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Art and Its Resistance to Society: Theodor W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory

Ehrhard Bahr

in Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism

This chapter focuses on the concept of the “culture industry,” as defined in Dialectic of Enlightenment, and on Theodor W. Adorno's Philosophy of Modern Music of 1949 and his late Aesthetic Theory of ... More

This chapter focuses on the concept of the “culture industry,” as defined in Dialectic of Enlightenment, and on Theodor W. Adorno's Philosophy of Modern Music of 1949 and his late Aesthetic Theory of 1970. The process of enlightenment had proved both progressive and regressive, and culminated in a crisis around 1933 that needed not only political action to decide its outcome, but also philosophical reflection to chart the future course of enlightenment. The chapter shows how Adorno, in his book on Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, integrated the development of modern music into the historical process and identified resistance to society as the function of art. Later in his aesthetics, Adorno added the concept of art as historical record and the permanent language of human suffering. As a close reading of the chapter “The Culture Industry” shows, Max Horkheimer and Adorno suggest similarities between Adolf Hitler and Hollywood, or between German national socialism and American mass culture.Less

Hyping the Grimms’ Fairy Tales

Jack Zipes

in Grimm Legacies: The Magic Spell of the Grimms' Folk and Fairy Tales

This chapter discusses how the Grimms became involved in hyping their own tales to change their reception at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It first considers some of the theoretical ... More

This chapter discusses how the Grimms became involved in hyping their own tales to change their reception at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It first considers some of the theoretical aspects of hyping and the particular role hyping plays in the media paratexts of the culture industry. Hereafter the chapter reviews how the Brothers Grimm changed the format and scope of their tales, primarily under the influence of Taylor's 1823 translation, German Popular Stories, to make their tales more accessible to the general reading public in Germany. Lastly, the chapter examines some recent filmic adaptations of fairy tales and considers whether the hyping of these films detracts from the value of the fairy-tale genre and storytelling in general.Less

Conclusion: Dickens Worlds Past, Present, and Yet to Come

Juliet John

in Dickens and Mass Culture

The Conclusion analyses the larger implications of the debate surrounding the opening of the commercial visitor attraction, ‘Dickens World’ in Chatham, Kent, in 2007. It argues that the site ... More

The Conclusion analyses the larger implications of the debate surrounding the opening of the commercial visitor attraction, ‘Dickens World’ in Chatham, Kent, in 2007. It argues that the site represents a challenge to the process of familiarization and ‘heritagization’ that has accompanied Dickens's rise to respectability and diminished his ability to empower ‘the people’ in the sense of those outside the cultural elite. Disparaging comparisons between Dickens World and Disney stem partly from a prevailing distrust in the modern era of the ‘culture industry’ — but also to the perceived Americanization of Dickens. The chapter argues that Dickens World reverses of the dissociation of Dickens from materialism that has accompanied his rise to ‘English iconhood’ in the public imagination. Moreover, if ancestry and heritage involve an idea of value residing in veneration, in an emotional relationship between the past and the present which is nonetheless hierarchical, then the accessibility, materialism and indeed playfulness of Dickens World break the bonds of ancestry. It arguably had to do so if it wanted to play to the lowbrow end of the spectrum in today's segregated cultural marketplace; its success or failure will thus tell us a great deal about whether or not Dickens's inclusive vision for the amusements of the people is still viable in the twenty‐first century, and about whether Dickens continues to amuse the people.Less

Introduction: Make Fandom Great Again

Suzanne Scott

in Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry

This introduction briefly introduces the book’s topic and historical scope and establishes “the convergence culture industry” as an analytical framework. This portmanteau of Henry Jenkins’s ... More

This introduction briefly introduces the book’s topic and historical scope and establishes “the convergence culture industry” as an analytical framework. This portmanteau of Henry Jenkins’s “convergence culture” and Adorno and Horkheimer’s “the culture industry” is positioned as a polemic, but nonetheless one that can help us understand the gendered mainstreaming of fan culture and attempts to standardize fan identities and practices in the digital age. As the title of the introduction suggests, it also situates this moment within fan and geek culture (and the privilege of white, straight, cis-gendered men in it) within a broader array of antifeminist pushbacks against “political correctness” and “social justice warriors.” Accordingly, the introduction concludes with a consideration of whether systemic attempts to remarginalize female fans within both fan culture and fan studies might be productively, if allegorically, framed through the GOP’s “War on Women,” emergent “Men’s Rights” and alt-right movements, and nostalgia for a lost status quo.Less

The Psyche in Late Capitalism I: Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and the Crisis of Internalization

Benjamin Y. Fong

in Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism

Employs the drive theory developed in the first three chapters toward a reinterpretation of the culture industry thesis of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer.

