Standardization and Pseudo-Individualization in Adorno — How Popular Music Offers Choice

Two records open with different sounds. One begins with a guitar and a voice close to the microphone. The other opens with a bright keyboard and a chorus of backing singers. After the introductions, both move through much the same pattern of verses, refrains and instrumental breaks. A listener can have good reasons to prefer one. Theodor W. Adorno asks what kind of choice the difference gives that listener, and which decisions about the song have already been made.

What does standardization mean?

In On Popular Music, written with the assistance of George Simpson and published in 1941, Adorno describes standardization as a relation between the parts of a song and its whole. A phrase can lead into a chorus we have already learned to anticipate, even on a first hearing. A break can draw attention to itself while arriving in exactly the place the form has prepared for it. The point is about how a song is organized and how a listener comes to recognize its organization.

A repeated form can be a resource for performers as well as a commercial convention. For Adorno, the question is what the form asks of the detail. Could an unusual break change how we hear the rest of the song? Or is it there to mark one version of a pattern whose course is already settled?

What is pseudo-individualization?

Pseudo-individualization is the work done by those distinguishing features. A voice, an arrangement or a performer’s persona can make a record immediately recognizable. Adorno argues that the record can thereby acquire the appearance of individuality even when the broader structure remains standardized. He discusses improvisation as one place to look for that tension. A break can sound spontaneous while staying within a framework listeners and musicians already know.

Return to the two records. One might be sold as intimate and the other as exuberant. The descriptions capture differences people can hear. They also encourage us to choose among versions of a familiar experience. Adorno’s distinction directs attention both to what varies and to the commercial reasons why some parts of the experience are kept in place.

How does this connect to the culture industry?

In The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, Adorno and Max Horkheimer ask how financing, distribution and repetition organize entertainment more broadly. The music essay makes the question audible at the level of a song. You can test the distinction by listening for where the refrain arrives, what the arrangement changes and whether that change alters how the song unfolds.

There is also a question about what happens after a record circulates. Simon Frith’s account of popular music asks how listeners use musical conventions to make sense of feelings and social situations. An account of what a market makes available can be read alongside an account of what people do with it.

Further reading · Culture Industry Explained Simply · Culture Industry Reconsidered · Read On Popular Music

Karl Popper Explained — Falsifiability, Scientific Knowledge and Critical Rationalism

What would make you change your mind about a theory? For Karl Popper (1902–1994), the question belongs at the center of scientific inquiry. Researchers learn by proposing explanations and giving others a chance to find where they fail. That same willingness to revise a judgment connects his philosophy of science to his wider account of rational criticism.

Falsifiability and the growth of knowledge

A scientific theory makes claims that could conflict with experience. In Popper’s account of falsifiability, what matters is whether a theory rules out a conceivable result. Surviving a demanding test can count in its favor, while leaving it open to further tests. For the argument in context, start with Conjectures and Refutations: Summary and Key Ideas.

The problem of induction

David Hume asks how experience can justify expectations about cases we have yet to observe. Popper argues that a universal theory cannot be deduced from a collection of particular observations. Scientists can still use experience to test explanations. Alan Chalmers on deriving theories from facts sets out the logical problem behind this proposal.

Criticism, institutions and the open society

Popper’s critical rationalism starts from the possibility that any of us may be mistaken. Its practical question is how to arrange inquiry so that errors can be found and corrected. In politics, his idea of the open society emphasizes institutions that allow policies to be criticized and governments to be changed without violence. This connects the possibility of reform with the possibility of learning from mistakes.

Where to go next

Thomas Kuhn on scientific revolutions asks how research communities respond to anomalies. Chalmers on Lakatos’s research programmes considers how researchers revise a family of theories over time, and Chalmers on realism introduces Popper’s view that scientific theories can aim at truth while remaining conjectural.

Browse all Cultural Reader posts on Karl Popper for new readings.

Karl Popper’s Falsifiability Explained — Science and the Demarcation Problem

Imagine two explanations for why a plant stopped growing. One predicts that plants of the same kind will grow less under a specified light level, other conditions being equal. The other says a hidden force explains whatever the plants do. The first explanation tells us how to test it. The second can accommodate every result. Karl Popper uses this difference to ask what makes a claim open to empirical science.

What does falsifiability mean?

A claim is falsifiable if it rules out at least one conceivable observation. To count as a test, an inquiry must leave open the possibility of finding something the claim says should not happen. The test of the plant hypothesis would specify the light level, how growth is measured and what pattern would count against it. Falsifiability concerns the possibility of that test, even before anyone carries it out.

