulsively fulfill by I don't know, buying magazines. I mean his biggest examples
37:51
are film, magazines, radio, and these sorts of new mass media forms.
37:59
But I should add that this isn't an argument for asceticism, right.
38:02
It's not like Murcusa and our Dona are saying that what we should do is
38:06
embrace some kind of stoic philosophy where we realize that we don't actually need all
38:08
this crap and then go sit in a commune dissociating ourselves from the world.
38:15
What they're saying is that the problem with the way that the capitalist system and
38:19
the culture industry organizes the production of needs is that we have genuine desires that
38:25
aren't being fulfilled. They're being commodified, and we're giving a cheap iteration of
38:32
what it is that we really want. So, for example, people really
38:37
want genuine connection with other people, particularly like romantic partners, but let's just
38:42
use other people in general, right, And they're unable to get that because
38:45
they're working twelve fourteen hours a day if you add up labor time at the
38:50
home and so on and so forth. And to compensate for that fact,
38:52
people will watch romantic movies about the man getting the girl and how happy he
38:58
is, and everyone in the movie never seems to have to work because they're
39:00
always hanging out at the cafe and dealing with each other's drama. And what
39:05
a Dorna would say is the movie has a real insight to it, right,
39:07
which is that people want human connection, but rather than telling you how
39:12
it is that you genuinely achieve it, which would be by transforming the conditions
39:15
under which you live, which would allow you to spend more time with those
39:17
people that you love and you care about. It's giving you a cheap substitute
39:22
for it, which is just sec romantic love under the conditions of that capitalism.
39:25
Make sure you have enough money that you can have plenty of leisure time
39:29
and everything will be fine. Right. So it's not an argument for asceticism,
39:32
which is what I think sometimes people interpret Adorno and port Crimer, especially
39:36
as saying right that we should all stop wanting things. It's an argument for
39:39
the fact that we aren't getting what we want out of capitalism. What we're
39:43
getting is the mix substitute for it. We're paying for further unhappiness. Yeah.
39:49
No, I was just gonna agree with you, Matt and just say
39:53
that. You know, people often think of Adorno as an elitist, which
39:59
is a completely wrong way to think about him, you know, because what
40:05
he's actually saying is one like you pointed out earlier, the culture industry is
40:09
a structural problem. You can't you can't work within the culture industry. You
40:14
can't work within capitalism to fix the problems of capitalism. The only solution to
40:20
these problems is appending capitalism. So you know, he's making a very Marxist
40:25
argument. It's not elitist at all. In fact, it's the opposite of
40:29
that. For for a Dorno like, we are not reaching our true potential
40:34
as individuals because this the oversight of capitalism, completely dominates our lives. And
40:43
the second point to what you were saying is that and uh, you know,
40:49
Pills can probably say more about the notion of Catharsis. But the culture
40:54
industry specifically gives us ideas about revolution to pacify us. So one of the
41:04
most recent examples is things like that Joker movie, you know, where you
41:09
know people are like, oh, look, this is like such a revolutionary
41:13
movie. It's it's you know, got all these revolutionary themes, which you
41:15
know, I watched it, and you know it, I guess had some
41:21
light revolutionary themes. I guess you could also say they were reactionary. They
41:27
just kind of were Hollywood in my opinion. But that's a perfect example of
41:31
how the industry feeds us little bits of like, oh, look, we
41:37
know that the system sucks, so let me, as the culture industry,
41:43
let me give you some stuff to make you feel feel like you're participating in
41:50
resistance against the system by participating in this entertainment and industry product. And you
41:58
know, like I said, Pills can probably talk a little bit more about
42:00
the nature catharsis and how that works within all this. I was going to
42:07
turn it to Eric since I interrupted him. Oh yeah, well, I
42:10
was hoping for other people to respond to this. I'll just throw this out
42:15
there, okay, and say the main difference between since we're on the topic
42:19
of aesthetics, say Adorno and Marcusa. So Adorno's version of aesthetics is okay.
42:28
Yes, he did get rejected maybe in the sixties by the seventies as
42:35
a kind of elitist because he did enjoy writers like Kafka and insanely complex composers
42:45
like Schoenberg and Berg, who he was friends with. And this is because
42:50
Adorno's version of aesthetics is a kind of bourgeois aesthetics. Not bourgeois aesthetics,
42:57
but the autonomy of the work of art. The work of art needs to
43:00
provide a space in which the contradictions of real life, which the culture industry
43:07
does not allow, to be worked out to their full completion. It does
43:12
not allow for what do you call it sublation, Because as Adorno says in
43:17
his Freuded Moments, the culture industry does not sublate. It represses, right.
