Section Breakdown, for the attention or time deficient: 0:25 - The Culture Industry (Intro) 4:55 - Art & Aesthetics 10:17 - Capitalism as Psychology 14:37 - Catharsis (selling your own anxieties back to you)
PlasticPills holy shit kid, great video. All business needs to become co-op. Worker shares not government where each remains a node in the market. Ownership changes yet the “free” market survives.
Great stuff... But oohhh the irony. Turning the AH into a consumable product in my feed. As Marcuse says, you cant utilize the tools of recuperation as a means of liberation.
Well done. “The culture industry is not the art of the consumer but rather the projection of the will of those in control onto their victims. The automatic self-reproduction of the status quo in its established forms is itself an expression of domination.” Adorno, The Culture Industry
If the rich didn't buy those paintings, they'd be gone. It's very expensive to maintain and restore art objects. I know it's a bit of a "sad reality" where only the rich can buy actual works of art, but their value is calculated by how many people value the work, which also means how much the work travels which is also very expensive bc of insurances, custom fit travelling cases not to mention it is often guarded by specialized personnel. Art is expensive because it is valuable to us culturally. Complaining about the rich sustaining the arts, even if their motivation might be to show it off as another piece within their collection, is stupid. I say this as an artist and writer. Cultural objects would not sustain under state government and everyone paying their fair share of taxes. It's just too damn expensive and those taxes can be used for other necessary causes, like proper infrastructure.
@@tangerinesarebetterthanora7060 Better just in their neighborhoods by a burgeoning bohemian scene of folks too smart, genuinely creative, and unable to fit in to the insanity of the world, them making the art for homies to see rather than what a part of the problem committee decides to stick in a museum. Not that there aren’t very good museums in places.
This is incredible! It took me literally weeks to break into this book and you described it so eloquently! After watching this I am going to reread the brilliant chapter in the book; and because of this video I'll now be able to see it in a whole new light! Seriously thank you for this resource
The channel "Theory Pleeb" addresses the two-prong alienation and alienated, consumptive leisure with their concept of "timenergy", in which productive "work" action (free energy, beyond the energy to recover from the last period of sustained exertion, with time for sustained repetition and cultivation) is owned by your boss, and your "free time" is actually **not** time for sustained repetition and cultivation, and a major chunk of it is also without free energy. When you're done recovering, you don't have enough time to sustain what you might call spontaneous action, so your only action is on owned time, not free time. And you only have enough free time to use your energy in a way that can't really cultivate anything substantive. So, you consume and veg out or perform actions that give immediate feedback without cultivation.
@Mori Totebag - If I correctly grok what you’re writing, I remember reading a similar idea in a pamphlet called “The Abolition of Work,” by a writer named Bob Black, which made the rounds of the underground circuit in the 1980s: “Between getting ready for work, traveling to work, coming back from work, recovering from work, and preparing for next day’s work, the only thing ‘free’ about your ‘free time’ is nobody pays you.” Eye-opening!
Great content - disaffected 60yo cynical artist here, reacquainted with Postmodernism after the mid 80s. Cannot explain originality to my Marvel-zed son (as a kid was a huge fan) the cultural loop. Hat tip to you for clearly explaining this topic to a younger generation that took me 40 years to understand.
Wow, the production and editing is getting so good on your videos. This video was really entertaining and enlightening. Looking forward to the next one 👌
Woooow thank you so much!!! I am a Brazilian student and I am analyzing the Cultural Industry inside Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and your sources helped so much!!! Great video composition and content! Perfect!
What is it with Brazil having this amazing education system? Everytime I look up a video on my side interests in philosophy and economics there's always some kid like u saying they're from Brazil and watching these videos for class. From different viewpoints to. Pro capitalism, pro marxism, pro libertarian, rothbarian, objectivism, critical theory, mutualism... American college students don't look this stuff up on RUclips. Im like 30 now, but when I was looking this kinda stuff up at 20 people thought I was crazy.
As a graduate student who just took Adorno & Benjamin’s class, reading Dialect of Enlightenment, Critical Models, Aesthetic Theory, and Minima Moralia, this video is underrated and has the explanatory power beyond what you can find on the internet. Have nothing but respect for this man 🙏
"Capitalism" is the word used by Marxists. "Free Market" is used by those who understand the true nature of the system. The choice is between voluntary transactions ("Free Market") and voluntarily helping others ("charity") and coercive transactions and involuntarily helping the politically favored ("socialism"). The question is, is wealth exchange through voluntary transactions or involuntary transactions ? this is a moral question. Socialism is involuntary and achieved using state force against people who have done nothing wrong except be productive, therefore it is evil.
@@staubsauger2305 you'd have to elucidate the notion of free and voluntary interaction you're employing for your argument to have any meaning beyond the abstractions you posit in it. One big difference between the way you, in this more libertarian, laissez-faire view society and economy, and more left-leaning perspectives consists in the belief that freedom, as it is formulated in neoclassical economy, is insufficent, and ought be expanded to also include more subtle forms of domination. This discord in the fundamental premises of your thinking with those of more socialist types, I think must be worked out for productive discourse to be possible.
