Adorno, as is well known, used [the Culture Industry] argument to dismiss not only the popular music of his day, but also the entire jazz tradition. This has caused a certain consternation among left-leaning musicologists, who have been tortured by the attempt to reconcile the leading Marxist in their discipline with the obligatory need to stand up for the working classes against cultural ‘elitism’.

There are two easy ways out of this consternation. The first is to reject Adorno’s argument about commodification, and in particular to reject the Marxian theory of commodity fetishism and all the sub-Hegelian and Feuerbachian mumbo-jumbo that it has served to perpetuate. The second way out is to endorse Adorno’s elitism, and to be robustly dismissive of the consumer culture: surely a more plausible stance in the days of Oasis and The Verve than it was when Adorno directed his guns at inspired melodists like Richard Rodgers and Hoagy Carmichael.

Meaning, I take it, Adorno was premature in his assessment of the culture industry, that it became more apparent after Communism was no longer an economic possibility. But if that's the case, then the theory of the culture industry is still incomplete, given that there is no other economic system to compete with, only a hodgepodge of capitalisms connected by an amorphously globalized society. That, I believe, is the social paradox theorists like Lauren Berlant, Slavoj Zizek, an Derridean critics try to address.

Theory is dead; long live Theory.

Sen. Obama, based on his Blueprint for America (BPC):

• Taxes: "cut income taxes by $1000 for working class families to offest payroll tax" (BPC 11). From what I read, this means that the Federal Income Tax Returns for families earning less than $100k annually will be reduced by $1k, thereby "offsetting" the taxes accrued on weekly, bi-monthly, or monthly pay checks. This, in essence, is not a "tax cut" in the sense that overall taxes will decrease, but rather a "tax reduction" in the sense that the money and time spent on Federal taxes will decrease proportionate to the amount of total household income (less income = less taxes).
• Trade: "trade should strengthen the American family and create more jobs": that is a no-brainer. On page 12 of BPC, Obama voices specific opposition to NAFTA, but general encouragement for negotiated foreign trade.
• Domestic Investment: Obama proposes a remarkably ambitious plan to overhaul the American economy, which seems to include four steps: (1) improve "education, training, and workforce development to leverage [American] strengths"; (2) use high skilled manufacturing workforce to implement 21st century industries and alternative energy ("first wave of green technologies"); (3) deploy next generation broadband "Open" Internet; (4) invest in rural communities. I agree with these investment priorities wholeheartedly, especially (1) and (2).
• Labor Policy: protect workers rights and raise minimum wage. These are more traditional Democratic platforms.
• Mortgage & Credit: here, Obama proposes consumer-based policies that I don't quite understand. Part of the message in this section appears to be that the mortgage and credit system is designed so that consumers don't easily understand it, and that appears to be Obama's main focus for change.
• the Workplace (or, "Balance of Work and Family"): Obama's final economic concern is the way in which Americans work. The policies he proposes on pg 15 of the BPC are more liberal, reminiscent of some European policies on family and the workplace. They include paid leave for medical emergencies and child-bearing, flexible work arrangements, protection against childcare discrimination, and after-school opportunities for children. These policies are not unreasonable, but difficult to implement.
  

More information on Obama's economic policies can be found here.

Sen. McCain, based on his Jobs for America document:

• Taxes: (1) keep tax rates as they are for the top bracket while phasing out the Alternative Minimum Tax; (2) cut corporate taxes; (3) allow tax deduction for new technology investments; (3) create research and development tax credit; (4) eliminate the Estate Tax. In all, McCain has a much more elaborate tax policy, but proposes effective incentives for those who already have money (corporations and the wealthy) and does not propose (in this document) any overhaul of the IRS. Which means: more loopholes for the rich. That could translate into a more robust economy, but only considered globally, i.e. the rich get richer and the poor rely on the "trickle down" effect.
  