43:24
It shows you boobs and nice, nice torsos of heroic people, and
43:30
it just those unsublimated desires at place with them. So Adorno says, you
43:36
need a sort of separate, autonomous space in which art can work out these
43:39
contradictions in a certain way. Whereas Marcusa, he gets picked up in the
43:45
nineteen sixty eight student revolutions, especially in Germany, because Marcusa's philosophy is seen
43:51
as more friendly to popular art and to the way that we're going to find
43:55
sublation in real life. We need to integrate art into the movement itself,
44:00
into real life, and that's sort of the difference between Marcusa and Adorno.
44:07
Adorno has this idea that art does need to be a little bit autonomous.
44:12
Whereas Marcusa is all for you know, art as a kind of well.
44:19
He has this theory of happiness and arrows and the way that art should not
44:25
present an illusion world in which cultural ideals ideals are shown. No, that
44:32
that should be in real life. Art should feed movements and be something that
44:37
we really like. Have you know, if I'm a part of a movement,
44:42
maybe we'll have our representative artists who produce our pamphlets and our images and
44:49
our memes and everything, and those go into the struggle. Whereas for Adorno,
44:53
no, there's an autonomous realm of art which presents us with these nice
44:58
cultural ideals and we can actually see them in all their contradictions and all of
45:01
their workings out. And that's where sublation happens. Because sublation does not happen
45:07
in the culture industry, that's where repression happens. If you want to talk
45:14
about drive theory, I think I can unify this with the Catharsis angle.
45:19
Is that with drives, drives seek a certain satisfaction. So you feel driven
45:24
to eat because you're hungry, and that reduces the tension inside your body,
45:30
or you get horny, So you have to reduce that tension by getting laid
45:36
And this if we're gonna like blow up Freud's theories to a macro level,
45:40
we could talk about Joker or Black Panther as they respond to like this this
45:47
intensity, this tension, and they're like, oh, the oscars are too
45:52
white for you. Okay, we'll make We'll give you this Black Panther movie.
45:55
Then it wins the Oscars. Or you feel like there's social alienation that
46:00
you need to respond to, there's angst, and like you said, Chalaty,
46:05
it's like unclear who the joker is for. Is it for leftists?
46:09
Is it for in cells? No, it's just for anyone who feels like
46:13
a vague sense of alienation doesn't know what to do with it. We're going
46:16
to give you this to know that you're being heard, but you're going to
46:22
pay for it also, And this contrast with Adorno's theory of art, which
46:25
is, no, we want to leave you in dissonance. We want to
46:30
leave you not knowing what to do, so that you can walk away from
46:32
whatever it is you're walking away from and still feel that angst. Maybe you
46:37
even get a more cute sense of angst. Well, actually, I'd like
46:42
to build on that by just saying one thing in response to Eric, which
46:45
is that what he is also opposed to is reactionary responses to the contradictions of
46:50
capitalism, right, which is something like what hadigear we're propose, right,
46:53
because you can look at movies like say No Country for Old Men or Into
46:57
the Wild, and what they involve are are typically male protagonists who retreat from
47:01
society and its vulgarity to try to discover their true self or to get what
47:07
it is that they want. And these movies, you know, are reactionary
47:12
in the sense that they don't actually have any kind of revolutionary potential. It's
47:15
about the individual deciding that this world is so radically fallen that there's no point
47:20
in actually trying to even invest yourself in it any longer. So anything to
47:23
do is withdraw and look after yourself and try to rediscover some kind of spiritual
47:28
element in your personal life. And I don't think that's what a Dorner would
47:30
approve of, right. What he wanted was a revolutionary kind of art that
47:35
allowed you to connect your alienation or your sense of enemy to a broader struggle
47:40
for collective emancipation or social emancipation, depending on how you want to frame it,
47:45
which is why we have to be really careful in saying that just because
47:47
something is genuinely a work of art, that doesn't mean it can't be a
47:51
reactionary piece of art, right, yes. And to add to that to
47:57
both what Eric and Matt said, a Dorno is I'll just sort of tweak
48:05
one thing that Eric said, which is that you know, you mentioned how
48:08
he was sort of into bourgeois art. I would say that he was.
