While T.W. Adorno is a lively figure on the contemporary cultural scene, his thought in many ways cuts across the grain of emerging postmodern orthodoxies. Although Adorno anticipated many post-structuralist critiques of the subject, philosophy, and intellectual practice, his work clashes with the postmodern celebration of media culture, attacks on modernism as obsolete and elitist, and the more affirmative attitude toward contemporary culture and society found in many, but not all, postmodern circles. Adorno is thus a (...) highly contradictory figure in the present constellation, anticipating some advanced tendencies of contemporary thought, while standing firming against other regnant intellectual attitudes and positions. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that concern with the public sphere and the necessary conditions for a genuine democracy can be seen as a central theme of Jurgen Habermas's work that deserves respect and critical scrutiny in the contemporary moment, when throughout the world liberal democracies are in crisis. My study intends to point to the continuing importance of Habermas' problematic of the public sphere and its relevance for debates over democratic politics and social and cultural life in the present (...) age, in an era in which the Occupy Movements, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, the Trump Resistance Movement, and Ukraine and Palestine Solidarity groups use social media to struggle against multiple forms of oppression. At stake is delineating a concept of the public sphere which facilitates maximum public participation and debate over the key issues of the contemporary era and which consequently promotes the cause of radical democracy and social transformation. (shrink)

Preface: The dog's bollocks-- at the media dinner party -- Introduction: "The Marx brothers", "The Elvis of cultural theory", and other media clichés -- The mediated imp of the perverse -- Žižek's tickling shtick -- Big (Br)other : psychoanalysing the media -- Understanding the media : the sublime objectification of ideology -- The media's violence -- The joker's little shop of ideological horrors -- Conclusion: Don't just do it : negative dialectics in the age of (...) Nike. (shrink)

Do numbers have a life of their own or do we give them meaning? How do data play a role in constructing people’s perceptions of the world around them? How far can we trust numbers to speak truth to power? The COVID-19 pandemic offers a unique moment to answer these questions. This book examines how politicians, experts and journalists gave meaning to data through the story of seven iconic numbers from the pandemic. Shedding light on a new dawn of data, (...) this book makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the relationship between numbers, meaning and society. (shrink)

The growing presence of women in the legal profession and the prominence of law as a site of feminist social change make the complex interrelationship between the media, feminism, and the law a critical concern across disciplines. Drawing on legal theory, cultural studies, journalism, political science, sociology, and communications, this book presents a collection of essays that explore how the media represents and constructs gender, law, and feminism. Arranged thematically, these twenty-three articles are the work of distinguished academics (...) and activists. The collection begins with a section on "Portrayals of Feminism in the Media", which provides historical background on the media's treatment of feminist issues. The anthology proceeds with sections entitled "Feminism, Law, and Popular Culture"; "Essentializing Gender"; and "Media Images of Violence". Giving fresh and provocative treatments to such complex and topical subjects as hate radio, Anita Hill, popular women's magazines, and the portrayal of women in film and television, Feminism, Media, and the Law is required reading for anyone interested in feminism and its relationship to the media. (shrink)

This essay offers a theoretical analysis of the changes which are taking place in the musical consciousness of listeners in the present phase of society. The author seeks rather to deduce the conditions of musical reception from the present stage of musical production. The first part of the article deals with changes in production as they affect the general consciousness of listeners. Light music is discussed as well as serious music insofar as it reaches the consumer. Changes in reception are (...) revealed in certain characteristics like the cult of the melody, of the voice, of the master violin, and they are tied up with specific economic concepts. Success plays a particularly important role in this connection.The second part is devoted to the retrogression in listening, analyzed psychologically. Docile passivity, imitation of pre-given patterns, and bitter resentment of the „abnormal“ have become characteristic for the listener. The author shows how this retrogression has become concretized in the formation of a „musical child’s language.“Many listeners seek to overcome passivity by a pseudo-activity. The social function of certain types like the jitter-bug, the radio amateur, or the man with a knack for jazz, are discussed.L’article entreprend d’interpréter sous forme d’une esquisse théorique les transformations qu’a subies la conscience musicale des auditeurs dans la phase actuelle de l’évolution sociale.On n’analyse pas psychologiquement les réactions des auditeurs ; mais on prend pour point de départ Tétât de la production, et de celui-ci on déduit celui de la réception.La première partie traite de la transformation de la production dans la mesure où celle-ci atteint la conscience commune des auditeurs. L’auteur considère aussi bien la musique légère que la soi-disant musique sérieuse et les modifications que connaît celle-ci pour parvenir à la consommation.Ces modifications font de la musique un fétiche. On en prend pour exemple le culte des „idées“ musicales, de la voix et des „violons de maître“. Le caractère fétiche de la musique se mesure au succès accumulé.Ensuite, on développe quelques catégories du fétichisme musical : dépravation, arrangement, „divertissement élevé“, idolâtrie de la perfection.Au fétichisme de la musique correspond du côté de l’auditeur une régression de la faculté d’entendre — phénomène qui fait l’objet de la deuxième partie de l’étude. On l’interprète comme l’attitude auditive caractéristique des „régressifs“. Soumission passive, imitation de l’antérieurement donné, fureur contre ce qui sort de la norme — définissent cette attitude, qui s’objective en un langage musical puéril en formation et dont quelques éléments sont esquissés.A cette passivité, de larges groupes d’auditeurs cherchent vainement à échapper par une pseudo-activité. Quelques types de pseudo-activité sont décrits : l’enthousiaste, le bricoleur et le „chic type“. On montre la fonction sociale de ces types.Enfin, on traite des possibilités dialectiques de l’audition du régressif. Une confrontation de l’expérience fondamentale de la musique radicalement neuve avec le mode régressif d’entendre termine l’article. (shrink)

