Patreon: / cuck Twitter: / philosophycuck Adorno works referenced: Dialectic of Enlightenment - www.contrib.an... Culture Industry Reconsidered - www.sociosite.... How to Look at Television - users.clas.ufl....
What I find interesting about those genres is that after they lost popularity to other genres they began to really experiment/push the envelope of their own genres. Once it fell out of public favor was when the real music really started (not to say the music wasn't real or good when it was pop music, just that these genres have flourished in new directions now that rap/edm/trap are the pop of the Era).
Adorno's miserable expression on top of the emoji's face in the thumbnail, running through the shitty cyberspace apocalypse is more or less how I feel about my life
"Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work. It is sought after as an escape from the mechanised work process, and to recruit strength in order to be able to cope with it again. But at the same time mechanisation has such power over a man’s leisure and happiness, and so profoundly determines the manufacture of amusement goods, that his experiences are inevitably after-images of the work process itself. The ostensible content is merely a faded foreground; what sinks in is the automatic succession of standardised operations. What happens at work, in the factory, or in the office can only be escaped from by approximation to it in one’s leisure time." Truck simulator lol
Vicky Osterweil in reallifemag talks about how video-games makes us do boring repetitive work seem interesting so our boring repetitive jobs seems more entertaining, like our games. And other ways games reinforces the dominant ideology, the necessary ideology to maintain capitalism.
hot take: the emoji movie's plot is that way because the writers wanted to point out how every legitimized way of rebellion is assimilated into the system, the movie is so deep in meta commentary that it its avowal or disavowal of the system is irrecognizable, as such it is only an apathetic cry for help, like a dejected prisoner on his way to death row who still looks sadly upon the onlookers of his electrocution. this is the starship troopers of 2k18.
@@GallowsofGhent Interesting comment, but I don't think we need "the next Kafka", there are plenty of writers out there with integrity that avoid the kind of pretensions you mention, they just don't get the promotion. There is honestly so much great work out there, but the presumption that it isn't what people want, combined with the over-emphasis on providing cheap throwaway entertainment, leads to a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy when it comes to both the public mind and the creators who provide for it. As you note, the creators are indeed part of that public, and they are swayed by the same pressures as well. Having said all this I wish people would read some more of the "old shit". It's essential for an inspired life.
@@akumoth8357 The problem with this question is that the Anglophone world of literature is notoriously insular. Only 3% of the books published in the USA are in translation. Most of the authors the English speaking world is exposed to are authors who are already products of the literary industry machine. But to answer your question, two authors that come to mind off the top of my head are the Argentine Ricardo Piglia, and the Spaniard Juan Goytisolo. Both straddled the intersection between politically engaged, socially conscious, with avant-garde tendencies. Both were exiled from their respective countries during military dictatorships. Unfortunately, both died within the last 2 years. You could also look to certain Latin American poets. And, of course, there is the literary darling Roberto Bolaño, who, although dead, is still being published posthumously.
@@GallowsofGhent this is only in regards to the artists who are too self involved. I think it is important to keep in mind that Adorno made a distinction between high art and art for the masses. High art or autonomous art retains a negative dialectic movement from the given social and economic reality. In a way, it both critiques the given reality, and also posits certain utopian ideals. Adorno might very well say that artists who are too self involved are basically reproducing, through their art, the social reality that made them a "suffering" or "starving" or "alienated" artist in the first place. There would be no negative movement away from their reified social or economic role. Bit it's also noteworthy to state that Adorno was pretty elitist. I just got done reading his essay "The Schema of Mass Culture" and he cites Joyce, Proust, and Flaubert as the last true novelists...that's a pretty long measuring stick...
I think that Paul was complaining about how bad and vapid pop music has become. He says that as a criticism from his standpoint that values beauty, meaning and joy. Christian values had inspired Paul to say that. Adorno's criticism is similar, but he does not value what Paul values. Am I right on that?
abtract philosophy in movies and music is hard unless you can define it properly. Some art and music is very vauge as well much like old religious books and texts needing translation to modern times to read and despute properly as well in debates that can make anyone pull thier hair out and lose thier minds with stupid people.
Compare and contrast with George Orwell's 1984 where the hero and heroine also end up being absorbed back into the system but the reader is left in no doubt that this is a tragedy.