48:15
We kind of look back at classical music now and sort of think of it
48:19
as one sort of homogeneous thing. Unless you're someone who's into music theory and
48:23
history, it kind of seems that way, but it's not all bourgeois art.
48:30
So like A Dorna was actually into modernist art and Scherenberg. One of
48:35
the reasons he liked Scherenberg is because that he was a radical challenge to tradition
48:43
in music theory, and he there's a there's a great essay that A Dorno
48:51
wrote where he's comparing Stravinsky, who was originally a radical composer and then became
49:00
more of a popular composer over time that became very nationalists and comparing him to
49:06
Scherenberg, and he's talking about what's really important for Dorno is that art remain
49:14
radical. And so you'll see like he often changes opinions on composers over historical
49:21
time, not because his not because of reasons of aesthetics, but because of
49:29
reasons that they no longer were acting revolutionary in the composition of their works.
49:37
Another thing I'll just sort of note too on the topic of art is that,
49:42
you know, I saw some comments on the culture industry video. You
49:46
know, people were saying, what about movies like Sorry to Bother You?
49:52
Which you know, I really liked Sorry to Bother You. It's it was
49:55
made by Boots Riley, who's who is a communist. But I think a
50:00
lot this sort of is this example is sort of a example of how the
50:06
culture industry has perminated our lives so much that people think that everything that's a
50:09
film or music comes out of the culture industry. Sorry to Bother You,
50:14
as an example, was not a culture industry product. It was an independent
50:17
film, and it got very limit Because it was an independent film, it
50:22
got very limited theater play and limited distribution and so forth. So that film
50:30
was able to be revolutionary, have anti capitalist themes because it was not a
50:37
product of the culture industry. So there are still ways for art to work
50:44
outside of the culture industry. It's just incredibly difficult because the culture industry dominates
50:50
everything. And just one last point about that, which is that you know,
50:54
when we're talking about the culture industry, we're not just talking about Hollywood
51:00
or you know, Sony, you know, the big films, the big
51:04
music labels, and so forth. We're also talking about news media. News
51:09
used to be separate from a profit making endeavor. Ever since the seventies,
51:16
media has come under the influence of corporate control. Now media is concentrated.
51:23
News media is concentrated to five or six companies. It changes every now and
51:29
then, but five or six companies that own all of you know, ninety
51:34
percent of news media. And I'm not talking about alternative Press proud of their
51:38
seven companies that they have, right. So this is this is how like
51:45
I'll finish up, but like this is how the culture industry sort of maintains
51:51
these ideological notions, uh is because these sorts of ideas are you know,
52:00
in tandem with with the news and where we get our information about politics,
52:06
where we get our information about the world around us. So they work together
52:09
and there's a very intimate relationship between them. No, I just want to
52:14
say, I think people mainly accuse of Dornor of being elitist because they figured
52:16
if they had a copy of like a Beatles record or something, you would
52:20
just come in and smash it right our own a road. Fuck that please
52:24
please meet go please your fucking boss, bitch bang. Yeah. Yeah.
52:31
And even though we have alternative news sources like I don't know, podcasts on
52:37
both the right and left, like Fox News gets two million views a day
52:45
compared to even the most popular podcast which might get like what is it Joe
52:51
Rogan, Yeah, he'll get a million on a on a video over like
52:55
a month or two, I guess. I mean like HBO and both have
53:00
they have their their Last Week tonight and their their Patriot Act, and they
53:05
often like shit on their chemicals that own them, right, Like, I
53:09
consider those to be like sort of semi independent. But I think when like
53:14
Adorno, Yeah, one of the later critiques is, yeah, they didn't
53:17
really predict these like independent value spheres that could emerge within the culture industry at
53:22
the point they're writing it's really when culture has just become, like since before
53:29
World War One, a little really just integrated into this totalizing system. And
53:34
he does say they do say that cultural monopolies are weak. The culture industry
53:39
does not have ideological control unless it's backed by whom, By big steel,
53:46
by chemical, by petroleum, and by electricity. Those are the Those are
53:52
the industrial monopolies that support the existence of the culture industry. And you can
53:57
think of this in terms of even today, the Coke Brothers have a huge
54:00
stake in Getty Images. So every time you use an image from Getty Images,
54:06
you think you're just using a stock image, but no, you're using
54:08
something that the Koch brothers own, and they really keep an eye on that
54:14
shit. And you've got to pay the money every time you use a stock
54:16
image from Getty Images. So it's not that just the culture industry exists,
54:22
like there's a material base for that, and that is big steel, oil,
54:27
chemical, and electricity. Right, So those things are ever present today
54:32
in our society as well. They have an overbearing presence over everything. And
54:37
so even though there's independent value spheres that emerge and subcultures the legacy of the
54:44
sixties, we also still have that same underlying material base that enable all this
54:52
stuff to happen, Like where do the wires come from? Where do all
54:54
the materials come from? Like where an independent value sphere? Just right here?