Culture, U.S. Imperialism, and Globalization

John Carlos Rowe (ed.)

in America and the Misshaping of a New World Order

This chapters explores the various ways in which U.S. cultural production, also known as the “the culture industry,” conditioned American citizens to accept the undisguised militarism and jingoistic ... More

This chapters explores the various ways in which U.S. cultural production, also known as the “the culture industry,” conditioned American citizens to accept the undisguised militarism and jingoistic nationalism driving U.S. foreign policy. The culture industry today encompasses a wide range of nominally different political positions, so that in many respects left, liberal, and conservative cultural works often achieve complementary ends. Exposures of U.S. military propaganda during the war have continued in news coverage of the supposed “rebuilding” of the political and economic infrastructure in Iraq. Public concern, regarding the federal government's veracity, is evident in the debate regarding who was actually responsible for the disinformation regarding the “Weapons of Mass Destruction” used as the principal justification for the invasion of Iraq. The chapter follows the capitalization of “cultural exports” ranging from Hollywood entertainment and television programming to digital technologies and their protocols for communication that aims towards rapid Americanization of the world.Less

Seoul Calling

John Lie

in K-Pop

Chapter 2 delineates the rise of K-pop and explores its political-economic background, South Korea’s export-orientated innovation economy, and finally the aesthetics of K-pop.

Make Me Beautiful: Aesthetic Discourses of New Negro Womanhood

Treva B. Lindsey

in Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, D.C.

This chapter closely engages African American beauty culture. Advertisements for beauty products such as hair pomades and skin bleaches comprised a significant portion of advertisements in African ... More

This chapter closely engages African American beauty culture. Advertisements for beauty products such as hair pomades and skin bleaches comprised a significant portion of advertisements in African American newspapers throughout the early twentieth century. The advertisements for beauty products targeting African American women unveil a discourse and an industry that were instrumental to the materialization of a New Negro culture. Through advertisements and open discussions about African American beauty, self-presentation and adornment shifted from an individual/private sphere issue to a formidable public culture site of individual and collective expressivity during the New Negro era. African American beauty culture thrived as a site of reinvention and re-imagining for New Negro women. It also offered multiple authorial roles in which these women could partake, including: producer, consumer, and manufacturer. In Washington, this black women’s beauty culture was a thriving industry as well as a battleground and playground for black women actualizing themselves as New Negro women.Less

After the End: Adorno

Samuel Weber

in Theatricality as Medium

This chapter attempts to summarize an array of Adorno's works and analyses of various concepts as a critique of Kierkegaard's texts or as a comparison with a Hegelian line of ... More

This chapter attempts to summarize an array of Adorno's works and analyses of various concepts as a critique of Kierkegaard's texts or as a comparison with a Hegelian line of thought. Adorno shares his thoughts on concreteness and a conception of knowledge as an active process of self-constituting rather than a passive medium. Among some of the concepts discussed in this chapter is that which concerns reading: Hegel requires repeated reading, but one could easily fool someone who relies on repeated reading. Adorno also gives focus to Hegel's concept of reading as an art. Adorno analyzes the “Culture Industry” and associates this with the critique of the “Critical Theory”. Lastly, Adorno turns his attention to the importance of the use of language and pseudonyms and their philosophical implications.Less

How Did We Get Here?

John Lie

in K-Pop

The introductory chapter provides a genealogy of popular music in South Korea and charts a series of rifts that separates traditional Korean music from K-pop. In particular, Japanese and American ... More

The introductory chapter provides a genealogy of popular music in South Korea and charts a series of rifts that separates traditional Korean music from K-pop. In particular, Japanese and American influences are significant, as are the changing political-economic context of South Korea, including the salience of censorship.Less

When you're lookin' at Hank (you're looking at country)

David Brackett

in Interpreting Popular Music

This chapter explores how the idea of country music emerged through a confluence of forces, focusing on the case of Hank Williams. It comments on Chet Flippo's controversial 1981 biography of ... More

This chapter explores how the idea of country music emerged through a confluence of forces, focusing on the case of Hank Williams. It comments on Chet Flippo's controversial 1981 biography of Williams. It investigates how voices, lyrics and music create the effect of authenticity in country music and how this effect emerges and shifts historically. It also considers how the association of country music with the culture industry affects the production of authentic effects and how images of resistance and marginality may contribute to the popularity of artists and songs in country music.Less

Do All we could to Get What we Felt Belonged to us by the Laws of Nature: Selling Real Negro Melodies and Marketing Authentic Black Rhythms

David Gilbert

in The Product of Our Souls: Ragtime, Race, and the Birth of the Manhattan Musical Marketplace

This chapter explores how, by embracing and selling racial difference, black musicians were able to become leading cultural innovators, symbols of modern black representation, and central players in ... More