The article consists of four chapters taken from a comprehensive study on Wagner.The first chapter discusses the character of the man Wagner. The author undertakes a social analysis which reveals Wagner to be a bourgeois figure who is no longer able to fulfill the monadological claims of bourgeois society, and who actually deserts to the ruling powers while seemingly in conflict with the society of his day. This analysis is made particularly clear through a study of Wagner's anti-Semitism.The following sections, (...) only excerpts of which appear in the present essay, study the relationship between Wagner’s social character and the technical structure of his works, using concepts such as the conductor- composer and the,,gestural type“ of composition. This approach involves minute analyses of certain essential elements of Wagner's technique : the leitmotif, the infinite („unendliche“) melody, his harmonization and scoring.From the principle of Wagner's instrumentation the author derives the concept of phantasmagoria, which is the subject of the sixth chapter of the larger wrork (reprinted here). Phantasmagoria is defined as the aesthetic phenomenon that tends to hide the mode of its genesis and to appear as „nature“.The seventh and eighth chapters have not been included. They deal with the notion of the music drama as the phantasmagoric form, developed primarily from Wagner's theoretical writings, and with the mythical element in his work. The mythical in Wagner is two-sided, for it seeks to interpret the unconscious and in turn to dissolve the real into the unconscious.The two final chapters are devoted to the philosophy inherent in the works of Wagner and to a philosophical interpretation of his work. Chapter nine discusses the Ring from the standpoint of the betrayal of the revolution by the „rebel“. The canon is given by analysis of Wotan as the unity of Impotent old god and beggar. Chapter ten describes Wagner's pessimism. It shows the fundamental difference between Wagner and Schopenhauer, analyzes the Wagnerian concept of the nil as that of the chimaerical, and concludes by „rescuing“ his nihilism as the form adopted by Utopia in the early period of bourgeois decay.L'article se compose de quatre chapitres extraits d’un vaste travail consacré à Richard Wagner.Le premier chapitre étudie la personnalité de Wagner : son caractère est défini comme étant celui du bourgeois désormais incapable de répondre aux exigences monadologiques de la société bourgeoise. L’apparence d’un conflit avec la société masque la soumission de fait aux puissances établies : c’est ce qui est étudié de près dans l’analyse de l’antisémitisme wagnérien.Les chapitres suivants, desquels la présente publication n’offre que des extraits, établissent d’abord — grâce aux concepts du chef d’orchestre et du mode „gestique“ de la composition — le rapport entre le caractère social de Wagner et la complexité technique de son oeuvre. Viennent ensuite des analyses détaillées de quelques éléments essentiels du mode wagnérien de composition, tels que la technique du leitmotiv, de la mélodie infinie, de l’harmonique et de l’instrumentation.Le concept de la fantasmagorie est déduit du principe de l’instrumentation wagnérienne : voilà le thème central du sixième chapitre que notre texte présente, de nouveau, intégralement. La fantasmagorie est définie comme le phénomène esthétique qui renie le mode de sa production.Les chapitres VII et VIII encore, manquent dans la présente publication. Ils traitent du concept du drame musical en tant que forme fantasmagorique. Ce sont surtout les écrits théoriques de Wagner qui servent à développer ce concept. On en vient à examiner l’élément mythique de l’oeuvre wagnérienne — élément équivoque en ce qu’il tend à interpréter l’inconscient en même temps qu’il voudrait le dissoudre dans un inconscient plus profond encore.Les deux derniers chapitres étudient la philosophie inhérente de Wagner, et tâchent de donner une interprétation philosophique de son oeuvre. Le neuvième chapitre donne une analyse du „Ring“ — la trahison de la révolution par le „rebelle“. Le „canon“ du raisonnement est, ici, la figure de Wotan — à la fois vieux dieu rendu impuissant et mendiant. Le chapitre X décrit le pessimisme wagnérien. Il expose la différence fondamentale entre Wagner et Schopenhauer, la reconstruction méthodique du concept wagnérien du néant montre que ce néant est chimérique. La conclusion est, en quelque sorte, une réhabilitation du nihilisme wagnérien en ce que ce nihilisme fut la forme que revêtit l’utopie au début de la décadence bourgeoise. (shrink)