Falsifiability, falsification and corroboration

Falsification is a judgment that a claim has failed a test. An unexpected reading may be a reason to investigate the instrument, the procedure or an assumption about the plants before deciding which claim to reject. Corroboration is the provisional standing a theory earns by surviving demanding tests. Finding a result that a theory can explain is more informative when the theory had ruled out plausible alternatives in advance.

Why Popper calls this a problem of demarcation

In Conjectures and Refutations, Popper contrasts Einstein’s prediction that light would be deflected near the Sun with explanations that can be adjusted to fit every case. An eclipse made it possible to observe apparent changes in the positions of stars near the Sun. A sufficiently reliable result incompatible with the predicted deflection would have counted against the theory. What interests Popper is the risk taken by the prediction.

The boundary he draws concerns the empirical status of a claim. A philosophical idea can be meaningful and worth discussing even if observations cannot settle it. An empirical theory can be scientific and still turn out to be false. When assessing a claim, ask which result would cause its defenders to reconsider it and whether the proposed test could actually produce that result.

Further reading · Karl Popper: ideas and works · Chalmers on Deriving Theories from Facts · Read Popper’s opening chapter

Is Écriture Féminine Essentialist? Reading Hélène Cixous with Judith Butler

When Hélène Cixous calls on women to write themselves, who can recognize themselves in the invitation? The question is especially pressing in The Laugh of the Medusa, an essay that speaks to women as a group while insisting on the diversity of their experiences. Judith Butler’s account of feminist representation offers a way to read that tension.

What the charge of essentialism asks

An essentialist account treats a shared identity as if it followed from an underlying nature. Some images in Cixous can be read in that way, especially when the body or the maternal seems to supply a common ground for writing. Other passages resist that reading. Cixous distinguishes biological and cultural questions, refuses the idea of a uniform female sexuality and leaves écriture féminine open to forms she cannot define in advance.

Butler and the limits of representation

In the first chapter of Gender Trouble, Butler asks how feminist politics makes use of the category women. Representation can bring a group into view. It can also set boundaries around who counts as a recognizable member of that group. The political question includes what those boundaries do and who is left outside them.

Reading the invitation again

Cixous wants an address capable of reaching people excluded from writing. Butler helps us ask whether the address can be revised by the people who receive it. A reading can attend to the collective appeal and to the places where it strains against the diversity it is meant to welcome. That tension belongs to what makes the essay worth returning to.

Further reading · Hélène Cixous: ideas and works · Syntax as Power: Butler and Cixous · Read the essay in Signs

Why Does Medusa Laugh? Hélène Cixous and Freud’s Medusa’s Head

A reader opens Hélène Cixous’s essay expecting Medusa to turn someone to stone. Instead, she laughs. That change is small enough to fit in a sentence and large enough to rearrange the scene. The figure usually introduced through someone else’s fear has an expression and a presence of her own. To see what Cixous does with the myth, it helps to read it beside Freud’s brief essay Medusa’s Head.

What does Freud see in Medusa’s head?

Freud wrote his note in 1922, and it was published posthumously in 1940. He interprets the severed head as a figure of castration anxiety. In his account the snakes are substitutes that also offer reassurance, and the onlooker’s petrification combines terror with a sign of erection. The note is a psychoanalytic interpretation of the myth. Its organizing question is what the sight means to a spectator whose anxiety it provokes.

What changes when Medusa laughs?

In The Laugh of the Medusa, Cixous asks the reader to look directly at Medusa. The encounter yields beauty and laughter where the inherited account had led the reader to expect danger. Cixous gives us a different relation to the scene. We can attend to Medusa herself and ask how the story came to be told primarily through the fear she supposedly causes.

The laughter matters because it has no obligation to reassure the spectator. We cannot tell from it exactly what Medusa thinks. We can hear a response that exceeds the meanings already assigned to her. The essay asks what women could say or write if the terms in which they have been described ceased to determine the limits of what they could express.

Why the scene belongs in an essay about writing

Cixous’s invitation to look is also an invitation to reread. She keeps a familiar figure in view and changes the relation among figure, spectator and reader. That is one way to approach écriture féminine. A writer can work with inherited language while changing who speaks and what the language makes possible. The essay does some of that work through its own sudden changes of address, rhythm and image.

A comparison with Freud leaves a question for the reader. When a story tells us who is frightening or unknowable, whose position makes that judgment seem natural? Reading the two essays together gives us a way to ask how the answer can change when someone else gets to take up the scene.

Further reading · Hélène Cixous: ideas and works · Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Popular Culture · Freud’s Medusa’s Head · Cixous’s essay in Signs

The Fashion System by Roland Barthes — Summary and How Fashion Writing Makes Meaning

A magazine calls a jacket with wide lapels “the look for a city weekend.” The phrase tells you which detail to notice. It also supplies a setting and an idea of the person who might wear the jacket. None of those things follows automatically from the cut of the lapels. In The Fashion System (Système de la mode, 1967), Roland Barthes asks how fashion writing produces these connections and makes them seem obvious.

