THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL/ NEO-MARXISM

Marxism in a Nutshell
- developed in 19th c by Marx and Engels from their interest in the economic conditions of
Europe during industrialization.
- the class system governs unequal relations: the dominant/ruling/capitalist class, the middle
class, and the working class. Working and middle class work under wage- labour conditions to
produce goods/services that benefit the capitalist/ruling class.
To sum up, Marxism is a theory arguing that the hierarchical class system is at the root
of all social problems. It must be ended by resistance, or a revolution of the proletariat (Marx
and Engels).
Neo-Marxism/ The Frankfurt School
The Frankfurt School is a school of critical theory stemming from basic German
contributions. It brings the sociological turn adding to the traditional triad of ancient Greece
(the good, the true, the beautiful kalokagathon) the concrete of
everyday life
UNIVERSALS
PARTICULARS
the ONE
the MANY
invariant
variants
[the Hegelian connection: the spirit-in-history topos, the Zeitgeist vs. postmodern
awareness of relativism, historicity, embeddedness ]
Foucault: man is a recent invention the 1966 Johns Hopkins University
Conference on the human sciences: Derridas first overt act of destabilising structuralism
rooted in the system of correspondences (isomorphic model) between the world up there
and the world down here. So, hiatus between the two.
The Institute for Social Research opens at Frankfurt am Main in 1924. It started out as
a post-WWI (formed in 1923), Marxist-based reaction to the crises of war in Europe. [From
1931, the school was under Max Horkheimer, with a focus on philosophy, culture, and the
media (this became the main focus for European intellectuals from the 1930s to 1940s).]

CRITICAL THEORY as a systematic account of social reality:

a blanket term for Marxism, whether old or new
focus on class structure, economic processes, material culture
commodity as fetish
modernity as the era of technology
the individual in relation to society
a philosophy of praxis

political theory using the ingredients of Antonio Gramscis philosophy of

praxis: praxis, alienation, hegemony, reification (anticipating Foucaults theory of power)
Backgroung figures: Georg Lukacs - theory of reification (derived from the Latin res,
rei=thing): thingified social relations integrate to efface the individual in the anonymous,
objective, impersonal community
Walter Benjamin - the age of mechanical reproducibility
Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its
presence in time and space, its unique existence at a place where it happens to be.
[post-structuralist embeddedness, situatedness, positioning ]
- the loss of the auratic (derivative of the word aura) force of the work of art; reproduction
displaces the unique work by launching instead a plurality of copies, mere commodities
- fascism aestheticizes politics, communism politicizes art
Theodor Adorno
- a cultural critique dealing with alienation in the modern world
- a culture industry has replaced traditional culture and spread commodification in each and
every aspect of cultural activity or manifestation:
- art has been abolished
- industry is the victor
- the culture industry commodifies and standardizes art (music, fashion, etc.) then fools
people into thinking its original in order to sell it.
- the technological veil covers the already thinglike facts of a fetishist reality functioning
as a network of relations of domination and control
- ideology not a function of authentic individual beliefs, instead characterized as distortions of
reality whose purpose is to camouflage and legitimate unequal power relations.

POWER RELATIONS
Michel Foucault: Discipline and Punish (Chapter III: Panopticism)
The study is a genealogy of power mechanisms. It traces the evolution of the ultimate
manifestation of power: imposed discipline, followed by punishment should its norms fail to
be observed
Discipline an institution, an apparatus
= a form of power, a way of exercising it
= constituted of a series of instruments, techniques
= the anatomy of power
Two images of discipline:
monolithic discipline = closed institution
discipline as mechanism
(1. premised upon a plagued city)
(2. premised upon Benthams Panopticon)
1. The disciplinary schema of the plagued city

Upon declaration of quarantine, people are secluded in their homes and denied any
contact with the exterior.
Power is exercised monolithically, according to a continuous, hierarchical schema,
from the top to the bottom.
The plagued city = the utopia of the perfectly governed city
principled on binary distribution (dangerous/innocuous; normal/abnormal
alienated/non-alienated;)
2. Jeremy Benthams panoptical schema
Panopticon = all-seeing device
= compound establishment, having at its centre a tower of vigil,
surrounded by a peripheral ring, which could not escape permanent watch from within the
tower = someone can see everything without ever being seen
- principle: power must be visible, yet must resist verification
Since disciplinary methods and procedures are all-pervasive in such a society, then
prisons = schools = hospitals = enterprises (panoptical institutions of power, not monolithical)
Michel Foucaults understanding of power (Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the
Clinic, Discipline and Punish): power somehow inheres in institutions themselves rather than
in the individuals that make those institutions function.
Foucault explores how power is disindividualized, it seems to inhere in the prison,
the school, and so on. The Panopticon becomes Foucaults model for the way such institutions
function: the Panopticon is an important mechanism, for it automatizes and disindividualizes
power.
Foucault makes clear that power is not a renunciation of freedom, a transference of
rights. Power is not the same as violence because the opposite pole of violence "can only be
passivity. By contrast, a power relationship can only be articulated on the basis of two
elements which are each indispensable: that the one over whom power is exercised be
thoroughly recognized as a person who acts. Although violence may be a part of some power
relationships, in itself the exercise of power is not violence.
Foucaults understanding of power: freedom. Power is exercised only over free
subjects, and only insofar as they are free, Foucault explains. Conversely, slavery is not a
power relationship when man is in chains.