Masterminded by women, the Red Army Faction terrorized West Germany from the 1970s to the 1990s. Afterimages of its leaders persist in the works of pivotal artists and writers, including Gerhard Richter, Elfriede Jelinek, and Slavoj Žižek. Why were women so prominent in the RAF? What does the continuing cultural response to the German armed struggle tell us about the representation of violence, power, and gender today? Engaging critical theory, Charity Scribner addresses these questions and analyzes signal works that point (...) beyond militancy and terrorism. This literature and art discloses the failures of the Far Left and registers the radical potential that RAF women actually forfeited. _After the Red Army Faction_ maps out a cultural history of militancy and introduces "postmilitancy" as a new critical term. As Scribner demonstrates, the most compelling examples of postmilitant culture don't just repudiate militancy: these works investigate its horizons of possibility, particularly on the front of sexual politics. Objects of analysis include as-yet untranslated essays by Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas, as well as novels by Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Judith Kuckart, Johann Kresnik's _Tanztheaterstück Ulrike Meinhof_, and the blockbuster exhibition _Regarding Terror_ at the Berlin Kunst-Werke. Scribner focuses on German cinema, offering incisive interpretations of films by Margarethe von Trotta, Volker Schlöndorff, and Fatih Akin, as well as the international box-office success _The Baader-Meinhof Complex_. These readings disclose dynamic junctures among several fields of inquiry: national and sexual identity, the disciplining of the militant body, and the relationship between mass media and the arts. (shrink)

Adorno believed that a circular relationship was established between immediacy and mediation. Should we now say that this model with its clear Hegelian influence is outdated? Or does it need some theoretical integration? This volume addresses these questions by covering the performance of music, its technological reproduction and its modes of communication - in particular, pedagogy and dissemination through the media. The book's four parts each deal with different aspects of the mediation process. The contributing authors outline the (...) problematic moments in Adorno's reasoning but also highlight its potential. In many chapters the pole of immediacy is explicitly brought into play, its different manifestations often proving to be fundamental for the understanding of mediation processes. The prime reference sources are Adorno's Current of Music, Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction and Composing for the Films. Critical readings of these texts are supplemented by reflections on performance studies, media theories, sociology of listening, post-structuralism and other contiguous research fields. (shrink)

This article explores the interrelationships and tensions between public engagement in higher education and media discourse. It tracks the mediated trajectory of an attempt by a group of academics to connect with audiences beyond academia, comparing a magazine article in which their opinions first became public, to its recontextualisation across various UK newspapers and their Internet spin-offs. A mediated stylistic analysis reveals the discursive, rhetorical and performative techniques via which a sociologically imaginative attempt to transform a seemingly-personal-trouble into a (...) definitively-public-issue got recontextualised as if merely the public projection of personal angst. The article concludes by noting that in an era where public engagement increasingly means mediated public engagement, to take seriously the interactive, intertextual and rhetorical affordances of media discourse is to understand that and how sociologically imaginative work can – but does not always – end up circulating within public debate. (shrink)

This essay will examine the role of cultural memory in an age of global interconnection. It will discuss how the traditional idea of culture is threatened by the “culture industry,” information technology and the media. In the West, there seems to be a loss of culture’s function as an engine of change and reform. But throughout the history of South East Asia (and especially in Indonesia) one sees a both a process of appropriation of ideas from the outside, and (...) at the same time, the maintenance of a deeper cultural identity that is resistant to complete control. It is an unconscious memory – or a cultural reflex – present within the languages and stories and rationalities. I will explain this with reading of Michel de Certeau. And I will show how the Wayang story of the “Death of Semar” is emblematic of this idea. The awareness of these old processes of appropriation and resistance are extremely important in our age of global networks of power that attempt to impose, various religious, political, financial and legal structures. (shrink)

The alleged emergence of a ‘post-truth’ regime links the rise of new forms of social media and the reemergence of political populism. Post-truth has theoretical roots in the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies, with sociologists of science arguing that both true and false claims should be explained by the same kinds of social causes. Most STS theorists have sought to deflect blame for post-truth, while at the same time enacting a normative turn, looking to deconstruct truth claims (...) and subject expertise to criticism. Steve Fuller has developed a positive case for post-truth in science, arguing that post-truth democratizes science. I criticize this argument and suggest an alternative approach that draws on the prehistory of the field in the 1930s and 1940s, when philosophers and sociologists sought to define the social conditions necessary for reliable knowledge production that might stem mass media irrationalism. (shrink)

