Thomas Nast
CRITICAL THEORY DEFINITION
Marxist theoretical approaches,
especially those of the Frankfurt School.
COMPREHENSIVE LINK: "Illuminations": a site devoted to classic thinkers from the Frankfurt School and also contemporary figures influenced by the School. The site is maintained by Douglas Kellner, UCLA.
THEORY
Critical Theory:Theory link
It is fashionable,
just now, to suppose that there is no power elite, as it was fashionable
in the 'thirties to suppose a set of ruling-class villains to be the source
of all social injustice and public malaise. I should be as far from supposing
that some simple and unilateral ruling class could be firmly located as
the prime mover of American society, as I should be from supposing that
all historical change in America today is merely impersonal drift.
C.
Wright Mills
Critical Theory:Theory link
Cartoons were once exponents of fantasy as
opposed to rationalism. They ensured that justice was done to the creatures
and objects they electrified, by giving the maimed specimens a second life.
All they do today is to confirm the victory of technological reason over
truth.
Theodor
Adorno and Max Horkheimer, "The
Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception"
Critical Theory:Theory link
One of the foremost tasks of art has always
been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later.
The history of every art form shows critical epochs in which a certain
art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed
technical standard, that is to say, in a new art form.
Walter
Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
Critical Theory:Theory link
Economic freedom would mean freedom
from the economy - from being controlled by economic forces and
relationships; freedom from the daily struggle for existence, from earning
a living. Political freedom would mean liberation of the individuals
from politics over which they have no control. Similarly, intellectual
freedom would mean the restoration of individual thought now absorbed by
mass communication and indoctrination, abolition of "public opinion" together
with its makers.
Herbert
Marcuse , ONE-DIMENSIONAL MAN
Critical Theory:Theory link
Even before reading Jurgen
Habermas -the German sociologist formerly associated with the Frankfurt
School-I had come to suspect that discipline is foreign to the liberal
mind, that liberals hate contours and self-definition that comes from limits.
Thus, public space becomes for liberals an extension of their private living
room.
Elizabeth Powers, "Habermas
on the Upper West Side"
PRACTICE:
Critical Theory Practice link
Presence of mind and omnipresence of mimetic ability also characterize
the empirical
Chaplin. It is well known that he does not confine his mimetic
arts strictly to the films which, since his youth, he produces only
over great intervals of time and in an intensely and openly self-criticalspirit.
He acts incessantly, just like
Kafka's trapeze artist, who sleeps in the baggage rack so as not
to ease off training even for a moment. Any time spent with him is an uninterrupted
performance. One scarcely dares speak to him, not from awe of his fame--no
one could set himself less apart, no one could be less pretentious
than he--but rather from fear of disturbing the spell of the performance.
Theodor W. Adorno, "Chaplin
Times Two"
Critical Theory Practice link
Architecturally, the McDonald's
environment is a sterile and dehumanizing site of standardized and banalized
design and structure signifying sameness, corporate homogeneity,
and artificial standardized space. As for its workers and conditions
of labor, the McDonald's production mechanism is an extremely blatant
and degrading form of low-paid and alienated labor which is a careerdead-end,
"minimum wage from cradle to grave," enerating extremely high turnover
rates.
Douglas Kellner on McDonaldization