This is one of the best applications of this quote and coherent comments on the current dominance of the cultural hegemony of capitalism that I've seen. Capitalist realism has become so pervasive that I believe it's why most people are so quick to automatically just reject any positive change that would alleviate the oligarchic control of modern society, at least in the West. Its sad. Its depressing. We could become a vibrant society once again if people would only open up to the possibility of moving to a post-capitalism. I think using words like 'post-capitalism' instead of 'anti' is also a way that we can begin to change the way people think.
been exploring lots of philosophy channels and PlasticPills popped up (no pun intended) last night, so glad it did! Really enjoyed the interpretation of Adorno etc. in this video, looking forward to watching the rest...
I’m writing a paper on Hamilton and the american narrative and this has been super helpful! Especially considering that Disney+ has just bought & distributed the pro shot
To maybe put a more optimistic spin; foucault, in his later years talked quite a bit about the possibility that late-capitalism effectively sews the seeds of its own dissolution, in that it is constantly creating cracks in the metaphorical pavement through which new forms of human life and social relations can emerge. Capitalism naturally does this as a part of its own internal mechanisms, and it is on us to recognize these spaces which open up, and take advantage of them. ok so what I'm really saying is, let's start an anarchy-hippie commune. I can already play bongos and harmonica. whose bringing the weed???
haha how Marxist and dialectical from Foucault to say something like that. But to the point, the idea that something like this could happen is not wrong, but its so that we actually searching for such things since the 30s and people have not really found something. Why the 30s you asking? Because we thought until then that the proletariat will rise up and start communism, thing is not world communism was rising but mostly fascist counterrevolutions. Which actually led Adorno and Horkheimer to write dialectic of Enlightenment. Which showed us that commodification of all parts of life and capitalistic ideology is pretty big and you can barely escape it and when you really go to a anarchy-hippie-commune, your mostly isolated with no real power to change anything, because and that's the last reason why there was no big revolution, capitalism works for the people in a specific way, it gives them cars, fridges and the new marvel movie and that's all they apparently want.
@@joel0joel0 capitalism creates commodities in order to create profit. What people "really want" is a more complicated question, bc we must also take into consideration the fact that human desire is sculpted by a range of possibilities which is itself delimited by the functioning of capitalism itself. I can't very well desire something which has never been truly presented to me as a live possibility, for example. If by "the 30s" you mean the 1917 october revolution, then my preferred take on that issue is that 20th century communist parties became bogged down in authoritarianism due specifically to the totalitarian nature of Leninist essentialism itself, as Leninism was able to function as an absolutist doctrine which was able to become it's own form of normalizing force of social power, rather than a force of de-territorialization, horizontality and solidarity. "Hippie communes" may be politically ineffectual insofar as they lack the capacity for broader social transformation, but that shouldn't diminish the potential of counter-economics in general, which will likely become an even more significant dynamic of resistance moving forward as we see the continual development of climate change, non-state currencies and localized social organization.
Adding to the two replies - IMO anarcho-hippie communes, if they engage in outreach (and I’d argue their true primary function is as education nodes, even if not overtly so) can illustrate to their surrounding communities what’s possible… which is why pop culture today studiously derides them, despite their meager direct political power: they might excite and expand the imagination of capitalism’s current alienated “beneficiaries.” I’m not real down with weed as part of a revolutionary message - that seems like something more for private use - but music and happy people can illustrate the benefits of alternatives to current unquestioned economic and cultural paradigms, and can trigger larger conversation: “Oh, that will never scale up…” “Well, what about small autonomous communities, interdependent within a larger democratic framework?” and so on. I doubt any sudden top-down change could occur in the USA without the furthest far-right nutcases swooping in to take over anyway - that’s the problem with destabilizing top government structures, is you accidentally create an opportunity for better-organized forces, willing to be brutal, to seize the whole kit and caboodle once you’ve done the work of destabilizing its leadership. Grassroots change by contrast is surer and stabler. Having grown up in a developing nation, I can tell you that in those impoverished or precarious states, more so than in the USA, is where capitalist-conformist pop culture has become the unquestioned and unquestionable totalitarian force. We‘d get so much further globally if there were a pan-tropical multi-continental progressive alliance. It seemed attainable before the ‘80s, but how to cultivate alternatives there now is hard to imagine.
Is capitalism really at it's late stage though? I don't think so. This system came into life approx. in the 18th century, it's the 21st now. It's only been like 3 centuries, feudalism lasted for at least 6. I really don't think we've seen capitalism's full form yet, much less its demise.
I'm an disabled veteran from my service as a USAF flight medic. I have alot of experience as an IDMT Special Operations medic. Usually attached to Army Ranger units and Marine MAPS Operators. It REALLY bothers me that "Special Operations" - usually SEALS, Rangers etc. are ALWAYS painted as these Rock Star, comic like "Super Heroes" protecting "Freedom" from "Bad Guys". In my experience, these guys are sociopathic/psychopathic killers that just love hurting people, ending life and breaking things. As part of the MEDICAL CORPS, these boys struck me more as terrifying characters in "The Boys" than ones in "Lone Survivor" or "Captain America". They ARE impressively capable "Super-men" in the true Nietzschian sense of the word. More scary than inspiring. It kills me that DoD has such a close and successful relationship with the Media Industrial Complex. Especially since they make money brain washing the public.
