Frankfurt School

1. Marxist critique of the Culture
Industries

2.  The idea that the mass media and systems of
cultural production have done a great deal to
prevent the collapse of capitalism predicted by
Marx was developed by the theorists of the
Frankfurt School. This group of intellectuals
were active from the inception of the Frankfurt
Institute for Social Research in 1923 and their
work has been highly influential in Marxist
approaches to culture in capitalist societies.

3.  Through radio, TV, movies and forms of popular
music like jazz, the expanding culture industries
were disseminating ruling-class ideologies with
greater effect than Marx could have envisaged. The
further development of consumer society in the
twentieth century powerfully aided the process of
working-class incorporation by promoting new
myths of classlessness, and wedded the working
class even more tightly to acquisitive and property
owning beliefs. Even oppositional and critical
forms of culture can be marketed (consider Andy
Warhol, the Sex Pistols and Damian Hurst).

4. Even Anti-fashion is re-cycled as High
Fashion and then High Street fashion

5.  The Frankfurt School are (on the whole) highly
dismissive of popular culture because they see the
‘culture industry’ and the products that it churns
out as being little more than propaganda for
capitalism. This approach leads Theodor Adorno,
in particular, to make some damning indictments
of popular culture. Listeners to pop music are
‘infantile’ and fans of the jitterbug dance craze
were described as ‘retarded’, their dancing having
‘convulsive aspects reminiscent of St. Vitus’ dance
or the reflexes of mutilated animals.’ What would
he would have made of body popping?

6.  The very fact that popular culture is neither
difficult nor demanding and that it offers
simple and direct pleasures contributes to its
complicity in capitalist ideology. According to
Adorno, we crave ‘standardised’ cultural
products because they seem to validate lives
that are themselves standardised. At work we
are alienated by dull, repetitive and
undemanding tasks, but this alienating effect is
relieved by dull, repetitive and undemanding
cultural products (like pop songs) and cultural
pursuits (like dancing).

8.  Popular cultural products may seem to offer us
freedom of choice and aid to self-expression, but
for Adorno, this is an illusion; a phenomenon he
terms ‘pseudo-individualisation’. In singing along
with a pop song or in recognising a particular
variation on a theme we enjoy the feeling that we
are finding expression for own individual
emotions, but in reality we are simply imitating
others. Our consumption of popular culture
simply makes us docile, apathetic and passive,
hence more susceptible to manipulation by ruling
class ideology.

9.  Bands like Kraftwerk have focused on the
relationship between industry, machines,
robots and popular culture
 This is also expressed in many forms of dance
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1088521/brea
kin_turbos_broom_dance/

10.  Critics of the Frankfurt School analysis of
popular culture have argued that it is just too
negative and too sweeping in its
characterisation of cultural products and
cultural practices as ‘tools of capitalism’. It is
difficult to find evidence amongst today’s
consumers of popular culture of the
unqualified conformity that Adorno and
Horkheimer argued was responsible for
adjusting us to the norms and values of the
social system.

11.  It would be just as easy to find evidence of
diversity, creativity and, even, resistance to
dominant ideology in contemporary popular
cultural pursuits. This is not to say that cultural
practices have no ideological significance – far
from it.
 Rather, the critics of the Frankfurt School, still
working in a broadly Marxist tradition, have
suggested a more subtle relationship between
culture and ideology; one which recognises the
active role of consumers and users of cultural
products in creating meanings.