 Hello, my name is Fabio Gigi. I am a lecturer in anthropology with reference to Japan here at SOAS. Today we'll give you a taste of what it is like to study anthropology at SOAS. I'm teaching the first year course that it's called Social Theory. This is one of the courses that you will have to take, one of the courses that has a reputation as being very difficult, but it is also very rewarding. It will allow you to understand what anthropology and theory is all about. Why is it called Social Theory? Now, of course, before anthropology was established as a scientific discipline around the tone of the century, people have been thinking about society and what makes individuals and societies hang together for a very long time. So there's sort of a prehistory of the social and because we are still dealing with the same problem. What makes a human being human? What creates society? What holds society together? How is the individual connected to society? And of course, what kind of science is anthropology? Is it more like a natural science that has models based on the real, the natural world, like physics or chemistry? Or is it part of the humanities, merely interpreting human action and expression? And many anthropologists over the years have given different answers to these problems. And these problems, of course, are still around today, especially now that we deal with neurology, with the brain sciences that give us a whole new way of looking at human beings. And again, of course, the idea whether brain sciences, of course, being a natural science, whether that is compatible with what we do in the humanities, still remains relevant. Anthropology, therefore, is known as the most scientific of the humanities and the most humanistic of the social sciences. The particular text we will look at today was written in 1953 by Theodor Wiesnkondadono, who was a member of the Frankfurt School. One of the particular contributions that the text that we discuss today has made to anthropological theory is the connection that it seeks between the everyday, very minute details of everyday life and the larger social context, the larger social forces that impinge on the individuals. So this connection, which is always part of how anthropology thinks of the link between individuals and society, here is exemplified by a text about astrology. Well, I will start to give you some kind of background in order to understand where Adorno is coming from. Adorno is a member of the Frankfurt School. They're a group of German philosophers who take up the ideas of the founder of communism, Karl Marx, and combine them or try to find a synthesis between Marxism and psychoanalysis, invented by Siegmund Freud in Vienna. In short, what you need to know about psychoanalysis can be summed up in three elements. One, the idea that people are shaped by their history, by the way that they have been socialized into becoming a member of society. Secondly, that the psyche has a deep structure, which means there are parts of it that are conscious and other parts that are unconscious, which means you cannot access them. So this deep structure is the second important point. And probably the third sort of linking those up is the idea that unconscious processes are involved when we make decisions, when we act. They are involved in our attitudes towards other people, towards social problems, for example. It's not everything is conscious. A large part of what shapes our attitudes towards others in terms of racism, for example, in terms of attitudes towards religious minorities is unconscious. So these are the three things to remember about psychoanalysis. So the Frankfurt School tried to create a philosophy, a critical theory, as they call it, out of these two broad streams of Western thought. It's very important to remember the context. Of course, we're talking about the rise of fascism in Europe that was witnessed by all these philosophers, especially in Germany and in Italy. And especially already during the war and after the war when the atrocities, the monstrosities that have been committed all across Europe against the Jews, against the political dissidents, against communists, also against homosexuals. When this became known, any science who claimed to say something about the human condition would have to answer to that. They would have to be able to say, why did this happen? In Germany, especially in the country that was perceived as being a country of poets and thinkers, how could this descent into barbarity happen? So this is sort of the wider context. Every philosophy that had any kind of worth in those times would have to address this problem. What can philosophy contribute to make us understand what happened? And so this is sort of one of the premises of critical theory. Critical theory by the collaborator of Adorno-Max Horchheimer. He formulated this as any kind of theory is critical if it helps to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them. So critical theory is not a particular kind of theory. It's a much more broader category. That has the potential to help us understand the forces that oppress us is critical theory. So how can philosophy contribute to an understanding of fascism? And this is where the Frankfurt School very famously goes back to the question of the Enlightenment. What is enlightenment? Which is basically the idea that we can use our own reason to understand the world. And we do not have to rely on blind faith. We do not have to rely on what authority figures tell us is true. We have the ability to find out what's true, to perceive, to reason about truth in our own way. And everybody, every human being has this capacity. So this is the idea of the Enlightenment. And it's usually sort of formulated as the emancipation of humankind from the shackles of tradition and superstition as a progress towards freedom. This is the standard narrative. I'm sure you're familiar with that from history lessons at school. But Adorno and Hochheimer in a co-authored work, they try to understand the Enlightenment as a dialectical process. It is a process that leads to more freedom for some, but it also unleashes powers of destruction. You only have to think of nuclear energy as an example. It has the