The Frankfurt School & the Politics of Visual Aesthetics

Catalog description

The course examines the Frankfurt School's critical theories regarding visual strategies for representing and challenging urban consumer culture. The course will examine critical theories by members of the Frankfurt School regarding visual strategies for representing and challenging urban consumer culture. The course will center on German Marxist theories about how the rise of urban mass culture at the beginning of the twentieth century produced Modernist forms of visual representation. The course will examine how the spread of fashion-driven behavior had dramatic implications for aesthetic theory, film, architecture, and literature. The course will provide a survey of the most important works in the German critical tradition and the major thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School. These include Georg Simmel, Georg Lukacs, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Jürgen Habermas, among others. Students will learn how these modern theories relate to the German Idealist tradition, particularly Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, as well as the history of German Marxism. Topics include the psychology of the metropolitan individual, the commodification of culture, money, and interpersonal relationships, the architecture of shopping, visual advertising through posters and photography, and cinema as a means of understanding social relations, as well as the role of visual media in public debate. The course will consider how modernist architecture, particularly from the Bauhaus school, redefined urban spaces and introduced new functionalist designs. The course will examine how Frankfurt School thinkers responded to the provocative design proposals presented by modernist architects. Students will examine specific modernist designs for consumer products to examine the relationship between the appearance of a commodity and its use, in order to understand how appearance and function are interdependent within modernism. In broad terms, class discussions will focus on such questions as: How does the relationship between the visual image and society change under industrial capitalism? What political functions do visual images have in consumer culture? What visual mechanisms does the "culture industry" deploy to organize public consciousness? What critical responses are available to visual artists within a mass-market economy? The course will provide students an historical understanding of early twentieth-century German consumer culture and its visual representation, while also offering them critical intellectual tools to understand the social and economic implications of visual images within consumer culture. The course will be taught in English with readings in both languages.