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The Frankfurt School

Communication 602

The Origins of The Frankfurt School*


Set up in 1923 to study the social characteristics and contradictions of modern capitalist societies, with a particular focus on the role of ideological systems on reproducing these societies. Key Figures: Adorno, Horkheimer, Lowenthal, Marcuse, Habermas, Benjamin.

*Dominic Strinati (1995)

The Rise of Fascism


Hitlers rise to power in Germany forced the members of the School to flee. Adorno, Horkheimer, and Lowenthal landed in America, living in Los Angeles and New York. Most returned to Germany in the late 1940s. Marcuse remained in the USA.

The Dialectic of the Enlightenment (1944)

First, some definitions


What is the Enlightenment anyway?

The Enlightenment

The Enlightenment is the name given to the philosophical, scientific, and social movements of the 18th century.
These movements (the Scientific Revolution, the Age of Reason, etc.) sought to liberate humanity from the tyranny of myth, religion, and superstition.

The Enlightenment: Instrumental Rationality

The scholars of the Enlightenment sought to replace these myths and repressive institutions (the King, the Church, etc.) with the rule of reason.

The Enlightenment

Science vs. Myth: Science and rationality would replace religion in explaining the natural and social world. Man vs. Nature: Technological progress would dominate nature. Nature would serve humanity. Freedom vs. Tyranny: The application of reason to politics would create political systems that liberate individuals and subject state policy to the process of reasoned debate and argument.

But then, something went very, very wrong

The tools of instrumental rationality, originally intended to liberate humanity from myth and nature were quickly turned on humanity itself.

The Frankfurt Schools Critique of the Enlightenment

The promise of the Enlightenment, the belief in scientific and technical progress and the extension of human freedom, had turned into a nightmare, the use of science and rationality to stamp out human freedom (Strinati, 1995, p. 54).

The Critique of The Enlightenment

Technological and scientific advances enhance the ability of established power to exert social control over individuals.
The tools of the Enlightenmentreason, science, technologybecome powerful tools of bureaucracy, administration, and centralized control.

The Triumph of Total Administration

The use of instrumental rationality to subdue and control nature is used by elites to subdue, control, and administer human life.

Political Life Economic Life Cultural Life

The Result: Fascism

The endpoint of the Enlightenment the total, rationalized, inhuman regimentation of everyday life.
All social life, cultural life, political life efficiently but ruthlessly administered by central state bureaucracy.

The Frankfurt School: It isnt just Fascism, folks

Horkheimer and Adorno saw a similar process of total administration occurring in the ostensibly free societies of the capitalist West.

The Triumph of Total Administration: Modern Capitalism

The lives of individuals in capitalism are administered and controlled almost as completely as those in Fascist societies.

The Promise of the Enlightenment: Politics


The State would be subject to the consent of the governed. State policies would be debated by a vigorous and rational public, whose opinion would be informed by an independent press. Representatives would be subject to the force of this rational-critical public opinion.

The Reality of Total Administration: Political Life

Public opinion is profoundly by established (pro-capitalist) powers and their allies in the private (corporate-controlled) media. Consent to the status quo is manufactured through the political media. The choice of voters is a false choice. No real alternatives to the current system are ever allowed into the process.

The Promise of the Enlightenment: Economics

An economy run by the natural laws of the market would generate freedom and increase wealth in the society. Private property and the pursuit of selfinterest would spur producers to best meet the needs of consumers. The force of competition would make sure that producers would continually innovate and would prevent them from exploiting either their consumers or their workers.

Total Administration: Economic Life

Both workers and capitalist are chained to an economic system capitalismthat has escaped their control and, in turn, has enslaved them.

Economic Life: The Workers

Most people, separated from the means of production by rules of private property, are forced to sell their labor to survive. Their labortheir human energies and timeis turned into a commodity that is bought and sold. They cannot but do this, their survival depends on selling their labor.

Economic Life: The Workers and Alienation

Their labor becomes alienatedwhat should be a source of creativity becomes a source of pain and misery. They become mere extensions of the machines to which they are chained.

Another day in paradise

Economic Life: The Capitalists


The capitalists are enslaved by the market system as well. The force of coercive competition compels the capitalist to forever innovate, invest, improve, restructure. To rest for a moment is to court disaster, and a plunge back into the ranks of the dispossessed.

Total Administration: Cultural and Social Life

For the Frankfurt School, the realms of culture (high art and folk art) are being progressively colonized by the logic of the marketplace. Culture becomes the culture industry

In the process, the intellectual challenge of high art, and the primal, rebellious release of folk art are lost in the easy, light distractions of mass culture.