potential to free us from reliance on fossil fuels on one side, but of course on the other side it has an enormous destructive potential. Not only nuclear weapons, but of course if anything goes wrong. So technology has both these faces. And this is exactly how Adorno and Hochheimer try to understand the Enlightenment. There is the progress towards freedom, but at the same time destructive forces are unleashed as well. And the important thing is that they don't think of that as evil forces that come from the outside to threaten the order. It is inherent in the system. It is part of the dynamics of the system. It is part of modernity. It is part of emancipation, this darker sign to it as well. And they coined the phrase or the term instrumental rationality to try to understand what that is. Which leads Adorno to formulate this contradiction as the Enlightenment that turns against itself. In other words rationality run amok. And this is also something that he comes back to in the text. So I'll give you just a quick glimpse into the life of Theodor Wiesengund Adorno. He was born in Frankfurt into an assimilated Jewish family. His mother was Catholic. His father converted to Protestantism. He had musical ambitions early on. He studied with Alban Berg, but he also wanted to be a philosopher. He was very much disillusioned with the attitude public intellectuals in Germany took during the First World War. This outpour of patriotism was to him distasteful. And he eventually decided to write his dissertation in philosophy about theory of aesthetics. In an ironic turn of faith, Adorno's thesis is published the very day Hitler sees his dictatorial powers. And this would also end his career very shortly. He starts teaching, but in 1933 he receives this letter that revokes his teaching license. And I show you the letter here because it is really relevant to the point that the Frankfurt school is trying to make about rationality, about rationalization, about bureaucracy. You can see the letter here, of course, written in German dated 7th of April, 1933. It basically says, because of the changes to the law regulating professional bureaucracy, we have to revoke your teaching license with immediate effect signed by the Minister for Science, Art and Education, with a stamp from the University of Frankfurt and Science. So this is something that appears very rational, right? There's a change in the law. You don't no longer fulfill the criteria given in the law that would allow you to teach. Therefore, we will have to let you go a very rational argument. Behind it, of course, is the whole irrational belief system, the creed of antisemitism, because this is what the law was really about. It was no longer allowing Jewish professionals and Jewish bureaucrats to hold on to their posts. Adorno then emigrates to the US. This is his immigration card. You can see the name. He's using his middle name, Riesenkond. He emigrates to the US with the Institute of Social Research, which he was part of in Frankfurt. The whole institute moves to New York and becomes the new school of social research. While he was certainly glad to have escaped Nazi Germany, America proved to be a kind of a culture shock to him as well. He saw entertainment, mass culture, mass consumption as it hadn't really existed in Germany for the same time. Of course, he analyses this as a form of capitalism that is a kind of mass deception. He looks at popular culture very critically. He looks at mass consumption very critically. He thinks that the human beings are turned into consumers just for consumption's sake. There's nothing human left anymore, and popular culture, popular entertainment just helps to anesthetize the sense of alienation that people feel. He sees many of the rationalizations in production, both in popular culture but also in consumer culture, as just a further step to the human enslavement, making human beings slaves of the machine really. He sees glimpses of this in everyday life, in soap operas for example, but also in astrology column. He sees many of these steps towards a more rational mode of production, towards a more rational mode of consumption, as a further step in the enslavement of humanity. He sees glimpses of this everywhere he goes, in popular culture, in popular entertainment such as soap operas, in the worship of celebrities, but also in the popularity of astrology columns. And this is what the text today deals with. You're all familiar with astrology columns, right? This is the London Evening Standard from yesterday evening. Shelly Funstrunkel, a wonderful black queen named her, here predicts what will happen to you over the next few days. I'm just going to read you one. This is an image of the column. I'm sure you've seen this before. I'm going to read you the one for me. I don't believe in astrology, but then that's very typical of Pisces apparently. So I'm Pisces, and it says here yesterday evening, while logic would suggest it's best to diffuse potentially explosive issues before they become serious, it's unwise. These are far more complex than you think. You won't fully understand them until they blow up into something big, as they will next week. So yes, you see, it's quite interesting. Slightly threatening, and this is exactly part of Adornos analysis. There is a kind of threat veiled in these columns that comes to the fore, but is then alleviated. If you do exactly as the stars suggest you do, you will be fine. So there's a strange relationship there between threat and relief of anxiety. This is another one. I just thought we'll do Sagittarius as well. When you began discussing one contentious issue, the only thing that was clear was how much you use different from others. Now that you've talked things through, you realize they were better informed than you and therefore, rationality, decisions should be up to them. So this is from a week ago, and it's quite interesting to see how similar this material is to the material that Adorno analyzed from 1951 to 1953 in the LA Times. He's looking at the LA Times astrology column by Carol Reiter. This is an example for Scorpio, December 14, 1952. Be careful that in haste to do chore and get to church or off on trip, you do not damage articles of clothing. In