Of elephants and men politics and nature conservation 1994 Ellis

1. What is the association between game parks and the military in south Africa? -1980s evidence grows that the Zimbabwe National Army in Moz. was smuggling ivory 1961 WWF is setup to raise funds for who? World's aprticiapnts and others who where interested in animal conservation -the white South Africa lobby had a role in the financing of WWF international

1975-trade in Ivory is governed by the Convention on Int Tarde in Endangered Species (CITES) pg 62

"What is beyond doubt is that the import and re-export of ivorry and rhino horn from South Africa was a substantial trade which was growing ins zie, and that it was a direct result of South Afican destabilization of Mozambique and Angola in particular. .. South African has now taken over from Burundi as one of the chief conduits for illegal ivory from all over Africa, withouht being able to establish exactly who was controlling the trade, or how they were doing it.. From Johanensburg most rhino horn was re-exported to taiwan..." pg. 63

1991-the WWF made a campaign to shut down the rhino horn trade it made no mention of South Afrca's role in teh trade

1. What is the new model or approach for wildlife conservation?

2. What is the role of prominent South Africans like Anton Rupert in moden wildlife conservation approaches? see "To judge form the presence of so many former senior army and police officers in the Afrikaner-Volksfront the main grouping of the far right which is led by the Lieutenant General Constand Viljoen...many white military thinkers are much preocuppied with the necessity to control at least some territory in future as a means fo guranteeing the physical security of white South Africans." pg 68

3. What argument is Ellis (1994) making about power and control of territory in relation to wildlife conservation?

Williams

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3070-raymond-williams-base-and-superstructure-in-marxist-cultural-theory

Gramci's work was translated to English until the 1970s.

-Stuart Hall engaged him; Tony Blair and New Labor Movement -Everyone has their own view of Gramsci; Gramsci did most of his writing inside a jail cell. His writing can be obscure illusive or indirect. He is writing in surveillance of German Cell. -People wanted to read Marxist struggle instead of analysis of culture. -Gramsci was orthodox who tried to try apply Marxist to post-WWI in Italy. -Is hegemony a culturally grounded concept, what exactly is the place of culture in class struggle?

Biographical Sketch: Born 1891 in small Island of Sardenia; hunchback and poor health at young age. 1921 formed Peachy and gained support of Lenin; pointed away from Santerianism ans facist banned the communists and established witch hunts of enemy of the states 1926 he was jailed for treason and 20 years of prison 1937-Death

Neapolitian Revolution Is there a conscious direction? if it is where is it coming from?

The Culture Industry: Mass Deception in Dialectic of Enlightenment

The culture industry is any industry that is producing cultural products: news, beauty, music, fashion industry has one goal: generate profit. They will produce things that are produced like a factory. They are intended to produce consumerism. In the way that sex sells, rebellion also sells. The industries that are making our culture are feeding us our news so are corporaterized. Adorno and Horkheimer would not be suprised about YouTube. That cultural adversary may be dialectical.

Academia. You know more about less and less.

Backdrop context: Shaky ground of liberal democracy in the beginnings of WW2,rise of social movements, rise of nationalism and facism.

Englightment: Reason & Individual liberty Bacon: a larger system that synthesized knowledge and power as one; a flipping of nature over man and man over nature; but A/H thought that this played out in a human global scale.

If Enlightenment was supposed to create logic and reason why did we experience WW2, for A/H if we're to take Bacon seriously we have to consider DOMINATION in newer notions of freedom.

Regression: Enlightenment as Myth. Englightenment becomes totalitarian it ABSTRACTS. Ex. Hitler youth, a difference among others yet they become homogenous sameness among each other.

The result of the sacrifice continues that is far more reaching that MArx's alienation. --> UNFETTERED ACCEPTANCE

Adorno/H say that positivism: 1) a system of philiospgy were every assertion can be proved 2) as ideoogy where eveyrthing is true by default and questioning it goes against objective foundations.

