Name: From Critical Theory to Postmodernism, part 3 of 4
Uploaded: 2014-10-04T08:40:10.000Z
Duration: 16 min 49 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

They do explore some, if not alternatives to the Enlightenment mode of domination,

they do explore some possibilities that still exist for us.

Adverbs of degree

that are not totally subsumed by that mode of domination.

And they focused on art and memory. We're on page 25, I'm going to read you a

small section here. The urge to rescue the past as something

living, instead of using it as the material of progress, has been satisfied

only in art. Okay, so notice there, it's not to use

the past. but, to rescue the past as something

Has been satisfied only in art, in which even history, as a representation of past

life, is included. As long as art, including history here,

as long as art does not insist on being treated as knowledge.

And thus exclude itself from praxis, it is tolerated by social praxis in the same

way as pleasure. So art like pleasure is tolerated in the

Enlightenment modality. But art rescues the past.

This will be important for Horkheimer and Adorno because the past contains

alternatives to the status quo. The seeds of alternatives to the status

Rather than trying to project a utopian future, they think of the past as having

seeds of possibility that have not yet been cultivated.

And so, art can somehow rescue the past. Culture can provide us with reminders,

pleasurable reminders, because there's aesthetic pleasure involved, pleasurable

reminders of alternatives to this totalitarian picture generated by the

Enlightenment. However, art too is colonized by the

forces of progress in Enlightenment. Art too is used by the forces of

domination. They certainly saw that in Nazi Germany

with the great choreography of mass rallies, the use of film to generate an

enthusiasm for the regime, for, to generate hatred of the regime's enemies.

But they see, Horkheimer and Adorno, and over the years Adorno in particular, will

see in mass culture. and and another mode of dominating

people, by reducing the spectrum of what they can hear and see and take pleasure

in and find alternative to the status quo through.

so they write at like page 28 to 29 that regression of the masses today lies in

their inability To hear with your own ears.

What has not already been heard. The masses ability to hear with your own

hears. What has not already been heard to touch

with their hands, what has not previously been grasped.

This is a new form of blindness, which supersedes that of vanquished mist, myth.

So what what Horkheimer and Adorno are trying to eh do here is to remind us that

there are forms of art that we might open our ears to if you will.

That we might open our eyes to, but there were great forces in social praxis and

social coecion and the homogenization of society That limit what we can hear and

take pleasure from. Limit what we can see, and, and consider

as art. Horkheimer and Adorno were, dedicated

avant gardists. They were very interested in how art

aggressively pushes the boundaries of, What we can think and take pleasure from

and they were worried that as part of the dialectic enlightening, as part of the

cycle of domination, art would become less and less adventurous.

Art would become more and more a, a form of mass culture or pop culture, appealing

to our most base tastes and reinforcing the status quo.

They wanted an art that was going to push us to think beyond where we were, to

think beyond what the status quo required.

and that would be the path to what they call true praxis.

true praxis is overturning the status quo through action informed by feeling a

knowledge. This doesn't come until the very end of

the essay, towards like the middle 30s of our reading.

True praxis is capable of overturning the status quo because it integrates theory

pleasure and aesthetics. So, they are wary that aesthetics is

being, or art, music is being dumbed down into something that everybody can sing

and tap their feet to. and they worry that that will close the

door of art off as well. but they have some hope, they have some

hope that through art, the past can be redeemed, rescued and possiblities for

the future can be opened up despite the awful persistence of domination and our

participation in it. So Horkheimer and Adorno were doing that

work, as I say, in the 1940s and, and, continue to do that for many years to

come. the Frankfurt school is a, a group of

thinkers still today very active through its elder statesman Jurgen Habermas.

de-, developing a body of, of, of dialectical thinking called critical,

theory that remains a, a force, in, in many countries around the globe.

A force for understanding how we participate in our own oppression and how

we might imagine alternatives to it. The, the next thinker we're going to talk

about this week is Michel Foucault who comes of age a generation later than

Horkheimer and Adorno. Foucault who was a historian, a

philosopher wrote about art and literature he He was an activist as and,

and, and a bit of a trickster in some ways as well.

he participated in, in a the French Postmodernism, in fact was a leader of

French Postmodernism insofar as he was rigorously antifoundational.

He, didn't want to find the really real. he didn't want to find a total dialectic.

What Foucault wanted to do in his work was just a small piece of which we have

read for, this week. But Foucault wanted to do in his work.

Was to tell the story of progress in such a way that we would see how what we

thought of was progress was actually a, a form of a, a greater social control and

homogenization. He told that story not because he thought

it had objective truth but because he thought that alternative accounts of how

we came to be who we are might actually open up possibilities for us to change

who we would be in the future. So, we have read something for this week

from Michel Foucault's great work on the mental asylums and mental hospitals.

the which was called a madness in civilization.

and I, he, he just gives you an example of the Foucaultian, as it comes to be

called, approach to the past and approach to politics.

For Foucault the history of mental illness was great field for

deconstruction if I can use that phrase. It wasn't a phrase he would of used

himself. Or he would of said a feel for genealogy,

Foucault himself in the Nichean tradition why?

Because what we see in the field of mental illness is a history where we say

up until the end of the 18th century or sometime shortly thereafter, we treated

insane people very badly. We didn't know they were sick, we thought

they were possessed, we thought they were criminals, we thought that we had to

chain them up and And, and, and contain mental illness in a way that was

barbaric. And then afterwards we realized, oh my

Subtitles ListPlay Video

From Critical Theory to Postmodernism, part 3 of 4

mental

dude

progress

alternative