They do explore some, if not alternatives to the Enlightenment mode of domination,
they do explore some possibilities that still exist for us.
that are not totally subsumed by that mode of domination.
And they focused on art and memory.
We're on page 25, I'm going to read you a small section here.
The urge to rescue the past as something living, instead of using it as the
material of progress, has been satisfied only in art.
Okay, so notice there, it's not to use the past.
but, to rescue the past as something living.
That's a nice phrase I think.
Has been satisfied only in art, in which even history, as a representation of past
life, is included.
As long as art, including history here, as long as art does not insist on being
treated as knowledge.
And thus exclude itself from praxis, it is tolerated by social praxis in the same
way as pleasure.
So art like pleasure is tolerated in the Enlightenment modality.
But art rescues the past.
This will be important for Horkheimer and Adorno because the past contains
alternatives to the status quo.
The seeds of alternatives to the status quo.
It's interesting isn't it.
Rather than trying to project a utopian future, they think of the past as having
seeds of possibility that have not yet been cultivated.
And so, art can somehow rescue the past.
Culture can provide us with reminders, pleasurable reminders, because there's
aesthetic pleasure involved, pleasurable reminders of alternatives to this
totalitarian picture generated by the Enlightenment.
However, art too is colonized by the forces of progress in Enlightenment.
Art too is used by the forces of domination.
They certainly saw that in Nazi Germany with the great choreography of mass
rallies, the use of film to generate an enthusiasm for the regime, for, to
generate hatred of the regime's enemies.
But they see, Horkheimer and Adorno, and over the years Adorno in particular, will
see in mass culture.
and and another mode of dominating people, by reducing the spectrum of what
they can hear and see and take pleasure in and find alternative to the status quo
through.
so they write at like page 28 to 29 that regression of the masses today lies in
their inability To hear with your own ears.
What has not already been heard.
The masses ability to hear with your own hears.
What has not already been heard to touch with their hands, what has not previously
been grasped.
This is a new form of blindness, which supersedes that of vanquished mist, myth.
So what what Horkheimer and Adorno are trying to eh do here is to remind us that
there are forms of art that we might open our ears to if you will.
That we might open our eyes to, but there were great forces in social praxis and
social coecion and the homogenization of society That limit what we can hear and
take pleasure from.
Limit what we can see, and, and consider as art.
Horkheimer and Adorno were, dedicated avant gardists.
They were very interested in how art aggressively pushes the boundaries of,
What we can think and take pleasure from and they were worried that as part of the
dialectic enlightening, as part of the cycle of domination, art would become
less and less adventurous.
Art would become more and more a, a form of mass culture or pop culture, appealing
to our most base tastes and reinforcing the status quo.
They wanted an art that was going to push us to think beyond where we were, to
think beyond what the status quo required.
and that would be the path to what they call true praxis.
true praxis is overturning the status quo through action informed by feeling a
knowledge.
This doesn't come until the very end of the essay, towards like the middle 30s of
our reading.
True praxis is capable of overturning the status quo because it integrates theory
pleasure and aesthetics.
So, they are wary that aesthetics is being, or art, music is being dumbed down
into something that everybody can sing and tap their feet to.
and they worry that that will close the door of art off as well.
but they have some hope, they have some hope that through art, the past can be
redeemed, rescued and possiblities for the future can be opened up despite the
awful persistence of domination and our participation in it.
So Horkheimer and Adorno were doing that work, as I say, in the 1940s and, and,
continue to do that for many years to come.
the Frankfurt school is a, a group of thinkers still today very active through
its elder statesman Jurgen Habermas.
de-, developing a body of, of, of dialectical thinking called critical,
theory that remains a, a force, in, in many countries around the globe.
A force for understanding how we participate in our own oppression and how
we might imagine alternatives to it.
The, the next thinker we're going to talk about this week is Michel Foucault who
comes of age a generation later than Horkheimer and Adorno.
Foucault who was a historian, a philosopher wrote about art and
literature he He was an activist as and, and, and a bit of a trickster in some
ways as well. he participated in, in a the French
Postmodernism, in fact was a leader of French Postmodernism insofar as he was
rigorously antifoundational.
He, didn't want to find the really real. he didn't want to find a total dialectic.
What Foucault wanted to do in his work was just a small piece of which we have
read for, this week.
But Foucault wanted to do in his work.
Was to tell the story of progress in such a way that we would see how what we
thought of was progress was actually a, a form of a, a greater social control and
homogenization.
He told that story not because he thought it had objective truth but because he
thought that alternative accounts of how we came to be who we are might actually
open up possibilities for us to change who we would be in the future.
So, we have read something for this week from Michel Foucault's great work on the
mental asylums and mental hospitals.
the which was called a madness in civilization.
and I, he, he just gives you an example of the Foucaultian, as it comes to be
called, approach to the past and approach to politics.
For Foucault the history of mental illness was great field for
deconstruction if I can use that phrase.
It wasn't a phrase he would of used himself.
Or he would of said a feel for genealogy, Foucault himself in the Nichean tradition
why?
Because what we see in the field of mental illness is a history where we say
up until the end of the 18th century or sometime shortly thereafter, we treated
insane people very badly.