Kant saw a short-sighted view of self-reason

IDEOLOGY of defintiion #2 the process of Englightenment is brought into analysis of the Culture Industry.

Context: AMerica is becoming global powerhouse, Soviet underwent their own Industrial Revolution, change was everywhere and revolutionary change with one large outlier thus the immediat question. Despite a global population of workers revolitng around the globe then why didnt the United States or Western Countries embrace similar post-capitalist systems seen across teh globe? And how is Soviet existing as a post-capitalist system alongside the capitalist system?

Art is being systematized, newer technology is being synthesized into one and the same narrative. The same repackaged story; subject and authority. This mimics the governance of a few over many.

A/H utilize Kant's idea of schemtaism (being how the midn communicates with objects and other structures aorund us, how to reason and cogantate; synthesize and bring Froyd into the mix, how we suppress ourselves and our desires to how we fit into society. We cognitively pick up how the world is presented to us. Viewership creates the bounds within which we can do art. A psychological realism that is difficult to break for a person who works a 9-5pm; to break it in a capitalist system is used to labor and build wealth. Art becomes the same even when it tries to stand out. There is a unifornm aethetic if you wnat to be different, the sameness and constant

Art is now abstracted a fulfilmmnet of mere numbers rather than aesthetic work and utility. Regarding art in newer creation, A/H bring up autombiles as an example, a film must have a romatic sequence that the industry now demands. This is part of Mechanical reproduction. Art will become tailored to your class relation as well. But it's not only class and poleconomy but it's not just corporate art is entirely based oof profit but rather there is a cyclcial ideology that reinforces this ideology. see

The focus isn't on marvel movies (for their thrist for profit) or to tell consumers to not consume this art but its the industry itself that reproduces the

"Thirst" is not conscious it is a result of the structure that is capitalism the culture industry modling of our desires in the first place.

It's not good enough to tell individuals to not consume said tailored art. Example anti-semitism is a result of essentialist notions of race. Largest incubators of anti-semitism stem from the bourigeoise themselves but a ruling class of people attempting to hide a ruling class domination. Here the bouregoise know the struggles of individuals and pins this to Jewish individuals.

Thus its not really just pushing Jewish people out of certain borders this marks the downfall of bouregoise property.

Look up: > Cultural education became....

The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry...

Culture is a paradoxical commodity. It is so completely subject to the law of exchange that it is no longer exchanged; it is so blindly equated with use that it can no longer be used. For this reason it merges with the adver­tisement. The more meaningless the latter appears under monopoly, the more omnipotent culture becomes. (pg 131).

Unending sameness also governs the relationship to the past. What is new in the phase of mass culture compared to that of late liberalism is the exclusion of the new.

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin

1. Benjamin is part of the Frankfurt School at Institute of Social Studies in Germany.
2. They are trying to examine the failure of Marxist revolutionary social change.
3. The idea is that ideology disseminated through mass media are making it very difficult for Marx's prognotication are making it very difficult for social change to occur.
4. 19th century modernity: mass transportation, factory work, dissemination of capitalism, movement to cities and experience of urban life

 These convergent endeavors made predictable a situation which Paul Valéry pointed up in this sentence: “Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.” (op. cit., p. 226) Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public; it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes. For the study of this standard nothing is more revealing than the nature of the repercussions that these two different manifestations—the reproduction of works of art and the art of the film—have had on art in its traditional form.

Q: Why does it matter that film minimizes the aura?

At the time, art reacted with the doctrine of l’art pour l’art, that is, with a theology of art. This gave rise to what might be called a negative theology in the form of the idea of ‘pure’ art, which not only denied any social function of art but also any categorizing by subject matter. (In poetry, Mallarmé was the first to take this position.) An analysis of art in the age of mechanical reproduction must do justice to these relationships, for they lead us to an all-important insight: for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.7 From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the ‘authentic’ print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice—politics.<br> Ritual: pre-modern timesPolitics: Despite the political painting the art piece will be associated with the aura of original piece of art.

