Page 68 - Cultural Theory

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••• The Frankfurt School •••

account also points to the increasingly important role of the media in politics and
everyday life and the ways that corporate interests have colonized this sphere, using
the media and culture to promote their own interests.
The culture industry thesis described both the production of massified cultural prod-
ucts and homogenized subjectivities. Mass culture for the Frankfurt School produced
desires, dreams, hopes, fears, and longings, as well as unending desire for consumer
products. The culture industry produced cultural consumers who would consume its
products and conform to the dictates and the behaviours of the existing society. And
yet, as Walter Benjamin pointed out (1969), the culture industry also produces rational
and critical consumers able to dissect and discriminate among cultural texts and per-
formances, much as sports fans learn to analyze and criticize sports events.

The Frankfurt School and British Cultural Studies

While the Frankfurt School arguably articulates cultural conditions in the stage of
state monopoly capitalism or Fordism that produced a regime of mass production
and consumption, British cultural studies emerged in the 1960s when, first, there was
widespread global resistance to consumer capitalism and an upsurge of revolutionary
movements, and then emergence of a new stage of capital, described as ‘post-
Fordism’, postmodernity, or other terminology that attempted to describe a more
variegated and contested social and cultural formation (Kellner, 1997).
Moreover, the forms of culture described by the earliest phase of British cultural stud-
ies in the 1950s and early 1960s articulated conditions in an era in which there were still
significant tensions in the UK and much of Europe between an older culture based on
the working class and the newer mass-produced culture whose models and exemplars
were the products of American culture industries. The initial project of cultural studies
developed by Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, and E.P. Thompson attempted to
preserve working-class culture against the onslaughts of mass culture produced by the
culture industries. Thompson’s inquiries into the history of British working-class insti-
tutions and struggles, the defence of working-class culture by Hoggart and Williams, and
their attacks on mass culture were part of a socialist and working-class-oriented project
that assumed that the industrial working class was a force of progressive social change
and that it could be mobilized and organized to struggle against the inequalities of the
existing capitalist societies and for a more egalitarian socialist one. Williams and Hoggart
were deeply involved in projects of working-class education and were oriented toward
socialist working-class politics, seeing their form of cultural studies as an instrument of
progressive social change.
The early critiques in the first wave of British cultural studies of Americanism and
mass culture in Hoggart, Williams, and others during the late 1950s and early 1960s,
thus paralleled to some extent the earlier critique of the Frankfurt School, yet val-
orized a working class that the Frankfurt School saw as defeated in Germany and
much of Europe during the era of fascism and which they never saw as a strong
resource for emancipatory social change. The 1960s work of the Birmingham School

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