Over the last thirty years, once staunchly film history scholars such as Thomas Elsaesser, Jane Gaines, Siegfried Zielinski, André Gaudreault and Benoît Turquety (to name just a few) have abandoned history for historiography and film studies for media archaeology. Considering the heightened attention given to kulturtechnik (Siegert), the database as a dominant symbolic metaphor,1 and the decentered networked tenants of the postmodern global present, cinema is taking on the characteristics of new media, existing in increasingly intertextual space. Thus, (...) the term “post-cinema” has been co-opted as a viable intermediary that accounts for new media conditions, as cinema is no longer emblematic of our cultural climate. It was once presaged in 1992 that “[t]he end of the cinema truly sounds the death knell of the ultimate metaphysical adventure of Dasein. In the twilight of post-cinema, of which we are seeing the beginning, human quasi-existence, now stripped of any metaphysical hypostasis and deprived of any theological model, will have to seek its proper generic consistency elsewhere.” Accordingly, we are no longer “moviegoing animals” who seek images of ourselves among a collective in the dark but, rather, users interfacing within a network of moving images. By locating post-cinema within the semblance of social media, we are allocated a newfound series of theoretical interventions, the most marked of which is that of media archeology vis-à-vis dialectical materialism. This is a lens through which Brian Winston has recently deftly decried Virtual Reality’s “empathy machine” utopic illusionism, bolstered by Chris Milk and a slew of neurohumanities researchers, steadily maintaining that the fundamental myth of “technologies of seeing” is in disguising “their artifice, their cultural formation and their ideological import.” However, this approach, which illuminates the bifurcation between Max Horkheimer/Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, neglects what Benjamin identified as occurring to the work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility—a shift from a technology’s “cult value,” associated with the unique work, to its “exhibition value,” associated with the social act of viewing as part of a mass. Speaking to this divarication, Benjamin Barber, in Strong Democracy, foresaw new media’s two-fold potential—as they are organized and networked, new media and communications technologies possess the possibility to both energize citizen information and political participation but, simultaneously, to supplement the deterioration of public debate. As evinced by Mark Adrejevic’s concept of Infoglut, this two-pronged possibility has only been exacerbated by the interlocking relationship between the advent of a “glut” of information, post-truth politics, the demise of symbolic efficiency, and a renewed focus on the role of affect and emotion as “alternative modalities for thinking about the role of communication in a post-referential era.” Manuel Castells qualifies Barber’s pessimism, noting that the Internet can “be an appropriate platform for informed, interactive politics, stimulating political participation.. […] beyond the closed doors of political institutions,” but that the Internet, like any technology, “is shaped by its uses and users.” Thus, if there exists a positive correlation between exposure to post-cinema media artifacts and political participation, then I seek to explore the revelatory political possibilities of “exhibition value” by way of a particular “post-cinema” case study: the Marxist-Leninist Turkish hacktivist group Redhack’s YouTube-circulated documentary RED! (2013), a project that demanded—by way of the moving-image—to galvanize cyberprotest and democratize a “hacktivist commons. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 37.1 (2004) 92-95 [Access article in PDF] Rethinking the Frankfurt School: Alternative Legacies of Cultural Critique. Ed. Jeffrey T. Nealon and Caren Irr. Albany: SUNY Press, 2002. Pp. 227. $23.95, paperback. Not long ago at a gathering of arts and humanities scholars, I found myself introduced to a group of people as someone interested in the work of Theodor Adorno, whose name led one member (...) of the group to groan, "Not that old chestnut!" Such has been an ambient attitude in cultural studies toward not just the work of Adorno but many of the scholars who came to be known collectively in the 1960s as the Frankfurt School, thanks to their affiliation with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt. Rethinking the Frankfurt School, a deceptively slim volume that manages to cover a lot of ground in a dozen densely packed essays edited by Jeffrey T. Nealon and Caren Irr, counters the conventional cultural studies wisdom regarding the Frankfurt School, debunking along the way not just the facile dismissal of some of the school's members for their "mandarin elitism," but also the notion that the scholars who arguably pioneered the critical study of mass culture have lost their relevance for cultural studies.The association of the Frankfurt School with a cranky and outdated variant of bourgeois proto-Marxism—what Lukacs once dismissed as self-indulgent despair cultivated in the comfort of "the Grand Hotel Abyss"—was at least in part a legacy of the rediscovered cultural and political optimism of the late 1960s. This optimism came to characterize those strands of cultural studies that countered the gloomy assessments of the Frankfurt School with the potential of what the collection's editors disparagingly describe as "subversive consumption." From the perspective of the new millennium it's no longer the Frankfurt scholars who look misguided. In a turning of the tables, the outdated figure of this volume is not Adorno, the pointy-headed pessimist, but rather those who helped dismiss him as such. In particular, Simon During, who edited the 1993 version of the cultural studies canon, The Cultural Studies Reader, comes in for a double dose of implicit criticism (thanks in part to what seems to be an editing oversight) for his critique of Horkheimer and Adorno's failure to take into account [End Page 92] the "opportunities for all kinds of individual collective creativity and decoding" provided by the culture industries (3, 62). If, as During suggested, the 1960s represented a time in which the mass media had become more variegated and presumably more flexible and porous than in the period treated by Horkheimer and Adorno, this collection suggests the renewed relevance of the Frankfurt School might in part be explained by the "unprecedented consolidation within the multinational 'infotainment' industry" during the 1990s (5). The triumphal resuscitation and consolidation of monopoly capitalism triggers, on this account, the rehabilitation of its most scathing critics.The more compelling argument advanced in this volume, however, is that the ostensibly outdated character of much of the work of the Frankfurt School was as much a result of superficial and dismissive readings as of changing historical conditions. As contributor Evan Watkins suggests in his discussion of Adorno, the dominant tendency in culture studies has been to contradict disparaging claims about mass culture (claims which earned Adorno and Horkheimer the sticky moniker of elitists) rather than to take seriously an approach that explored the intricate connections between mass culture and the social relations of production and consumption. Only in the abstract can the consumption of ostensibly counter-hegemonic texts be figured as subversive politics, especially during a time when "The Times They Are A-Changin' " can become a jingle for a bank commercial.Against the theoretical backdrop of the Frankfurt School, the very attempt to isolate culture as a sphere of resistance unto itself becomes a symptom of reification. As Imre Szeman puts it, perhaps the most important lesson of the Frankfurt School for cultural studies "can be summarized by a negative maxim: don't fetishize culture" (74... (shrink)

