EN264: Explorations in Critical Theory, 2016-17

First Assessed Essay Questions (2,500 or 5,000 words)

Due on 10th January 2017 (Tuesday, Week 1, Term 2)

Please consult the Department website for guidance on essay submission and citations:

(ERASMUS students should follow their own deadlines)

Answer ONE of the following questions, or develop your own question in consultation with me.

  1. ‘The best mode of conduct, in face of all this, still seems an uncommitted, suspended one: to lead a private life, as far as the social order and one’s own needs will tolerate nothing else, but not to attach weight to it as to something still socially substantial and individually appropriate. “It is even part of my good fortune not to be a house-owner,” Nietzsche already wrote in the Gay Science. Today we should have to add: it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home’ (Minima Moralia, p. 39). Discuss.
  1. ‘Wrong life cannot be lived rightly’ (Minima Moralia, p. 39). Discuss.
  1. ‘The feminine character, and the ideal of femininity on which it is modelled, are products of masculine society…Glorification of the feminine character implies the humiliation of all who bear it’. Attempt a close reading of Fragment 59 of Adorno’sMinima Moralia (‘Since I set eyes on him’), elucidating and evaluating its meaning and linking it to Adorno’s thought overall.
  1. Much of Adorno’s work consists of a qualified lament for ‘the subject’, who has been (or is being) ‘liquidated’ by the encroaching forces of monopolisation (‘monopoly’), instrumentalism, and (mass) democracy. But what exactly does Adorno mean by ‘the subject’ – who or what is this ‘subject’, and when is or was its time?
  1. ‘That fascism lives on, that the oft-invoked working through of the past has to this day been unsuccessful and has degenerated into its own caricature, an empty and cold forgetting, is due to the fact that the objective conditions of society that engendered fascism continue to exist’ (‘The Meaning of Working Through the Past’). What does Adorno see as ‘the objective conditions of society that engendered fascism’? And what does he see as the ‘subjective’ correlates of these ‘objective conditions’?
  1. ‘We are also familiar with the readiness today to deny or minimize what happened – no matter how difficult it is to comprehend that people feel no shame in arguing that it was at most only five and not six million Jews who were gassed. Furthermore, the quite common move of drawing up a balance sheet of guilt is irrational, as though Dresden compensated for Auschwitz. Drawing up such calculations, the haste to produce counter-arguments in order to exempt oneself from self-reflection, already contain something inhuman, and military actions in the war, the examples of which, moreover, are called “Coventry” and “Rotterdam,” are scarcely comparable to the administrative murder of millions of innocent people. Even their innocence, which cannot be more simple and plausible, is contested. The enormity of what was perpetrated works to justify this: a lax consciousness consoles itself with the thought that such a thing surely could not have happened unless the victims had in some way or another furnished some kind of instigation, and this “some kind of” may then be multiplied at will. The blindness disregards the flagrant disproportion between an extremely fictitious guilt and an extremely real punishment. At times the victors themselves are made responsible for what the vanquished did when they themselves were still beyond reach, and responsibility for the atrocities of Hitler is shifted onto those who tolerated his seizure of power and not to the ones who cheered him on. The idiocy of all this is truly a sign of something that psychologically has not been mastered, a wound, although the idea of wounds would be rather more appropriate for the victims’ (‘The Meaning of Working through the Past’, pp. 90-91). Attempt a close reading of this passage, explaining and elucidating it, and exploring what if any implications it holds for us in today’s political culture.
  2. ‘The great artists were never those who embodied a wholly flawless and perfect style, but those who used style as a way of hardening themselves against the chaotic expression of suffering, as a negative truth. The style of their works gave what was expressed that force without which life flows away unheard… Style represents a promise in every work of art. That which is expressed is subsumed through style into the dominant forms of generality, into the language of music, painting, or words, in the hope that it will be reconciled thus with the idea of true generality. This promise held out by the work of art that it will create truth by lending new shape to the conventional social forms is as necessary as it is hypocritical. It unconditionally posits the real forms of life as it is by suggesting that fulfilment lies in their aesthetic derivatives. To this extent the claim of art is always ideology too. However, only in this confrontation with tradition of which style is the record can art express suffering. That factor in a work of art which enables it to transcend reality certainly cannot be detached from style; but it does not consist of the harmony actually realized, of any doubtful unity of form and content, within and without, of individual and society; it is to be found in those features in which discrepancy appears: in the necessary failure of the passionate striving for identity’ (‘The Culture Industry’, pp. 130-1). Write an essay on this passage, examining and elucidating its key terms and overall conception. Can what Horkheimer and Adorno write here serve to describe any contemporary artists or writers with whose work you are familiar?
  1. The Culture Industry 2.0: Write an essay that addresses the situation of mass culture today, with reference to at least one aspect/artifact of new(er) media, by way of assessing the strengths and limitations of Adorno and Horkheimer’s essay.
  1. ‘I have… meant to offer a periodizing hypothesis, and that at a moment in which the very conception of historical periodization has come to seem most problematical indeed… One of the concerns frequently aroused by periodizing hypotheses is that these tend to obliterate difference and to project an idea of the historical period as massive homogeneity (bounded on either side by inexplicable chronological metamorphoses and punctuation marks). This is, however, precisely why it seems to me essential to grasp postmodernism not as a style but rather as a cultural dominant: a conception which allows for the presence and coexistence of a range of very different, yet subordinate, features’ (‘Postmodernism’, pp. 3-4). What does Jameson mean by his term ‘cultural dominant’, and how does it help him to develop his theory of postmodernism? Why is he so interested in periodisation?
  1. Critically examine any of Jameson’s ‘readings’ in the ‘Postmodernism’ essay (of van Gogh, Warhol, Kafka, the Bonaventure Hotel, etc.). What is the relation of this reading to the theoretical frame of the essay as a whole?
  1. ‘This latest mutation in space – postmodern hyperspace – has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surrounds perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world’. Write an essay on the idea of ‘cognitive mapping’ as Jameson develops it, most notably (but not exclusively) in his ‘Postmodernism’ essay (from which this citation is drawn).
  1. Discuss the articulation of the terms ‘modernization’, ‘modernity’ and ‘modernism’ in Jameson’s thought.
  1. Discuss the work done by the concept of the ‘Third World’ in Jameson’s thinking about postmodernity.
  1. Discuss the relation between modernism and realism as Jameson characterises it in any of the writings of his that you have read.
  1. ‘Today, what is called postmodernity articulates the symptomatology of yet another stage of abstraction, qualitatively and structurally distinct from the previous one, which I have drawn on Arrighi to characterize as our own moment of finance capitalism’ (‘Culture and finance capital’, p. 252). Discuss the relation between ‘culture’ and ‘the economy’ in Jameson’s work.
  1. Discuss the ideas of continuity and rupture, break and period, identity and difference, as they arise in A Singular Modernity (and/or elsewhere in Jameson’s work).