Page 70 - Cultural Theory

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••• The Frankfurt School •••

From the beginning, British cultural studies was highly political in nature and
investigated the potentials for resistance in oppositional subcultures. After first val-
orizing the potential of working-class cultures, they next indicated how youth sub-
cultures could resist the hegemonic forms of capitalist domination. Unlike the
classical Frankfurt School (but similar to Herbert Marcuse), British cultural studies
turned to youth cultures as providing potentially new forms of opposition and social
change. Through studies of youth subcultures, British cultural studies demonstrated
how culture came to constitute distinct forms of identity and group membership and
appraised the oppositional potential of various youth subcultures (see Jefferson,
1976; Hebdige, 1979). Cultural studies came to focus on how subcultural groups
resist dominant forms of culture and identity, creating their own style and identities.
Individuals who conform to dominant dress and fashion codes, behaviour, and polit-
ical ideologies thus produce their identities within mainstream groups, as members
of specific social groupings (such as white, middle-class conservative Americans).
Individuals who identify with subcultures, like punk culture, or black nationalist sub-
cultures, look and act differently from those in the mainstream, and thus create
oppositional identities, defining themselves against standard models.
However, British cultural studies, unlike the Frankfurt School, did not adequately
engage modernist and avant-garde aesthetic movements, limiting its attentions by
and large to products of media culture and ‘the popular’. However, the Frankfurt
School engagement with modernism and avant-garde art in many of its protean
forms is arguably more productive than the ignoring of modernism and to some
extent high culture as a whole by many within British cultural studies. It appears that
in its anxiety to legitimate study of the popular and to engage the artefacts of media
culture, British cultural studies turned away from so-called ‘high’ culture in favour of
the popular, but such a turn sacrifices the possible insights into all forms of culture
and replicates the bifurcation of the field of culture into a ‘popular’ and ‘elite’ (which
merely inverts the positive/negative valorizations of the older high/low distinction).
More importantly, it disconnects cultural studies from attempts to develop opposi-
tional forms of culture of the sort associated with the ‘historical avant-garde’. Avant-
garde movements such as Expressionism, Surrealism, and Dada wanted to develop art
that would revolutionize society, which would provide alternatives to hegemonic
forms of culture.
British cultural studies – like the Frankfurt School – insists that culture must be
studied within the social relations and system through which culture is produced and
consumed, and that thus analysis of culture is intimately bound up with the study of
society, politics, and economics. The key Gramscian concept of hegemony led British
cultural studies to investigate how media culture articulates a set of dominant values,
political ideologies, and cultural forms into a hegemonic project that incorporates indi-
viduals into a shared consensus, as individuals became integrated into the consumer
society and political projects like Reaganism or Thatcherism (see Hall, 1988). This
project is similar in many ways to that of the Frankfurt School, as are their meta-
theoretical perspectives that combine political economy, textual analysis, and study of
audience reception within the framework of critical social theory.

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