The Frankfurt School
David Marc Nieporent
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/fs.htm
Douglas Kellner
The "Frankfurt School" refers to a group of German-American
theorists who developed powerful analyses of the changes in Western
capitalist societies that occurred since the classical theory of
Marx. Working at the Institut fur Sozialforschung in Frankfurt,
Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s, theorists such as Max
Horkheimer, T.W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal, and Erich
Fromm produced some of the first accounts within critical social
theory of the importance of mass culture and communication in
social reproduction and domination. The Frankfurt School also
generated one of the first models of a critical cultural studies
that analyzes the processes of cultural production and political
economy, the politics of cultural texts, and audience reception and
use of cultural artifacts (Kellner 1989 and 1995).
Moving from Nazi Germany to the United States, the Frankfurt School
experienced at first hand the rise of a media culture involving
film, popular music, radio, television, and other forms of mass
culture (Wiggershaus 1994). In the United States, where they found
themselves in exile, media production was by and large a form of
commercial entertainment controlled by big corporations. Two of its
key theorists Max Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno developed an account
of the "culture industry" to call attention to the
industrialization and commercialization of culture under capitalist
relations of production (1972). This situation was most marked in
the United States that had little state support of film or
television industries, and where a highly commercial mass culture
emerged that came to be a distinctive feature of capitalist
societies and a focus of critical cultural studies.
During the 1930s, the Frankfurt school developed a critical and
transdisciplinary approach to cultural and communications studies,
combining political economy, textual analysis, and analysis of
social and ideological effects of. They coined the term "culture
industry" to signify the process of the industrialization of
mass-produced culture and the commercial imperatives that drove the
system. The critical theorists analyzed all mass-mediated cultural
artifacts within the context of industrial production, in which the
commodities of the culture industries exhibited the same features
as other products of mass production: commodification,
standardization, and massification. The culture industries had the
specific function, however, of providing ideological legitimation
of the existing capitalist societies and of integrating individuals
into its way of life.
Adorno's analyses of popular music, television, and other phenomena
ranging from astrology columns to fascist speeches (1991, 1994),
Lowenthal's studies of popular literature and magazines (1961),
Herzog's studies of radio soap operas (1941), and the perspectives
and critiques of mass culture developed in Horkheimer and Adorno's
famous study of the culture industries (1972 and Adorno 1991)
provide many examples of the Frankfurt school approach. Moreover,
in their theories of the culture industries and critiques of mass
culture, they were among the first social theorists its importance
in the reproduction of contemporary societies. In their view, mass
culture and communications stand in the center of leisure activity,
are important agents of socialization, mediators of political
reality, and should thus be seen as major institutions of
contemporary societies with a variety of economic, political,
cultural and social effects.
Furthermore, the critical theorists investigated the cultural
industries in a political context as a form of the integration of
the working class into capitalist societies. The Frankfurt school
theorists were among the first neo-Marxian groups to examine the
effects of mass culture and the rise of the consumer society on the
working classes which were to be the instrument of revolution in
the classical Marxian scenario. They also analyzed the ways that
the culture industries and consumer society were stabilizing
contemporary capitalism and accordingly sought new strategies for
political change, agencies of political transformation, and models
for political emancipation that could serve as norms of social
critique and goals for political struggle. This project required
rethinking Marxian theory and produced many important contributions
-- as well as some problematical positions.
The Frankfurt school focused intently on technology and culture,
indicating how technology was becoming both a major force of
production and formative mode of social organization and control.
In a 1941 article, "Some Social Implications of Modern Technology,"
Herbert Marcuse argued that technology in the contemporary era
constitutes an entire "mode of organizing and perpetuating (or
changing) social relationships, a manifestation of prevalent
thought and behavior patterns, an instrument for control and
domination" (414). In the realm of culture, technology produced
mass culture that habituated individuals to conform to the dominant
patterns of thought and behavior, and thus provided powerful
instruments of social control and domination.
Victims of European fascism, the Frankfurt school experienced first
hand the ways that the Nazis used the instruments of mass culture
to produce submission to fascist culture and society. While in
exile in the United States, the members of the Frankfurt school
came to believe that American "popular culture" was also highly
ideological and worked to promote the interests of American
capitalism. Controlled by giant corporations, the culture
industries were organized according to the strictures of mass
production, churning out mass-produced products that generated a
highly commercial system of culture which in turn sold the values,
life-styles, and institutions of "the American way of life."