“The mechanical factory like reproduction of art objects reduces it’s perceived aesthetic intimacy with the artist, it’s aura.” This quote wonderfully also explains art in the 21st century, where advancement in artificial intelligence let’s create art from text prompts (see DALL-E 2 as an example), as well as the vacuous phenomenon that is NFT art.
listen man i cannot thank you enough for making this video 2 years ago lol you break this stuff down and make it so understandable. Have an essay due on this and now thanks to you i can go write about terrible dystopian teen fiction and capitalism
ok I will probably have to rewatch this at some point but this is what I got from this: so when you watch something that you relate a great deal to, it feels cathartic but it is taking away your drive to do anything real about your situation. Also because the media is owned by like 5 companies, the messages within the media are going to be limited to what they find acceptable to maintain the status quo and this keeps people from thinking that doing something else outside of this media bubble is allowed. And thus people then get more attracted to shows that are more stunted.
Thank u so much!🖤 Everything in this video calls out to perfection, from editing, to sectioning the essay for better understanding & ur explaining the essay in a much simpler way with the examples👏... This really helped 🤗
Good Lord that was exceptional and piercing. Will be re watching and re watching to further absorb and integrate and activate. Thank you for this gift! You rock!
I just want to say you make great videos and I think people like you are important for educating people by breaking down complex issues in digestible ways. I've read the dialectic of the enlightenment and I think you summed their stuff up well
Damn.. I am hooked to your channel... This is some really powerful stuff on this platform.. You're doing a great job. thank you for putting in all these efforts and getting down some really complex ideas in a simplified way. Also, Great editing skills and narration! :)
Watched this video right after finished reading the Culture Industry. You made the whole thing clearer. Thank you for this comrade! Feel bad for even getting to watch such hight quality content for free.
Thanks Ian, you done with Fatal Strategies yet? I don't mind doin the vids on theory but I agree that it's most effective when applied. Comments like this help me decide on direction so preach!
@@PlasticPills No problem, and I am! I've read System of Objects, In the Shadows of Silent Majorities, and now Fatal Strategies. Baudrillard's ideas, and these related theory videos are really interesting to me. I work as a wedding musician, and the wedding industry (at least in the US) is such a concentrated example of a lot of these ideas. Seeing you apply them helps me understand and apply the ideas better for myself.
Revisting this after the election. John Stewart was interviewing Heather Cox Richardson and he jokingly asked if this was a failure of the enlightenment and i was like yes actually.
18:08 "change of ownership",... I would add: change in how people see/understand the ownership concept and its history .. (for more info see general semantics)
@@afbf6522 lol the one from prisms right? Adorno does not like Jazz, at one point he implies that they’re homosexuals (in memoria moralia he also calls fascists homoexuals... I insist this is most problematic!). I always wondered what his feelings would be of ornette Coleman and dolphy style free jazz/avant garde Jazz, I’m pretty sure he wrote that at a point where jazz was predictably unpredictable. What’d you think of it? I read it a while ago I kinda forget it
@@fuzzydunlop4513 Adorno was really a bit of a snob and definitely too overly dismissive. I do think that his critique of modern day "art" is still really valuable though.
Nice. Theorywave nights is going to be doing a read through of dialectic of enlightenment soon. I'm looking forward to finally going through the whole thing.
great video. production quality = A+. a suggestion from a filmmaker: give yourself more "headroom" on the video. seeing your hat/head cut off from the video frame isn''t horrible, but the frame with your whole head plus an inch or two would look better
I see a lot of these comments, which seems kinda ironic considering the message IN his videos. Like, ud think the way it looks and the "quality" wouldn't matter if the information was good. Clearly yall didn't absorb the video.
@@juanmccoy3066 bruh the effort on transfering the info promised is the content is the main point . Like if he got drunk and ranted the whole time itd be a shitty one with novody benefittin . You already knew what i meant
In reference to 6:22 , didn't Adorno assert that folk culture had been integrated into pop culture? That in attempting to bridge the gap between high art and low art, the culture industry had essentially eliminated the meaning of both in one fell swoop. High art because it was now broken apart from its whole, as it was fractured into digestible pieces for the masses (separated from the whole, which is what gives much of it it's substance and lack of 'sameness'). Low art then lost its ability to protest and truly represent the commoners, because it had been integrated into popular mainstream culture, elevating those artists to higher status, and thus eliminating its ability to protest the establishment due to now being intertwined directly with it in its cycle of repetition. In bridging the gap between the two, effectively both were destroyed of meaning. That's was my takeaway from "On The Fetish Character In Music And The Regression Of Listening" and "The Schema of Mass Culture" at least.
this blew my motherfucking mind. in my fourth year of film school. digging for a deeper understanding of what the "culture industry" is. a lot of people think that the field of the arts, entertainment, content, news media, ect, are full of insane contradictions. this is one of the pieces that makes it make sense, apart from the interpersonal weirdness it can sometimes induce. there's a rationality to everything, but it can get odd...
Honestly, an analysis of the backlash against Disney Star Wars, from the perspective of Atar Wars being seen as a social myth that fans actually felt a connection to and were so invested in the lore that they hated the breaking of the rules for the purposes of profit seeking and ignoring the democratic desires of the people watching them; the tyranny of the culture industry over the appreciators of culture.
Appreciate the video. I'm currently reading Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and trying to make some sense of the early Frankfurt School. I'm sure this will be very helpful!
Some of the insights of "Adork" seem to run parallel to those of Huxley in Brave New World (written in the 30s). Possible inspiration? Currently reading "surveillance capitalism" by Shoshana Zuboff, where our situation (as described in your video) is described as a "coup from above" by the elite against the people of the democracy.