We present a short introduction to, and the first English language translation of, Theodor W. Adorno's 1964 article, "Meinungsforschung und Öffentlichkeit." In this article, Adorno situates the misunderstanding of public opinion within a dialectic of elements of publicness itself: empirical publicness' dependence on a normative ideology of publicness, and modern publicness' tendency to undermine its own principles. He also locates it in the dual role of mass media as both fora for the expression of opinion and, as (...) he calls them, "organs of public opinion." The introduction provides a discussion of Adorno's reception in the American academy, arguing that contemporary sociological practice should be concerned with the problems Adorno raises. We suggest that Adorno's relegation to the fields of philosophy and aesthetics belies his relevance to empirical sociological research. (shrink)

We extend prior research of deceitful behavior by studying the reactions of those who are targets of deception and how a specific attribute of communication media, cue multiplicity , influences such reactions. We report on a laboratory experiment involving dyads asked to engage in a stock share purchase exercise. We find that when a broker is perceived to act deceitfully by the buyer, the buyer reacts with negative affect (anger) which provokes subsequent acts of revenge against the broker. Importantly, (...) we find that media with higher cue multiplicity attenuate buyer anger as well as lessen the propensity for the buyer to seek retaliatory acts of revenge. We further find that moral anger mediates the effect of buyers’ perceived deception on revenge. (shrink)

In this paper I investigate the relationship between T.W. Adornos general aesthetic theory and his actual view on contemporary art. Adornos view on art is centered around concepts like praxis, matter and critique: Fine art is supposed to make it obvious that any understanding of matter always in some way is inadequate. Praxis is always grounded on an understanding of matter, but in hiding this fact it becomes ideological and repressive. The fine arts have to make this visible – they (...) have to criticize the given praxis. This leads him to reject very big areas of the actual contemporary art – e.g. the music of Igor Strawinsky. I will show that this rejection springs from Adornos view on matters that turns out to be too narrow: His view on matter is too physicalistic. He focuses on the fact that Strawinskys music on the pure audible level is not as radical as for example Schoenbergs music. In this critique I think he overlooks that the music material is not just the audible sound. Strawinskys music appears as new - but only if one realizes how history is part of its material. Adornos being unaware of this leads to a modification (through Heidegger and Strawinsky) of his (and the general marxist) concept of history: The marxist (romanticist) view on history as being one-dimensional shows to be repressive! Adornos own methodology (the negative dialectics) therefore demands a modication of his own view on history – and also of his view on contemporary arts. (shrink)

The Cooperative Extension System serves as the conduit through which scientific knowledge generated by the 130 land-grant colleges and universities in the United States is translated and delivered directly to its constituents. Since its inception over 100 years ago, Extension has been integral in developing, delivering, and applying cutting-edge knowledge in agriculture and natural resources, youth development, family and consumer sciences, and community and rural development. Today, more than ever, Extension will need to lead the way in building and maintaining (...) sustainable partnerships across disciplines and with organizations at the local, state, and national levels to tackle complex issues considering diminishing resources. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars, this volume discusses how Extension is addressing issues and opportunities relevant to children, youth, families, and communities across the country both now and in the future. Topics include Extension's role in supporting childcare, social media use, entrepreneurship, rural communities, and underserved audiences. (shrink)

T. W. Adorno's philosophy of music aims to show that music is a source of important insights into the nature of modern society. This position leads, though, to a series of methodological difficulties, some of which can be alleviated by using resources from Heidegger's hermeneutics. The essay takes the key notion of `judgementless synthesis' from Adorno's unfinished book on Beethoven and connects it to Heidegger's account of pre-propositional under-standing and to Kant's notion of schematism. This connection is shown (...) to have consequences for how we conceive of both the meaning of music and meaning in more general terms, especially with regard to analytical philosophy. The essay argues that, despite its many important insights, Adorno's account of the meaning of music in modernity depends too much on his analogy between Hegel's claim to achieve the final philosophy and Beethoven's establishment of new forms of integration for musical material. (shrink)

Through the summer and fall of 1989, Hegel scholars in America were treated to the unusual spectacle of a debate in the mass media over the meaning and truth of Hegel’s philosophy of history, a debate running through the pages of major daily newspapers, the weekly news magazines, and the journals of opinion. The occasion for this unaccustomed attention devoted to Hegel was the appearance of an article by Francis Fukuyama in the Summer 1989 issue of The National Interest (...) entitled “The End of History?”. (shrink)

The momentum of globalization and universalism, operating through the media, information technology and politics, has steadily diminished the importance of cultural diversity. It has even threatened to erase many of our cultural traditions, or extinguish our diverse experiences of the sacred. Yet the sacred which seems to be lost is often still encased in our cultural objects, stories and religious rituals. This paper will discuss how the memories of the sacred can be both preserved and reawakened. This paper will (...) focus on three scholars who develop alternative approaches to the universal. Franz Rosenzweig saw universal historical progress as oppressive. He believed that the practice of his Jewish religion offered a resistance and a possible correction to the general movement of history. Walter Benjamin saw the forgotten 'ruins' of history encase memories of the sacred and the silenced voices within history. For Benjamin, the role of interpretation is to awaken these hidden memories and voices which are encoded within our objects, images and commodities. This led him to a particular idea of a momentary messianic redemption in relation to greater flow of time. And finally, Jacob Taubes read St. Paul as offering a revolutionary model on how to live one's particular faith within a wider political order. In general, each writer developed an idea of redemption which involves a kind of remembrance of what has been obscured by the more general universal movement of history itself. This is especially relevant for the various religious and cultural communities within Cambodia. The paper will begin and end by discussing the origin story of Cambodia – the marriage between Preah Thong, the Indian prince, and Neag Neak, the Naga princess. I will additionally try to demonstrate that the story and its various reenactments is important because it represents a regenerative process rooted in the eclectic character of South East Asian culture in general. Various forms of memory within the syncretic or eclectic context of Southeast Asia can operate to preserve the sacred in an age of universalization and globalization. It also illustrates how the performance of memory can also offer an antidote to the "trauma" of Cambodia's past. (shrink)