The work of the Frankfurt School provided what Paul Lazarsfeld
(1942), one of the originators of modern communications studies,
called a critical approach, which he distinguished from the
"administrative research." The positions of Adorno, Lowenthal, and
other members of the inner circle of the Institute for Social
Research were contested by Walter Benjamin, an idiosyncratic
theorist loosely affiliated with the Institute. Benjamin, writing
in Paris during the 1930s, discerned progressive aspects in new
technologies of cultural production such as photography, film, and
radio. In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
(1969), Benjamin noted how new mass media were supplanting older
forms of culture whereby the mass reproduction of photography,
film, recordings, and publications replaced the emphasis on the
originality and "aura" of the work of art in an earlier era. Freed
from the mystification of high culture, Benjamin believed that
media culture could cultivate more critical individuals able to
judge and analyze their culture, just as sports fans could dissect
and evaluate athletic activities. In addition, processing the rush
of images of cinema created, Benjamin believed, subjectivities
better able to parry and comprehend the flux and turbulence of
experience in industrialized, urbanized societies.
Himself a collaborator of the prolific German artist Bertolt
Brecht, Benjamin worked with Brecht on films, created radio plays,
and attempted to utilize the media as organs of social progress. In
the essay "The Artist as Producer" (1999 [1934]), Benjamin argued
that progressive cultural creators should "refunction" the
apparatus of cultural production, turning theater and film, for
instance, into a forum of political enlightenment and discussion
rather than a medium of "culinary" audience pleasure. Both Brecht
and Benjamin wrote radio plays and were interested in film as an
instrument of progressive social change. In an essay on radio
theory, Brecht anticipated the Internet in his call for
reconstructing the apparatus of broadcasting from one-way
transmission to a more interactive form of two-way, or multiple,
communication (in Silberman 2000: 41ff.)-- a form first realized in
CB radio and then electronically-mediated computer communication.
Moreover, Benjamin wished to promote a radical cultural and media
politics concerned with the creation of alternative oppositional
cultures. Yet he recognized that media such as film could have
conservative effects. While he thought it was progressive that
mass-produced works were losing their "aura," their magical force,
and were opening cultural artifacts for more critical and political
discussion, he recognized that film could create a new kind of
ideological magic through the cult of celebrity and techniques like
the close-up that fetishized certain stars or images via the
technology of the cinema. Benjamin was thus one of the first
radical cultural critics to look carefully at the form and
technology of media culture in appraising its complex nature and
effects. Moreover, he developed a unique approach to cultural
history that is one of his most enduring legacies, constituting a
micrological history of Paris in the 18th century, an uncompleted
project that contains a wealth of material for study and reflection
(see Benjamin 2000 and the study in Buck-Morss 1989).
Max Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno answered Benjamin's optimism in a
highly influential analysis of the culture industry published in
their book Dialectic of Enlightenment, which first appeared in 1948
and was translated into English in 1972. They argued that the
system of cultural production dominated by film, radio
broadcasting, newspapers, and magazines, was controlled by
advertising and commercial imperatives, and served to create
subservience to the system of consumer capitalism. While later
critics pronounced their approach too manipulative, reductive, and
elitist, it provides an important corrective to more populist
approaches to media culture that downplay the way the media
industries exert power over audiences and help produce thought and
behavior that conforms to the existing society.
The Frankfurt School also provide useful historical perspectives on
the transition from traditional culture and modernism in the arts
to a mass-produced media and consumer society. In his path-breaking
book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Jurgen
Habermas further historicizes Adorno and Horkheimer's analysis of
the culture industry. Providing historical background to the
triumph of the culture industry, Habermas notes how bourgeois
society in the late 18th and 19th century was distinguished by the
rise of a public sphere that stood between civil society and the
state and which mediated between public and private interests. For
the first time in history, individuals and groups could shape
public opinion, giving direct expression to their needs and
interests while influencing political practice. The bourgeois
public sphere made it possible to form a realm of public opinion
that opposed state power and the powerful interests that were
coming to shape bourgeois society.
Habermas notes a transition from the liberal public sphere which
originated in the Enlightenment and the American and French
Revolution to a media-dominated public sphere in the current stage
of what he calls "welfare state capitalism and mass democracy."