55:00
But I'm sure the things that I bought that let me do this are
55:02
owned by people I would not want to give my money too, but I
55:06
have to anyway, And so I can produce some kind of nice counter culture
55:12
dialogue with my money that I gave to Bill Gates or to whatever whoever fill
55:20
in whatever semi conspiratorial family rich name you want. But I think you hit
55:27
on a really good point about this, and I would actually just broaden it
55:30
further by saying that one of the things that the cultural industry, according to
55:34
a Darno and like it's later figures like Mark Fisher, what it does that's
55:38
so effective is it's able to co opt a lot of revolutionary forms of art
55:44
and be analize them. I can't remember who actually coined that term, but
55:46
it might have been Fisher, right, And therefore I kind of got them
55:51
of revolutionary potential. And again, this isn't a conscious activity. It's something
55:55
that savvy marketers are just really good at, right. They sit there,
56:00
they say, all the youth of today are actually getting really riled up by
56:02
this, so why don't we take it and transform it into something it's a
56:05
little bit more commercial. And I remember Schelon did a really good presentation for
56:07
my class, maybe about a year and a half ago what she talked about
56:12
this, right, And so I won't steal the examples, but just one
56:14
that I sometimes think about because I'm a big fan. It's like punk music,
56:17
right, you think about the class and enjoy division and a lot of
56:21
the early bands, you know, the sex pistols, that had really revolutionary
56:24
working class rage behind them, and you take that and you transform it into
56:29
angry sounding music for the youth. By the time the mid eighties comes along,
56:34
and all of a sudden, it's transformed into anthems that people will pay
56:37
big dollars in order to go, you know, enjoy it right, as
56:42
a kind of supplement to capitalism, or as a substitute for January and revolutionary
56:47
activity, depending on how you interpreted, right. Yeah, I mean really,
56:52
I think it's perfect that. Yeah, looking at punk and hip hop
56:59
as good examples of how the culture industry co ops countercultural movements. I mean
57:06
both punk and hip hop started as independent cult forms of cultural rebellion, but
57:13
it was not long before, you know, advertisers and the music industry realize
57:20
their potential for profit making and completely essentially bought them up. And you know,
57:25
we see this kind of throughout the history of twentieth century music especially,
57:31
and you know, Adorna's always given a hard time. I have to say,
57:36
Adorna has always given a hard time about his takes on jazz. But
57:40
you know, people who kind of misunderstand that don't really understand either the music
57:44
theory or the music history there. You know, when Adorna's talking about jazz,
57:51
he's he's saying that he's referring to the popular dance form of music that
57:57
existed, you know, in the nineteen forties, which you know, this
58:00
is a time when you know, this isn't the jazz that people think of
58:06
when they think of jazz. It's not cool jazz and bebop that came,
58:08
you know, later in the fifties. When Adorna's talking about this, he's
58:14
talking about music like Glenn Miller and Lawrence Welk and jazz music that had been
58:20
completely standardized and one hundred percent became formulaic, and it was being picked up
58:27
by the culture industry that was forming at this time. And you have the
58:34
music industry like ASCAP BMI that pretty much owns most of music. Those got
58:42
their form those formed in like nineteen forty abouts. So you know, you
58:46
see this throughout all of the twentieth century music and especially into the twenty first
58:52
century, where you'll see pockets of cultural rebellion and that seems sort of promising.
59:00
But then the culture industry, being the behemoth that it is, quickly
59:04
can take these up and use them for their own purposes or even to use
59:08
the example you gave earlier on Joker, Right, I mean, like you
59:12
have margin Scorsese movies and other kind of New Way films in the nineteen seventies
59:16
that I would say, at their best did genuinely have some revolutionary potential.
