The basic goal of Theodor Adorno’s “Progress” is made apparent in the very first sentence: to provide a clear, theoretical and philosophical understanding of the concept of progress. Though he does not clarify until later, the author is referring to the progress of humanity in the widest possible sense. Simply contemplating this task [...]
Archive for the ‘critical theory’ Category
Theodor Adorno: Progress
Posted in Adorno, Benjamin, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer, Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, critical theory, progress, regression on April 28, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Max Pensky : The Trash of History
Posted in Adorno, Benjamin, critical theory, historical materialism, historicism, history, melancholy, object, subject on April 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
In Max Pensky’s “The Trash of History,” taken from the larger Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning, Walter Benjamin’s use of the objective dialectical image is viewed in juxtaposition–and unwanted collaboration -with subjective allegorical imagery. The dialectical image, where past and present interact with one another, is Benjamin’s method and [...]
Herbert Marcuse: On Science and Phenomenology
Posted in Marcuse, critical theory, subject, tagged Being, Husserl, Marcuse, phenomenology, reason, Science, Subject-Object, Universe on April 25, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
By Ben Daly and Rose Mackey
In his essay On Science and Phenomenology Herbert Marcuse attempts to lay out the ways in which a split has occurred between the scientific and philosophical views on the world, and how this split has been detrimental to the development of human society in the west. For Marcuse this [...]
Stefan Breuer : The Long Friendship – Theoretical Differences Between Horkheimer and Adorno
Posted in Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer, critical theory, historical materialism, history on April 25, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The Long Friendship: Theoretical Differences Between Horkheimer and Adorno originally appeared in the book On Max Horkheimer: New Perspectives. In this essay Stefan Breuer successfully highlights the contrasting viewpoints that arise when juxtaposing the works of Horkheimer and Adorno.
Adorno, Ellison, and the Critique of Jazz
Posted in Adorno, critical theory, history on April 25, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
In the “ Culture Industry” chapter of The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer wrote of jazz, “ No Palestrina could have eliminated the unprepared or unresolved dissonance more puristically than the jazz arranger excludes any phrase which does not exactly fit the jargon. If he jazzes up Mozart, he changes the music not only [...]
Max Pensky: Melancholia and Allegory
Posted in Benjamin, critical theory, melancholy, subject on April 25, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Everything is a composite of smaller group of factors, therefore everything is connected. This is why Benjamin argues that art and science must find a way to coexist. But, as the author points out, these claims also embody an aspect of hypocrisy. As he states, “the claim that the Trauerspiel study ‘is’ allegorical is as [...]
Canetti, Elias + Theodor Adorno: Crowds and Power
Posted in Adorno, critical theory, subject, tagged Add new tag on April 25, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The article I read was a conversation between Theodor Adorno and Elias Canetti after Canetti’s publication of his book Crowds and Power in 1960. Adorno asks Canetti about the close relationship between crowds and power, survival and self-preservation, and his idea of the “invisible crowd.” Adorno begins by commenting that Canetti’s anthropological works reveal [...]
Gillian Rose : The Melancholy Science
Posted in critical theory, melancholy, subject on April 25, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Gillian Rose’s first published work, The Melancholy Science is a critical exploration of Adorno’s thought. The self-titled last chapter of the book seeks to outline the progression of complications Adorno’s social philosophy encounters and his emerging response. She establishes his social diagnosis as “approached as the immanent question of ‘the conceptual mediation’ of social reality [...]
Josef Fruchtl : The Struggle of the Self Against Itself: Adorno and Heidegger on Modernity.
Posted in Adorno, critical theory, history, phenomenology, self, subject on April 24, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
In this paper Fruchtl attempts to investigate the question of reflection on modernity. His main thesis is that to reflect upon modernity is to reflect upon the self. This immediately launches the investigation into the realm of subjectivity. He begins by building a picturing of the current dynamic concerning the subject. He creates a dynamic [...]
Introducing Critical Theory
Posted in Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer, Marcuse, critical theory on January 23, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
“Critical Theory has a narrow and a broad meaning in philosophy and in the history of the social sciences. “Critical Theory” in the narrow sense designates several generations of German philosophers and social theorists in the Western European Marxist tradition known as the Frankfurt School. According to these theorists, a “critical” theory may be distinguished [...]
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