I. The Entitlement theory
Distributive Justice not a neutral term. Presumption of giving out a supply of something via the principle of a mechanism
Should redistribution take place?
" There is no central distribution, no person or group entitled to control all the resources, jointly deciding how they are to be doled out. what each person gets, he gets from others who give to him in exchange for something, or as a gift."
" We shall speak of peoples holdings; a principle of justice in holdings describes (part of) what justice tells us (requires) about holdings."
Justice consists of 3 major topics:
1: The Original Aquisition of Holdings - How unheld things come to be held, the things that come to be held by these processes, the extent of what comes to be held by a particular person, and so on. The principle of Justice in Aquisition
2: The Transfer of Holdings - From one person to another. What processes may a person transfer holdings to another? How may a person aquire a holding from another who holds it? ie: voluntary exchange, gift, fraud etc. The principle of Justice in Transfer.
The complete principle of distributive justice would say simply that a distribution is just if everyone is entitled to the holdings they possess under the distribution.
Justice in holdings is historical; it depends on what has actually happened.
Justice in holdings arises from principles of justice in aquistion and justice in transfer
Stealing, fraud, enslavement, siezure of product whic prevents one living as they choose, or forcible exclusion from competition in exchanges are not permissible modes of transition from one situation to another.
Some acquisitions are not sanctioned by the principle of justice in aquisition.
Existence of past injustice bears out the third topic:
3: Rectification of Injustice in Holdings - If past injustice has shaped present holdings in various ways, some identifiable and some not, What now, if anything, ought to be done to rectify these injustices?What obligations do the performers of injustice have toward those whose position is worse than it would have been had the injustice not been done? Or, than it would have been had compensation been paid promptly?
This principle uses historical information about previous situations and injustices done in them (as defined by the first two principles of justice and rights against interference), and information about the actual course of events that flowed from the injustices, until the present, and it yields a description of holdings in society.
The general outlines of the theory of justice in holdings are that the holdings of a person are just if he is entitled to them by the principle of rectification of injustice. If each persons holdings are just, the the total set (distribution) of holdings is just.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Friday, November 13, 2009
Adorno and Horkheimer - The Culture Industry
Theorist: Adorno and Horkheimer /Frankfurt School
Origin: Germany
Influences : Marx
Peers: Marcuse
Elements:
Standardisation - Standardization was a species of technical rationality, in which culture was purged of all spontaneity AND novelty. Intrinsic worth was calculated in advance for the sole purpose of achieving maximum profitability. Eliminates originality, challenge and authenticity in its products.
Pseudo individualization- Pseudo- individualization is a phenomenon he saw of mass-produced culture to be a danger to the high arts which is more difficult to understand. This false needs in the culture industries was created and satisfied by capitalism. True needs are freedom, creativity or genuine happiness. Marketing industry refers this term as "product differentiation". Something provided for all.
Commodity fetishism - commodity fetishism tends to replace inter-human relationships with relationships between humans and objects: for example, the relationship between producer and consumer is obscured. The producer can only see his relationship with the object he produces, being unaware of the people who will ultimately use that object
Cultural Dupes Key to the concept of the culture industry in relation to media is the idea of a passive audience, Adorno’s assertion that through false individualism, and standardised products, we are a ‘cultural dupe’: an irrational slave to the trivial, material desires, who can be manipulated into mass conformity; a fool seduced by advertising and fashion
Concepts of the culture industry:
Origin: Germany
Influences : Marx
Peers: Marcuse
Elements:
Standardisation - Standardization was a species of technical rationality, in which culture was purged of all spontaneity AND novelty. Intrinsic worth was calculated in advance for the sole purpose of achieving maximum profitability. Eliminates originality, challenge and authenticity in its products.
Pseudo individualization- Pseudo- individualization is a phenomenon he saw of mass-produced culture to be a danger to the high arts which is more difficult to understand. This false needs in the culture industries was created and satisfied by capitalism. True needs are freedom, creativity or genuine happiness. Marketing industry refers this term as "product differentiation". Something provided for all.
Commodity fetishism - commodity fetishism tends to replace inter-human relationships with relationships between humans and objects: for example, the relationship between producer and consumer is obscured. The producer can only see his relationship with the object he produces, being unaware of the people who will ultimately use that object
Cultural Dupes Key to the concept of the culture industry in relation to media is the idea of a passive audience, Adorno’s assertion that through false individualism, and standardised products, we are a ‘cultural dupe’: an irrational slave to the trivial, material desires, who can be manipulated into mass conformity; a fool seduced by advertising and fashion
Concepts of the culture industry:
- Adorno’s theory of the culture industry being used by the ruling class to lull the masses into a false sense of individualism in which they are passive receivers
- it operates to channel and subvert oppositional conciousness of the working class, thereby eliminating any threat to capitalism
- Culture industries may cultivate false needs; that is, needs created and satisfied by capitalism. True needs, in contrast, are freedom, creativity, or genuine happiness.