Adorno definitely knew about Huxley's work and regularly references him in some of his lesser known essays, although he considered him somewhat of a reactionary
The 30s and 40s was a time of insane transition, i think for observant people many changing aspects would have been obvious. Being born into makes it so much harder to extract yourself out to a different perspective all together.
not fitting the typical profile of scholarly figures often found in such videos. that is the effect guy! breaking the "habituation" of eyes watching such videos :) i truly wish u the continuation of ur passion
Reminiscent of baudrillard’s void: at the point where nothing really even matters. We all just have to step inside completely to “see it.” Perhaps then - there may be something like a “collective awakening” haha
4 года назад+48
Then Parasite enters the scene and gets the Oscar. That movie was not complicit or shy about where it stands. I admit that a lot of people just saw the theme as the heist of a poor family and were disturbed about so much social critic in the movie even when the whole theme of the movie was the class conflict but the movie could not be more in your face than it is. I am not saying this about 40's critics but today instead of brooding about the culture industry, people should take advantage of its tools, like you are doing here in youtube and Bong Joon Ho does it in his movies. I don't think there is an alternative.
but this is infinitely more possible in early capitalist societies like South Korea, because there is a growing middle class of people willing to take risks in media and entertainment on something like Parasite. And I don't really think Parasite is all that revolutionary, one could read it just as easily as a critique of the idiotic foibles of the lower class as one can feel that they were justified. That's the problem with entertainment as a form of class consciousness, one is free to perceive it however they want to, which is usually however the culture industry has demanded that they respond to it. (buy more Joker masks, which then become a joke in itself, etc.)
Fuck. That little bit about the active producer and passive consumer perfect complementing one another is dreadful in its implications. This dynamic is scary for its simplistic and self evident truth. It hit me like a tonne of bricks.
![ARGENTINA vs. PERÚ [1-0] | RESUMEN | ELIMINATORIAS SUDAMERICANAS | FECHA 12](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/xtI25ENDDSY/mqdefault.jpg)
Section Breakdown, for the attention or time deficient:
0:25 - The Culture Industry (Intro)
4:55 - Art & Aesthetics
10:17 - Capitalism as Psychology
14:37 - Catharsis (selling your own anxieties back to you)
PlasticPills holy shit kid, great video. All business needs to become co-op. Worker shares not government where each remains a node in the market. Ownership changes yet the “free” market survives.
Ayo you really have a gift for rendering extremely complex ideas super accessible
That is what I strive for in every video--relevance without cheapening the material--so thank you very much for saying so.
“It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.”
@@MMAneuver - Cliffs Notes, personified.
Great stuff... But oohhh the irony. Turning the AH into a consumable product in my feed. As Marcuse says, you cant utilize the tools of recuperation as a means of liberation.
@@PlasticPills he’s right
Well done. “The culture industry is not the art of the consumer but rather the projection of the will of those in control onto their victims. The automatic self-reproduction of the status quo in its established forms is itself an expression of domination.”
Adorno, The Culture Industry
Cool, they repackaged Marxist slogans with slightly different words. So impressive and ground breaking 🥱
Well, they've been trying to do that themselves, with limited success.
"Owning the present isn't enough for them so they buy the past as well." So true and beautifully said.
If the rich didn't buy those paintings, they'd be gone. It's very expensive to maintain and restore art objects. I know it's a bit of a "sad reality" where only the rich can buy actual works of art, but their value is calculated by how many people value the work, which also means how much the work travels which is also very expensive bc of insurances, custom fit travelling cases not to mention it is often guarded by specialized personnel. Art is expensive because it is valuable to us culturally. Complaining about the rich sustaining the arts, even if their motivation might be to show it off as another piece within their collection, is stupid.
I say this as an artist and writer. Cultural objects would not sustain under state government and everyone paying their fair share of taxes. It's just too damn expensive and those taxes can be used for other necessary causes, like proper infrastructure.
They buy the past, own the present, control the future. Man, it's bleak.
It would be nice if art was more accessible to others in museums and such. @@DarkAngelEU
@@Helen-dv4uk And unfortunately the future too!
@@tangerinesarebetterthanora7060 Better just in their neighborhoods by a burgeoning bohemian scene of folks too smart, genuinely creative, and unable to fit in to the insanity of the world, them making the art for homies to see rather than what a part of the problem committee decides to stick in a museum. Not that there aren’t very good museums in places.
This is incredible!
It took me literally weeks to break into this book and you described it so eloquently! After watching this I am going to reread the brilliant chapter in the book; and because of this video I'll now be able to see it in a whole new light! Seriously thank you for this resource
The channel "Theory Pleeb" addresses the two-prong alienation and alienated, consumptive leisure with their concept of "timenergy", in which productive "work" action (free energy, beyond the energy to recover from the last period of sustained exertion, with time for sustained repetition and cultivation) is owned by your boss, and your "free time" is actually **not** time for sustained repetition and cultivation, and a major chunk of it is also without free energy. When you're done recovering, you don't have enough time to sustain what you might call spontaneous action, so your only action is on owned time, not free time. And you only have enough free time to use your energy in a way that can't really cultivate anything substantive. So, you consume and veg out or perform actions that give immediate feedback without cultivation.
Mori Totebag cand give a link brother?
@Mori Totebag - If I correctly grok what you’re writing, I remember reading a similar idea in a pamphlet called “The Abolition of Work,” by a writer named Bob Black, which made the rounds of the underground circuit in the 1980s: “Between getting ready for work, traveling to work, coming back from work, recovering from work, and preparing for next day’s work, the only thing ‘free’ about your ‘free time’ is nobody pays you.” Eye-opening!