This chapter explores how, by embracing and selling racial difference, black musicians were able to become leading cultural innovators, symbols of modern black representation, and central players in the formation of modern American culture. This emerging racial formation was essentially strengthened by its diversity within the Manhattan marketplace. The popularity of ragtime empowered African American musicians to intervene in the city's local—but nationalizing—commercial culture industries with new and inventive musical commodities that, in turn, further propelled black innovators to the top of Manhattan markets. This reflexive, mutually propelling circuit promoted the increase of black artistry alongside the expansion of New York culture industries such as song publishing, musical theater, and vaudeville. It reinforced the idea that African American entertainers were some of the best in New York City and, increasingly, throughout America.Less

Writing at the Margins: Postcolonialism, Exoticism and the Politics of Cultural Value (from The Postcolonial Exotic)

Graham Huggan

in Bourdieu and Postcolonial Studies

This chapter reprints the introduction to The Postcolonial Exotic to set the stage for all of the Bourdieu-inspired approaches to postcolonial studies that will follow. Huggan shows how the ... More

This chapter reprints the introduction to The Postcolonial Exotic to set the stage for all of the Bourdieu-inspired approaches to postcolonial studies that will follow. Huggan shows how the oppositional ethos of postcolonial studies runs up against the commodifying apparatus of postcoloniality. The emerging “alterity industry” and its exoticizing processes threaten the potentiality for critique that postcolonial studies seeks to offer. Yet Huggan also steers clear of reductive attacks on postcolonialism as therefore contaminated and complicit; in a context where the global market aspires to commodify all forms of resistance and opposition, there is no uncontaminated stance. Bourdieu offers Huggan conceptual tools to call attention to this tenuous positioning within which postcolonial studies is located in order to explore the possibilities for critique still offered by this contaminated space.Less

The Golden Age: Pan Americanist Culture, War, and the Triumph of Universalism

Carol A. Hess

in Representing the Good Neighbor: Music, Difference, and the Pan American Dream

This chapter examines the climax of north-south sameness-embracing, the period following the outbreak of war in September 1939. One manifestation of Pan Americanist culture was Latin American–themed ... More

This chapter examines the climax of north-south sameness-embracing, the period following the outbreak of war in September 1939. One manifestation of Pan Americanist culture was Latin American–themed music by U.S. composers, much of which verged on the commercial. Virgil Thomson, who reviewed Villa-Lobos’s music (and whose antinationalist barbs parallel the sentiments of many Latin American composers and critics), laid the groundwork for Brazilian universalism. Villa-Lobos’s reputation in the United States also gained luster from the alliance between the Brazilian strongman Getúlio Vargas and the United States, cemented in 1942 after a long courtship and touted by art music critics and the U.S. music industry. Reflecting the commercial bent of much Pan Americanist culture, Villa-Lobos was also bound to Hollywood and the culture industry, as corroborated by his foray into the American musical, Magdalena, read here in the context of Pan Americanism’s abrupt deterioration during the early years of the cold war.Less

Introduction

Ulf Olsson

in Listening for the Secret: The Grateful Dead and the Politics of Improvisation

The introduction provides with basic facts about the band, as well as the book’s basic theoretical perspective, inspired by the work of Theodor W. Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. Their theories make it ... More

The introduction provides with basic facts about the band, as well as the book’s basic theoretical perspective, inspired by the work of Theodor W. Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. Their theories make it possible to see the band as simultaneously part of and opposed to the culture industry. “Self-organization” is introduced as a flexible concept, applicable to many aspects of the band. Polarized representations of the band, by Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion, respectively, serve as a background to the book’s critical discussion and evaluation of the band and its culture. Even the Grateful Dead, symbols of the counterculture, worked within a cultural market, but challenged it in different ways. The introduction argues that the band actually produced music with an aesthetic value, and thus political significance.Less

Conclusion: “Our Beautiful White …”

James Smethurst

in The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance

This book concludes by arguing that, while the United States had long been an expansionist nation, the transformation of U.S. manifest destiny to include the domination of territories outside of ... More

This book concludes by arguing that, while the United States had long been an expansionist nation, the transformation of U.S. manifest destiny to include the domination of territories outside of North America and of populations that would be ruled rather than displaced entailed the rise of new cultural geographies and new anxieties attending those geographies mapped onto the older meanings of the East–West and North–South axes. Economic and industrial changes also began to transform the symbolic meaning of East and West and North and South as the industrial center of the United States moved from the Northeast to the Midwest and, to a lesser degree, the South. While financial capital and the culture industries, with the exception of the burgeoning film industry, remained largely based in the Northeast, especially New York, the new mass production industries and the mineral extraction industries other than the electrical industry were increasingly identified with the Midwest and the South.Less