PM, confer with associate about new big venture. So again, very interesting setup, right? The stars, the universe is set up around you as an individual and the stars send you warnings not to damage your clothes or items of clothing while doing them, but it's also very interesting because of other elements as well. The assumption, of course, that people go to church, right? Something that probably, especially in England, you wouldn't automatically make. So how does an astrology column work? Now the first thing that Adorno comments upon is that the pronouncements that are made must be so general that the readers make sense of them themselves. And this is a technique that is called reading and it's used widely by spiritists and medium and everybody who does tarot cards and so on. It's simply the process by which you make any kind of broad statement that your client or the readers of the column will then appropriate and make it meaningful for themselves. But in order to do that, of course, it needs to be targeted to a certain audience and Adorno in a chapter called Image of the Addressee sort of reads out of the text who the column itself is addressing and this is the most interesting part, I think. So you can already see here church is an element, no denomination given, of course, is as open as possible. So even if you do any kind of worship on a Sunday, you'd be included in that category. But of course not everybody goes to church, so you have an alternative or off-on-trip. So that sort of alleviates this and that sort of creates an alternative possible reading, right? So even if you read this and say, oh, I'm an atheist, I never go to church. And then you go, oh, or on a trip. Yes, I may be going on a trip. So it's still valid for me. Do not damage articles of clothing. This strange combination between the supernatural and the very mundane, the very everyday also exemplified here in chores. If you read the column by Carol Wright, there's an enormous amount of chores that people have to do. And this, of course, for Adorno is symptomatic for modern bureaucratic society where most of the people, especially those in white-collar work, those who are addressed by the column, work in jobs that are not necessarily meaningful for them. They are just a cog in the machine. They do routine work. They do routine paperwork that doesn't have any meaning apart from the larger embeddedness in a corporation or a company. So people are really just a cox in a machine. And this perception is reflected in astrology columns, especially in this kind of a column in the Los Angeles Times. Then if you go further, very interesting also in PM, there's a strong distinction between AM and PM. Of course, we all know that life is complicated and complex. There's all kinds of different things happening at the same time. But the column sorts them out very neatly into the morning, the AM, where you should do work, where you should fulfill your duties, where you should concentrate on success, on business, and PM where you are a bit more relaxed, where you reward yourself for the work that you have done. But here, interestingly, I'm also a point that Adorno emphasizes in PM confer with associate about new big venture. There's no leisure as leisure left over. Even leisure is turned into part of business. Even relaxing with friends is turned into networking. This is something that is very visible. Also when you analyze what kind of people appear in the column. You can see family is another category that appears always in a sort of friendly light. Family always comes to help. It's always there to support you. Friends, similar. Friends can sometimes be a bit ambivalent. But there are associates and business partners and very importantly, higher ups. And this is something that maybe in the modern day, maybe Shelley from Strunkle doesn't really refer to the higher ups all that much. But it's precisely this idea that you are embedded in a social hierarchy. And this is a social hierarchy that is condoned by the universe. It is condoned by the stars. The stars sort of form the perimeter of this particular setting. There are higher ups. You have to suck up to those. And there are people that are under you. You're underlings. And you can basically trample on them. And this is, of course, what the Dornal analyzes as a part of the fascistic, the authoritarian character. The idea that you suck up to the people above you and you trample down those who are below you, who are inferior in status. So this is something that actually, if you read the column, is subliminally always present. There's a strong emphasis on social hierarchy. So to sort of end this lecture with, I will give you sort of an idea of how the writing itself works. Adorno is very famous for particularly convoluted philosophical style. But there is a reason for it. It's not just whimsical. He writes this way because he feels that this style of writing reproduces the phenomenon that he tries to describe. So it's not the complexity that he creates out of whim or fancy. It's a complexity that mirrors the complexity of the real situation. I'll give you an example of this. And I'll read it out. The semi-eridite vaguely wants to understand and is also driven by the narcissistic wish to prove superior to the plain people. But he is not in a position to carry through complicated and detached intellectual operations. The semi-eridite, of course, the half-learned person is the one Adorno thinks is addressed in these astrology columns. To him, to the reader, and it is a him because although probably many readers are in fact women, Adorno makes the point that who is addressed? It's always men that are addressed. It's always men, owners of cars, men that are business associates, men that go home to their families. And that's again, it's of course an interesting point when you think about gender and astrology. So to him, astrology just as other irrational creeds like racism provides a shortcut by bringing the complex to a handy formula and offering at the same time the pleasant gratification that he who feels to be excluded from educational privileges nevertheless belongs to the minority of those who are in the know. So the appeal of astrology really is that you have some