Queer Political Astrology

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-120
Author(s):  
Alexa Winstanley-Smith
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Culture Industry ◽  
The Self ◽  
Western World ◽  
Therapeutic Alternative ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
Scientific Fact ◽  
Mainstream Culture ◽  
Aby Warburg ◽  
Political Scene

The resurgence of fascism has quickly become an unavoidable fact of the Western world. Perhaps it comes as no surprise to today’s inheritors of cultural studies and critical theory that astrology has made its own comeback; however, it has made its comeback with a difference. The vanguard of today’s astrological movement is led by the queer Left. Uprooted from its role as fate’s theological handmaiden for mounting figures of authority and apparently removed from the (implicitly heterosexual) reproductive model of a mainstream “culture industry,” queer astrology has come to the fore as an antitraditionalist, anticonservative mode of rethinking human biography in community. The queer astrological model of self-understanding and self-analysis has potential: it is not held in thrall to the perpetually outmoded biological paradigms of scientific “fact,” nor does it require cleaving to secularized but still-fraught figures for the self such as the “martyr,” the “saint,” or the “heretic.” Queer astrology unquestionably breaks the fearful mold beheld by critics like Aby Warburg and Theodor Adorno. But is it political? And if it is, how so? What are its potentials? How do we construe a queer astrological politics that is capable of mounting more than a therapeutic alternative to tradition — one that can play an activist role in a political scene that has already donned the kitsch comb-over of that tabloid credential to which tawdry horoscopes once made their claims?

scholarly journals Os meios de comunicação como instrumento de poder: Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund Adorno (1903-1969) e a Indústria Cultural

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 35-43
Author(s):  
Rodrigo Duarte Fernandes dos Passos
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Culture Industry ◽  
Main Question ◽  
Critical Position ◽  
Main Thesis ◽  
Theodor Adorno

Resumo: O objetivo do texto abordar a temtica dos meios de comunicao como instrumento de poder luz da indstria cultural conforme Theodor Adorno. Busca-se responder seguinte questo: como a indstria cultural reproduz as relaes de poder no capitalismo contemporneo? Para a consecuo de tal objetivo, o texto apresenta as seguintes etapas: uma breve contextualizao histrica e terica da Teoria Crtica - vertente filosfica qual Adorno e outros autores se filiaram - a definio da indstria cultural conforme Adorno em seus principais argumentos, os efeitos da indstria cultural e do capitalismo organizado, a postura crtica frente ao contexto referido e a nova postura de Adorno nos anos 50 e 60 frente aos meios de comunicao. A principal tese do artigo leva ao entendimento de que a indstria cultural incorpora toda uma racionalidade de dominao e disciplina da vida social e reproduo da ordem capitalista vigente, acabando com as contradies no mbito das manifestaes artsticas na medida em que somente o lucro visado. Summary: The aim of this text is discuss communication means as power instrument in the light of culture industry according to Theodor Adorno. There is a main question which the article seeks an answer: how does culture industry reproduce power relations in contemporary capitalism? In order to concretize this aim, this text presents the following parts: a brief historical and theoretical contextualization of Critical Theory - Adorno and other authors' philosophical current - culture industry concept according to Adorno, culture industry and organized capitalism effects, critical position on this context and Adrono's new posture in the fifties and sixties on communication means. The article's main thesis points to evaluation of culture industry1s rationality of domination and discipline of social life and reproducing of actual capitalist order. This leads to the end of contradictions in art, considering that profit is the only aim. Keywords: Culture Industry, Communication, Power.

Culture, Politics, and Governing: Contemporary Ascetics and the Pecuniary Subject

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 391-394 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Mooney Nickel
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
Culture Industry ◽  
The Self ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Art Of Living ◽  
Max Horkheimer ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
A Site

In Culture, Politics, and Governing, the study of contemporary ascetics provided me with a way to approach the practice of knowledge production and its intersection with cultural production that was able to take into account the institutionalization of authors and artists and the ways in which their practices were both governed and governing, often through valorization. Recently, I have worked to extend this framework to settings that are less obvious as sites for the production of governing knowledge: what Max Weber and Foucault discussed as ascetics, generated through what Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno called the culture industry. The contemporary culture industry produces an art of living genre that encourages pecuniary subjects who treat the self as a site for the production of value from which to practice valorized ascetics.

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.