• Trade: "the U.S. should engage in multilateral, regional and bilateral efforts to reduce barriers to trade, level the global playing field and build effective enforcement of global trading rules." Like Obama, McCain is justifiably vague, since nobody can predict the outcomes of international market performance. Unlike Obama, McCain writes only two paragraphs on "trade" leaving the remainder of page 7 blank!!! To be fair, McCain has a few pages of extensive energy policy, which I will comment on later.
• Domestic Investment: (1) Improve energy policy, (2) improve education, and (3) improve unemployment insurance. Again, I'll take a look at McCain's energy policy later; otherwise the highlight here is unemployment insurance, which McCain proposes making into a program for retraining and relocating. This sounds very interesting, but it is another very short paragraph, and I wonder what is to be done to keep people from losing jobs.
• Labor Policy: Essentially none. Not a traditional Republican issue. I shoud probably take a closer look at labor policy in general at some point.
  
• the Workplace: essentialy no policy initiatives here, unless you consider the abolishment of the Estate Tax a family-oriented economic policy.

More information on McCain's economic policies can be found here. I have not included Health Care, Energy Policy, or Government Reform as economic policies in this assessment, as I consider them worthy of their own Issue headings.

In summary: when it comes to a reasoned consideration of economic issues, I choose Obama. Given my prior preference to Obama, I'd say my current likelihood of voting for him in November is 3 to 1 (granting McCain one point for credit and giving him a non-zero possiblity). We'll see how my current preference will change as I consider these coming weeks Health Care, Energry, Government Reform, Foriegn Policy, Civil Rights, Immigration, Socal Secuirty, and--my personal favorite--Education.

I think the worries are misplaced for a few quick reasons:

1. Stanford also has the Humanities Center, a prestigious fellowship granting institution in interdisciplinary study; and a more than fair balance to any conservative institutional presence. It would be great if the University of Chicago could construct its own interdisciplinary research center of the same calibre and prestige, and I think the precedence of politically conservative institutions is encouraging to potential donors.
2. As James Galbraith states, Chicago never denounced Friedman during his lifetime, nor could they given the importance of his work and the University's commitment to academic freedom. Despite the failures of some of Friedman's policies in South America, including the disastrous politico-economic experiments in Chile, Friedman's work offered innovative ways to integrate robust capitalist economics with liberal democratic ideals--a new trick for non-Communists intended to alleviate 3rd world countries transition to Modern global society. For reasons beyond my ability to explain, it did not work; but I think we can all appreciate the effort, at least from the theoretician's standpoint.
3. The entire song of student and faculty opposition to the Friedman Institute has been to the tune of: "It's not fair!" They would, justifiably, like to see funding for students and junior professors, so that the burden of the life of the mind were a little more bearable, especially at the end of the month. Those most thoughtlessly opposed to the MFI make it seem as if it will ban the reading of Marx on campus. That certainly will never happen (althought the number of symposiums on the failure of communism and in defence of capitalism will surely increase, thereby increasing the amount of scholarship on what went wrong in late 20th century politics--something sorely needed). None of those sorts of objections have a chance; and energy is better spent finding sympathetic sponsors for programs fitting the needs of humanities researchers. That has already been done, and I'm sure it can be done some more if the need be.

I find no need to sign the desperately ineffective petitions going around; and I have to say I have rapidly diminishing confidence in student activists at the UC.

The fact is that it will be problems in epistemological foundationalism, even in the more modest version proposed by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason, which lead to the story of aesthetics and the beginnings of literary theory...the significance of 'literature' and art for the thought of Kant's period relates precisely to the awareness that epistemology cannot complete the job it is intended for. It was Jacobi who was one of the first to claim he could show why.
The epistemological problems whose consequences both Kant and Jacobi confront put into question the very status of Western philosophy's attempt to reach the truth of the world, if that truth is understood to be 'ready-made' and awaiting its adequate 're-presentation'...The world of the laws of nature for Kant is a world of 'conditions', in which the explanation of something depends on seeking its prior condition, such that z is conditioned by y is conditioned by x, etc. This leads to a regress, because any particular judgment will be reliant upon a potentially infinite series of prior conditions... (33)

I started reading Bowie when a mentor brought up his treatment of "eternal regression," such as it is quoted above. I think I could answer Bowie's worry, and my teacher's, by citing the ordinary language philosophers' treatment of sufficient conditions; most familiar to me is Cavell's reading of Austin in The Claim of Reason. A principle of sufficient condition would state that an eternal regression--synonymous with philosophical skepticism and its threat of nihilism--can be avoided if the search for truth can be quieted once enough reasons are given for z being real, i.e. not an illusion (in which case Cavell's question would be, why or how am I mistaken?).