본 연구는 아도르노의 미학 이론에 대한 비판적 해석과 이에 내재해 있는 교육학적 함의를 해명해 보는 것을 목적으로 삼고 있다. 잘 알려져 있듯이, 아도르노도 예술에 대한 전통적인 정의를 어느 정도 수용하고 있다. 이를테면 아도르노는, 예술작품은 단순히 일상적인 자연 언어에 의한 기술(description)과 그 성격이 다르다는 점을 인정한다. 그래서 예술 작품에는 기술이라는 개념 대신에 표현(expression)이라는 용어를 적용시킨다. 아도르노가 제시하고 있는 예술 작품의 의미론적 위치를 보다 도식적으로 구조화하면 이러하다. 그는 실재, 소여, 직접적 경험, 자연 등을 인정한다. 이런 것들이 절대정신의 외화라는 헤겔적인 관념론에 대해서는 비판적이다. (...) 여기서 문제는 이러한 직접적 소여를 다시 드러내는 것이다. 하지만 그것을 드러내는 방식에는 다양한 것을 생각할 수 있으나, 그것이 어떠한 방식이든 우리의 직접적 경험 자체를 직접적으로 드러나게 하는 것은 아무 것도 없다. 설사 내가 너무나 슬퍼서 눈물을 흘리며 울부짖는다고 하더라도, 이러한 울부짖음 그 자체는 이미 표현이다. 때때로 너무 슬플 때 웃는 경우가 있듯이, 표현은 문화적인 것이고 인습적인 것이다. 따라서 그것이 문자적 기술이든 음악이나 그림에 의한 표현이든 이들은 모두 이미 매개적인 것이며 이차적인 것이다. 그러나 그 다양한 매개자들 중에서도 어는 것이 직접적 경험에 더 가까이 다가서 있는가는 말할 수 있다. 이 점에 있어서, 예술 작품에 의한 표현들이 일상 언어적 기술들보다는 우리들의 직접적 경험에 더 접근해 있다. 음악을 통해 시간이 압축되고 그림을 통해 공간이 겹치게 됨으로써 이 세상사이 달라질 수 있다. 그러나 실제의 공간이나 시간은 무시되는 일은 없으며, 그 힘이 부정되지도 않는다. 단지 그것들의 구속성은 사라지게 된다. 그와 같은 한에 있어서, 예술은 경험적 과학적 인식보다 덜 가상적이고 덜 추상적이며 또 주관적으로 규정된 합법칙성에 의해 인간을 소외시키는 경우도 오히려 더 적다. 결국 본고는 이러한 논지를 부각시키면서, 예술의 형식, 작품 재료, 작가의 의도, 작품의 의미 등에 대한 아도르노의 정의가 함의하는 교육학적 시사점을 제시해 보고자 한다. (shrink)

The increasing standardization, specialisation and monetarization of academic publishing is designed to foster quality in research and expression. But these tendencies also pose serious challenges to the expression of cultural difference, particularly with regard to philosophy and religious studies. Scholars from various cultural backgrounds outside of mainstream universities often find themselves marginalised when the quality of their work is judged through the metrics of mainstream academic publishing. Smaller journals which give a forum to local research are gradually disappearing or becoming (...) irrelevant. The corporate control of publishing limits the access and distribution of information making it difficult for smaller regional universities to access and conduct research. But these challenges to the expression of cultural difference also reflect the deeper tendencies of the information age. To approach this problem, we need to consider the conflict between culture and spirit on the one hand, with the flows of information and capital on the other. I will introduce this problem through an idea of hermeneutics presented by George McLean. I will then discuss the approaches to this problem by such writers as Michel Serres, Jean Francois Lyotard, Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Derrida. I will show that these latter writers devise strategies to reach something outside of the cybernetic flows of information in the media age, but that their solutions are incomplete because they rely on intellectual concepts of redemption and ignore the concrete practices of spiritual redemption. The issue that cross-cultural journals must consider is how to emphasize something beyond the merely intellectual; how to amplify practice within its expression. I will address this issue in the spirit of a poem by Emily Dickinson entitled “Publication – is the Auction” which supplies the title of this essay. (shrink)

This article brings media ecology into conversation with Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy of organism in an effort to lure the former beyond its normally anthropocentric orientation. The article is divided into two parts. Part 1 spells out the way Whitehead's approach can aid media ecology in developing a less anthropocentric theory of communication. Part 2 engages more specifically with Mark B. N. Hansen's Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media. Hansen's work is an example of the exciting (...) new directions opened up for media theory by Whitehead's panexperientialist ontology, but I argue that Hansen's attempt to "invert" Whitehead's theory of perception is based on a terminological confusion. (shrink)

