Page 65 - Cultural Theory

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••• Douglas Kellner •••

meaning’ found in popular television, stressing ‘polymorphic meanings’ and
distinctions between latent and manifest content.
Adorno’s examples come from the early 1950s TV shows and tend to see these
works as highly formulaic and reproducing conformity and adjustment. He criticizes
stereotyping in television, ‘pseudo-realism’, and its highly conventional forms and
meaning, an approach that accurately captures certain aspects of 1950s television,
but which is inadequate to capture the growing complexity of contemporary televi-
sion. Adorno’s approach to ‘hidden meanings’ is highly interesting, however, and his
psychoanalytic and ideological readings of television texts and speculation on their
effects are pioneering, and his call to transform the institution and forms of televi-
sion goes against what is sometimes presented as his elitism and lack of activism and
intervention in media culture.
While Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas, and other major Frankfurt School
theorists never systematically engage with production, texts, or audiences of media cul-
ture, they frequently acknowledge its importance in their development of a critical the-
ory of society, or in their comments on contemporary social phenomena. Following the
Frankfurt School analysis of changes in the nature of socialization, Herbert Marcuse, for
instance, noted the decline of the family as the dominant agent of socialization in Eros
and Civilization (1955) and the rise of the mass media, like radio and television:
For Marcuse, the repressive organization of the instincts seems to be collective, and the
ego seems to be prematurely socialized by a whole system of extra-familial agents and
agencies. As early as the pre-school level, gangs, radio, and television set the pattern for
conformity and rebellion; deviations from the pattern are punished not so much in the
family as outside and against the family. The experts of the mass media transmit the
required values; they offer the perfect training in efficiency, toughness, personality, dream
and romance. With this education, the family can no longer compete (ibid.: 97).
Marcuse saw broadcasting as part of an apparatus of administration and domina-
tion in a one-dimensional society. In his words:

with the control of information, with the absorption of individuals into mass
communication, knowledge is administered and confined. The individual does
not really know what is going on; the overpowering machine of entertainment
and entertainment unites him with the others in a state of anaesthesia from
which all detrimental ideas tend to be excluded.
(ibid.: 104)

On this view, media culture is part of an apparatus of manipulation and societal
domination. In One-Dimensional Man (1964), Marcuse claimed that the inanities of
commercial radio and television confirm his analyses of the individual and the
demise of authentic culture and oppositional thought, portraying broadcasting as
part of an apparatus producing the thought and behaviour needed for the social and
cultural reproduction of contemporary capitalist societies.
While the classical Frankfurt School members wrote little on contemporary media cul-
ture, their approach strongly influenced critical approaches to mass communication and

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