Great content - disaffected 60yo cynical artist here, reacquainted with Postmodernism after the mid 80s. Cannot explain originality to my Marvel-zed son (as a kid was a huge fan) the cultural loop. Hat tip to you for clearly explaining this topic to a younger generation that took me 40 years to understand.
live what you're doing. my 20 yr old philosophy degree wasn't a waste.
Crazy to think Neil Breen is technically more artistic than any other director in the mainstream.
No idea why I never get recommended your videos anymore. Still great, this is one of my favourite topics. Thanks!
Daaamn here's a throwback, you were one of my first viewers Potato!
@@PlasticPills wholesome moment
Wow, the production and editing is getting so good on your videos. This video was really entertaining and enlightening. Looking forward to the next one 👌
Yo ya, it's kinda embarrassing looking back to the early days. Volume's whack, cuts are slow, talking's boring... I'm happy with the progress.
Woooow thank you so much!!! I am a Brazilian student and I am analyzing the Cultural Industry inside Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and your sources helped so much!!! Great video composition and content! Perfect!
What is it with Brazil having this amazing education system? Everytime I look up a video on my side interests in philosophy and economics there's always some kid like u saying they're from Brazil and watching these videos for class.
From different viewpoints to. Pro capitalism, pro marxism, pro libertarian, rothbarian, objectivism, critical theory, mutualism...
American college students don't look this stuff up on RUclips. Im like 30 now, but when I was looking this kinda stuff up at 20 people thought I was crazy.
"all that is solid melts into PR" is such an unforgettable chapter title, very cool to see fisher mentioned
As a graduate student who just took Adorno & Benjamin’s class, reading Dialect of Enlightenment, Critical Models, Aesthetic Theory, and Minima Moralia, this video is underrated and has the explanatory power beyond what you can find on the internet. Have nothing but respect for this man 🙏
The amount of views this video has is incredibly disproportionate to the value of its content and production quality.
Agree
I'm glad it's not being taken down or censored. I'm so glad i found out about this
@@rabbyssi4392 Matter of opinion.
@@randstrickfaden4148 well now that this video has 180k views four years later it is not as disproportionate hahaha. Have a good day.
@@rabbyssi4392 there ya go! You have a good day too!
Following Derrida's thought: every construction has in itself its deconstruction. Let's hope that's the case for capitalism realism too.
"Capitalism" is the word used by Marxists. "Free Market" is used by those who understand the true nature of the system. The choice is between voluntary transactions ("Free Market") and voluntarily helping others ("charity") and coercive transactions and involuntarily helping the politically favored ("socialism"). The question is, is wealth exchange through voluntary transactions or involuntary transactions ? this is a moral question. Socialism is involuntary and achieved using state force against people who have done nothing wrong except be productive, therefore it is evil.
Staub Sauger free market is not exclusive to capitalism, so there goes your argument. The use of free market is a way to hide the system we live undrt
@@staubsauger2305 you'd have to elucidate the notion of free and voluntary interaction you're employing for your argument to have any meaning beyond the abstractions you posit in it. One big difference between the way you, in this more libertarian, laissez-faire view society and economy, and more left-leaning perspectives consists in the belief that freedom, as it is formulated in neoclassical economy, is insufficent, and ought be expanded to also include more subtle forms of domination. This discord in the fundamental premises of your thinking with those of more socialist types, I think must be worked out for productive discourse to be possible.
Staub Sauger what % of transactions involving you and other people would you categorize as market transactions?
This is one of the best applications of this quote and coherent comments on the current dominance of the cultural hegemony of capitalism that I've seen. Capitalist realism has become so pervasive that I believe it's why most people are so quick to automatically just reject any positive change that would alleviate the oligarchic control of modern society, at least in the West. Its sad. Its depressing. We could become a vibrant society once again if people would only open up to the possibility of moving to a post-capitalism. I think using words like 'post-capitalism' instead of 'anti' is also a way that we can begin to change the way people think.
The Clash have a lyric: “Turning rebellion into money”
been exploring lots of philosophy channels and PlasticPills popped up (no pun intended) last night, so glad it did! Really enjoyed the interpretation of Adorno etc. in this video, looking forward to watching the rest...
I’m writing a paper on Hamilton and the american narrative and this has been super helpful! Especially considering that Disney+ has just bought & distributed the pro shot
I had stumbled across this video because I was having trouble writing a paper on culture industry and this video helped me sooo much thank you!! :)
To maybe put a more optimistic spin; foucault, in his later years talked quite a bit about the possibility that late-capitalism effectively sews the seeds of its own dissolution, in that it is constantly creating cracks in the metaphorical pavement through which new forms of human life and social relations can emerge. Capitalism naturally does this as a part of its own internal mechanisms, and it is on us to recognize these spaces which open up, and take advantage of them.
ok so what I'm really saying is, let's start an anarchy-hippie commune. I can already play bongos and harmonica. whose bringing the weed???
haha how Marxist and dialectical from Foucault to say something like that. But to the point, the idea that something like this could happen is not wrong, but its so that we actually searching for such things since the 30s and people have not really found something. Why the 30s you asking? Because we thought until then that the proletariat will rise up and start communism, thing is not world communism was rising but mostly fascist counterrevolutions. Which actually led Adorno and Horkheimer to write dialectic of Enlightenment. Which showed us that commodification of all parts of life and capitalistic ideology is pretty big and you can barely escape it and when you really go to a anarchy-hippie-commune, your mostly isolated with no real power to change anything, because and that's the last reason why there was no big revolution, capitalism works for the people in a specific way, it gives them cars, fridges and the new marvel movie and that's all they apparently want.
