02.06.01

On Gramsci:

• Relationship between class conflict and revolution
  • Marx understands the dialectic as straight-forward and inexorable
  • Gramsci suggests that the conflict between classes may be revolutionary or reactionary
• Role of intellectuals:
  • Marx sees as part of bourgeoisie; doesn't really discuss
  • Gramsci sees the intellectual as a potentially revolutionary force, when she breaks away from the bureaucracy
• Bonapartism/Caesarism
  • For Marx, Bonapartism is a completely counter-revolutionary force; the way that the revolutionary drives of the proletariat get undermined by the bourgeoisie
  • For Gramsci, Caesarism is instead a compromise between the revolutionary and the reactionary; the question is not how the Caesarist figure "takes" control, but rather how the masses are led to consent to that control
• Fable of the beaver
  • In Marx, the proletariat is wholly dominated by the capitalists, who ruthlessly seek to alienate and destroy them
  • In Gramsci, the proletariat seem to inflict some measure of their own damage
• Hegemony and ideology
  • In Marx, the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class
  • In Gramsci, ideology is a process, a constant struggle, in which the ruling class attempts to maintain control, and the ruled attempt to subvert that control

Benjamin

• Interplay between ownership and access of art, information
• Advent of new technologies creates a crisis for the proletariat; technology has the potential to liberate culture from traditional values, but it also has the potential to enslave the viewer into ideology
• Aura = authenticity, cult value, ritual value, heavily based on inaccessibility to general public; reproduction destroys the aura, turns art into consumer item
• Importance of seeing art in "natural habitat"; change of location changes something about art
• The more things are reproduced, the more aura is destroyed, and the more the artist is separated from his/her work

Adorno & Horkheimer

• People with the money are in charge of dispersing ideas, do so with economic view in mind
• proletariat being taught how to think and act by the culture industry
• resistance is "incorporated"; conformity is necessary; deviation is gobbled up by higher powers; industry creates or anticipates niche markets

For next time:

Everybody read both of the Althusser essays carefully.

Select, at least tentatively, one of the concepts we've considered so far that you're interested in (such as ideology, reification, hegemony, revolution, contradiction, etc.). Make notes on the development of that concept in Althusser. Note particularly any differences between the two essays in their treatment of the concept.

Also, to continue this work with Benjamin/Adorno & Horkheimer: decide which of these essays seems more in line with the thinking of "your" position. We'll continue our debate next time.