We didn't know they were sick, we thought they were possessed, we thought they were
criminals, we thought that we had to chain them up and And, and, and contain
mental illness in a way that was barbaric.
And then afterwards we realized, oh my goodness, these people need our help.
We can help them get better, we can, we can return them to normality.
And that that was the story of progress from persecution and torture and
confinement to liberation.
And progress towards health.
Foucault said no, no, no, no, no.
What looks like progress towards health is actually a wave of conformity.
Of trying to erase the possibility of difference that man has always
represented.
So, what Foucault sees in in the development of the asylum Is a massive
social undertaking, where we erase the possibility of authentic madness.
So that we can all have more powerful pressure towards normalization.
Not just for the mentally ill, but for all of us.
So here a history of madness.
Foucault wrote, madness escaped from the arbitrary, only in order to enter a kind
of endless trial.
For which the asylum furnished simultaneously police, magistrates, and
torturers.
Madness will be punished in the asylum, even if it is innocent outside it.
For a long time to come, and until our own day at least, it is imprisoned in a
moral world.
And what Foucault meant by being imprisoned in a moral world after the
liberation of the ment-, of the, of the mad from the asylum.
Is that we replace notions of the excessive madman, or the excessive
madwoman who is on the borders of society.
Replace that notion with the notion of health to which all of us, in which,
within which all of us are imprisoned.
In the old days for Foucault, we just had to imprison or ostrasize or torture the
crazy dude.
We had, that was the crazy, and, and that the rest of us were not actually subject
to the order, the moralistic order that will later develop.
We just tortured the crazy dude.
Or we made the crazy dude into a kind of hero for ourselves.
We made that crazy dude the king for the day.
We gave him pride of place.
We invited him to special parties.
We made fun of him, we might have tortured him, but we were not all trying
to be sane.
Because the crazy dude actually relieved us of the obligation to conform to some
novel of sanity.
Whereas today, if I asked you, which I will not do, because I think it might be
illegal.
if I, now you're wondering what I'm going to ask you.
I, if I asked you what, how many of you in this room are taking psychoactive
medication, I actually know already that 36% of you would raise your hands.
Why?
Oh, you think that's high?
The art school, no, the art school I used to work at it was 76% [LAUGH] and proud
of it.
Because it was a sign that the parents of all these artists were actually trying to
make them into non art, I mean, into healthy people.
And that's the moral of Foucault's History of Madness, is that yes you
liberate the patient so that the patient can be normal.
So that if you need to study there's a pill for that.
If you want to have sex there's a pill for that, if you want to have less sex
there's a pill for that, if you can't read very much there's a pill for that.
And all of that is so much kinder than torturing them, mad dude.
So much nicer, so much kinder.
So, just to give you an example from the reading, Foucault writes that the asylum
no longer punished the mad man's guilt, it is true.
It didn't see the mad man as guilty, but it organized the guilt of the mad man and
then organized all of the guilt of society, making all of us subject to the
pressures of psychologization.
that, the, the asylum used to be the place where people were confined.
And sometimes they, go, went, where folks went to watch them.
And, and look at them like they would look at animals in a zoo.
But you would look at them because they they were living an alternative reality.
And what happens, Foucault says, is that alternative reality is closed off.
And instead, the only reality is the reality of normalization.
And that means increasing the power to homogenize, to flatten out society.
This is Foucault.
We should admit, rather, that power produces this is knowledge and not simply
encouraging it because it serves power, by applying it because it is useful.
In other words he doesn't want to, he doesn't want to be instrumentalists.
That power, that power and knowledge directly imply one another.
That there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field
of knowledge nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same
time power relations.
What Foucault is articulating here is the way in which every discourse Presupposes
and contributes to the, the, the dispersal.
But more often, the the concentration of, of, of, power.
That is the capasity to produce even more effect.
What, what, what, where criticism of Foucault rose in this period is that he
would, people wanted to know for whom, for what purpose.
Who's the bad guy?
You know in the yeah, in the story, he's a bad guy.
It's, it's capital.
Or in the Marxist stories, it's the bad guy, it's the capital.
in in in the anticolonial story, there's the bad guys, the colonial powers, right
and the anti racist stories of today is racism.
And Foucault said who say well who is the bad guy, who is the servant and it seems
sometimes the bad guy if we put it that way is conformity or this this forces of
more and more restraint and convention.
Foucault really avoids that trope because I think for Foucault, is so important
that this is a system without an author.
And that comes out of the language oriented theory of which he is a part.
There is no subject behind this development.
Its happening all by itself, which is it's own spooky, uncanny thing that you
don't know who to attack to change it.
Or who to allow yourself with to change.
this is an example from 148 in the reading I've assigned.
The asylum is a religious domain without religion, a domain of pure morality, of
ethical uniformity Now, the asylum must represent the great continuity of social
morality.
The values of family and work, all the acknowledged virtues, now reign in the
asylum.
So in the 19th century, the asylum becomes a model place for bourgeois
morality.
And then, we all have to conform more closely to bourgeois morality to show
that we're not insane.