The Origins of Negative Dialectics: Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School

Telos ◽  
1977 ◽  
Vol 1977 (34) ◽  
pp. 184-187 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. U. Hohendahl
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
Negative Dialectics ◽  
Theodor Adorno

Educação e imagem audiovisual: espaço para reflexões, conflitos e convergências / Education and Audio-Visual Image: Space for Reflections, Conflicts and Convergence

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sônia Cristina Soares Dias Vermelho ◽  
Ana Paula Machado Velho ◽  
Regiane Da Silva Macuch
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Visual Image ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
Critical Social Theory ◽  
Scientific Content ◽  
Pedagogical Strategy ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
Short Films ◽  
Production Experience ◽  
Experience Education

ABSTRACTThe article is the result of research with adolescents where we analyze the audiovisual production experience to understand the content of speech in audiovisual narratives. The hypothesis is that it is possible to use the audiovisual production to mix scientific content and social experience for a formation reflexive criticism. We analyzed 32 short films and we can say that the problems presented in the movies bring the dilemmas and conflicts that society brings adolescents. As experience, education can take ownership of the audiovisual production process as "pedagogical strategy", both to give greater meaning to education, and to "give voice" to these young people. We use the Freudian psychoanalytic theory, critical social theory of the Frankfurt School, in particular Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, and the field of communication theories of Jesus Martin-Barbero and German Rey.RESUMOO artigo é resultado da pesquisa com adolescentes na qual analisamos a experiência de produção audiovisual com objetivo de compreender o conteúdo do discurso nas narrativas audiovisuais. A hipótese de trabalho é de que seja possível utilizar a produção audiovisual como meio para articular conteúdos científicos e experiência social, na perspectiva da formação para a reflexão sobre a sociedade atual. Foram analisados 32 curtas-metragens e é possível indicar que as problemáticas apresentadas nos filmes trazem os dilemas e os conflitos que a sociedade lhe coloca, aliado às questões próprias da adolescên-cia. Do ponto de vista da experiência, vislumbramos a possibilidade da educação se apropriar do processo de produção audio-visual como “estratégia pedagógica” o qual poderá servir, dependendo de um conjunto de fatores, não só para dar maior significado à educação, mas também para dar voz a esses jovens, que possa ser ouvida e considerada pela sociedade. A base teórica para esse trabalho foi a psicanálise freudiana, a teoria social crítica da Escola de Frankfurt, em particular nas obras de Benjamin e Adorno, e no campo da comunicação nas teorias do Jesus Martin-Barbero e German Rey.

scholarly journals Aesthetical views of Vojislav Vučković in the light of 'Theory of reflection and critical theory'

New Sound ◽  
2013 ◽  
pp. 27-41
Author(s):  
Milan Milojković
Keyword(s):  
Problem Solving ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
The West ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Theoretical System ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
Significant Difference ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theoretical Stage

Although Vojislav Vučković (1910-1942) did not leave an elaborate and selfcontained theoretical system behind, his creativity can nevertheless be perceived from a relatively integral perspective, thanks to collections of papers published posthumously. It should be kept in mind that our great composer lost his life at the pinnacle of productivity; hence, we can safely say that his work was interrupted in every sense of the word, and thus left somewhat fragmentary. There is a very significant difference between the views on problem solving he advocated in his early essays and those he promoted before and during the war, given that the timespan involved is just ten years (1932-1942). Based on these theoretical wanderings, one could assume that Vučković was following the intensive changes on the West European theoretical stage of his time, endeavouring to shape his standpoints in a dialogue with the main theoretical currents. In this text, I will try to highlight the possible connections between some of Vuþkoviügs views and the theories which left an important imprint on the cultural life of Europe between the wars, such as the theory of reflection by Todor Pavlov (1890-1977) and critical (aesthetical) theory by Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) and Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). It should be said that Vučković used Pavlov's theory directly, but in a quite distinctive way which, alongside the theoretical trends of the upcoming generation of Marxist thinkers, was close to the critical standpoints of distinguished members of the Frankfurt School, who in those years, like Vučković, were writing new chapters of the history of aesthetics

scholarly journals Art, Aura, and Admiration in the Age of Digital Reproduction

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-16
Author(s):  
Patricia Anne Emison
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Art Market ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
The Other ◽  
Mass Public ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
The World ◽  
Digital Reproduction ◽  
Price Escalation ◽  
Establishment Phase