59:20
Right. You think about Taxi Driver as a kind of an e Vietnam War
59:23
credo, analyzing the kind of depression that results from being in this highly Nixonite
59:30
society, right, And then you know it had a little bit of political
59:34
heft to it, And then you take that and you transport it into twenty
59:37
nineteen, and all of a sudden. What you're just given is revolution about
59:40
nothing, right, You're just angry. So here's a figure who can act
59:44
as an empty signifier for you to project all your animosities into. And hey,
59:49
it's also a pop culture figure, so you know him, you're familiar
59:52
with him, and he's a relatively comfortable person to do that with. Right.
59:54
Oh and it made billions of dollars by the way. Yeah, as
59:58
opposed to Travis Pickle, where you say there and you think, you know,
1:00:00
green beret working a blue collar job, goes crazy and kills a bunch
1:00:05
of people. That's a really uncomfortable person to actually have to think through these
1:00:08
dynamics with, right, which is part of what makes that movie relatively provocative.
1:00:14
So if we can get back to I mean we just did I think
1:00:17
we covered the culture industry there, but and actually, you know what,
1:00:22
this sounds like a conspiracy theory, right. It sounds like, oh,
1:00:25
Marxism didn't work. So now we're going to go find psychoanalysis because we our
1:00:30
theory has to be right about this behemoth thing. Anyway, We've done some
1:00:36
shalon We've done some work before about how we sound like conspiracy theorists if we
1:00:39
were listening to ourselves from the outside. But back to the Marxist thrust of
1:00:44
this whole thing, the whole Marxist thrust. The way I see it anyway,
1:00:47
is this is a theory of why do we have so much and yet
1:00:54
we're unhappy? I think at bottom that's what all of them are trying to
1:00:59
address. And as opposed to someone like Steven Pinker, who's like Africa is
1:01:05
making four dollars a day now, like this is an improvement, you know,
1:01:09
So MARCUSA says something basically like if this were a rational system, we
1:01:15
would have stopped overproducing a long time ago because we already had enough. We
1:01:21
already have enough to be happy, and now the overproduction, the surplus is
1:01:25
just making us more unhappy. By the way, if you want to know
1:01:29
more about MARCUSA, I got a shout out to my friend on YouTube,
1:01:36
Epoch Philosophy, who just released a video on it. I didn't finish it,
1:01:38
so I can't vouch for the whole thing, but I can vouch for
1:01:42
the first half anyway, Great epok philosophy. So yeah, like the idea
1:01:50
that MARCUSA has, and I think the rest of them sort of generally with
1:01:52
this culture industry stuff. Is if this were rational system in the way that
1:01:59
we kind of think of capitalism being rational and the arguments that are made for
1:02:04
capitalism being rational, like, look, it's better for everybody, it's not
1:02:07
producing happiness in the end. So I was wondering what you of what you
1:02:12
guys read today, and Shalon, what you've read your entire life, your
1:02:16
entire your entire career. From the cradles he was kicking of negative dialectics,
1:02:24
being like, oh, this is my future, just spoon feeding her being
1:02:30
here. She was not happy until she read negative Dialectics for the first time.
1:02:37
I was just wondering, what, like, in terms of applying Marxism
1:02:40
today and the way they do it and the way we've tried to do it,
1:02:45
in the way other people have done it, what do they speak to
1:02:49
in terms of like human happiness and what would a good system look like?
1:02:52
And what are the things that we're missing? And we're doing critical theory,
1:02:54
but how do we go just beyond like whining about the music industry and things
1:03:00
like that, this whole thing is fucked. It's like we're I think he
1:03:05
says it somewhere. It's like we're the first society that has the capability I
1:03:09
mean, like the twenty first, twentieth century capitalist society. It's the first
1:03:14
society that has the capability of say, like ending world hunger, and we
1:03:19
just fucking don't do it. Like we're so deep in this ideology that it's
1:03:24
not good for business. It's not, it doesn't it doesn't conform to the
1:03:28
profit motive of the culture industry, So we just don't fucking do it.
1:03:31
And instead we make movies about it because those make money. So that's a
1:03:36
great fucking thought. I mean, when you come out of a Doorno and
1:03:38
hard Cimer, you just have this complete pessimism. There's nothing, there's nothing
1:03:43
you can fucking do. What do you do? Like, Okay, it's
1:03:45
can point the way, but that's not gonna happen. Cool I make art
1:03:50
and it resolves tensions in an autonomous sphere. Is that ever going to be
1:03:53
operationalized now? But if you want to use it to study the history of
1:04:00
culture, this this is an amazing framework for like asking questions about twentieth century
1:04:08
industrial capitalism. But the second wave critical theorist definitely try to do this right.