@@joel0joel0 capitalism creates commodities in order to create profit. What people "really want" is a more complicated question, bc we must also take into consideration the fact that human desire is sculpted by a range of possibilities which is itself delimited by the functioning of capitalism itself. I can't very well desire something which has never been truly presented to me as a live possibility, for example. If by "the 30s" you mean the 1917 october revolution, then my preferred take on that issue is that 20th century communist parties became bogged down in authoritarianism due specifically to the totalitarian nature of Leninist essentialism itself, as Leninism was able to function as an absolutist doctrine which was able to become it's own form of normalizing force of social power, rather than a force of de-territorialization, horizontality and solidarity. "Hippie communes" may be politically ineffectual insofar as they lack the capacity for broader social transformation, but that shouldn't diminish the potential of counter-economics in general, which will likely become an even more significant dynamic of resistance moving forward as we see the continual development of climate change, non-state currencies and localized social organization.
Adding to the two replies - IMO anarcho-hippie communes, if they engage in outreach (and I’d argue their true primary function is as education nodes, even if not overtly so) can illustrate to their surrounding communities what’s possible… which is why pop culture today studiously derides them, despite their meager direct political power: they might excite and expand the imagination of capitalism’s current alienated “beneficiaries.”
I’m not real down with weed as part of a revolutionary message - that seems like something more for private use - but music and happy people can illustrate the benefits of alternatives to current unquestioned economic and cultural paradigms, and can trigger larger conversation: “Oh, that will never scale up…” “Well, what about small autonomous communities, interdependent within a larger democratic framework?” and so on.
I doubt any sudden top-down change could occur in the USA without the furthest far-right nutcases swooping in to take over anyway - that’s the problem with destabilizing top government structures, is you accidentally create an opportunity for better-organized forces, willing to be brutal, to seize the whole kit and caboodle once you’ve done the work of destabilizing its leadership. Grassroots change by contrast is surer and stabler.
Having grown up in a developing nation, I can tell you that in those impoverished or precarious states, more so than in the USA, is where capitalist-conformist pop culture has become the unquestioned and unquestionable totalitarian force. We‘d get so much further globally if there were a pan-tropical multi-continental progressive alliance. It seemed attainable before the ‘80s, but how to cultivate alternatives there now is hard to imagine.
Is capitalism really at it's late stage though? I don't think so. This system came into life approx. in the 18th century, it's the 21st now. It's only been like 3 centuries, feudalism lasted for at least 6. I really don't think we've seen capitalism's full form yet, much less its demise.
foucault was interested in neoliberalism tho
This is the best YT channel I have stumbled across in a very long time.
I'm an disabled veteran from my service as a USAF flight medic. I have alot of experience as an IDMT Special Operations medic. Usually attached to Army Ranger units and Marine MAPS Operators. It REALLY bothers me that "Special Operations" - usually SEALS, Rangers etc. are ALWAYS painted as these Rock Star, comic like "Super Heroes" protecting "Freedom" from "Bad Guys". In my experience, these guys are sociopathic/psychopathic killers that just love hurting people, ending life and breaking things. As part of the MEDICAL CORPS, these boys struck me more as terrifying characters in "The Boys" than ones in "Lone Survivor" or "Captain America".
They ARE impressively capable "Super-men" in the true Nietzschian sense of the word. More scary than inspiring. It kills me that DoD has such a close and successful relationship with the Media Industrial Complex. Especially since they make money brain washing the public.
RLTW
Doctors in the USA kill a helluva lot more people than the Rangers do 💯
“The mechanical factory like reproduction of art objects reduces it’s perceived aesthetic intimacy with the artist, it’s aura.”
This quote wonderfully also explains art in the 21st century, where advancement in artificial intelligence let’s create art from text prompts (see DALL-E 2 as an example), as well as the vacuous phenomenon that is NFT art.
I'm going to read dialectics of enlightenment. Thank you so much.
Don’t bother - communism has never worked and will never work - it’s evil and misleading
@@tamarasaxon9232 I Agree.
@@tamarasaxon9232 are you scared of opposing ideas?
@@ruth078 I am scared of communism, lol.
@@tamarasaxon9232 why tho? It's just a different economic system.
So insightful. Came across this as I was preparing an essay on 1984. Very thought provoking
Thank you for this video! i watch it often to refresh my memory on the cultural industries before i have to write a paper!
listen man i cannot thank you enough for making this video 2 years ago lol you break this stuff down and make it so understandable. Have an essay due on this and now thanks to you i can go write about terrible dystopian teen fiction and capitalism
ok I will probably have to rewatch this at some point but this is what I got from this: so when you watch something that you relate a great deal to, it feels cathartic but it is taking away your drive to do anything real about your situation. Also because the media is owned by like 5 companies, the messages within the media are going to be limited to what they find acceptable to maintain the status quo and this keeps people from thinking that doing something else outside of this media bubble is allowed. And thus people then get more attracted to shows that are more stunted.
You are now my favorite youtuber. Thank you so much for your hard work and research!