Alongside a revival of interest in Thomism in philosophy, scholars have realised its relevance when addressing certain contemporary issues in bioethics. This book offers a rigorous interpretation of Aquinas's metaphysics and ethical thought, and highlights its significance to questions in bioethics. Jason T. Eberl applies Aquinas’s views on the seminal topics of human nature and morality to key questions in bioethics at the margins of human life – questions which are currently contested in the academia, politics and the media (...) such as: When does a human person’s life begin? How should we define and clinically determine a person’s death? Is abortion ever morally permissible? How should we resolve the conflict between the potential benefits of embryonic stem cell research and the lives of human embryos? Does cloning involve a misuse of human ingenuity and technology? What forms of treatment are appropriate for irreversibly comatose patients? How should we care for patients who experience unbearable suffering as they approach the end of life? _Thomistic Principles and Bioethics_ presents a significant philosophical viewpoint which will motivate further dialogue amongst religious and secular arenas of inquiry concerning such complex issues of both individual and public concern. (shrink)

This paper explores the economic factors that influence news coverage and discusses the difficulties of determining the impact of news content on political outcomes. Evidence from the United States clearly shows how supply and demand concepts can be used to predict content in newspapers, television, and the Internet. To demonstrate how the concept of market-driven news extends beyond the US, I trace out hypotheses about how media content in many countries should vary depending on three factors in news markets: (...) the motivations of media outlet owners, the technologies of information dissemination available, and the property rights that govern how information is created and conveyed. I offer three different types of analyses to show how these ideas about competition influencing content could be tested across countries. The paper briefly discusses the degree to which market competition affects content in three Asian countries (China, Thailand, and Japan) and concludes with a section on the difficulties of designing policies to improve the operation of media markets. (shrink)

When Adorno and Horkheimer constructed in the early forties the critical concept of culture industry they had in mind mainly movies and radio as its main media. Even television broad- casting was not developed enough at that time to be considered as an important player in the scene of mass culture. Nevertheless the critical aspects of their contribution were so strong and well structured that even today they cannot be discarded in a fair evaluation of such an import- (...) ant phenomenon of contemporary culture. However there have been since the time of Adorno and Horkheimer’s criticism many models of mass culture critique that took into account the evolution of the technological devices, from analogical video systems to the more recent developments of digital media. Since the consideration of the latter does not always rely on the maintenance of the aforementioned critical point of view, a criterion guiding the choice of a theoretical approach could be the way in which the relation between artworks and cultural commodities is conceived. According to this criterion the author chooses as an updated counterpoint to Adorno and Horkheimer’s mass culture critique Vilém Flusser’s theory of what he calls “post-history,” especially in its approach on communication, entertainment and art tout court. (shrink)

Steve Fuller has replied to my critique of his endorsement of a post-truth epistemology. I trace the divergence in our approach to social epistemology by examining our distinct responses to the principle of symmetry in the sociology of scientific knowledge. Fuller has extended the concept of symmetry and challenged the field to embrace a post-truth condition that flattens the difference between experts and the public. By contrast, I have criticized the concept of symmetry for policing the field to rule ideology (...) critique out of court. I argue that a focus on post-truth populism obscures the role of counter-elites and ideologies that restrict political choice. A better way to promote democracy would be to support minority positions within science that promise to open up suppressed political possibilities and to seek the coordinated use of different disciplines to address significant public problems. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Edward Bellamy's influential utopian novel Looking Backward dramatizes the epistemological impact of an increasingly media-saturated urban environment on turn-of-the-century American culture and identity. Bellamy's fanciful adaptation of the telephone receives particularly careful analysis in this essay. Deprived of its transmitting function, this denatured instrument both disrupts Bellamy's utopian project and, more subtly, registers the effect of mass media technologies on the construction and coherence of subjectivity. Lowenstein ultimately argues that Bellamy's novel rehearses the displacement of an epistemology (...) rooted in the search for ontological certainty by what Anthony Giddens calls an epistemology of social reflexivity. (shrink)

