Page 60 - Cultural Theory

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The Frankfurt

CHAPTER THREE School
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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 have occurred since
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the classical theory of Marx. Working at the Institut for Sozialforschung in Frankfurt,
Germany, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, theorists such as Max Horkheimer,
Theodor. W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Löwenthal, and Erich Fromm analyzed a
wide variety of cultural phenomena, ranging from mass culture and communication to
classical music and literature. While Adorno, Löwenthal, and Marcuse are well known
as literary theorists, the Frankfurt School also produced some of the first accounts
within critical social theory of the importance of mass culture and communication in
social reproduction and domination. In their theory of the ‘culture industry’, the
Frankfurt School generated one of the first models of a critical cultural studies that ana-
lyzes the processes of cultural production and political economy, the politics of cultural
texts, and audience reception and use of cultural artefacts (Kellner, 1989; 1995; Steinert,
2003). I will accordingly first sketch out their ground-breaking critique of mass culture
and communication and then will indicate their broad perspectives on cultural sociol-
ogy, stressing both contributions and limitations.

The Frankfurt School and the Culture Industries

To a large extent, the Frankfurt School inaugurated critical studies of mass communica-
tion and culture, and produced the first critical theory of the cultural industries (see
Kellner, 1989; 1995; 1997). Moving from Nazi Germany to the United States, the
Frankfurt School experienced at first hand the rise of a media culture involving film, pop-
ular 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 theo-
rists, Max Horkheimer and Theodor. W. Adorno, developed an account of the ‘culture
industry’ to call attention to the industrialization and commercialization of culture under
capitalist relations of production (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1972). This situation was

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