Adorno, Barthes, and Benjamin

The way I read Theodor Adorno’s Culture Industry Reconsidered was at least partially as a response to Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility. I also read Roland Barthes’ Rhetoric of the Image that way. So I am going to try to elaborate the three in relation to each other. These are all three difficult texts, so there is a good chance that I am completely missing the point. As such, any comments of a critical nature are welcome (non-critical comments, as I shall show, are either fascist or conformist).

Premonition (2007) and Louis Althusser

Sandra Bullock’s recent movie Premonition is a really interesting case to examine in light of Louis Althusser’s theory of ideology (as expressed in his article “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses“). I’m going to start giving a rough outline of the overall meaning I take from the movie using Althusser’s theory of ideology. I will then attempt to explain some of the inconsistencies I saw in the movie.

Robert Cover’s Nomos and Narrative and Thelma and Louise

This post is an attempt to move Robert Cover’s theory of nomoi from its original theoretical space (American critical legal studies) into the realm of cultural theory (i.e. to extract from it a methodology, a hermeneutic device, that can be used to examine cultural objects). There are three parts: the first is an exegesis of the hermeneutic device; the second is a specific application of it to the film Thelma and Louise; the third is a brief comparison of it with Louis Althusser’s theory.