From Automaton to Autonomy

2021 ◽  
pp. 67-87
Author(s):  
Richard Begam
Keyword(s):  
Frankfurt School ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
The Real ◽  
Political Autonomy ◽  
Mechanical Reproduction ◽  
German Cinema ◽  
Siegfried Kracauer ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
Aesthetic Autonomy

This essay considers Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) in relation to Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936) and the writings of two other Frankfurt School critics—Theodor Adorno and Siegfried Kracauer. Anticipating the larger argument of Benjamin’s essay, the film situates its central conflict around the “auratic” (as represented by Maria’s Christianity) and the “mechanical” (as embodied by Joh Fredersen’s technology). This conflict is crystallized by the robotic Maria, who is an exact duplicate of the real Maria. The essay highlights Adorno’s correspondence with Benjamin, examining how Metropolis itself engages with the positions these critics take on mechanical reproduction in film. Especially relevant in this regard is Kracauer’s classic study of German cinema, From Caligari to Hitler (1947), a book that levels against Lang the charge that Marxism often levels against modernism: its formalism mystifies its politics. The essay concludes with an analysis of the flood scene from Metropolis, demonstrating that the film’s formalism is not merely “ornamental”—as Kracauer claimed—and that for Lang political autonomy is inextricably linked with aesthetic autonomy.

scholarly journals The Frankfurt School and the authoritarian personality: Balance sheet of an insight

Thesis Eleven ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 072551362110059
Author(s):  
Geoff Boucher
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Balance Sheet ◽  
Research Programme ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
The Other ◽  
Authoritarian Personality ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Authoritarian Populism ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
School Research

Frankfurt School critical theory is perhaps the most significant theory of society to have developed directly from a research programme focused on the critique of political authoritarianism, as it manifested during the interwar decades of the 20th century. The Frankfurt School’s analysis of the persistent roots – and therefore the perennial nature – of what it describes as the ‘authoritarian personality’ remains influential in the analysis of authoritarian populism in the contemporary world, as evidenced by several recent studies. Yet the tendency in these studies is to reference the final formulation of the category, as expressed in Theodor Adorno and co-thinkers’ The Authoritarian Personality (1950), as if this were a theoretical readymade that can be unproblematically inserted into a measured assessment of the threat to democracy posed by current authoritarian trends. It is high time that the theoretical commitments and political stakes in the category of the authoritarian personality are re-evaluated, in light of the evolution of the Frankfurt School. In this paper, I review the classical theories of the authoritarian personality, arguing that two quite different versions of the theory – one characterological, the other psychodynamic – can be extracted from Frankfurt School research.

Tracing the Rift: Heidegger, Hölderlin, and “The Origin of the Work of Art”

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
pp. 295-307
Author(s):  
Will McNeill ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Central Concept ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
The Real ◽  
Philosophical Significance ◽  
To Come ◽  
Central Claim ◽  
Do So

Heidegger’s 1936 essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” is notoriously dense and difficult. In part this is because it appears to come almost from nowhere, given that Heidegger has relatively little to say about art in his earlier work. Yet the essay can only be adequately understood, I would argue, in concert with Heidegger’s essay on Hölderlin from the same year, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetizing.” Without the Hölderlin essay, for instance, the central claim of “The Origin of the Work of Art” to the effect that all art is in essence poetizing, Dichtung, can hardly be appreciated in its philosophical significance without the discussions of both essence and poetizing that appear in the Hölderlin essay. This is true of other concepts also. The central concept of the rift (Riß)—the fissure or tear—that appears in “The Origin of the Work of Art” might readily be assumed to be adopted from Albrecht Dürer, whose use of the term Heidegger cites at a key point in the 1936 essay. Here, however, I argue that the real source of the concept for Heidegger is Hölderlin, and that the Riß is, moreover—quite literally—an inscription of originary, ekstatic temporality; that is, of temporality as the “origin” of Being and as the poetic or poetizing essence of art. I do so, first, by briefly considering Heidegger’s references to Dürer in “The Origin of the Work of Art” and other texts from the period, as well as his understanding of the Riß and of the tearing of the Riß in that essay and in its two earlier versions. I then turn to Heidegger’s 1936 Rome lecture “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetizing,” in order to show the Hölderlinian origins of this concept for Heidegger.

