Review: Adorno on Music, by Robert W. Witkin; Sound Figures, by Theodor W. Adorno. Translated by Rodney Livingstone; Adorno, Modernism and Mass Culture: Essays on Critical Theory and Music, by Max Paddison

The end of the nineteenth century witnessed the birth of an international avant-garde that focused upon alienation, standardization, and the liberation of the individual from constrictive social norms. Impressionists, Cubists, Expressionists, Futurists, Dadaists, Surrealists, and representatives from many other styles provided a blizzard of philosophical–aesthetic manifestos that blended political with cultural resistance to mass society. The Frankfurt School’s inner circle was sympathetic from the start; modernism provided a response to the ontology of false conditions and, indeed, an avant-garde opposition to mass culture provided inspiration and cohesion. ‘Critical theory and modernism’ explains how the unflinching support of modernism and experimental art by the Frankfurt School confirmed both its cultural radicalism and contempt for totalitarianism.

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Post Media Literacy: Menyaksikan Kuasa Media Bersama Michel Foucault

Jurnal ASPIKOM ◽

10.24329/aspikom.v1i1.4 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 1 (1) ◽

pp. 1

Author(s):

Iswandi Syahputra

Keyword(s):

Critical Theory ◽

Mass Media ◽

Media Literacy ◽

Mass Culture ◽

Control Process ◽

Media Industry ◽

The Media ◽

New Space ◽

New Perspective ◽

Unique Style

This article would like to present Michel Foucault’s idea concerning Knowledge and Power in media industry. As a contemporary intellectual, Foucault’s thought has a unique style of postmodernism. His thought had gone beyond traditional critical theory whose trying to disclose the relation of power and economic behind the ideology of media. Foucault’s thought had given new perspective in understanding how the media produce truth under tightly control process into something that seems normal. With the assumption of media has the power to create mass culture, which has to be studied critically by media literacy approach, Foucault’s thought had given new space of discursive. An alternative thought on how to estimate the work of mass media as supervisor of truth and creator of information trough normalization practice.

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Illusion and Non-Identity Thinking in Nietzsche’s Critical Theory

Critical Sociology ◽

10.1177/08969205211056354 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 089692052110563

Author(s):

Vasilis Grollios

Keyword(s):

Critical Theory ◽

Mass Culture ◽

First Generation ◽

Frankfurt School ◽

Core Values ◽

One Dimensional ◽

The Core ◽

Identity Thinking ◽

Radical Character

The paper attempts to bring to the fore the radical character of Nietzsche’s critical theory. It argues that behind Nietzsche’s consideration of suffering lies both a critique of one-dimensional mass culture and fetishism, and a theory of alienation that is much closer to Marx’s critique of alienation in capitalism than is usually believed. Uniquely, it will also support the idea that Nietzsche holds a theory of a dialectics between content and form, that is of non-identity thinking, very similar to that of the first generation of the Frankfurt School, and will attempt to connect it to an attempt to doubt the core values sustaining capitalism.

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On the Critical Theory of Mass Culture of Frankfurt School

Advances in Social Sciences ◽

10.12677/ass.2021.106196 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 10 (06) ◽

pp. 1425-1430

Author(s):

广丰方

Keyword(s):

Critical Theory ◽

Mass Culture ◽

Frankfurt School

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‘Or any art at all?’: Frank Zappa meets critical theory

Popular Music ◽

10.1017/s0261143001001416 ◽

2001 ◽

Vol 20 (2) ◽

pp. 205-222

Author(s):

DAVID WRAGG

Keyword(s):

Critical Theory ◽

Popular Music ◽

Mass Culture ◽

Special Section ◽

Culture Industry ◽

Crucial Point ◽

Negative Dialectics ◽

Paperback Edition ◽

Dust Jacket ◽

Point Of Reference

Back in 1982, Max Paddison suggested that Frank Zappa's 1960s' Mothers of Invention recordings deserved to be read in the context of Adorno's views on mass culture. Based on a ‘critical, self-reflective attitude’ (Paddison 1982, p. 216) towards their musical processes, as anticipated in Adorno's essay, ‘Music and technique’ of 1959, these records could be seen to mount an incisive critique of the ‘culture industry’. The title of a series of essays in Telos (Spring 1991), ‘Special Section on Musicology: popular music from Adorno to Zappa’, locates Zappa in a debate about Adorno's continuing relevance where theories of popular music are concerned. More recently, Ben Watson's Frank Zappa, The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play (1994) uses a theoretical admixture of Marx and Freud in which Adorno looms large. (The dust jacket photograph of Watson mirrors the photograph of Adorno at Oxford in December 1935 which now adorns the 1997 paperback edition of Paddison's Adorno's Aesthetics of Music.) The influence of Adorno remains in Watson's later essay in The Frank Zappa Companion (1997), which takes Dada as a crucial point of reference. Central to all this remains the question of Zappa's identity and status as an avant-gardist, and it is this issue which concerns me here. I agree that the Mothers' albums, together with later work, can be made to represent a radical popular music. It's the word ‘represent’ that causes the problem.

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Modernism and Affect

10.3366/edinburgh/9780748693252.001.0001 ◽

2015 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Keyword(s):

Critical Theory ◽

Mass Culture ◽

Visual Art ◽

Postwar Period ◽

Cultural Products ◽

Art And Design ◽

Wide Range ◽

Post War ◽

Affective Dimensions ◽

Linguistic Philosophy

This book contains eleven original multi-disciplinary chapters – and one chapter-length introduction – that explore the affective dimensions of modernism. Modernism has often been characterized by its blunt opposition to both the kitsch sentimentality of mass culture and the expressive emotionality of Romanticism, and so its relationship to affective matters has historically been underexplored. The chapters in this book reconsider the complexity of modernist attitudes towards feeling in the light of theory’s turn to matters of embodiment, materiality, and affect. However, Modernism and Affect does not rely on a homogeneous theory of affect, but rather explores modernist feeling from a variety of theoretical and historical positions. While some chapters consider modernist texts alongside theorists associated with the recent upsurge of interest in affect, such as Brian Massumi, Giles Deleuze, and Sianne Ngai, others engage with longer histories of emotion, and find a wide range of models helpful in rethinking modernist feeling, including psychoanalysis, phenomenology, critical theory, and even the deconstructive linguistic philosophy with which the ‘affective turn’ has been opposed. Similarly, the chapters collectively understand ‘modernism’ in capacious terms, tracing the movement from its origins in the post-war period to its afterlives in the postwar period. The range of cultural products considered spans from the canonical to the marginal, and includes literature, architecture, philosophy, dance, visual art, and design.

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