Summary Walter Benjamin famously argued that the mass public of the twentieth century would necessarily correlate with a newly politicized art. But the world has changed considerably since Benjamin’s article was written, as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer already were assessing less than a decade later. It is the purpose of this article to examine how the aesthetics of the Frankfurt school, though frequently still invoked, have lost some of their immediate relevance. The anti-establishment phase of the 60s, compounded by a pronounced taste for irony, rendered aura and exhibition outmoded values, while on the other hand, more recently, price escalation in the art market and digitization have made certain of the Frankfurt school arguments more pertinent than ever. Taking as examples Goldsworthy and Kentridge, this essay argues that a deliberate loosening of the artist’s control over both medium and reception displaces the warmed-over religious responses endorsed by Benjamin, positing instead increased intellectual agency on the part of viewers, whose identity as a mass public has become newly complicated.

Grand Illusion

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriela Cruz
Keyword(s):  
Karl Marx ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Richard Wagner ◽  
Giuseppe Verdi ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
Tristan Und Isolde ◽  
Giacomo Meyerbeer ◽  
History Of ◽  
Grand Opera ◽  
Philosophical Understanding

Grand Illusion is a new history of grand opera as an art of illusion facilitated by the introduction of gaslight illumination at the Académie Royale de Musique (Paris) in the 1820s. It contends that gas lighting and the technologies of illusion used in the theater after the 1820s spurred the development of a new lyrical art, attentive to the conditions of darkness and radiance, and inspired by the model of phantasmagoria. Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno have used the concept of phantasmagoria to arrive at a philosophical understanding of modern life as total spectacle, in which the appearance of things supplants their reality. The book argues that the Académie became an early laboratory for this historical process of commodification, for the transformation of opera into an audio-visual spectacle delivering dream-like images. It shows that this transformation began in Paris and then defined opera after the mid-century. In the hands of Giacomo Meyerbeer (Robert le diable, L’Africaine), Richard Wagner (Der fliegende Holländer, Lohengrin, and Tristan und Isolde), and Giuseppe Verdi (Aida), opera became an expanded form of phantasmagoria.

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.

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 Aesthetic Taboo: Aura, Magic, and the Primitive

2018 ◽  
pp. 124-160
Author(s):  
David Lloyd
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Ideal State ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
The Aesthetic

“The Aesthetic Taboo” concerns the place of primitive anthropology in the aesthetic theory of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. It traces the influence of Freud’s Totem and Taboo through their work, in the concepts myth, magic, and aura. Neither thinker ever manages to escape the historical narrative of aesthetics: the transition from a state of necessity that defines the Savage as pathological subject, through a state of domination to an ideal state of freedom. Adorno and Benjamin continue to think within the traditions of Kant and Schiller. Yet in Aesthetic Theory magic images the sensuous remnant in the artwork that withstands rationalization. This “pathological” moment restores to the aesthetic its foundations in pleasure and pain and demands the destruction of the racial regime of representation. Its analogy with the Subaltern suggests another conception of life in common, predicated on the pains and pleasures of the pathological subject.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Peter E. Gordon
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Social Process ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
Social Philosophy ◽  
Cultural Criticism ◽  
Max Horkheimer ◽  
Proper Sense ◽  
Religious Theme

Dwelling, in the proper sense, is now impossible. —Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia This book is a meditation on a philosophical and religious theme. In it I explore the problem of secularization, not as a social process, but as a conceptual gesture that appears with some prominence in the writings of three key theorists: Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor W. Adorno. The fact that all three of these writers were affiliates of the Institute for Social Research, the so-called Frankfurt School of social philosophy and cultural criticism, may encourage the impression that they agreed upon a common doctrine, though in fact their differences were often profound. This is especially clear when we examine their distinctive views on secularization, a topic that surely ranks among the more controversial problems in modern social theory. Philosophers, political theorists, sociologists, and historians continue...

1. The Frankfurt School

2017 ◽  
pp. 7-16
Author(s):  
Stephen Eric Bronner
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
Herbert Marcuse ◽  
Think Tank ◽  
Erich Fromm ◽  
Max Horkheimer ◽  
History Of ◽  
Inner Circle

‘The Frankfurt School’ provides a brief history of the formation of the Frankfurt School, and biographies of prominent members. The Frankfurt School grew out of the Institute for Social Research, the first Marxist think tank. However, in 1930, under the directorship of Max Horkheimer, the organization moved to America to escape the Nazis, and began to concentrate on critical theory. Aside from Horkheimer, notable members of the Frankfurt School's inner circle included Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and Jürgen Habermas. Each member of the inner circle was different, but they all shared the same concerns, and attempted to solve them through intellectual daring and experimentation.

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