- Top Down Culture created and manufactured by the ruling class to be consumed by the proletariat.
- media culture by and large keeps individuals gratified and subservient to the logic and practices of market capitalism, that the culture industry has become thoroughly commodified and absorbs and deflects all oppositional culture to subservient ends
- Boiled down to its most obvious modern-day application, the argument would be that television leads people away from talking to each other or questioning the oppression in their lives. Instead they get up and go to work (if they are employed), come home and switch on TV, absorb TV's nonsense until bedtime, and then the daily cycle starts again.
Art:
- works of art are ascetic and unashamed; the culture industry is pornographic and prudish.
- Art pushing the conventions, self creating , not predetermined
Theory - Structuralism
Description
Structuralism assumes that things are the sum of their parts and the relationships between the parts, which are assembled into the larger structure.
Thus it combines separation and creation of a distinct part with relational combination of parts into a greater whole.
It seeks to describe meta-languages that describe the systems under scrutiny.
Structuralism rejects the purposeful human agent as the key force in history.
Discussion
Structuralism aligns with the positivist viewpoint, but not with postmodernism.
For parts to be identified, they must have boundaries that separate them as unities.
In psychology, structuralism started with William Wundt, who sought to break consciousness down into its constituent parts.
In anthropology, meaning seen to be produced and reproduced through practices, phenomena and activities which act as systems of signification.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, analyzed cultural phenomena including mythology, kinship, and food preparation. He rejected the purposeful human agent as the motivating force in history.
In linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure used structuralism in his analysis of language and signs, creating Semiotics and his idea of parole (talk) and langue (underlying structured system). He argued that meaning is created inside language in the difference between words.
Structuralism assumes that things are the sum of their parts and the relationships between the parts, which are assembled into the larger structure.
Thus it combines separation and creation of a distinct part with relational combination of parts into a greater whole.
It seeks to describe meta-languages that describe the systems under scrutiny.
Structuralism rejects the purposeful human agent as the key force in history.
Discussion
Structuralism aligns with the positivist viewpoint, but not with postmodernism.
For parts to be identified, they must have boundaries that separate them as unities.
In psychology, structuralism started with William Wundt, who sought to break consciousness down into its constituent parts.
In anthropology, meaning seen to be produced and reproduced through practices, phenomena and activities which act as systems of signification.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, analyzed cultural phenomena including mythology, kinship, and food preparation. He rejected the purposeful human agent as the motivating force in history.
In linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure used structuralism in his analysis of language and signs, creating Semiotics and his idea of parole (talk) and langue (underlying structured system). He argued that meaning is created inside language in the difference between words.
Karl marx - Alienation
Marx's Theory of Alienation is the contention that in modern industrial production under capitalist conditions workers will inevitably lose control of their lives by losing control over their work. Workers thus cease to be autonomous beings in any significant sense. Under pre-capitalist conditions a blacksmith, e.g., or a shoemaker would own his own shop, set his own hours, determine his own working conditions, shape his own product, and have some say in how his product is bartered or sold. His relationships with the people with whom he worked and dealt had a more or less personal character.
Louis Althusser
Ethnicity: French.
Discipline: Structuralist Theorist / Structuralist Marxism
Writings: For Marx (1965) / Reading Capital (1975)
Influences: Lacan
Analysed the links between the structures of the economy state, and ideology in relation to material conditions of production that were ' in the last instance' the determining forces of all domains of social life.
Discipline: Structuralist Theorist / Structuralist Marxism
Writings: For Marx (1965) / Reading Capital (1975)
Influences: Lacan
Analysed the links between the structures of the economy state, and ideology in relation to material conditions of production that were ' in the last instance' the determining forces of all domains of social life.
