Page 64 - Cultural Theory

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••• The Frankfurt School •••

Following the model of critique of mass culture in Dialectic of Enlightenment, a
Frankfurt School approach to the media analyzed these cultural forces within the
dominant system of cultural production and reception, situating the medium
within its institutional and political framework. It combined study of text and audi-
ence with ideology critique and a contextualizing analysis of how television texts
and audiences are situated within specific social relations and institutions. The
approach combines Marxian critique of political economy with ideology critique,
textual analysis, and psychoanalytically-inspired depth-approaches to audiences
and effects.
Theodor W. Adorno’s article ‘How to look at television’ (1991) provides a striking
example of a classic Frankfurt School analysis. Adorno opens by stressing the impor-
tance of undertaking an examination of the effects of television upon viewers,
making using of ‘depth-psychological categories’). In his words:

The effect of television cannot be adequately expressed in terms of success or
failure, likes or dislikes, approval or disapproval. Rather, an attempt should be
made, with the aid of depth-psychological categories and previous knowledge
of mass media, to crystallize a number of theoretical concepts by which the
potential effect of television – its impact upon various layers of the spectator’s
personality – could be studied. It seems timely to investigate systematically
socio-psychological stimuli typical of televised material both on a descriptive
and psychodynamic level, to analyze their presuppositions as well as their total
pattern, and to evaluate the effect they are likely to produce it …
We can change this medium of far-reaching potentialities only if we look at
it in the same spirit which we hope will one day be expressed by its imagery.

(Adorno 1991: 136, 151)

Adorno had previously collaborated with Paul Lazarsfeld on some of the first exami-
nations of the impact of radio and popular music on audiences (Lazarsfeld, 1941).
While working on The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al., [1950] 1969), Adorno
took on a position as director of the scientific branch of the Hacker Foundation in
Beverly Hills, a psychoanalytically-oriented foundation, and undertook examina-
tions of the socio-psychological roots and impact of mass cultural phenomena, focus-
ing on television in one study (Adorno, 1991) and the astrological column of the Los
Angeles Times in another (Adorno, 1994).
In view of the general impression that the Frankfurt School make sharp and prob-
lematic distinctions between high and low culture, it is interesting that Adorno
opens his study with a deconstruction of ‘the dichotomy between autonomous art
and mass media’. Stressing that their relation is ‘highly complex’, Adorno claims that
distinctions between popular and elite art are a product of historical conditions and
should not be exaggerated. After a historical examination of older and recent popu-
lar culture, Adorno analyzes the ‘multilayered structure of contemporary television’.
In light of the notion that the Frankfurt School reduces the texts of media culture
to ideology, it is interesting that Adorno calls for analysis of the ‘various layers of

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