• Film is not auratic because in film: 1) spaces and times are constructed 2) actors performance is stitched together 3) actors do not share space with spectators 4) multiple points of view 5) appeals to a MASS AUDIENCE and a COLLECTIVE AUDIENCE 6) reveals new aspects of the thing reproduced (time alpse, slow motion).

How do institutions put the aura back into film?

In photography, exhibition value begins to displace cult value all along the line. But cult value does not give way without resistance. It retires into an ultimate retrenchment: the human countenance.

The superstar is a way to put the aura back into film

The film responds to the shriveling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the “personality” outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the “spell of the personality,” the phony spell of a commodity. So long as the movie-makers’ capital sets the fashion, as a rule no other revolutionary merit can be accredited to today’s film than the promotion of a revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art. We do not deny that in some cases today’s films can also promote revolutionary criticism of social conditions, even of the distribution of property. However, our present study is no more specifically concerned with this than is the film production of Western Europe.

*Marx says capitalism produces the seeds of its demise. We can think of that as a guiding principle in which capitalism produces the neorosis that leads Chaplins character into a destructive set of behaviors that stops the Fordist capitalist production in a factory.

Feelings of belongoing and togetherness and being overhwemed by a mass you want to be a part of , but for Benjamin this is a trynanny where people feel they are in control but they are not really in control. Thus communism replies by politicizing art. Art for art's sake is harmful when put in the service of a facist regime. Art for political progress.

The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.21 The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.

Film is not merely a translation of an in-person thetaer performance. Rather film is performing for future audiences and for the director and for cinematrography. This supports the idea that film is a collabroative creation that brings an object into the world.

One film can be playing multiple times around the world and so this can be distributed on mass scale.

Film is not merely a recording of reality. Film reproduced new aspects of the things reproduced through slow motion and it brings to light entirely new aspects of matter but discloses quite aspects within them. If Benjamin merely interested in the epistemological possibility of the film to expand our limited perceptual appartus, yes but think about how this reinforces his claim that film moves us away from the aura,...that if we can see unknown aspects by recording it then we can't rely on film to reproduce an original we have to keep in mind that the image is qualitatively distinct from our perceptual access to the thing. So film is not merely a copy of the thing that it records.

Benjamin flips things and says that maybe film isn't art the way we see an art and this will get us away from the trappings.

What is Benjamin's definition of art which he is defining with the aura, the transcendence of individual of ritual.

1. substructure or base: factors that produce commodities and economic relations that result from these concrete aspects
2. superstructure: culture, law, media that for a Marxist thinker emerges in the way that the economic structure functions; the more media/education/political cosumption that you do the less you are going to understand the conditions of your exploitation and the more you are going to think change is possible.
3. What role does cinema play in the move from cult and aura to mechanical reproduction? See snapshots.

It was thus the black worker, as founding stone of a new economic system in the nineteenth century and for the modern world, who brought civil war in America. He was its underlying cause, in spite of every eff ort to base the strife upon union and national power.

Out of the exploitation of the dark proletariat comes the Surplus Value fi lched from human beasts which, in cultured lands, the Machine and harnessed Power veil and conceal. Th e emancipation of man is the eman- cipation of labor and the emancipation of labor is the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown and black.

Above all, we must remember the black worker was the ultimate exploited; that he formed that mass of labor which had neither wish nor power to escape from the labor status, in order to directly exploit other laborers, or indirectly, by alliance with capital, to share in their exploitation.

Th e true signifi cance of slavery in the United States to the whole social development of America lay in the ultimate relation of slaves to democracy. What were to be the limits of democratic control in the United States? If all labor, black as well as white, became free—were given schools and the right to vote—what control could or should be set to the power and action of these laborers?

And of all human development, ancient and modern, not the least singular and significant is the philosophy of life and action which slavery bred in the souls of black folk.