A garment, a photograph and a description

Barthes distinguishes the actual garment, the garment shown in an image and the garment described in words. The physical jacket has fabric, seams and a way of being constructed. A photograph shows it through a particular angle, pose and lighting. A caption may pick out one detail from everything the image makes available. Each presents the garment through a different set of relations.

Barthes concentrates on written clothing in fashion magazines. A caption can turn one feature into the reason an item matters, even when the photograph gives the feature little emphasis. Writing can also connect a visible detail to something that cannot be seen in the garment, such as a season, an occasion or a way of living.

How one caption makes meaning

Take the invented caption “A jacket with wide lapels for a city weekend.” In Barthes’s terms, the object is the jacket. The lapels are the support, the part in which a difference appears. Their width is the variant. Changing “wide” to “narrow” keeps the jacket and the lapels in view while altering the feature to which the caption gives value.

The phrase “for a city weekend” connects that feature to a situation. A different description might associate the same jacket with a formal dinner or a return to office dress. The magazine’s readers can learn to recognize these connections as they encounter similar contrasts elsewhere. The pairing makes sense within a fashion code that can change from one season to the next.

Where the fashion code comes from

Magazines do more than identify fabrics and cuts. They tell readers when something counts as current and how a garment fits into a recognizable scene. A caption may speak as though its suggestion were a practical fact about the jacket. Looking across several captions shows how often editorial language supplies the link between a detail and a social occasion.

This is where the book extends the questions of Elements of Semiology. A sign gets part of its meaning from the alternatives that could replace it. It also connects with Myth Today. A cultural association can come to seem like a natural property of an object. In fashion writing, a feature as ordinary as the width of a lapel can be made to carry an idea of what a modern weekend looks like.

Further reading · Rhetoric of the Image · Mythologies · Barthes on the Structural Analysis of Narratives · The Fashion System at University of California Press

Roland Barthes’s Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives — Summary and Example

A courier arrives at a house with a letter. She turns it over twice, slips it back into her coat and knocks. The house has been empty for years, we later learn, and the letter is addressed to her. Which of these details changes what can happen next? Which makes the scene feel a certain way? In his 1966 essay Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives, Roland Barthes uses questions like these to build a method for reading stories.

Why analyze the structure of a story?

Stories circulate in novels, films, conversations and many other forms. Barthes asks what makes it possible to recognize them as narratives across such different media. Linguistics offers a starting point. A sentence is organized through relations among its parts. A narrative can be studied in a similar way, on a larger scale, by asking what each unit does and how units combine. This is one application of the approach described in Structuralism: Summary and Explanation.

Barthes distinguishes three levels of description: functions, actions and narration. They are levels of analysis of the same story. A detail may make sense through the sequence it belongs to, through what a character is trying to do, and through the way the story is told.

Functions: what a detail does

A cardinal function, or nucleus, opens, maintains or closes a consequential alternative. The courier can deliver the letter or keep it. If a story makes that choice decisive, it is a nucleus. A catalysis fills out the interval around such a decision. Turning the envelope over twice can slow the scene down and make us wait for the knock. In a different story that same gesture could reveal a hidden address and become decisive.

Some details work across the story instead of advancing a sequence. Barthes calls these indices when they point to an atmosphere, a trait or a feeling that we infer. The boarded windows can suggest neglect or make the visit ominous. Informants supply more direct information, such as a date or a street name. A detail can do several jobs, depending on how the rest of the story uses it.

Actions and narration: who acts and who tells?

At the level of actions, Barthes examines characters as participants in patterns such as a search or a conflict. The courier starts as the person charged with delivering a message. Finding her own name on it can make her the person seeking an explanation. What matters here is the role she plays in the action and how that role changes.

At the level of narration, we ask how the story is given to a reader or listener. Telling us at the start that the letter is addressed to the courier creates a different experience from withholding it until the door opens. The order of disclosure is part of the narration. It shapes what we can make of the action as we encounter it.

How this differs from S/Z

In this essay Barthes sets out categories that can be applied across narratives. In S/Z, he follows five codes through one story, Balzac’s Sarrasine, and attends closely to the different meanings a passage can sustain. Try both approaches on the courier’s letter. First trace the decisions and delays. Then return to the details that do more than one thing. The first reading maps the sequence. The second shows how much a detail can suggest even when the sequence is clear.

Barthes applies a related method to a different kind of writing in The Fashion System, tracing how small differences in clothing descriptions acquire meaning within a code.

Further reading · Readerly and Writerly Texts · Roland Barthes: ideas and books · Read the original essay