Page 62 - Cultural Theory

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••• The Frankfurt School •••

patterns of thought and behaviour, 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, churn-
ing 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 (1941), one of the orig-
inators of modern communications studies, called a critical approach, which he distin-
guished from the ‘administrative research’. The positions of Adorno, Löwenthal, 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 sup-
planting 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, subjectiv-
ities better able to parry and comprehend the flux and turbulence of experience in indus-
trialized, 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’ ([1934] 1999), Benjamin argued that
progressive cultural creators should ‘refunction’ the apparatus of cultural production,
turning theatre and film, for instance, into a forum of political enlightenment and dis-
cussion 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 recon-
structing 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 con-
cerned 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 artefacts to more critical and political discussion, he recognized that film could
create a new kind of ideological magic through the cult of celebrity and techniques such

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