@@brunosarramide572The fascist method is but another method to enforce the rule of Capital. Therefore, no perspective is more true than the other, but rather both reflect different superstructures that enforce the same interests.
IMO some of the most meaningful films of this century have been so by accident. And wouldn't have been able to be as good at communicating that message if it were deliberate
@@Graknorke That's an opinion I can share. Sometimes I wonder if there was even a message (unintended or not). Interpretation of art starts to feel more and more like a delusion en masse.
@Andras Buzas Philosophical ideas, at least in Adorno's case, are descriptors of culture and industry which necessarily pervade every aspect of society. There's no reason they wouldn't apply to a "stupid kids cartoon." They apply to everything by the nature of their construction.
Late comment, but Jazz in his day was highly commercialized and appropriated from its black working class roots by and for white culture. While music should be enjoyed by many cultures, the 1930's marked a period where there was a hell of a lot more famous white jazz players than black players, at least until the counterculture of bebop as music for musicians blew up in the late 30's. The most obvious sign of this appropriation can be heard in how these bands incorporate the swing rhythm; a mainly white band, like Benny Goodman and the Dorsey Bros., is characteristically rigid, to the point where older musicians will call it "square swing", because most of these musicians were classically trained completely and joining in on the cash cow that was big band at the time. Then, listen to a band with a good number of black musicians, like the Basie Band or the Duke Ellington Band. This changes with time as entirely new musical precedents for jazz were set by bebop, which established jazz as a legitimate art form outside of commercial arts, and raised the bar for practicing musicians in general, which is why white-led bands after WW2, like the Stan Kenton and Woody Shaw bands, began to swing on a comparable level to black and mixed bands, like the Basie and Ellington bands, and new orchestras like the Clayton-Hamilton Orchestras or the Village Vanguard. The main reason big band survived after the war at all was because of the number of bands in the military and the sheer number of musicians that went in and out of the forces. Overall, it only gets a lot more complicated like this, but I'm already feeling tired of writing out an entire essay to a single RU-vid comment. Sorry for overrreacting, lol
Quite weird criticism of Jazz because Jazz is the least standardised category of music in the world I can think of at the moment. Pure fluidity and improvisation, how is that manufactured? Surely his criticisms must be directed towards pop or some rap culture not jazz??
"Then we will continue being emojis, all serving Alex, living at his mercy. (Comic beat) And now I'd like to thank my Patreons." I don't know if this was intentional or not, but it does a really succinct job of demonstrating how the culture industry even pervades the realm of RU-vid video essays.
And it has to be mentioned in a sort of ironic, 'yes I'm aware of participating in the system and I have been pre incorporated into the culture, removing the dissident qualities it of had in another system' way.
seems like a false equivalence to equate patreon support with Hollywood studio investment. Like the video says, Adorno's critique was made in a time of a centralized film industry.
I didn't know you weren't a native English speaker. Double impressed now. Also, i never thought the Emoji movie could ever be used to grow brains. Bravo
Yeah, a sociologist whose theory was debunked by an actual science like neuropsychology. Well, the video did an OK job explaining how those theories work in the world of The Emoji Movie. I'm glad our world is completely different though.
@@AA-lz4wq HEy... that's seems interesing. like, at the moment what Adorno said amakes sense fo me, but... could you explain how neuropsychology debunked his theory? or where should i look?