The Mausoleum of Youth: Between Experience and Nihilism in Benjamin's Berlin Childhood

Paragraph ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 313-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael W. Jennings
Keyword(s):  
Human Experience ◽  
The Moon ◽  
History Of Photography ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Modern Media ◽  
Siegfried Kracauer ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

Key sections of Walter Benjamin's montage-text Berlin Childhood around 1900 figure the relationship between human experience and modern media, with the sections that frame the text, ‘Loggias’ and ‘The Moon’, structured around metaphors of photography. Drawing on the work of Siegfried Kracauer, and especially his seminal essay ‘Photography’, Benjamin develops, in the course of his book, a theory of photography's relationship to experience that runs counter to the better-known theories developed in such essays as ‘Little History of Photography’ and ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’, theories that are part of the broad currents of technological utopianism and, as such, emphasize photography's transformative potentials. In the Berlin Childhood, Benjamin instead emphasizes photography's role in the mortification and annihilation of meaningful human experience. Photography emerges here as the mausoleum of youth and hope.

Genre and content in mid-century Verdi: ‘Addio, del passato’ (La traviata, Act III)

1989 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 249-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
James A. Hepokoski
Keyword(s):  
Important Work ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Standard Practice ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
Italian Opera ◽  
Structural Types ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
La Traviata

In the attempt to construct the ‘story’ of post-Rossinian Italian opera it has been standard practice to identify as the central plot the dissolution of traditional structural types and genres. The charting of those musical ‘facts’ that illustrate this dissolution is a familiar musicological endeavour, and there remains a persistent temptation not merely to notice the ever-weakening pull of convention but also to identify it with the notion of ‘historical progress’: a move towards the mature virtues of dramatic complexity, idiosyncrasy and flexibility. Considerations of established conventions and their modifications tend to encourage anti-generic evaluative positions, judgements which are then bolstered by appealing to influential aesthetic systems. Thus Benedetto Croce: ‘Every true work of art has violated some established kind and upset the ideas of the critics’. Or Theodor Adorno: ‘Actually, there may never have been an important work that corresponded to its genre in all respects’. Or Hans Robert Jauss: ‘The more stereotypically a text repeats the generic, the more inferior is its artistic character and its degree of historicity […]. A masterwork is definable in terms of an alteration of the horizon of the genre that is as unexpected as it is enriching’? So bewitching is this image of genre dissolution that artistic production is often assessed by the degree to which it rebels against the idées reçues of tradition or encourages the momentum of the ‘historically inevitable’.

Kluge, Alexander (1932--)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moira Weigel
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Aesthetics And Politics ◽  
Frankfurt Am Main ◽  
Black And White ◽  
German Cinema ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
Alexander Kluge ◽  
Young Writer ◽  
New German Cinema

Alexander Kluge is a German author, film director, and television producer who has also worked as a lawyer, teacher, and political lobbyist. A founding figure of the New German Cinema, he has continued to publish numerous works of fiction and social criticism, and to make experimental films and "film essays" for television. Kluge was born in Halberstadt in 1932. After studying at the University of Marburg, he earned a doctorate in law at the Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main in 1956. During this time, Kluge began writing short stories. He also befriended the philosopher Theodor Adorno, who was then teaching at the Institute for Social Research. The encounter with critical theory would profoundly shape Kluge’s work. Adorno also introduced the young writer to director Fritz Lang. In 1960, Kluge made his first film, Brutalitätim Stein (Brutality in Stone), a twelve-minute, black-and-white montage of Nazi architecture, intended to open discussion of Germany’s recent past that public discourse had suppressed. It premiered at the Oberhausen Film Festival in 1961. The following year, Kluge signed the Oberhausen Manifesto with twenty-five other filmmakers. This document, usually identified as the beginning of the New German Cinema, declared that "Daddy’s cinema is dead." Celebrating the innovative potential of experimental shorts, it called for greater political and creative freedom for, and a better system for financing and distributing, independent films. Lutze argues that Kluge belongs to a distinctly modernist tradition of figures who have opposed what they see to be the dominant culture of capitalist society, taking adversarial stances on mainstream aesthetics and politics alike.

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production

2009 ◽  
pp. 2325-2336
Author(s):  
Thomas B. Cavanaugh
Keyword(s):  
General Population ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Cultural Changes ◽  
Mechanical Reproduction ◽  
Artistic Collaboration ◽  
Electronic Distribution ◽  
Low Threshold

When Walter Benjamin wrote his famous essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, he shone a light on the cultural changes inherent in technology’s ability to infinitely reproduce and distribute art. One of the important consequences of this development was the democratization of art’s availability, allowing the general population to experience artwork that they would otherwise be unable to access. Now technology has advanced to a point where not only is art’s reproduction available to anyone who wants it, its very production is now accessible to almost everyone, even if the prospective artist is utterly devoid of training, expertise, or even talent. With software-based artistic assistance and low-threshold electronic distribution mechanisms, we have achieved the promise of Benjamin’s blurred distinction between artist and audience. As a result, the process by which art is produced has now been democratized, resulting in legitimate questions regarding quality, taste, and the legitimacy of authorship in a human-technological artistic collaboration.

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