Page 73 - Cultural Theory

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••• Douglas Kellner •••

during the 1930s. This was an era of large organizations, theorized earlier by
Austro-Marxist Rudolf Hilferding as ‘organized capitalism’ ([1910] 1981), in which
the state and giant corporations managed the economy and in which individuals
submitted to state and corporate control. This period is often described as ‘Fordism’
to designate the system of mass production and the homogenizing regime of capital
that produced mass desires, tastes, and behaviour. It was thus an era of mass pro-
duction and consumption characterized by uniformity and homogeneity of needs,
thought, and behaviour producing a mass society and what the Frankfurt School
described as ‘the end of the individual’. No longer were individual thought and
action the motor of social and cultural progress; instead giant organizations and
institutions overpowered individuals. The era corresponds to the staid, conformist,
and conservative world of corporate capitalism that was dominant in the 1950s with
its organization men and women, its mass consumption, and its mass culture.
During this period, mass culture and communication were instrumental in gener-
ating the modes of thought and behaviour appropriate to a highly organized and
massified social order. Thus, the Frankfurt School theory of the culture industry artic-
ulates a major historical shift to an era in which mass consumption and culture were
indispensable to producing a consumer society based on homogeneous needs and
desires for mass-produced products and a mass society based on social organization
and homogeneity. It is culturally the era of highly controlled network radio and tele-
vision, insipid top 40 pop music, glossy Hollywood films, national magazines, and
other mass-produced cultural artefacts.
Of course, media culture was never as massified and homogeneous as in the
Frankfurt School model and one could argue that the model was flawed even during
its time of origin and influence and that other models were preferable, such as those of
Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer (1995), Ernst Bloch (1986), and others of the
Weimar generation and, later, British cultural studies. Yet the original Frankfurt School
model of the culture industry did articulate the important social roles of media culture
during a specific regime of capital and provided a model, still of use, of a highly com-
mercial and technologically advanced culture that serves the needs of dominant
corporate interests, plays a major role in ideological reproduction, and in enculturating
individuals into the dominant system of needs, thought, and behaviour.
I have been arguing that there are many important anticipations of key positions
of British cultural studies in the Frankfurt School, that they share many positions and
dilemmas, and that a dialogue between these traditions is long overdue. I would also
propose seeing the project of cultural studies as broader than that taught in the con-
temporary curricula and as encompassing a wide range of figures from various social
locations and traditions. There are indeed 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 poststructuralist perspectives. In Britain and the United States, there is
2
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.
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