Page 72 - Cultural Theory

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••• The Frankfurt School •••

proliferating media culture, postmodern architecture, shopping malls, and the
culture of the postmodern spectacle became the promoters and palaces of a new stage
of technocapitalism, the latest stage of capital, encompassing a postmodern image
and consumer culture (see Best and Kellner, 2001; Kellner, 2003).
Consequently, the turn to a postmodern cultural studies is a response to a new era
of global capitalism. What is described as the ‘new revisionism’ (McGuigan, 1992)
severs cultural studies from political economy and critical social theory. During the
postmodern stage of cultural studies, there is a widespread tendency to decentre, or
even ignore completely, economics, history, and politics in favour of emphasis on
local pleasures, consumption, and the construction of hybrid identities from the
material of the popular. This cultural populism replicates the turn in postmodern
theory away from Marxism and its alleged reductionism, master narratives of libera-
tion and domination, and historical teleology.
As argued in this chapter, there are many important anticipations of key positions of
British cultural studies in cultural Marxism and a wide range of traditions and positions
to draw upon for cultural studies today. Consequently, the project of cultural studies is
significantly broader than that taught in some contemporary curricula that identifies
cultural studies merely with the Birmingham School and their progeny. There are, how-
ever, many traditions and models of cultural studies, ranging from neo-Marxist models
developed by Lukács, Gramsci, Bloch, and the Frankfurt School in the 1930s to feminist
and psychoanalytic cultural studies to semiotic and post-structuralist perspectives
(see Durham and Kellner, 2001; Kellner, 1995). In Britain and the United States, there is
a long tradition of cultural studies that preceded the Birmingham School. And France,
Germany, and other European countries have also produced rich traditions that provide
resources for cultural studies throughout the world.
The major traditions of cultural studies combine – at their best – social theory, cultural
critique, history, philosophical analysis, and specific political interventions, thus over-
coming the standard academic division of labour by surmounting specialization arbi-
trarily produced by an artificial academic division of labour. Cultural studies thus
operates with a transdisciplinary conception that draws on social theory, economics,
politics, history, communication studies, literary and cultural theory, philosophy, and
other theoretical discourses – an approach shared by the Frankfurt School, British cul-
tural studies, and French postmodern theory. Transdisciplinary approaches to culture
and society transgress borders between various academic disciplines. In regard to cul-
tural studies, such approaches suggest that one should not stop at the border of a text,
but should see how it fits into systems of textual production, and how various texts are
thus part of systems of genres or types of production, and have an intertextual con-
struction – as well as articulating discourses in a given socio-historical conjuncture.

Conclusion

To summarize, in retrospect, one can see the Frankfurt School work as articulation of
a theory of the stage of state and monopoly capitalism that became dominant

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