1:04:13
I mean, we might not like their answers and we can be very
1:04:15
critical of this, but like you'd be hard pressed to say that like ax
1:04:17
are second and third wave, I should say, you'd be hard pressed to
1:04:20
say that like copper Mass or Axelphone or Shaila Benabie don't have answers to these
1:04:26
problems, right. If anything, most of their career they've been trying to
1:04:29
give answers to these and the left has hated it, hated them for it.
1:04:32
So but I mean, if it's that easy, then why don't we
1:04:35
just do it? Because that's that's the point. Well, Matt, this
1:04:39
is kind of what I'm asking. What is that answer? I would get,
1:04:43
Hey, that the answer that logically follows from this, and I would
1:04:46
say that, you know, even though he's not perceived this way, a
1:04:50
close reading of his works will reveal this is that the only answer to this
1:04:56
is a Marxist solution, which is revolution. Revolution in the sense of not
1:05:00
just you know, pocketed rebellions and insurrections, but true revolution that appends capitalism
1:05:09
altogether and establishes a communist society. So you know, yes, they're the
1:05:17
at least you know the early figures. You know, I'm not as well
1:05:21
versed in the later ones. But the early figures do have a pessimistic sense,
1:05:28
and it does seem sort of doom. But but they're also in like
1:05:33
the best stage of capitalism. No one's going to revolt in nineteen fifties USA,
1:05:39
right, right? And oh you say that Martin Luther King did r
1:05:44
Yeah, I shouldn't say. I shouldn't say nineteen fifties USA was good for
1:05:47
everybody. But you know, Marshall Plan, Kingsley economics, oil boom business
1:05:53
was good. Yeah, I mean I would not consider the Civil Rights movement
1:06:00
the kind of communist revolution that you know, Marxist would would consider a true
1:06:06
revolution. I mean, you know, it was good. It changed a
1:06:10
lot of the legal aspects, but you know, if you study the Civil
1:06:15
rights period, you see there were all these ways that the government and everything
1:06:20
stopped any sort of progresses. And this is I think goes to a point
1:06:25
to today, which is that when you have people who try to work within
1:06:30
capitalism, like, oh, we can reform capitalism, it's not going to
1:06:33
work. You know. The only answer is a sober one, which is
1:06:39
it needs mass organization to truly uppend capitalism and create a new system. And
1:06:48
what that system looks like and you know, not exactly sure. Marx was
1:06:54
not clear on this either, and he you know, even talked about how
1:06:58
that's the kind of thing that you know, those who change the society can
1:07:03
determine. So in terms of happiness, I don't know the answer to that
1:07:10
question. I think humans are sort of inherently unhappy regardless of time period.
1:07:14
But uh, in terms of living a life that you know, where you
1:07:19
have food and shelter and you're not worked to death like a wage slave,
1:07:27
that requires revolution, and you know, there Adorno is at the end of
1:07:31
the day a Marxist, even though he you know, is sort of in
1:07:34
the realm of intellectual intellectual thought, you know, that's always in the background
1:07:41
of you know, his criticisms. He saw thinking about these things. He
1:07:46
saw radical thought as a radical move that we first have to understand the problems
1:07:56
and understand why capitalism is bad for all these reasons, because we have to
1:08:03
get rid of it. Yeah, that's why I say the theorists they're primarily
1:08:09
doing a descriptive thing. They're not prescriptive. Marx was descriptive. He was
1:08:15
not primarily a prescription guy. He's not like, this is what you do.
1:08:19
He's like, this is what's happening. It's description, it's social theory.