@@theALTF4 For example many people tend to say the debacle of western music industry you know, music being more and more simple using the same tones or the famous same 4 chords, is a proof of the hegemonic forces of cultural power creating a toxic environment for art and so on. However, they didn't even consider that said fenomena could have its root in the way our minds work. Here's a video talking about how repetition has been proven to be more appealing to our minds on a subconscious and neurological level: (around 10:00) ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-45v9g7KX-Ko.html ... Repetition it's more appealing, what's more appealing tend to have more demand, therefore, it will be produced more often (whether or not it's profit driven, see Zipf's law). It's not that difficult. It's not like evil corporations are trying to shape our minds into a certain functional way for their own benefit, that's giving those hack producers way too much credit. They just see a cultural trend (with biological roots in this case) and they exploit it, but this kind of practice isn't inherent to capitalism but to any system based on the production of goods.They would be completely stupid if they wouldn't take advantages of these trends and even if they wouldn't do it, someone on the other side of the world would and then they'd become the "hegemonic" force in the cultural industry. Yes, even if they weren't doing it for a profit motive. For instance, if Hollywood would ban Michael Bay movies and now they would only produce movies like Synecdoche New York, well that would be great for art!!1 But hey, maybe the market would shift and now Bollywood with their corny action-musical movies would become the new center of world entertainment and Hollywood would go bankrupt, or hey, maybe Neil Breen passion projects would actually gain more popularity because no one wants to see boring pretentious artsy stuff. It is really naive to think that art is inherently superior to entertainment and that all people share this sentiment. Movies doesn't change people's minds, it's the other way around. You can look up to recent research about the effects of nazi propaganda on Germany and you'll find that maybe it wasn't all that effective as we thought, maybe some people are inherently evil or at the very least open to destructive ideas such as armed revolutions and if the market provides them with said desctructive products (ideologies) they'll just embrace it. Humans aren't completely driven by rationality, some people do prefer Adam Sandler over Bergman. I'm not saying that this is good but I'm sure this isn't due to profit-driven elites shaping our culture or anything like that. Edit: In any case, I don't believe that the current trend of mass produced and pandering movies is completely butchering artistic value, The Emoji movie and other shitty products shouldn't be compared with some of the most profitable and popular movies (therefore a better reflection of society's current dominant culture) such as the MCU or James Cameron's Avatar and Titanic that know how to balance art and entertainment.
@@domoroboto8752 They just gave a diagnosis of the subject matter without doing the extra step to explain why it happens and how to fight it or if it can be fought. Its like a Doctor saying: "You have a colon, that's why you have colon cancer." "Ok. Thanks doctor, very useful." Most of the awful stuff with society can be attributed to capitalism but most great things, such as technological progress, can also be attributed to capitalism. You need to either propose a viable alternative proven to be superior or a reform that balances the good and bad stuff. Frankfurt School and critical theory authors did none, they failed miserably. That's why they lack any political and epistemological value.
The part at 10:47 when you talk about the reinforcement of how our system works being universal and natural reminded me of "Osmosis Jones" or more recently the anime " Cells at Work" where even our bodies are microcosmos of the system, we are naturally part of the system, we are wired and built like it (in these animations). Great analysis on the video! Really enjoyed it
Really good video. In musicology, Adorno tends to be brought out as a punching bag for his views on pop and jazz, but his shadow is longer than most musicologists admit. Thanks for doing Adorno! I remember recommending him in another video comment; i dunno if that influenced your decision to do a video on Adorno, but in any case I'm so glad you did.
Maybe it could be the fact that he may have been critical of European Christian culture and that was what those who opposed him had valued. Just a humble thought.
@@MohicanIncan Yeah, they're butthurt crybabies who (IMO, justifiably given their simpering authoritarianism) interpret any critique of their culture as blasphemy. This was during the Cold War after all.
Adorno is totally ethnocentric or Eurocentric and attacks non western cultures as sees no value in studying the Parmenidian paradigm of the east. Ontological rejection of the inner being as a theoretical entity has no relation to practice.All talk about culture industry without recognizing The ontological necessity is reduced to the mode of production, namely capitalism Culture industry is now is no different from the established religion where critical thinking is subject to the default mode of existence. Frankfurt school was useful but the reduction to use value and intrinsic value is subject to an into,logical negation of being. . It is for this reason that Adorno was a chauvinist and could not appreciate Jazz, or eastern music . This flaw has metamorphisized into “ woke philosophy”
He's broke but has a decent internet connection which allow him to enrich his life with many different cultural alternatives on his free time if he desires to do so. Man, life under our current economic system is truly awful, so awful that it creates platforms where consumers can provide economic support to independent creators based on the emotional/practical significance their products/services have.
I remember being super grossed out by the portrayal of the border between worlds in “Coco.” Same thing- that mythologizing of the “way things are” - especially in a movie that was marketed as a celebration of Mexican culture. Thanks for pin-pointing why it’s so icky!
I have been an Adornist for over 15 years without even knowing it. I went to conservatory for electronic music and I always felt a deep resistance against the culture industry. I didn’t know what it was, I didn’t have deep thoughts about it, but I just knew the way we were “taught” to conform to the industry was antithetical to my drive for making music. Not to say I’m some free spirit, I’m just as much a cookie cutter reproducer, but I always had some internal resistance to it, I just never knew what it was or that someone like Adorno had such clear thoughts about this.