Thank u so much!🖤 Everything in this video calls out to perfection, from editing, to sectioning the essay for better understanding & ur explaining the essay in a much simpler way with the examples👏... This really helped 🤗
I can almost hear Žižek begging to be inserted more here, this is all his best shit in the sublime object of ideology. Great video!
Good Lord that was exceptional and piercing. Will be re watching and re watching to further absorb and integrate and activate. Thank you for this gift! You rock!
I just want to say you make great videos and I think people like you are important for educating people by breaking down complex issues in digestible ways. I've read the dialectic of the enlightenment and I think you summed their stuff up well
Damn.. I am hooked to your channel... This is some really powerful stuff on this platform.. You're doing a great job. thank you for putting in all these efforts and getting down some really complex ideas in a simplified way.
Also, Great editing skills and narration! :)
From Lacan to this, definitely subbed. Finally some fucking substance and depth
Watched this video right after finished reading the Culture Industry. You made the whole thing clearer. Thank you for this comrade! Feel bad for even getting to watch such hight quality content for free.
Stellar exposition, man. Appreciate your efforts.
8:52 - you know is a great quote when you stop to read it twice and let it sink in.
That was really great. Thank you Mr. PlasticPills. You’re on my radar. Well played.
Just binged the whole channel, awesome stuff. Would love your take on vapourwave and hauntology!
Lol great! I am read on hauntology is but I am oblivious to vapourwave besides that it's music for always online people?
thank u, i was dying with this essay, i think i know what to do now. ily
Excellent breakdown of a difficult topic.
We need more quality content like this
My favorite videos of yours are the ones that talk about mass culture. I like how you cover similar ideas from the views of different thinkers.
Thanks Ian, you done with Fatal Strategies yet? I don't mind doin the vids on theory but I agree that it's most effective when applied. Comments like this help me decide on direction so preach!
@@PlasticPills No problem, and I am! I've read System of Objects, In the Shadows of Silent Majorities, and now Fatal Strategies. Baudrillard's ideas, and these related theory videos are really interesting to me. I work as a wedding musician, and the wedding industry (at least in the US) is such a concentrated example of a lot of these ideas. Seeing you apply them helps me understand and apply the ideas better for myself.
Ha! there's no place like a wedding for simulation and fetishes
There's really not!
Can't wait to see that 100k subscriber plaque thing sooner or later
That was literally mind blowing. Thanks.
If it was literally mind blowing u would be dead and u wouldn't have posted that comment... js
Revisting this after the election. John Stewart was interviewing Heather Cox Richardson and he jokingly asked if this was a failure of the enlightenment and i was like yes actually.
Liking this video has cured my cathartritis! May it generate more ad revenue for you so that you can produce many more sequels.
This is such an important concept for people to understand. Thanks for making this video, wish more people would watch it and understand!
«... the entire purpose of the culture industry is to alieanate the activity of consumption from every other part of life.»
18:08 "change of ownership",... I would add: change in how people see/understand the ownership concept and its history .. (for more info see general semantics)
Fascinating analysis. I enjoyed this👍
“Jazz is gay”
-Theodor Adorno
I found an interesting article about jazz by Adorno by searching this quote on the internet. Thanks
@@afbf6522 lol the one from prisms right? Adorno does not like Jazz, at one point he implies that they’re homosexuals (in memoria moralia he also calls fascists homoexuals... I insist this is most problematic!). I always wondered what his feelings would be of ornette Coleman and dolphy style free jazz/avant garde Jazz, I’m pretty sure he wrote that at a point where jazz was predictably unpredictable. What’d you think of it? I read it a while ago I kinda forget it
@@fuzzydunlop4513 I have a theory that Ornette Coleman's emergence to fame was the thing that killed Adorno
@@IvyTeaRN HA! I also wonder how Adorno would have reacted to free jazz and avant garde jazz. It has all of the qualifications of anti-pop art.
@@fuzzydunlop4513 Adorno was really a bit of a snob and definitely too overly dismissive. I do think that his critique of modern day "art" is still really valuable though.
'Probably my favourite video from your channel. Thank you.
It's sad to hear, cus I work in the movie industry and it does feel like exactly that
Nice.
Theorywave nights is going to be doing a read through of dialectic of enlightenment soon. I'm looking forward to finally going through the whole thing.
You wanna drop the link?
@@PlasticPills we start in April. We are doing communist manifesto first. Maybe you would like to participate?
@@dirtsonofearth2021 I'd be down, and maybe some of the guys and gals here too, which platform is it?
This video is revolutionary for me. Thank you.
This is a brilliant synthesis. Thank you!
Wonderful video as always
great video. production quality = A+. a suggestion from a filmmaker: give yourself more "headroom" on the video. seeing your hat/head cut off from the video frame isn''t horrible, but the frame with your whole head plus an inch or two would look better
Cheers for the video my dude, really helpful for my studies
Commenting to feed the parameterized attention displacement heuristic!
Good stuff!
You have never made low quality content man in all this time and im happy to see such a top tire class content creator
I see a lot of these comments, which seems kinda ironic considering the message IN his videos.
Like, ud think the way it looks and the "quality" wouldn't matter if the information was good. Clearly yall didn't absorb the video.
