Frankfurt counterexamples

Barton Fink (Ethan Coen 1991) demonstrates the separation of artists and artistic integrity when working in the Hollywood system, and implies the industry’s rigor towards giving entertainment and receiving capital. This disjunction becomes personified through the minds of Barton, a struggling writer, and Charlie Meadows, a mundane insurance salesman. Barton’s artistic integrity involves advocating for the common folk. Seeming as Charlie serves as a synecdoche for everyday people; he poses as a…

While the purpose of lying is to distract from the truth, bullshitting, as Harry Frankfurt describes in his essay On Bullshit, stands in its own class. Bullshit is a technique politicians and others use to sway the masses that disregards reality entirely. It occurs whenever someone makes a statement without considering “how things really are,” in Frankfurt’s terms. Throughout his political career, President Donald Trump has often ignored objective facts in favor of promoting bullshit, which his…

In 2001, Michael Haneke directed a film called, The Piano Teacher. Haneke’s attitude, as conveyed to the spectator, is not to rail against pornography, per se, but to rail against its impact as generated by a capitalist patriarchal society. This stems from a similar modality of thinking introduced by Linda Williams in 1989, in which she “...moves beyond the impasse of the anti-porn/anti-censorship debate to analyze what hard-core film pornography is and does…” (Slade 656). Haneke’s method…

Disease and degeneracy has taken place of the progression promised by the Enlightenment, there is discomfort present within modern society and its streamlining that has led to the world despair and nihilism. Modern mechanical social structure stands responsible for the capacity depletion of humanity to find meaning, and the increased intellectual sophistication is in fact a manifestation of a vane sense of egoism, bound to erupt violently. What was deemed to become the age of information has…

The cultural industry is described by Adorno and Horkheimer (1977) as the standardisation of culture and cultural goods, attained through the manipulation of consumers, pseudo-individualism and commercial marketing in order to accomplish an economic and social status. Within Adorno and Horkheimer’s theory, there are three major concepts that have increased the development of the cultural industry and the behaviour of consumers, this involves discussing the transformation of use value to…

specific historical time, place or political problem. In order to talk about critical theory and its genuinely critical features I believe it is essential to make a clear distinction between critical theories and scientific theories. According to Frankfurt School there are 3 main categories of differences: aims and goals, logical and cognitive structure and evidence used to determine acceptance. Firstly, scientific theories have as their aim the successful manipulation of the external world…

The idea does portray the plausible capabilities of humans. Essentially what we are addressing here is social engineering. Throughout many civilizations in history we can see where this has happened for the good and for the bad. Mayagoitia Soria writes in American Social Engineering through children's educational films (1945-1953) that we utilized short films to deal with topics on ethics, character, home or family life, civil protection, and knowledge of celebrations our country celebrates. (…

Huge department stores such as Macy’s stand for almost everything that Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer despise. Arguably, department stores minimize a person’s capability to act and think in a logical and self-governing manner. Adorno argues that “standardization develops due to the ability of the ‘people in power’ to regulate the manufacturing of cultural goods in order to try and gage and control what people like and want to buy to increase how much profit they make. Furthermore, he states…

In Benjamin’s piece, I was reminded of many of the lectures we have had throughout the lecture. The apparatus mentioned throughout the piece, in both cultural and camera lense forms, reminds me of Leni Riefenstahl. Professor Beebout spoke about how her innovative techniques changed cinema, but her association with the Nazi party casts a large shadow over her contributions. She added to the machine of fascism by creating this larger than life image of Hitler and the “superior race” rather than…

This essay examines the historical development, political activism, and techniques of culture jamming, analysing how this movement generated a monumental change in advertising. Commercial branding has been embraced by conglomerate companies for over 50 years, saturating targeted milieu with obtrusive emotional messages designed to segment the public into certain groups, with the intention to market their products in a misleading way. The study behind psychographics and demographics aids…