I have been an Adornist for a long time, but only because I have such a bourgeois academic and elitist upbringing, that my tastes go against what 99% of people like. Mixed with an element of boredom and reaction against modern cuiture infustry, a seeking to go back to an earlier period and an aristocratic, refined, elegant taste. Only thinking classical symphonies are real music, Shakespeare plays etc. all of the "fine arts" and "elite culture".
I just went through a significant portion of your back catalog. I want to thank you for combining approachable topics with real academic philosophy. Please don't ever change that aspect to appear a more general audience.
I actually just wrote an Homework about "Kulturindustrie", very interesting! The "Dialektik der Aufklärung" is, in my opinion, at least the part about Kulturindustrie, still up to date! Good Video by the way! you have my sub.
Thank you for making this video I watched this years ago and it subconsciously became a founding text on my own ideas of entertainment. Disheartening how far the issues you pointed out have worsened since then. 4 years ago most people would still have some level of understanding the mass media they consumed is safe, unchallenging art but that has progressed to an obsession, an enslavement to the perfected product for instant gratification under worsening living conditions which consumers will proclaim to be "freedom" and become extremely angry when pointed out it is in fact the opposite.
And this is equally an issue with self described social media "leftists" whose anticapitalism suddenly shuts down when it comes to media criticism. Because all the average person wants on the internet, especially post-pandemic which seems to have screwed everyone's minds is to be thoughtlessly entertained.
This is precisely why I tell people that it is an incomplete thought when they say that "Rock [music] is dead." The truth is that Rock music is dead on the inside, and it was the conformity to Corporate interests that killed it, by destroying the rebellious elements that made Rock what it was all about in the first place.
As a major rock fan, I agree. Rock music (especially punk and metal) has only become "rock music" again very recently, and only in certain corners of the world or on the internet. It became legitimately underground again after the culture industry was done with it. Rap music is now suffering the exact same process Rock music just finished.
It depends on where you classify "the inside." If you dig deep enough in the right place there's going to be some life at the bottom of the well somewhere. It might be more accurate to say "Rock music is dead on the surface," where "the surface" is everything from entry-level until you hit gold.
@@TRaWi Honestly none of those sound too bad. You should have brought up high infant mortality or something. My grandma tells me stories of growing up in Iceland and using human piss to cure wool, and sounds pretty fond about it all.
i still can't get over how in spite of being a philosophical analysis first and foremost, this video manages to pummel this movie into the ground harder than any 'lol worst movie ever review' type content could ever hope to xd
You are my favourite left-wing youtuber. I appreciate your neutral and bias-free way of approaching these concepts and people that you talk about and overall you give a mature and down-to-earth picture of yourself. Would you be interested in exploring some right-wing thinkers sometimes, such as Nick Land or Heidegger?
They look at the end-game, you pretend it isn't there, that their criticism wasn't based on revolutionary marxism, critical theory has its end in revolution and the destruction of the capitalist system, not in "saving western culture", oh my god, this is a complete misrepresentation of the Frankfurt School.
Adorno and Horkheimer's essay Mass Culture is simply stupendous. For many reasons, however having read it as late as 2012, as a musician I was stunned. As Adorno and Horkheimer had predicted or perhaps foretold that complex music and it's potency and legacy will be broken down, simplified, butchered, sequenced to rigid short forms and consequently levelled out for profit. Constitutes to elements of mass culture... came true - Hip Hop being an example...
What I find interesting is that while the structural forces fade into the background, the role of an invincible overlord is thrust forward in the shape of a person who could be emotionally approachable by the main characters but who is separated from them by the overlord's role and their roles. It seems to engender this idea that the entities on all levels are the same and would get along even though one group may literally have the power of life and death over the other. The Toy Story series does this as well, along with a number of 'kids' movies. The rules of the structure are often invisible and unquestioned and while some of the overlords are shown as fallible or even evil, the structure that places them in the status of overlord is presented as some kind of unchangeable natural law rather than a system that is used due to its efficiency and mutual benefit compared with other systems that might be considered.
So, what you're trying to tell is that our culture portrays hierarchies as something natural that cannot be escaped, right? Because if so, that would mean our culture is *entirely correct* on the subject.