@@juanmccoy3066 bruh the effort on transfering the info promised is the content is the main point . Like if he got drunk and ranted the whole time itd be a shitty one with novody benefittin . You already knew what i meant
This was a job well done. Thank you
In reference to 6:22 , didn't Adorno assert that folk culture had been integrated into pop culture? That in attempting to bridge the gap between high art and low art, the culture industry had essentially eliminated the meaning of both in one fell swoop. High art because it was now broken apart from its whole, as it was fractured into digestible pieces for the masses (separated from the whole, which is what gives much of it it's substance and lack of 'sameness'). Low art then lost its ability to protest and truly represent the commoners, because it had been integrated into popular mainstream culture, elevating those artists to higher status, and thus eliminating its ability to protest the establishment due to now being intertwined directly with it in its cycle of repetition. In bridging the gap between the two, effectively both were destroyed of meaning.
That's was my takeaway from "On The Fetish Character In Music And The Regression Of Listening" and "The Schema of Mass Culture" at least.
My goodness I love your work!
We need a book on an ethic for revolutionary practice and thought
Culture Creation The Frankfurt School, The Authoritarian Personality, The Macy Conferences, and Edward Bernays
You almost had me reaching for the bottle in the end. Til those last 3 words.
that was a PACKED 18 min but still very comprehensible. thanks for your work.
this blew my motherfucking mind. in my fourth year of film school. digging for a deeper understanding of what the "culture industry" is. a lot of people think that the field of the arts, entertainment, content, news media, ect, are full of insane contradictions. this is one of the pieces that makes it make sense, apart from the interpersonal weirdness it can sometimes induce. there's a rationality to everything, but it can get odd...
Honestly, an analysis of the backlash against Disney Star Wars, from the perspective of Atar Wars being seen as a social myth that fans actually felt a connection to and were so invested in the lore that they hated the breaking of the rules for the purposes of profit seeking and ignoring the democratic desires of the people watching them; the tyranny of the culture industry over the appreciators of culture.
Oh yeah, it’s big brain time.
great video man, super clear explanation of a text i was struggling to grasp, thanks.
Another great video. Thanks dude
👊
This channel is amazing!
thank you for breaking this down, definitely helped me for my paper, cheers mate
I think Adorno/Horkheim is the most amusing satire ever written.Its so acid, dark and elitist it backfires into a a big laugh.
Sobering video!!! So well said...
Thank you so much for sharing.
as of now this is officially my favorite channel. (what to do with this info is up to you)
This channel is really good.
Very easily explained. Now I can easily read the essay
Thanks for this summary. I’d been dreading reading this lots stuff (this and authoritarian personality).
Excellent explanation. Have more videos please
Appreciate the video. I'm currently reading Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and trying to make some sense of the early Frankfurt School. I'm sure this will be very helpful!
Some of the insights of "Adork" seem to run parallel to those of Huxley in Brave New World (written in the 30s). Possible inspiration?
Currently reading "surveillance capitalism" by Shoshana Zuboff, where our situation (as described in your video) is described as a "coup from above" by the elite against the people of the democracy.
Adorno definitely knew about Huxley's work and regularly references him in some of his lesser known essays, although he considered him somewhat of a reactionary
The 30s and 40s was a time of insane transition, i think for observant people many changing aspects would have been obvious. Being born into makes it so much harder to extract yourself out to a different perspective all together.
Huxley was a fascist. So, no
not fitting the typical profile of scholarly figures often found in such videos. that is the effect guy! breaking the "habituation" of eyes watching such videos :) i truly wish u the continuation of ur passion
I can't believe these ideas weren't forged in the last 10-15 years.
Excellent video, clear, concise and more erudite than I’ll ever manage thanks.
I always enjoy a plastic pills product. . Thank you again
Reminiscent of baudrillard’s void: at the point where nothing really even matters. We all just have to step inside completely to “see it.” Perhaps then - there may be something like a “collective awakening” haha
Then Parasite enters the scene and gets the Oscar. That movie was not complicit or shy about where it stands. I admit that a lot of people just saw the theme as the heist of a poor family and were disturbed about so much social critic in the movie even when the whole theme of the movie was the class conflict but the movie could not be more in your face than it is. I am not saying this about 40's critics but today instead of brooding about the culture industry, people should take advantage of its tools, like you are doing here in youtube and Bong Joon Ho does it in his movies. I don't think there is an alternative.
but this is infinitely more possible in early capitalist societies like South Korea, because there is a growing middle class of people willing to take risks in media and entertainment on something like Parasite. And I don't really think Parasite is all that revolutionary, one could read it just as easily as a critique of the idiotic foibles of the lower class as one can feel that they were justified. That's the problem with entertainment as a form of class consciousness, one is free to perceive it however they want to, which is usually however the culture industry has demanded that they respond to it. (buy more Joker masks, which then become a joke in itself, etc.)
I think you missed the Capitalist Realism™️
part at the end.
Parasite was funded by the daughter of Samsungs CEO, it's more of a middle finger to her dad than a rallying cry for revolution.
@@linkaima5403 We'll take it!
Is that not the "selling you your discontent" bit he was talking about? Parasite made $264 million.
You seem like a nice guy. Congratulations on your success 👍🏻
amazing research on content and extraordinary presentation.. Thankyou for this!!!
Fuck. That little bit about the active producer and passive consumer perfect complementing one another is dreadful in its implications. This dynamic is scary for its simplistic and self evident truth. It hit me like a tonne of bricks.
Excellent video! Solidarity from Amsterdam...
Well this was a banger of an episode.
Thanks! Take love from Bangladesh
teegasay