The Culture Industry

Mass Culture extends the reach of administration and control into our leisure time. Our leisure time is spent consuming commodities we dont need, and immersing ourselves in light entertainment that both blunts our capacity to think and affirms the legitimacy of the system. All of this serves to perpetuate the system that enslaves us.

The Culture Industry: False versus True Needs

Capitalist society cultivates false needs and easily satisfies them, thereby distracting individuals from realizing the inability of the system to meet their true needs. False needs include diversion, escape, sensation, status.

Cultural Industry: False vs. True Needs


True Needs: Justice Self-determination Creative work Independent thought

Coca-Cola: Id like to teach the world to sing

Total Administration and the Affluent Society

When the living standards of the masses rise to the point where they can gain access to the false needs of consumer society, the possibility of social change (revolution) recedes.
Distracted by the easy but false pleasures of mass culture and consumer society, the proletariat consents to a life of quiet toil and political manipulation.

The Result: One-Dimensional Society

Individuals increasingly identify their interests and their consciousness with the preservation of the system that dominates them (but which also delivers the goods).

One-Dimensional Society

There is no critical distance between individuals and the system. Every waking hour feeds back in to the preservation of the system.
The advertisements we see, the movies we watch, the novels we read: they all either distract us from the reality of our dispossession or they actively legitimate the status quo (representing it as free and progressive).

One-Dimensional Society

The result is a society where dissent, critique, and hope for social change recede into the horizon, due to the societys material affluence and the exclusion of alternatives from the media and political systems.
Our ability to imagine utopiaa society that can meet our true and vital needs evaporates.

Horkheimer & Adorno: The Critique of the Culture Industry


1. Mass Culture is Formulaic and Repetitive:

Every detail is so firmly stamped with sameness that nothing can appear which is not marked at birth or does not meet with approval at first sight. In this, culture becomes a commodity like any other pre-fabbed, standardized, mass produced.

The Critique of the Culture Industry


2. There are endless surface variations, but the underlying formulae are the same.

The Critique of the Culture Industry


3. Mass Culture does the work for us. It cues our response. It blunts our ability to think for ourselves.

The Music Swells

The Culture Industry and Regressive Consciousness

The ability of mass culture to perpetuate the status quo lies in its promotion and exploitation of the egoweakness to which the powerless members of contemporary society, with its concentration of power, are condemned. Their consciousness is further developed retrogressively. It is no coincidence that cynical American film producers are heard to say that their pictures must take into consideration the level of eleven year-olds. In doing so they would very much like to make adults into eleven-year olds. --Theodor Adorno, 1991.

The Critique of The Culture Industry


4. The content of the culture industry is affirmativethat is, it never directly challenges the status quo and takes the current system of social relations as an unquestioned given.

E-ring, NBC

The Affirmative Character of the Culture Industry

IT'S A LOOK INSIDE THE WORLD'S MOST POWERFUL BUILDING - THE PENTAGON - When an American "asset" in China sends out a call for help, Major Jim (J.T.) Tinewski (Benjamin Bratt) must take on the responsibility of convincing not only his superior, Colonel Bob McNulty (Dennis Hopper), but the Joint Chiefs of Staff and their advisors that the United States should risk a potential war with China and come to her rescue. It's a hub of highly explosive conflicts between decorated and experienced American military heroes and the civilians to whom they report.

The Affirmative Character of the Culture Industry

There is the agreementor at least the determinationof all executive authorities not to produce or sanction anything that in any way differs from their own rules, their own ideas about consumers, and above all themselves.
--Horkheimer & Adorno, 1944

The concepts of order that it [the culture industry] hammers into human beings are always that of the status quo
--Adorno, 1975

Doesnt the Culture Industry Just Give Us What We Want?

No. The Desires of Consumers are Conditioned by the Industry


Capitalist production so confines them [the consumers], body and soul, that they fall helpless victim to what is offered themImmovably they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them (H & A, 1944). The attitude of the public, which ostensibly and actually favors the system of the culture industry, is part of the system and not an excuse for it. (H & A, 1994)

Consumer Sovereignty or Mass Deception?


Media firms cannot predict the success of their offerings in advance. This leads them to be conservative, to reduce risks, to copy what has been successful in the past. This has led to the development of a handful of commercially successful genres with formulaic characters and plots.

Consumer Sovereignty or Mass Deception?


Over time, this supply of formulaic culture creates its own demand. Rarely exposed to alternatives, we become accustomed to these formulae. We come to demand them.

Consumer Sovereignty or Mass Deception?

The argumentbecomes circular. People consume from a relatively narrow range of what media firms find most lucrative to produce; then when consumers select from these options, the firms say, see, we must be giving you what you want. (McChesney, 2004, p. 199).

The Picture of the Audience?


Passive Beaten down Duped Manipulated Their imagination confined within the horizon of the media systemunable to imagine alternatives.

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