Great video! I actually got interested in reading Adorno now. Mostly because of the point about how the culture industry incorporates and kind of strips life out of so much art that previously felt radical and was a breath of fresh air (my own interpretation of your words). A bit petty and personal example of this phenomenon set in action is how a lot of very talented and unique bands get picked up on majorlabels, and as soon as they sign their contracts they have to conform to all these new norms and creative restricitions, leaving the original ideas kind of stranded, not abandoning them necessarily, but having them more or less degenerate to the standard of a very low denominator, and then repeating that idea ad naseum, being unable to innovate and change into something new from that point on. There are some artists that are able to eventually get the level of creative freedom they need on large labels, such an artist for me would be for example Marvin Gaye. And for a more contemporary example perhaps Kanye West (even though I personally disdain his music), but atleast from my observations it seems like there is a long long road for those artist to get through in order to get to that point of unhinged expressive freedom. And even if they do they are often considered to be more of an oddity within the industry, often respected for the craft and sometimes very commercially succesful, but considered as a sort of separate entity or exception to the rule of the mainstream music-industry as a whole. They kind of recieve a free pass to that creative freedom just because of their skill, talent and experience (which when compared to other musicians who perhaps werent able to get that level of expression people often overly glorified I find, especially with say Kanye West) when I personally think that for the absolute majority of musicians they should be able to have that creative freedom to begin with, there shouldn't be a huge change in the decisiontaking of what the music is supposed to be like just because you sign to a major label. I honestly think it creatively bankrupts waaay too much of contemporary music (and older aswell for that matter). Anyway my rant of consciousness is over. It was a great video, very well done.
In all honestly, I’m ideologically aligned with the right. That said, watching your channel has made me realize the left and right really do have the same goal, but have different concepts of how to achieve it, and different concepts of what is standing in the way of said goals (as you noted with your example contrasting Adorno with Paul Joseph Watson). It honestly gives me hope that the left right divide can be salved, and even mended, if only we’d begin to find where our worldview as collective groups align. So it is with all of that in mind that I say, thank you for making these video essays. I thoroughly enjoy them as a contrast to my own personal worldview.
I think that addressing todays issues with a left/right view of the world is outdated. We have to be able to debate about things without the game of ''defeating'' someone and that I think is a really hard thing to do.
@@radiorender7163 3 years is a lot of time when it comes to politics. My ideas have morphed over the years. Glad to see we are now in agreement. We are all enemies of, as you call call it, neo liberal capitalism. I like the term corporate techno-feudalism but it's all the same thing (semantics). It must be stopped. I don't even think in terms of "left or right" any more. I frame it more as corporations, banks, and their puppet governments versus all of us (Humanity and the planet as a whole).
@@radiorender7163 Do you not know what happened to the anarchists that collaborated with Lenin and associates? If you did you wouldn't want to collaborate with people that have some bad tendencies
If I am not being recommended Tommy Robinson videos left, right and centre on youtube. I am being recommended a 20th anniversary release of Bomfunk MC's 'Freestyler' with additional dragons in the music video. Content such as yours is a god send.
This is too real. I think with the advent of the internet, it's almost impossible to retain true culture anymore that hasn't been exploited by capitalism. Memes are co-opted by celebrities and orporate Twitter accounts faster thank you can blink. I always think about anime, because as a kid that felt like something most people in my life didn't know about and that felt interesting to me, but now you can buy dragon Ball z t shirts at forever 21 without even knowing what dragon Ball z is. I hate to be overly negative or blinded by nostalgia but I guess it just sucks to see something that you identified strongly with monetized and marketed to death... The internet is great but it's homogenizing everything, it's so hard to have your own identity
Frightening thing is that while this is considered a commercial failure when I read about it, it still earned $220M at the box office on a $50M budget.
Outstanding Review as usual on both the film and the philosophy. I would have never watched this movie before, thanks for reassuring me how right was I. BTW inside out has actually a nice depiction of the emotional balance within the platónic soul. The problem with Adorno and Co is that they don't actually provide any real alternative to the alienated spare time of Capitalist cultural industry, aside of course of no sparé Time from the quasi-slavery of the past and modern third world. In comparison. Cultural Industry might well be considered an improvement.
how I can go from watching this to watching the first recommended video "Elijah Wood Tastes the Lava of Mount Doom While Eating Spicy Wings | Hot Ones", I am not sure.