1:08:24
You're trying to theorize what's going on, because a better understanding of the
1:08:29
society that you're in can lead to more targeted action. Better understanding, like
1:08:35
if we move. These guys are all about reason, right, But there's
1:08:40
different forms of reason. There's the kind of instrumental rationality that capitalism applies to
1:08:45
everything, and then there's a different form of rationality, rationally organized society,
1:08:50
which could work for everybody that they want to get at. But it's not
1:08:56
really enough to just talk about it. We have to under stand the conditions
1:09:01
that we're in before we can, you know, change them in any meaningful
1:09:06
way. So who's going to do it? Not it? Yeah, no,
1:09:10
I understand. And this is why I want to push back a little
1:09:12
bit on both of these comments, because I absolutely appreciate the task of to
1:09:16
use airstream describing society rather than providing prescriptive guidelines, right. But I think
1:09:21
that there's a problem inherent within that, which is that we can't necessarily abscond
1:09:26
ourselves from the burdens of moral judgment and involving ourselves in the creative effort of
1:09:30
trying to imagine what a better society would be. And this is where I
1:09:33
think like somebody like Nomchonsky or hypermasc can be helpful, not necessarily because we
1:09:38
should take their own specific solutions on board, but becaise they provide models for
1:09:44
how this project could be undertaken and where it might go off the rails,
1:09:46
right, And this is one of the things that I think is interesting and
1:09:49
also problematic about the critical theory as a critical theory tradition as a whole,
1:09:54
because a lot of the people who took up the Adornian challenge of trying to
1:09:58
imagine a post capitalist society ultimately came to the conclusion that there's really no way
1:10:03
of doing that. Right if you think about somebody like Jurgen Habermas, right,
1:10:09
like his solution in the nineteen eighties was that there's no way of actually
1:10:12
overcoming the problems engaged involved in steering the market economy through state or democratic action.
1:10:18
So we just had to accept the persistence of the market as a constant
1:10:21
feature in life and settle for something like a social democratic welfare state. Axelhonath
1:10:27
was a little bit more radical in saying that we need to emphasize something like
1:10:30
social freedom as the basis of a common life that we create and share our
1:10:34
common but he never really was able to define that with great deal of specificity
1:10:41
beyond saying that this will be some kind of twenty first century socialism. Matt,
1:10:44
I would really love to hear your manifesto for Habermasian reform. No,
1:10:50
No, I don't think so. I mean what I endorse is something like
1:10:53
liberal socialism, which is a little bit different, right. But what I'm
1:10:56
just saying is that I do think there's this hunger on the part of critical
1:11:00
theorists to provide something more than just descriptions of why it is that the world,
1:11:04
if you want to put it bluntly sucks, right. But we're not
1:11:09
exactly willing to do that all that often, and many of the solutions that
1:11:13
haven't put forward aren't really all that radical break from what we've seen before,
1:11:17
which is why I think a lot of Marxists criticize them, right. But
1:11:21
if people are going to criticize them, then the onus is on people with
1:11:27
radical inclinations to at least provide some kind of prescriptive guidelines on how things will
1:11:31
be better off if we take more drastic steps to overcome the status quo.
1:11:35
If that makes sense, What do you guys think, Because I really don't
1:11:41
even want to step it on a limb here, but I was like reading
1:11:44
Marcusa, it seems like something like UBI would be a big step towards people
1:11:50
being able to use their leisure time creatively, because one of the problems is,
1:11:56
like you don't hand to mouth, you're not going to spend any that
1:12:00
time investing in things that cost money beyond like Netflix, because it costs too
1:12:05
much to like undertake a project. But if there were something like UBI,
1:12:11
do you think that would not not not wage a revolution, but in some
1:12:15
case make the possibility of leisure time be more valuable or be more meaningful.
1:12:21
Well, leisure time is work. In the culture industry, it's just like
1:12:27
work. You you go to work, you go home, and then that's
1:12:31
your leisure time. But what are you really doing. You're just like receiving
1:12:36
the products of your work. As like a collective member of the culture industry,
1:12:43
which you're part of. You just basically you consume and then you get
1:12:46
into this stage where it's like, Okay, I can fucking deal with another
1:12:50
day of work. And then you go back to work, and then that's
1:12:55
that's sort of like leisure just becomes just like work. It's a region tridful
1:13:00
work cycle. Yeah, but if you if you could make the leisure creative,
1:13:04
would that is that a step? If we can just make robots do
1:13:09
all the factory jobs. Say, well, I'm going to post to something
1:13:12
that I hate UBI, But I think the fundamentally Marx's point here still stands,
1:13:15
which is that what we don't just want is leisure time. What we
1:13:17
want to feel is in control of the labor process. And the only way
1:13:23
to actually achieve that is through a democratization of production, right, And you
1:13:29
don't get that from a UBI. Right. You don't get that by just
1:13:30
saying like, well, you can either receive money or you can go into
1:13:33
a workplace and you'll still be exploited and there will still be people are telling
1:13:36
you what to do, but you might happen to make a little bit more
1:13:40
money in those circumstances. This is where I think that Marx is really insightful,
1:13:43
right where you said that one of the problems with bourgeois economists and even
1:13:47
you know, welfare'st economists is that they only emphasize things like redistribution, right,
1:13:53
and how it is to give people the money to do what they want.
