Publications and Media Books

A layer of scholarship is antibody to liberation. The bonafide purpose of an introduction to a first rate thinker is to give the student a precis of the first rate.

But the obvious question, one raised by Adorno in his lectures on Kant, is why the student needs a mentor to explain the guru.

Adorno's answer was that Kantianism exists in partial independence from Kant and even from Kant's thought, in the sense that Kant raised concerns that Kant did not have the time to think through.

There is nothing mystical about this. It may result in part from the fact that Kant himself, in Keyne's image, heard "voices in the air" in the form of thoughts that arose out of material struggles during Kant's epoch.

Unfortunately, Witkin seems unaware of this possibility and provides instead a precis of "Adorno on Popular Culture" which reduces Adorno's thought to a biographical series of complaints about the way in which popular culture moronizes its consumer.

This biographical approach forces Witken unconsciously and by default into the role of answering Adorno, and laying Adorno to rest; Witkin becomes an Adorno antibody in the manner of antibodies to the HIV virus which are the diagnosis of AIDs.

In Adorno's own words and Adorno's own theory (which is almost never self-applied by texts in the Adorno industry) the thing represented is conquered by its representation in a way that has the Tedster, probably, spinning in his grave.

Witkin's Adorno machine is constructed by a scholar who is tone deaf to the music of the dialectic.

Witkin's Adorno machine emits racist music about jazz and Witkin seems to fail to realize that in the 1930s and 1940s, the word "jazz" was coterminous with popular music in an era before Coltrane. Adorno should not be forgiven, in writing about American music, for his apparently complete failure to inform himself about country blues and Scott Joplin but when asked to write about Jazz, he used the word in the same way ordinary GI's of occupied Germany used the word.

Witkin's major case against his Adorno machine is Woody Allen, a filmmaker who probably knows about Adorno: an Adorno figure appears in Woody's Hannah and Her Sisters.

Allen's films considered as a static *oeuvre* are thought by Witkin to constitute a riposte or counterexample to Adorno, for they are films with mass appeal that do not reject "inwardness and erudition."

The problem is the failure to apply Adorno's deep methodology. When he appeared in the 1920s in Weimar Germany, his colleagues were struck by the thoroughgoing influence of dialectical thinking on Adorno's details of thought and for better or worse, this makes a thinker unlikely to think in terms of a closure, which Witkin is seeking in raising the case of Woody Allen.

Witkin fails both the appreciate Hegel, and read Variety: for in fact, ever since the 1980s, Allen's personal and professional reputation have been under continual attack beginning with accusations about his relationships with his step-daughter.

The horror was based on the failure, of a large number of moviegoers, to connect with a Manhattan island of inwardness and erudition that was, in this period, diminishing both in Manhattan, and, at a rapid rate, elsewhere.

During Reagan's presidency, universities in self-defense conducted a *kulturkampf* on universites, and inwardness and erudition, in the form of commodified education, the replacement of tenured faculty with adjunct faculty, and student moronization.

The modal Allen clone became in this period a figure under increasing suspicion, and Allen himself expresses his rather bitter reaction to this in Deconstructing Harry.

The dialectic was not suspended, and a frozen, hypostatized Adorno not counter-exampled and demolished by Allen's now very retro oeuvre. Instead the gradual brutalization of the Allen "type" becomes a confirmation of Adorno's critique and more interesting than old Woody Allen films.

University faculty too often survive by pretending to celebrate liberation while in fact performing an older ideological function: thought control, and ensuring that things don't get outa hand. The reassurance, however, that popular culture is in any way a medium by means of which ordinary people can express their needs or find satisfaction is malarkey.

The reassurance requires Witkin's nonsensical theory of transparency of communication (something predemolished by Adorno in The Jargon of Authenticity) in which the mechanisms of popular culture provide a way for fellow spirits to communicate in Buber's mode, and eliminates a "third" term consisting of a shared set of ideals, considered unnecessary and indeed Quixotic.

The problem is that for Cervantes as for Adorno, humanity is the reverse of a brutalized, face-to-face, "I and thou" humanity which in fact is the face of one-on-one authority. Don Quixote was able to escape this exhausting struggle not by reification but by integrating an ontology into his praxis in a redemptory way..

It is dehumanizing to so erase the possibility of shared ideals and Witkin fails to show how this creates anything but twilight struggle in the name of "authenticity."

