Arts Research Institute

Keynote speakers: Alberto Toscano, Banu Bargu, Massimiliano Tomba

The California Ideology Project grew out of a conversation between Shaun Terry, Kyle Proehl, and Cara Greene that took place at the “Culture and Theory in Reactionary Times” conference in the Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature Department at the University of Minnesota in the Fall of 2022. During this conversation, we put together that we all lived in different parts of California and studied ideology from various academic vantage points. We marveled at the prevalence of certain bizarre cultural trends and practices that seem to have reached their zenith in California. For example, though the social-media-driven conflation of subjectivity and corporate branding is ubiquitous in today’s world, this phenomenon has crystallized in Los Angeles, as influencer-only housing collectives called “content houses” have sprung up along the Malibu coast. We also recognized that various eccentric Californian subcultures that appear to be products of the digital age are much older than they appear. For instance, the contemporary Californian preoccupation with biological perfection–as in Hollywood’s booming plastic surgery and wellness industries and Silicon Valley’s obsession with bio-hacking and physical optimization–bears traces of California’s long history of white supremacist eugenics, as in the forced sterilization of thousands of Asian, Mexican, indigenous, incarcerated, and impoverished Californians by scientists like G.M. Goethe and the Human Betterment Foundation. In fact, in the 1930s, Hitler’s eugenics projects were modeled on California’s eugenics experiments developed in prior decades. We also acknowledged that many of these contemporary cultural proclivities were well-documented in the mid-20th century by members of the Frankfurt School, a group of German intellectuals who were exiled to California during and after World War II.

These exiles–Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Löwenthal, and Franz Neumann, among others–studied the ways in which US politics and culture related to or departed from Germany’s politics and culture, to understand how something as catastrophic as the Holocaust could happen in a so-called “developed” “cosmopolitan” country like Germany. These studies were carried out primarily in Berkeley and Los Angeles, and the German exiles employed a variety of research methods in their studies: they collected sociological surveys, combed newspaper columns, reviewed Hollywood films, analyzed fringe right-wing movements, and drew connections between pop cultural trends and political rhetoric. Published in a variety of sources, including 1934’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and 1950’s The Authoritarian Personality, these thinkers’ research concluded that California’s main export—culture—arose from the forces and relations of mass-scale industrial capitalism and abstract political domination. Though the US and German contexts diverged in meaningful ways, the results of the Frankfurt School’s research into the California ideology rang alarm bells for these German-Jewish refugees.

Inspired by these studies, and taking our name from Barbrook and Cameron’s 1995 essay “The Californian Ideology,” a “critique of dotcom neoliberalism,” The California Ideology Project researches the enduringly paradoxical character of the Golden State, as both a utopia and a dystopia, a bastion of both liberal and conservative politics, both an exceptionally unique state, and, in other ways, paradigmatically American, and so on. Since that fateful conversation in 2022, we’ve held reading groups, screenings, and discussions on the intersections of politics, economics, spirituality, technology, and culture in California. We are excited to host an interdisciplinary conference, The California Ideology Conference in April 2024, and we anticipate publishing a select number of the conference proceedings in an edited volume or a special issue of an academic journal in 2025.

This conference is generously supported by the University of California Humanities Research Institute, Department of Comparative Literature (UC Davis), UCSC Humanities Division, The Humanities Institute (UCSC), Cowell College (UCSC), Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (UCSC), The Arts Research Institute (UCSC), History of Consciousness (UCSC), Sociology (UCSC), and Davis Humanities Institute (UC Davis)