Page 75 - Cultural Theory

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••• Douglas Kellner •••

range of cultural forms in our lives and, differentially, demonstrate how these forces
serve as instruments of domination, but also offer resources for resistance and
change. The Frankfurt School, I would argue, inaugurated such transdisciplinary
approaches to cultural studies combining analysis of the production and political
economy of culture, with textual analysis that contextualize cultural artefacts in their
socio-historical milieu, with studies of audience reception and use of cultural texts. 4
Yet there are serious flaws in the original programme of critical theory that requires
a radical reconstruction of the classical model of the culture industries (Kellner, 1989;
1995). Overcoming the limitations of the classical model would include: more con-
crete and empirical analysis of the political economy of the media and the processes
of the production of culture; more empirical and historical research into the con-
struction of media industries and their interaction with other social institutions;
more empirical studies of audience reception and media effects; more emphasis on
the use of media culture as providing forces of resistance; and the incorporation of
new cultural theories and methods into a reconstructed critical theory of culture and
society. Cumulatively, such a reconstruction of the classical Frankfurt School project
would update the critical theory of society and its activity of cultural criticism by
incorporating contemporary developments in social and cultural theory into the
enterprise of critical theory.
In addition, the Frankfurt School dichotomy between high culture and low culture is
problematical and should be superseded by a more unified model that takes culture as
a spectrum and applies similar critical methods to all cultural artefacts ranging from
opera to popular music, from modernist literature to soap operas. In particular, the
Frankfurt School model of a monolithic mass culture contrasted with an ideal of
‘authentic art’, which limits critical, subversive, and emancipatory moments to certain
privileged artefacts of high culture, is highly problematic. The Frankfurt School position
that all mass culture is ideological and homogenizing, having the effects of duping a pas-
sive mass of consumers, is also objectionable. Instead, one should see critical and ideo-
logical moments in the full range of culture, and not limit critical moments to high
culture and identify all of low culture as ideological. One should also allow for the pos-
sibility that critical and subversive moments could be found in the artefacts of the
cultural industries, as well as the canonized classics of high Modernist culture that the
Frankfurt School seemed to privilege as the site of artistic opposition and emancipation. 5
One should also distinguish between the encoding and decoding of media artefacts, and
recognize that an active audience often produces its own meanings and use for products
of the cultural industries.
British cultural studies overcomes some of these limitations of the Frankfurt School
by systematically rejecting high/low culture distinctions and taking seriously the
artefacts of media culture. Likewise, they overcome the limitations of the Frankfurt
School notion of a passive audience in their conceptions of an active audience that cre-
ates meanings and the popular. Yet it should be pointed out that Walter Benjamin –
loosely affiliated with the Frankfurt School but not part of their inner circle – also
took seriously media culture, saw its emancipatory potential, and posited the possi-
bility of an active audience. For Benjamin (1969), the spectators of sports events were
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