As I write, abstract ideals labeled Quixotic a year ago are proving to have weight, like the physicist's light. The Bush administration finds itself today in front of an obsidian wall, carved with serpent shapes, expressing abstract Enlightenment ideals and although it may circumvent this barrier it will be perceived, world-wide, as untrue to its own professed ideals. This will have enormous consequences for the United States in the real world of economics and diplomacy.

American media uses a jargon of authenticity and indeed, a debased, confrontational I and thou ethical style to REDUCE the hard work of arms inspectors to a series of completely misleading sound bytes. It is an anti-Quixote in that it refuses to test its results against any texts, whether chivalric novels or the Charter of the UN.

In this context, we do not need to exorcise Adorno but instead to channel him.

mass communication reseach, how to know the effect of mass communication, and how about advertising. what is relation betwen advertising and marketing communication

This book, which is a major study on the impact of media on what we refer to as reality, is interesting. The ideas are set forth in a very logical, matter-of-fact fashion. It covers first the methodology, the historical (such as it is) ideas, and then it presents the data, and finally the conclusions. For those interested in media studies, this is invaluable as a starting place and for a general overview.

That said, this book is flawed. It spends a lot of time repeating itself. In one chapter near the beginning, it makes a statement, and in the next chapter, it repeats itself ad nauseum. When a whole chapter can be summed up in less than a paragraph, there's a problem.

The other major flaw is a definite lack of examples. Weimann makes blanket statements and then neglects to back them up with sufficient description. It's nice to say that cop shows convince people that there are many more policemen in the world than there really are, but does this happen in other fields? How does this affect people? Are they less likely to go into police work because they feel there is a surfeit of policemen? Do they feel safer at night, knowing that there are more police around?

Too often, the book neglects those questions.

However, as a general overview or textbook (with the implication that the student must find the answers or examples him- or herself), this book works very well.

With the WWW changing daily, research is hard pressed to keep up, but the methods used by these folks are pretty solid -- good starting point for anyone doing net research. The essays in the book concentrate on Usenet/newsgroups in particular.

I wrote a few of the entries in this handbook and am quite sorry to read in the Booklist review that the weight of the the Handbook is decidedly in the direction of potential negative effects of media. The terms of the effects arguments are in general hyperbolic and poorly researched. If this is a fair reading of the handbook it makes me sorry to have contributed. On the other hand, I can't afford a copy of it myself so have never actually read the entries. That alone would be a good reason to ignore the star rating I gave -- I have no basis for making this judgment but it is not possible to submit a review without clicking stars.

This is a charming salute to the many Spanish and Italian fashion designers of the past century. As always Mr Tierney's drawings are of the highest standard, and I especially liked the striking Latin features of the dolls. Unfortunately the lack of accuracy lets this collection down. A Balenciaga creation is credited to Pertegaz, some costumes are incorrectly dated, and Gianni Versace's work is represented by a costume design for an opera, when this is supposed to be a collection of fashion designs. A number of outfits aren't typical of the particular designer's work (eg Gigli, Ferre, Fontana, etc). Most puzzling of all is the inclusion of people whose ethnic descent is either Spanish or Italian, but their careers and businesses were established in other countries (eg Emanuel Ungaro, John Galliano, Elsa Schiaparelli, Nina Ricci, to name a few. Even Oscar de la Renta, an American designer born in the Dominican Republic is included!). Mr Tierney is still a great graphic artist, but his research has let him down in this instance.

This is a decent overview on the issue, but Mr. McNair spends too much time examining pornographic magazines, and no time at all discussing the Internet. He was quite clearly wrong in stating there has not been a trend towards more violent imagery, anyone perusing the net can attest to that. So, the book is in need of an update.

I think this book, by format, is best suited to be used as a research tool, and as a source for students like myself to find information to support papers dealing with its subject. This book does an excellent job of gathering the information and statistics on the effects and influence of media on males and makes it clear that the men presented in the media reflect a minority in the male community. However, it presents this information in a dry, unentertaining manner. After reading it I feel that the information is very important, but I feel that the authors present it in a way that makes it largely inaccessible to those who could benefit from it most, the common man. I think that after reading this book most men would have a different outlook on media, from the advertising industry all the way to the format driven set up of sitcoms. Perhaps it would even alleviate some of the pressure men feel to be like the men they see in the media. I fear that it would be very unlikely to find anyone reading this book that would not be using it as a research tool.

This book is OK ... but a lot of the motifs are very much the same. Some instruction on how to use them and where would have been helpful. I really wanted something to help me with a wainscoted dining room and this was not it!

It's a good book with interesting stock photography, but not one company has a web page address printed on the book, so finding the companies from other countries is a pain.