Louis Althusser - Interpellation
Althusser proposed that "individuals are transformed into subjects through the ideological mechanism" of interpellation (Chandler 181). He explained that interpellation works primarily through language and occurs when we are hailed by a message. To illustrate hailing in the most straight forward way, Althusser offered the following example: when a policeman calls out, Hey, you there!, most people within hearing distance will immediately assume that they are the ones being summoned, even if they have done nothing wrong. This reaction positions the individual as a subject in relation to the general ideological codes of law and criminality (Brooker 122). Althusser believed that the dominant beliefs, values and practices that constitute ideology serve a political function. As we progress through the education system and enter the workforce, ideology works through state institutions to interpellate or construct us into particular subject positions in which our work and lifestyle benefits those who control the processes of production (Smith 208). The subject positions which are most prevalent configure us in terms of commercial culture - as consumers, taxpayers, employees, automobile drivers, homeowners, or parents. For instance, come election time, politicians continuously address their audience in their speeches as voters or taxpayers, thereby referring to the subject positions which most benefit them in their capacity as political leaders.
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We are interpellated, or 'hailed' into subject positions. Thus a policeman who calls to us is interpellating us into a subject position of subjugation by the state. For this to work, we must recognize and accept this subject position.
The process of identification thus creates identity. You identify me and I become that me that you have identified.
A strange fact is that we seem to recognize ourselves when we are hailed. I know that it is me who is being called as I unconsciously accept the subject position. It is as if we had always-already been there. The apparent freedom with which we accept the position only serves to cement us further into it.
Interpellation can be considered as 'recruitment' as it invites a person into a subject position. When they do so, the consistency principle then leads them into a cycle of investment whereby they bond their sense of identity both to the subject position and also the underlying ideology.
Discussion
Interpellation was described by Althusser in his reinterpretation of Marxism and the position of the subject. He explained how Ideological State Apparatuses interpellated the subjects into ideological positions.
This interpellation is a form of misrecognition, as in Lacan's mirror phase, where an externalized image is perceived both as the self and an 'other'.
The position we take is relative to a more significant, superior and central 'Other Subject', whether it is the state, God or some other ultimate authority. The person-as-subject is thus defined by the other and the person recognizes themselves as an image or reflection of the Other. This allows the person to claim the quality of the Other but also requires subjugation to the Other. To deny the Other is to deny one's own existence.
Thus we are become trapped within an ideology that creates an Other and hence the person.
Althusser uses Lacan's mirror phase to highlight how subjects are interpellated, but does not recognize the critical misrecognition that Lacan highlights. Althusser has also been criticized for how his subject is magically created of nowhere (what is there before the subject?).
Althusser, L. (1989). 'Ideology and ideological state apparatuses' in Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays. London: New Left Books pp 170-86
-------------------------------------------------------------
We are interpellated, or 'hailed' into subject positions. Thus a policeman who calls to us is interpellating us into a subject position of subjugation by the state. For this to work, we must recognize and accept this subject position.
The process of identification thus creates identity. You identify me and I become that me that you have identified.
A strange fact is that we seem to recognize ourselves when we are hailed. I know that it is me who is being called as I unconsciously accept the subject position. It is as if we had always-already been there. The apparent freedom with which we accept the position only serves to cement us further into it.
Interpellation can be considered as 'recruitment' as it invites a person into a subject position. When they do so, the consistency principle then leads them into a cycle of investment whereby they bond their sense of identity both to the subject position and also the underlying ideology.
Discussion
Interpellation was described by Althusser in his reinterpretation of Marxism and the position of the subject. He explained how Ideological State Apparatuses interpellated the subjects into ideological positions.
This interpellation is a form of misrecognition, as in Lacan's mirror phase, where an externalized image is perceived both as the self and an 'other'.
The position we take is relative to a more significant, superior and central 'Other Subject', whether it is the state, God or some other ultimate authority. The person-as-subject is thus defined by the other and the person recognizes themselves as an image or reflection of the Other. This allows the person to claim the quality of the Other but also requires subjugation to the Other. To deny the Other is to deny one's own existence.
Thus we are become trapped within an ideology that creates an Other and hence the person.
Althusser uses Lacan's mirror phase to highlight how subjects are interpellated, but does not recognize the critical misrecognition that Lacan highlights. Althusser has also been criticized for how his subject is magically created of nowhere (what is there before the subject?).
Althusser, L. (1989). 'Ideology and ideological state apparatuses' in Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays. London: New Left Books pp 170-86
Antoni Gramsci - Hegemony
HEGEMONY (hegemonic): The processes by which dominant culture maintains its dominant position: for example, the use of institutions to formalize power; the employment of a bureaucracy to make power seem abstract (and, therefore, not attached to any one individual); the inculcation of the populace in the ideals of the hegomonic group through education, advertising, publication, etc.; the mobilization of a police force as well as military personnel to subdue opposition.
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