Constructing the Oriental ‘Other’: Saint-Saëns's Samson et Dalila

1991 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 261-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph P. Locke
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
Western World ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Musical Practices

Opera is rich in works that construct visions of the non-Western world and its inhabitants: Rameau's Les Indes galantes, Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Bizet's Les Pêcheurs de perles, Verdi's Aida, Strauss's Salome, Puccini's Turandot. In these operas the representation of what recent critical theory calls ‘the Other’ is most clearly announced in the basic plot, in characters' names, and in costumes, sets and props. But to what extent do the libretto and the music also participate in this project?The question easily lends itself to a narrower formulation: to what extent do these operas signal Otherness – Turkishness, Indianness, Chineseness and so on – through musical materials that depart from Western stylistic norms or even reflect specific musical practices of the region in question? Scholars and critics have repeatedly posed the problem in these terms, only to find themselves frustrated by three limitations: general stylistic aberrations are often applied indiscriminately by composers to vastly different geographical settings; borrowed tunes and the like tend to lose distinctive features by being uprooted and transplanted; and whole stretches of these operas are written in an entirely Western idiom.

Paul and Philosophy

2020 ◽  
pp. 52-99
Author(s):  
Ole Jakob Løland
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
1 Corinthians ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Conceptual Revolution

Taubes’s readings of Paul demonstrate a hermeneutical art of disagreement within the intellectual life of post-Holocaust Europe. Taubes is a reader who looks for intellectual enemies with whom he can achieve a true disagreement without dismissing their true insights, whether they are historical or philosophical. This hermeneutic is not unattached to Taubes’s Jewish background but reflects a Talmudic spirit inherent within Taubes’s idiosyncratic readings of Paul. Moreover, Taubes’s readings are attuned to nuances, ambivalences, and contradictions within Paul, as Taubes powerfully demonstrates in his exegesis of 1 Corinthians. With the help of Nietzsche’s polemical reading of this Pauline epistle, Taubes detects the instances where Paul’s doctrine of the cross revolutionizes ancient perceptions and passages that contain the power to neutralize this very same conceptual revolution. This results in Taubes’s image of a contradictory apostle, who can be used throughout history for various purposes. In Taubes’s case, Paul becomes a messianic thinker and part of Taubes’s efforts to establish a powerful synthesis of the insights of Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt—against what Taubes considers as the merely aesthetic tradition of “critical theory” in Theodor Adorno that remains indifferent to the historical struggles of the excluded.

The Psyche in Late Capitalism I

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Y. Fong
Keyword(s):  
Culture Industry ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Max Horkheimer ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
Drive Theory

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

scholarly journals Heliotropes

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-9
Author(s):  
Robyn Marasco
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
And Migration

A reflection on Seyla Benhabib’s Exile, Statelessness, and Migration, with a particular focus on her reconstruction of early critical theory and the ‘Benjaminian moment’ that links Hannah Arendt to Theodor Adorno.

Surviving through subculture: Finding undeath in psychobilly

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly Kattari
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Culture Industry ◽  
Long Period ◽  
The Past ◽  
Relative Independence ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Mainstream Culture ◽  
Meaningful Role

While some scholars suggest that subcultures are a thing of the past, that we are living in a post-subcultural era, an ethnographic exploration of psychobilly shows that subcultures still play a meaningful role in contemporary society. Since its development in the early 1980s, psychobilly has uniquely blended punk, rockabilly and horror to express countercultural values and aesthetics. Like the groups studied by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 1960s and 1970s, the psychobilly subculture is characterized by consistent and distinct values and tastes, a shared sense of collective identity, committed involvement over a long period of time, and relative independence from the culture industry. By participating in this obscure but strongly defined subculture, psychobillies not only express their resistance to mainstream culture but also find strategies to manage and improve their lived experience. As a result of their committed subcultural involvement, psychobillies feel alive, or, rather, ‘undead’, a metaphor made all the more symbolic because of the subculture’s interest in a host of undead creatures. This article thus argues for continued application of subcultural theory to understand the significant meaning and impact of participation in non-conformist communities today.

scholarly journals Gordon Rohlehr and the Culture Industry in Trinidad

2011 ◽  
Vol 85 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 191-214
Author(s):  
Raymond Ramcharitar
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Trinidad And Tobago ◽  
West Indian ◽  
Culture Industry ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Max Horkheimer ◽  
Alternative Sexualities ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
Cyber Culture

The terms "culture" and "cultural studies" in Trinidad and Tobago have been narrowly defined to mean Carnival and various other phenomena connected to the nationalist project. There has been little acknowledgement of cyber culture, alternative sexualities, consumerism, media, and in general the "Culture Industry", as theorised by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. One critic, Gordon Rohlehr, has over decades presented a body of work ostensibly focused on Carnival, but which also contains a cogent critique and outline of the Trinidad and Tobago Culture Industry (as contemplated by Adorno). A close reading of Rohlehr's work, and his intellectual antecedents, reveal a compelling critique of the Trinidadian/West Indian notion and practice of culture and cultural studies, and suggests areas for the discipline's expansion to better serve the needs of the region.

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