Gaydar Culture: Gay Men, Technology and Embodiment in the Digital Age

There is nary a scholar in this collection of essays who works in the United States; nor is there a single sociologist represented among the nine authors who each wrote a chapter, all original except for one. Instead the book’s contents, well-orchestrated by its editor, David Berry, come from professors of media studies, politics, journalism, social psychology, art history, cultural studies, and screen media. Either the Frankfurt School’s ghost has moved on and left sociology in its wake while invading other fields, or sociology took all that it needed from the Frankfurters in the 1970s and 1980s, when its practitioners regularly wrote about that tight group of multi-talented Jewish thinkers who coalesced in Weimar Germany, escaped fascism, and blossomed in the United States. Studious tearing apart of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics or Marcuse’s OneDimensional Man or Fromm’s Escape from Freedom or Benjamin’s essays or Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment may well continue in some quarters of graduate study, but they do not seem to appear in the ‘‘comps’’ reading lists of sociology students in the way they did prior to the Rightist reaction of the 1980s. So why did Harvard University Press not long ago issue a lavish, expensive, and comprehensive collection of Walter Benjamin’s essays? Why do other fine university presses continue to publish all of Adorno’s works, whether on philosophy, music, cultural studies, or social theory? Monographs continue to appear with regularity, 45 years after Adorno’s untimely death, and for many scholars worldwide, the Frankfurt School remains a steadfast part of their everyday intellectual equipment. In a sense, once a Frankfurter, always a Frankfurter—except, it seems, within U.S. sociology, which never entirely embraced the Frankfurt perspective, a mixture of philosophy, cultural critique, and nonpositivist analysis. Perhaps Benjamin and Adorno were so far ahead of everyone else in understanding how mass culture would transform advanced societies that they outstripped sociology’s analytic tools and worldview, but have come into their own among researchers whose primary interest lies in understanding what film, computers, social media, and television have done to and with interaction. This is illustrated by Mike Wayne in his chapter on Hans Magnus Enzensberger (affiliated with the School if not a primary member), wherein the sad Facebook tale of Raoul Moat is analyzed. After seeing his social existence decompose while in prison, he informed the ‘‘world’’ via his Facebook identity about his ‘‘totally f_____ life,’’ then proceeded to shoot his ex-wife, her lover, a policeman, and so on, until killing himself while surrounded in a remote area of Northumberland by dozens of police. He instantly became a Facebook martyr and 38,000 ‘‘members’’ joined a sympathy page set up by an unrelated woman, against which the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister railed in the House of Commons (pp. 127–130). There are many ways of interpreting the ultimate sociological meaning of this otherwise trivial and ordinary event, but the Frankfurt perspective is surely as useful as any other, and that accounts for the utility and optimism of Berry’s collection. He wisely points out that ‘‘the hypodermic needle theory’’ of media infusions into empty minds, though via the internet attributed to the Frankfurters, has little to do with their actual work, and the chapters he commissioned try to correct this misapprehension. Characteristically useful, for instance, is Robert Babe’s simplified listing of Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of mass culture (pp. 103–106), which could be put to use in any course dealing with such matters. Other chapters handle the application of Bourdieu’s habitus to the case of Walter Benjamin himself, Marcuse’s ‘‘Great Refusal,’’ the heretofore unexplored relation