kind of inside knowledge. And very interesting, he of course equates this with racism. The idea that racism is based on a similar shortcut in thinking. It's also always the fault of the minorities. And that in a sense is similar here. You can reduce complexity into a very handy instruction that's handed down to you by the stars. And yet at the same time, of course, astrology is sort of esoteric knowledge. It is a complicated system, which by the way is never alluded to in the columns. The columns always go straight forward towards the instruction. This is what you have to do. And therefore they foster an authoritarian, sort of a follow up instinct. Adorno calls this dependency. An appeal for the readers to depend on the advice that is given. Something again that he of course associates with the authoritarian character. So we are reading this and we are held to believe that the stars tell us to do this or that. So what happens to freedom in that particular setting? What happens to the idea of American freedom, of liberation and so on and so forth? And this is what he sort of very succinctly sums it up to as freedom consists of the individuals taking upon himself voluntarily what is inevitable anyway. So the astrology columns create a very particular image. Freedom, you have the freedom to do what you want. But if you don't do it as the stars indicate you should, of course, you are at peril. The idea that you're only free to do what you would have to do anyway is of course no freedom at all. And this is precisely the illusion of freedom that Adorno attacks in capitalist society. There is not really a choice. Even if you follow your self interest, you have to follow the way things already are. And this is another exact sort of summing up the idea of dependency. They, the readers, are reassured that all their problems will solve themselves even if they themselves are unable to solve them. They are made to understand and in a way rightly that the very same powers by which they are threatened, the anonymous totality of the social process are also those which will somehow take care of them. So again, he makes this parallel between the idea that the course of the stars directly influences what we do. It's quite similar to the idea that there is a total social process going on that we don't have any insight into. We don't really know what's going on. We don't really know how the institutions that surround us actually work. But we can only hope for the best. There's always a threat, a veiled threat, that is then alleviated by a reference to everything will end up well. Everything will be okay in the end. And this leads us to sort of the last slide here, social conformity. This is, of course, the result of the astrology column. This is the social effect that it has. It creates, the column, if you read it, if you believe in it, creates this strange doubling. On one hand you're all powerful, not all powerful maybe, but all important. The whole universe is arranged around you. The stars directly influence what you actually do. On the other hand, you're completely impotent. You can't actually do anything because it's already premeditated. It's already decided in the stars. So there's this strange almost schizophrenic setup if you read the column. So he formulates this in the following way. On the one hand, the objective forces beyond the range of individual psychology and individual behavior are exempt from critique by being endowed with metaphysical dignity. So whatever happens to you is either your fault because you didn't follow the advice of the stars or it is something that you couldn't do anything about it anyway. This, of course, is a very conservative way of thinking about society because social change, of course, is impossible in such a system. So that's one side. On the other hand, one has nothing to fear from them if one only follows objective configurations through a process of adaptation. It's a complicated way of saying if you simply follow the advice, you have nothing to fear for. The universe will take care of you, but only if you keep quiet, only if you conform to what everybody else is also doing, only if you stick to what you already know. So that's, of course, a quite dangerous ideological way of thinking. You may think, well, people don't actually believe what is written in those columns. And, of course, a doorknob doesn't assume that they do. But he says something very interesting. He says the particular danger of these astrology columns is precisely their unseriousness. It is something that people laugh about. They read it, they think, okay, all right. But in a crisis, suddenly when push comes to shove, when you have to make a difficult decision, suddenly this may become much more relevant. And again, he creates a parallel here to fascist propaganda and he sort of recounts how in the early days of Hitler, people thought he was phony. People thought he was a comedian almost. But yet, they listen to what he had to say. And although throughout his career, he kept this double-sidedness. Adorno formulates this, a settler being both the Babenek store and King Kong. So a monstrous combination of something very ordinary and something quite monstrous. So there's two sides to him. And astrology, in a sense, reproduces this two-sidedness. So the fact that it's not taken entirely seriously is actually part of the appeal and also part of the danger. So to sum up, in Adorno's view, astrology columns provide insight without actually providing insight. They give you the illusion that you understand more than you do about your own situation, about your own life. And of course, by relying on the counsel of the stars, you also think that somebody else, some great manipulator, knows much more about what you do in your own life. So according to Adorno, what astrology does, what its social function is, is to provide insight without actual insight. It gives you the illusion that you understand what's happening. It gives you a certain illusion of control that if you follow the advice of the stars, everything will be fine. But of course, it also conditions you to listen to authority, to listen to an authority that, in this case, is completely depersonalized and abstract. What do you think?