Welcome to capitalist America. We will eat you, and destroy any country that dares to oppose us. Unless they have nukes, then we will just bitch about them.
Funny I was having these same sorts of thoughts when I watched Robots (2005) which has a similar sense of just swap out the boss and don't change the system and everything will be great. The people making these movies can't even imagine a world where the system is overthrown entirely, or can't imagine that might be a good thing. (I'm reminded also of JK Rowling a couple books after introducing a slave who wants to be freed, follows up with the notion that most of these slaves want to be slaves and are happy, because actually abolishing slavery would be too much of a disruption to the status quo for Rowling to cope with on an ideological level.)
The dissonance around this subject that I see from right-leaning and centrist people astounds me. If I point out how much of the art in our culture has been overtaken by safe, derivative, formulaic, cliched crap, they immediately, enthusiastically, agree with me. If I point out that a lot of this is owed to the behavior of a small number of very large corporations stifling innovation and individual artistic vision in order to maximize profit, I might get a couple uncomfortable looks, but they don't argue. It's so self-evident at this point that there's very little room to argue, even if it makes them uncomfortable. If I point out that maybe, just maybe, a system that did not require artists to produce a profit in order to be able to pursue their art would lead to greater freedom and originality for the artists, and a better culture for the public to enjoy... I'm called a dirty communist and informed that collectivist ideologies like communism stifle all free expression and individuality and that only capitalism (as much of it as possible, thank you) allows for freedom and innovation. A reference to breadlines or Venezuela may also appear. No apparent irony, no apparent awareness of the contradiction in their own beliefs.
Art seems to have become so commodified only because there is now such widespread access to it. Before the 19th/20th century the majority of art was consumed by the educated and upper class, being the only ones who could really afford it. It's not that art has changed, but only that a new market exists full of people who are not interested in challenging and original stuff. Sadly things like the emoji movie simply overshadow all the wonderful developments taking place, which I believe to be just as inspired and original as it ever was.
I've been thinking about this ever since I learned that Richard Spenser's University thesis was on Adorno, because the really twisted thing about postmodern fascism is how it seems to reverse the Nazi's hatred for degenerate art by insisting not on censorship, but on the markets being controlled by "cultural marxists" This lets them play sides while not actually suggesting much of their own idea of new cultural products. But I also think your explanation of the difference is illuminating, because it hinges on the idea of "objective requirements" where I think you can plug in things that have gained more visible appearances, like tropes ("stop touching my hand"). Take Jordan Peterson's dislike for Frozen, he reads it as reflecting a modern bias instead of a more classic myth like Beauty and the Beast. Seen on it's face he's decrying a movie beloved by audiences for it's positive message to children, and girls, but what's also clear is that even if you don't like him, but are weary of Disney kitsch and see no alternative, then not only Disney would look like the culture industry, but that the public, including feminists, who defend the film would actually look a little like their love for it was irrational and you would start looking everywhere for examples of creators who spoke out against the hegemony but only for projects that were as far from feminism and liberal values as possible...
Music has become largely decoupled from Capital through independent digital production. Computer aided production has pretty much eliminated large studios. Platforms provide free distribution and consumption. Music has pretty much become a non-commodity. Monetization of digital media would seem to be more of an issue than the actual production process. The algorithm and the search engine dominates in a sea of media. As a consumer of media my search habits and the search engine determine consumption. This reflects the surveillance character of modern digital consumption. My search history and personal profile mediate what I consume through the network. This would seem to be more a matter of surveillance and profile normalization. My profile and current surveillance characteristics is what is monetized.
It reminds to a famous sentence in The Clash's song 'Whiteman in Hammersmith Palais'. Joe Strummer singing 'you think it's funny, turning rebellion into money' about The Jam, who tried to sell more punk rock albums by going for more 'style' than The Clash. Very clear and informative video, thanks!
Generally very good, but it is reductive to assume that the contemporary worker is necessarily "more exhausted" or "dumber" than earlier - and is dangerously close to useless, leftist melancholy. There is a thousand, thousand examples of movies as bad as this one in the past, we do not, partout, live in the stupidest of times.
