Morton Schoolman
Morton Schoolman's teaching and research fields are modern political and social theory, including American political thought, with a particular interest within these fields in the relation between between politics, aesthetics, art and film. Recently he has completed a new book entitled A Democratic Enlightenment: The Reconciliation Image, Aesthetic Education, Possible Politics, published by Duke University Press. In A Democratic Enlightenment he proposes aesthetic education through film as a way to redress the political violence inflicted on difference that society constructs as its racialized, gendered, Semitic, and sexualized Other. Drawing on Voltaire, Diderot, and Schiller, Schoolman reconstructs the genealogical history of what he calls the reconciliation image—a visual model of a democratic ideal of reconciliation he then theorizes through Whitman's prose and poetry, Adorno's aesthetic theory, and the artworks of Poussin and Lorrain, Monet, Manet, and Rodin. Analyzing The Help (2011) and Gentleman's Agreement (1947), Schoolman shows how film produces a more advanced image of reconciliation than those originally created by modernist artworks. Each film depicts violence toward racial and ethnic difference while also displaying a reconciliation image that aesthetically educates the public about how the violence of constructing difference as otherness can be overcome. Mounting a democratic enlightenment, the reconciliation image in film illuminates a possible politics for challenging the rise of nationalism's violence toward differences in all their diversity. Other publications include Reason and Horror: Critical Theory, Democracy, and Aesthetic Individuality, published by Routledge Press, and The Imaginary Witness: The Critical Theory of Herbert Marcuse, published by Free Press.
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Recent Publications by Morton Schoolman
Excerpted from the "Introduction," pp. 10-11 of Reason and Horror: Critical Theory, Democracy, and Aesthetic Individuality (Routledge 2001).
This file replaces the earlier upload, which readers wrote to say had been corrupted. I believe the problem is now solved. Thank you!
As I already have indicated in a preliminary way, by drawing out the structural similarities of Nietzsche’s genealogical method to Dialectic of Enlightenment in chapter 3, and the genealogical framework of Horkheimer and Adorno’s work is thrown into relief, it becomes evident that they offer us more than a metanarrative of reason’s destruction of difference. Approaching Dialectic of Enlightenment genealogically, we begin to see, allows us to account for a reader whom they believe has been interdicted by the history of enlightenment to the point of becoming an “imaginary witness,” the term they use in the “Notes and Drafts” to their text. Short of this genealogical account, Dialectic of Enlightenment cannot be critically redeemed, for if we were unable to discover a historical basis for a reader, far more than the new interpretive possibilities that a genealogical approach opens to us would be lost. Lost, as well, would be the possibility of discovering in our own historical period some evidence for the aesthetic form of individuality a genealogy of reason recovers. As I will show, approaching their work as a genealogy reveals that Horkheimer and Adorno carry out what Nietzsche in his own work had called a “translation” of “man back into nature,” a translation—or what we more recently understand to be a “deconstruction”—of modern subjectivity back into individuality. With this genealogical translation they are able to recall individuality’s original aesthetic properties before it evolved into a different form as a consequence of a struggle within thought between two qualitatively different types of thinking. Recovering their genealogical reconstruction of the concept of aesthetic individuality allows us to imagine our own relationship to difference as becoming free of violence and to inquire into the conditions under which this relationship might be developed, as I will do in part II of my argument, even if within the framework of Horkheimer and Adorno’s own work such a possibility is no more than Utopian.
Earlier Publications by Morton Schoolman
aesthetic reason to modern art, and his insistence with Horkheimer that modern
art and the rationality it entails are emasculated by mass culture, appear premature.
As the host for aesthetic rationality, mass culture secures the rational
content of modernity against the hegemony of instrumental reason. Through the
increasing universalization of mass culture aesthetic reason achieves universality,
placing us on the threshold of another enlightenment, a democratic and aesthetic enlightenment that would be the completion of modernity’s as yet unfinished project.
Papers by Morton Schoolman
Excerpted from the "Introduction," pp. 10-11 of Reason and Horror: Critical Theory, Democracy, and Aesthetic Individuality (Routledge 2001).
This file replaces the earlier upload, which readers wrote to say had been corrupted. I believe the problem is now solved. Thank you!
As I already have indicated in a preliminary way, by drawing out the structural similarities of Nietzsche’s genealogical method to Dialectic of Enlightenment in chapter 3, and the genealogical framework of Horkheimer and Adorno’s work is thrown into relief, it becomes evident that they offer us more than a metanarrative of reason’s destruction of difference. Approaching Dialectic of Enlightenment genealogically, we begin to see, allows us to account for a reader whom they believe has been interdicted by the history of enlightenment to the point of becoming an “imaginary witness,” the term they use in the “Notes and Drafts” to their text. Short of this genealogical account, Dialectic of Enlightenment cannot be critically redeemed, for if we were unable to discover a historical basis for a reader, far more than the new interpretive possibilities that a genealogical approach opens to us would be lost. Lost, as well, would be the possibility of discovering in our own historical period some evidence for the aesthetic form of individuality a genealogy of reason recovers. As I will show, approaching their work as a genealogy reveals that Horkheimer and Adorno carry out what Nietzsche in his own work had called a “translation” of “man back into nature,” a translation—or what we more recently understand to be a “deconstruction”—of modern subjectivity back into individuality. With this genealogical translation they are able to recall individuality’s original aesthetic properties before it evolved into a different form as a consequence of a struggle within thought between two qualitatively different types of thinking. Recovering their genealogical reconstruction of the concept of aesthetic individuality allows us to imagine our own relationship to difference as becoming free of violence and to inquire into the conditions under which this relationship might be developed, as I will do in part II of my argument, even if within the framework of Horkheimer and Adorno’s own work such a possibility is no more than Utopian.
aesthetic reason to modern art, and his insistence with Horkheimer that modern
art and the rationality it entails are emasculated by mass culture, appear premature.
As the host for aesthetic rationality, mass culture secures the rational
content of modernity against the hegemony of instrumental reason. Through the
increasing universalization of mass culture aesthetic reason achieves universality,
placing us on the threshold of another enlightenment, a democratic and aesthetic enlightenment that would be the completion of modernity’s as yet unfinished project.