Midterm essays are due. Hard copies please, as I will be traveling and without access to a computer during the coming weekend.

For Thursday: Since I had to cancel the meeting last Thursday, we will continue with the readings for last week.

For Wednesday: Since we had such a good discussion, I did not get to give you a couple of examples of landscape interpretation. We will do that tomorrow and continue with the Horkheimer & Adorno reading next week

The assignment for your midterm essay is to critique (as in analyze) some of what you find connecting Horkheimer and Adorno's Culture Industry chapter, Eco's essay on Casablanca, and Borges' Pierre Menard.


For example, Borges writes of “one of those parasitic books which situate Christ on the boulevard, Hamlet on the La Cannebiere or Don Quixote on Wall Street. Like all men of good taste, Menard abhorred these useless carnivals, fit only --- as he would say --- to produce the plebeian pleasure of anachronism or (what is worse) to enthrall us with the elementary idea that all epochs are the same or are different.” (Ficciones, pg. 48)


While Horkheimer and Adorno discuss the absorption of “light art into serious or vice versa. That, however, is what the culture industry attempts.... What is new, however, is that the irreconcilable elements of culture, art, and amusement have been subjected equally to the concept of purpose and thus brought under a single false denominator: the totality of the culture industry. Its element is repetition. The fact that its characteristic innovations are in all cases mere improvements to mass production is not extraneous to the system. With good reason the interest of countless consumers is focused on the technology, not on the rigidly repeated, threadbare and half-abandoned content....” (Dialectic of Enlightenment, pg. 108) Today the culture industry has taken over the civilizing inheritance of the frontier and entrepreneurial democracy, whose receptivity to intellectual deviations was never too highly developed. All are free to dance and amuse themselves, just as, since the historical neutralization of religion, they have been free to join any of countless sects. But freedom to choose an ideology, which always reflects economics coercion, everywhere proves to be freedom to be the same. (pg. 136)


And Eco writes about how “in order to transform a work into a cult object one must be able to unhinge it, to break it up or take it apart so that one then may remember only parts of it, regardless of their original relationship to the whole... it must display certain features since, beyond the conscious control of the producer, it has become a sort of textual syllabus, a living example of living textuality. In the face of this, the addressee must suspect that it is not true that works are created by their authors. Works are created by other works, texts by other texts, and all together they speak to and with one another independently of the intentions of their authors. A cult movie is the proof that, as literature comes from literature, cinema comes from cinema. (pg.4)

What Casablanca does unconsciously, other movies will do with an extreme intertextual awareness --- and with the expectation that the spectator be equally aware of their purposes. These are 'postmodern' movies, where the quotation of the topos is recognized as the only way to cope with the burden of our encyclopedia filmic competence.” (pg.11)


Foucault's “What is an Author” likewise discusses at length the author function in relation to intention, intertextuality, classification, etc.

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Your essay should be concise, and should not exceed 8-10 typed pages. You can write your essay on the connections you see between these selections (read these fully, I did not include complete quotes for reasons of space) or choose other aspects to highlight, but these four texts are the primary ones to use.

I want to emphasize that your reading of Marx for next week should not focus on the economics of the political economists, but rather on the continuities of critique that you can find between the Holy Family, the Grundrisse, and Capital. There are significant discontinuities as well, and Althuseer goes over these in his "Ideological State Apparatus" essay in Lenin and Philosophy --- though most of these discontinuities existed either in the locus communis of Althusser's acolytes or in his attempts to justify the pro-USSR stances of the French Communist Party while taking into account the contradictions between Marx and "actually existing Marxism."