I agree, though I usually take those sorts of claims as being an aphoristic way of expressing that capitalist efficiency is efficiency in the exploitation of labor. Worse and dumber movies have been made, but I struggle to think of one that features this particular brand of cynicism to this extent.
Adorno was saying that in the 60s. He wasn't comparing new Hollywood movies with the old ones and judge the new ones as worse. What's being contrasted with the products of cultural industry is the avant-garde art, classical music and literature, which has been much less determined by financial interest. Virginia Woolf didn't have a editor who would tell her to change the way she wrote in order to sell better. She didn't look for recognition from the lowest common denominator. She looked for recognition from those who have literary talents, artistic sensibility and academic erudition she herself recognises. That's a time when culture is seen as self-cultivation and self-transcendence that requires you to work very hard to be able to begin to take pleasure from it. It's not like the consumer product that helps you spend your Sundays when you have nothing more meaningful to do.
@@jackkendall6420 In fairness, we actually have social programs now that make it a lot easier. Other times, like the Gilded Age, were much worse with respect to capitalist control. I think the difference now is that completely contrary ideas are more known and popular, so people have "discovered" this grip not because it is worse, but because they previously didn't know that they could live any other way.
man, i'm from brazil and wanted to thank you for the material, has helped me a lot in my graduation research. In this research I trying to connect David Lynch's subversive art (with limits) in Twin Peaks with the cultural industry (televisive specially). if you can send me cultural and television related materials I would be even more grateful
Even as a kid I was puzzled how american TV shows portray everything different (historical eras, exotic cultures, fantasy and science-fiction beings) as basically like the USA with a different colour palette. No matter if it's the stone age of Flintstones of the far future of Jetsons, people are always the same and thus society is always the same. Or take Star Trek where the universe is filled with aliens that are never truely alien but easily understandable personifications of real-life virtues and vices. The basic idea behind all those shows might even be considered well-intentioned and humanistic: "Don't fear people different from yourself, as they aren't so different after all." But it is also dangerously naive. What if it turns out the difference is genuine and fundamental after all?
Some one organize a /breadtube debate podcast about an Adorno interpretation of the emoji movie. I bet Lindsay Ellis would agree to participate in that.
Great video, I enjoy your content but gotta take you to task on 'the profit motive'. A lot of anti-capitalists grossly oversimplify the profit motif a simple step by step procedure or something, ignoring the ideas of novelty and innovation. Specifically in this video the idea of 'what is proven to work'. One of the first questions producers must ask themselves is "how is my product different?", "how can it provide the world something it doesn't already have?", "what gives it value?" etc. How many businesses n business strategies fell flat n failed because it was just stale ersatz, cheap reproductions of previously successful products? Happens all the time. One could make the argument that capitalism does the opposite of reproducing stale ersatz n triggers innovation and novelty. Entrepreneurial risk is precisely that risk. Art may be another can of worms, but even following the evolution of art in the last 50 years, the trite shit tends to fade away and the novel n provocative seems to be what is remembered more or less.
First question is what it is similar to? THEN it's how we can stand out. Lego sold tickets, what can we get that'll sell like Lego movie? How can we make it similar but different. That's how we got a battleship movie, Lego ninja-go, emoji, Lego 2, monopoly, etc. Innovation is needed to solve a problem or to stand out. But innovation implies going to market first. If you just change thinks but don't take it to market, the business term for it is simply invention, not innovation.
@@LightiningHobo Perhaps, insofar as Uber is 'similar to' a Taxi and the automobile is 'similar to' a horse-drawn carriage. If I'm to buy that argument I'd have a tough time explaining things like the airplane and the television, things that had no really close relatives. You are cherry picking examples like shitty movies, as if a world free of shitty knockoff movies could ever exist :/
The biggest weakness of this analysis is that CP has deliberately picked the dumbest contemporary movie he could find as an example of how capitalism makes people stupid. If the emoji movie is the standard of modern culture, sure, but this deliberately ignores all the amazing music, literature, and film that is still being made in capitalist societies. Especially capitalist societies. This video is typical of marxist critique: complaints based on a selective reading of capitalism and no alternative.
Hey remember that worldwide popular game called Tetris? Guess in which country it got developed. Capitalism is not a stimulant for the creation of art, in fact you deliberately ignore how immensely difficult capitalism makes it for amazing art to be created or to get known.