Though Bowie in his early chapters slips past a potential cure for eternal regression, in doing so he points out where so much of literary theory goes wrong: it assumes the philosophical tradition has not adequately questioned its formation of rationallity as the basis of human activity. Certainly, when theorists emulate Derrida's avoidance of analytic order or Deleuze's false Nietzscheanism, they do good to ask why philosophy has come to say what it does about language and reason. But often, by not recognizing how Modern philosophy has its roots in a debate over the stability of the most prominent and successful epistemological schemas, literary theorists assume that the rules can be cast aside, and interpretation can proceed at will. This is wrong, not only because it is theoretically unsound, but also because the Modern study of literature began in response to epistemology's failure to cover the entire field of human knowledge. Bringing the two back together means we need to figure out why they split in the first place, and that requires a good, accurate knowledge of philosophy.

But there's a caveat that helps us avoid issues embodied by the Sokal hoax: analogy is not the same as equation. That is to say, the fact that the relationship between Q and R is analogous to the relationship between T and C suggests the relationship between Q and R is not the same as the relationship between T and C. That distinction between analogy and equation prevents us from stating incorrectly that "Q is to C" and/or "T is to R". (Interested readers can look at Donald Davidson's "Metaphor" essay in the Blackwell Anthology of the Philosophy of Literature.)

Therefore, the "need to know" in physics does the same thing for physics as the "need to know" in aesthetics does for aesthetics, but the two needs are not the same. The next question is obviously: how are they different? Well, by distinguishing between reasons--by which I meant practical reasons in the Kantian sense--and conditions, I meant to show that reasons precipitated from a need characterized from a more rigid logical structure than that of conditions. But now I'm not so sure, especially since Davidson's insight on metaphor points out that even if the actual structure of "reasons" and "conditions" are non-commensurate, the logical structure of each is pretty much the same. We can then answer the question "how are they [the two "needs"] different?" by stating that we cannot cleanly infer from conditions to reasons. In otherwords, looking at the conditions for something is simply proving by induction a certain kind of need.

Does this sound right? If so, then I'll venture to say, in response to my original question, that the study of aesthetics in general, and film specifically, carries an importance that can only be derived from one's personal experience with a certain collection of works. We have grounds to believe that people's experiences will be very similar when viewing the same works in the same conditions, and from there we have practical reason to argue that aesthetics is good for human beings, as it provides a common basis by which people gain knowledge of one another that they could not have gained through other fields of research.

"But turn to the Catholic Church, go into mass at any moment--what do you walk in upon? Something that's already in your blood. You know the story that the priest is telling as he moves from one side of the altar to the other, be he a cardinal, Leo X, or just some poor bastard from Sicily who has discovered that pecca fortiter among his goats no longer masses his soul, and has, God knows, been God's child from the start--it makes no difference. Why? Because you are sitting there with your own meditations and a legend (which is nipping the fruit as the wren bites), and mingling them both with the Holy Spoon, which is that story; or you can get yourself into the confessional, where, in sonorous prose, lacking contrition (if you must) you can speak of the condition of the knotty, tangled soul and be answered in Gothic echoes, mutual and instantaneous--one saying hail to your farewell. Mischief unravels and the fine high hand of Heaven proffers the skein again, combed and forgiven!
"The one House," he went on, "is hard, as hard as the gift of gab, and the other is as soft as a goat's hip, and youcan blame no man for anything, and you can't like them at all."
"Wait!" said Felix.
"Yes?" said the Doctor.
Felix bending forward, deprecatory and annoyed, went on: "I like the prince who was reading a book when the executioner touched him on the shoulder telling him that it was time, and he, arising, laid a paper-cutter between the pages to keep his place and close the book."

The Doctor's response, in my opinion, is inane, and Felix's parable gets at what I'd call the Modernist response to an all-too-facile summation of world-values.