The Anglophone reception of the work of T. W. Adorno has yet to succeed in making him a major part of mainstream philosophical debate. Among the reasons for this are the refusal of too many analytic philosophers to consider alternative approaches to philosophy, and Adorno's writing style, which does not always offer direct points of access for other philosophical traditions. Things are also not helped by the fact that writers on Adorno can tend to adopt some of (...) his mode of writing, on the basis of the claim that Adorno's esoteric style is part of the content of his writing. However, Adorno's lectures on the topics of his major books are actually often remarkably lucid, offering ways of bringing him into almost any... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Scars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against InauthenticityChristopher S. SchreinerScars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against Inauthenticity, by Geoffrey Hartman; xii & 260 pp. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. $17.95 paper.Geoffrey Hartman is now an emeritus faculty member at Yale. All but the youngest readers of this journal will recognize him as a member of the now defunct Yale School of Criticism, which in its glory days included (...) Harold Bloom, Hillis Miller, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida. Among these accomplished individuals, Hartman distinguished himself as the one most engaged with discussing the role of style in theoretically propelled criticism, and this remains his lasting contribution. The question he kept asking was the following: what demands do the books we read and the theories we use make on our own critical practice, and in particular, on our style? Works such as Criticism in the Wilderness (1980) and Saving the Text (1981) were concerned with promoting a philosophical criticism that is as creative as the literature it seeks to criticize, in opposition to the Arnoldian standard of a disinterested criticism that respects and preserves the canonical hauteur of literary classics and doesn't seek to imitate them. Yet over the decades Hartman's own prose, except when it lapsed into copying Derrida's, seemed more that of the Doctor and less the Explorer, to borrow the terms Lionel Trilling used to describe Matthew Arnold's criticism. This is an irony we are grateful for.Hartman's most recent book, Scars of the Spirit, takes up the problem of authenticity in the context of postmodern culture, seeking to reestablish its legitimacy as a serious topic and unmask what merely poses as authentic in the global marketplace. Today his agenda ignominiously crosses paths with the likes of Jane Fonda, whose autobiography is replete with New Age claims to recover "the authentic me." One of the issues never resolved by Hartman's book and which taunts his project behind its back is whether his Continental erudition makes his project any more authentic than Fonda's celebrity psychobabble. Authenticity was the Heideggerian concept that Adorno ruthlessly and ironically attacked in his The Jargon of Authenticity, and it has an old-fashioned existential ring to it to this day. For those readers who haven't read Being and Time lately, authenticity (Jemeinigkeit) was the resolute impetus of making time one's own, taking it back from the instrumental public world that had appropriated it so that one can live a sincerely mortal life and die one's own death, as it were properly. Professors valiantly conjured an ethic out of this retrieval of selfhood, of one's personal property of time and destiny in the Lost and Found of culture, not fully cognizant of its Nietzschean roots. The absence of altruism in this existential ethic inspired Emmanel Levinas's patient attempt to persuade us to demote our egoism in an insatiable responsibility to and for others, for whom we can never do enough.There is surely irony in the fact that the anachrony of authenticity as a concept was accelerated by the deconstructive theory that Hartman helped [End Page 501] promulgate. Hence his new book reads a bit like someone having to gingerly retrace his steps in a field of landmines planted by the Yale School of Criticism. The question of propriety, what is right and proper, what is one's own, stamped with one's unique or authentic properties, was deconstructed by Derrida, and Hartman reverently recorded the results in the incongruously titled Saving the Text, an analysis of Derrida's attempt to promote textual intercourse between Hegel and Jean Genet by setting them in parallel columns on one page. In a nutshell, the original source of an event or text, its material advent, is untraceable due to its derivativeness, the forces of semiosis (or textuality) at play in and between texts. In parallel to this discovery, Jean Baudrillard spoke of the simulacrum as a media-generated version behind which the original "thing itself" was forever irrecoverable. The very idea of authenticity came to sound illusory, denoting a mirage sought in a hopeless regressive inquiry or Ruckfrage which Husserl (with... (shrink)

Kalenychenko T. A. Since the spring of 2014, we can observe the movement of update of military chaplaincy, the emergence of mass volunteering by religious leaders. While Ukraine only continues to develop a new Chaplaincy service, society has already received the first presentation about the priests at the forefront thanks to the work of the Ukrainian media. In this article, author examines the messages about the military chaplaincy of key media and analyzes the way in which the image (...) was formed from the military chaplain to a secular society, and the role it has assumed. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Social media is becoming increasingly embedded in people’s daily lives. These virtual spaces are now regularly used as a tool for information dissemination. Drawing on the moral intensity literature combined with uses and gratifications theory, this research explores how using social media to consume information can affect the ethical decision-making process. This study compares the influence of two online media dissemination formats – an online news article and social media discussion thread – on individuals’ ethical (...) perceptions and decisions. Results indicate that social media usage has an effect on perceptions of social consensus, problem recognition, and ethical sensemaking. Overall, Social media is shown to inhibit ethical decision-making when used as an information dissemination tool. (shrink)

Art history on the edge : iconology, media, and visual culture -- Four fundamental concepts of image science -- Image science -- Image X text -- Realism and the digital image -- Migrating images : totemism, fetishism, idolatry -- The future of the image : Rancière's road not taken -- World pictures : globalization and visual culture -- Media aesthetics -- There are no visual media -- Back to the drawing board : architecture, sculpture, and the digital (...) image -- Foundational sites and occupied spaces -- Border wars : translation and convergence in politics and media -- Art X environment -- The historical uncanny : phantoms, doubles, and repetition in the war on terror -- The spectacle today : a response to retort -- Coda : for a sweet science of images. (shrink)

Anti-introduction: Paint it Black -- PART I: MESSAGES IN A BOTTLE: AESTHETIC THEORY CONTRA CRITICAL THEORY -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Critical Messages in a Bottle and Restoration -- 3. Excursus I: The Prevalence of a View: Being Uncompromisingly Critical at the Grand Hotel Abyss -- 4. Excursus II: The Prevalence of a View: 'Don't participate:' The Politics of Social Praxis -- 5. Aesthetic Messages in a Bottle and Progress -- 6. Messages in a Bottle as the Work of Art (...) -- PART II: ART ITSELF THINKS: THE POLITICS OF AESTHETIC (MIS-)EDUCATION -- 7. Introduction -- 8. The Politics of Artistic Practice: 'What artist isn't socially engaged?' -- 9. The Politics of Spectatorship: Shocking Spectators -- 10. The Politics of Aesthetic (Mis-)Education -- 11. Contemporary Art Itself Thinking: Making the Invisible Visible? -- Anti-conclusion: The Russian Ending. (shrink)