This historical transformation is grounded in Horkheimer and
Adorno's analysis of the culture industry, in which giant
corporations have taken over the public sphere and transformed it
from a site of rational debate into one of manipulative consumption
and passivity. In this transformation, "public opinion" shifts from
rational consensus emerging from debate, discussion, and reflection
to the manufactured opinion of polls or media experts. For
Habermas, the interconnection between the sphere of public debate
and individual participation has thus been fractured and transmuted
into that of a realm of political manipulation and spectacle, in
which citizen-consumers ingest and absorb passively entertainment
and information. "Citizens" thus become spectators of media
presentations and discourse which arbitrate public discussion and
reduce its audiences to objects of news, information, and public
affairs. In Habermas's words: "Inasmuch as the mass media today
strip away the literary husks from the kind of bourgeois
self-interpretation and utilize them as marketable forms for the
public services provided in a culture of consumers, the original
meaning is reversed" (1989: 171).
Habermas's critics, however, contend that he idealizes the earlier
bourgeois public sphere by presenting it as a forum of rational
discussion and debate when in fact many social groups and most
women were excluded. Critics also contend that Habermas neglects
various oppositional working class, plebeian, and women's public
spheres developed alongside of the bourgeois public sphere to
represent voices and interests excluded in this forum (see the
studies in Calhoun 1992). Yet Habermas is right that in the period
of the democratic revolutions a public sphere emerged in which for
the first time in history ordinary citizens could participate in
political discussion and debate, organize, and struggle against
unjust authority. Habermas's account also points to the
increasingly important role of the media in politics and everyday
life and the ways that corporate interests have colonized this
sphere, using the media and culture to promote their own interests.
The culture industry thesis described both the production of
massified cultural products and homogenized subjectivities. Mass
culture for the Frankfurt School produced desires, dreams, hopes,
fears, and longings, as well as unending desire for consumer
products. The culture industry produced cultural consumers who
would consume its products and conform to the dictates and the
behaviors of the existing society. And yet, as Walter Benjamin
pointed out (1969), the culture industry also produces rational and
critical consumers able to dissect and discriminate among cultural
texts and performances, much as sports fans learn to analyze and
criticize sports events.
In retrospect, one can see the Frankfurt school work as
articulation of a theory of the stage of state and monopoly
capitalism that became dominant during the 1930s. This was an era
of large organizations, theorized earlier by Austro-Marxist Rudolf
Hilferding as "organized capitalism" (1980 [1910]), in which the
state and giant corporations managed the economy and in which
individuals submitted to state and corporate control. This period
is often described as "Fordism" to designate the system of mass
production and the homogenizing regime of capital which wanted to
produce mass desires, tastes, and behavior. It was thus an era of
mass production and consumption characterized by uniformity and
homogeneity of needs, thought, and behavior producing a mass
society and what the Frankfurt school described as "the end of the
individual." No longer was individual thought and action the motor
of social and cultural progress; instead giant organizations and
institutions overpowered individuals. The era corresponds to the
staid, conformist, and conservative world of corporate capitalism
that was dominant in the 1950s with its organization men and women,
its mass consumption, and its mass culture.
During this period, mass culture and communication were
instrumental in generating the modes of thought and behavior
appropriate to a highly organized and massified social order. Thus,
the Frankfurt school theory of the culture industry articulates a
major historical shift to an era in which mass consumption and
culture was indispensable to producing a consumer society based on
homogeneous needs and desires for mass-produced products and a mass
society based on social organization and homogeneity. It is
culturally the era of highly controlled network radio and
television, insipid top forty pop music, glossy Hollywood films,
national magazines, and other mass-produced cultural artifacts
Of course, media culture was never as massified and homogeneous as
in the Frankfurt school model and one could argue that the model
was flawed even during its time of origin and influence and that
other models were preferable, such as those of Walter Benjamin,
Siegfried Kracauer, Ernst Bloch, and others of the Weimar
generation and, later, British cultural studies. Yet the original
Frankfurt school model of the culture industry did articulate the
important social roles of media culture during a specific regime of
capital and provided a model, still of use, of a highly commercial
and technologically advanced culture that serves the needs of
dominant corporate interests, plays a major role in ideological
reproduction, and in enculturating individuals into the dominant
system of needs, thought, and behavior.
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David M. Nieporent niep...@alumni.princeton.edu