1:13:57
One what's also fundamentally important is looking at the product side of things,
1:14:00
and if we look there, we realize that people are still going to be
1:14:03
exploited, and people are still not going to be in charge of producing the
1:14:06
kinds of things that they desire, or do it at least producing things that
1:14:11
have market value in a democratic fashion. And that's what we need to challenge,
1:14:15
right. So I'll be in favor of a UBI because I think that
1:14:16
would be a big improvement on things, But I definitely don't think it would
1:14:20
challenge the underlying problem, which is the fact that many of us work for
1:14:25
crappy bosses and in crappy situations where we don't feel the control of our actions.
1:14:30
And if we're still going to spend eight nine hours a day doing that,
1:14:33
then not a lot's going to change by just giving people the option to
1:14:38
opt out and live on sixteen hundred dollars a month. All right, we
1:14:42
only have a few minutes left, so I'm going to give the final word
1:14:45
as long as as long as you want, Shalon, Oh no, but
1:14:50
we're gonna you can wrap up the discussion. Tell us what you bring us
1:14:55
home, tell us what you hope for, tell us what adorn no hope
1:14:59
for. If not you, well, I think that to wrap it up,
1:15:04
I mean, I think we have to be conscious of things like the
1:15:08
culture industry, of how things that I mean we see. I think an
1:15:15
average I think the last statistic I saw was that the average person sees about
1:15:19
five thousand ADS a day. So we are inundated with a day. Yes,
1:15:26
wow, So we are inundated with constant pressures to consume. Uh.
1:15:34
And I think the first step is to just sort of be aware of it.
1:15:40
And that's where a dorno can come in. But we can't really stop
1:15:44
there. And in my opinion, you know, we need to focus on
1:15:48
creating a mass workers party and really organizing to work towards changing this. And
1:16:00
you know, if you want to start on a small level in thinking of
1:16:03
terms of art, you can think about supporting independent artists. And I don't
1:16:09
mean like quote unquote indie artists that are really just put out by Hollywood,
1:16:14
but I mean like actual independent art. But you can't just consume your way
1:16:19
out of these problems. These problems the very thing that you know, all
1:16:26
of the at least the early Frankfurt school is talking about is problems with capitalism.
1:16:32
And you know they are the early ones were Marxists, and they were
1:16:38
saying, look, capitalism causes these problems. Marxists in the past have talked
1:16:44
about the political and economic problems that capitalism has caused. We're also looking at
1:16:48
the cultural and psychological problems that capitalism causes. All right, So now we
1:16:54
know there are all these things that are problems with capitalism. So what next.
1:16:59
I think what we have to think about as Marxist is how to unpend
1:17:04
it, how to get rid of it, and how to move forward.
1:17:10
And I think that's all I can really say as what we can take away
1:17:14
from critical theory. All right, Eric and Matt, do you have anything
1:17:17
that's less than a minute? And I mean that, and that's that I
1:17:23
really like the Beatles, and whatever Anna says about them, I stand by
1:17:28
at least every one of their posts sixty five records. So that's my final
1:17:32
statement on the matter. I think cars, bombs, and movies keep our
1:17:40
society going around. So keep those things coming. Cars, bombs, movies,
1:17:45
drive to school, give them your money. They invest in the weapons
1:17:49
and then go home and watch a movie. So are you saying like Michael
1:17:53
Bay is the ultimate producer in our economy? Yeah? Or like all hail
1:18:00
Avatar and the unfulfilled promises of that fucking movie, which there's gonna be like
1:18:06
four more of those, I think, or something like that. So there
1:18:10
are starting twenty twenty two, it's gonna be an Avatar movie a year,
1:18:14
So I'm looking forward to more unfulfilled culture industry promises. Red letter media was
1:18:19
the critical theory of today. There you go, all right, from Eric,
1:18:26
Nat and Pills. We'd like to thank Shallon go to her site,
1:18:30
which I have linked if you would like to see more of her stuff now
1:18:35
having heard her, Thanks Shllen for coming. It was great. Thanks so
1:18:42
much for having me. I don't know if I'm happier or sadder than when
1:18:45
we started, despite this being a product actually freely I mean labor are supported
1:18:53
by the mass of patrons. Anyway, Thank you very much, Eric,
1:19:00
Matt. I will see you guys later and you guys can hit your record
1:19:03
button. Ou