Page 76 - Cultural Theory

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••• The Frankfurt School •••

discriminating judges of athletic activity, able to criticize and analyze sports events.
Benjamin postulated that the film audience can also become experts of criticism and
dissect the meanings and ideologies of film. Yet I believe that we need to synthesize
the concepts of the active and manipulated audience to grasp the full range of media
effects, thus avoiding both cultural elitism and populism.
Indeed, it is precisely the critical focus on media culture from the perspectives of
commodification, reification, technification, ideology, and domination developed
by the Frankfurt School that provides a perspective useful as a corrective to more
populist and uncritical approaches to media culture that surrender critical perspec-
tives – as is evident in some current forms of British and North American cultural
studies. In fact, the field of communications study was initially split into a division,
described by Lazarsfeld (1941) in an issue edited by the Frankfurt School on mass
communications, between the critical school associated with the Institute for Social
Research and administrative research, which Lazarsfeld defined as research carried
out within the parameters of established media and social institutions and that
would provide material that was of use to these institutions – research with which
Lazarsfeld himself would be identified. Hence, it was the Frankfurt School that inau-
gurated critical communications research and I am suggesting that a return to a
reconstructed version of the original model would be useful for media and cultural
studies today.
Although the Frankfurt School approach itself is partial and one-sided, it does pro-
vide tools to criticize the ideological forms of media culture and the ways that it
provides ideologies that legitimize forms of oppression. Ideology critique is a funda-
mental constituent of cultural studies and the Frankfurt School is valuable for inau-
gurating systematic and sustained critiques of ideology within the cultural industries.
It is especially useful in providing contextualizations of cultural criticism. Members
of the group carried out their analysis within the framework of critical social theory,
thus integrating cultural studies within the study of capitalist society and the ways
that communications and culture were produced within this order and the roles and
functions they assumed. Thus, the study of communication and culture became an
important part of a theory of contemporary society, in which culture and communi-
cation were playing ever more significant roles, and the Frankfurt School continues
to provide stimulating perspectives on the study of culture and society in the con-
temporary era.

Notes

1 For my general perspectives on the Frankfurt School, see Kellner (1984; 1989; 1995) and
Bronner and Kellner (1989).
2 On earlier traditions of cultural studies in the USA, see Aronowitz (1993) and for Britain, see
Davies (1995).
3 Articles in the 1983 Journal of Communications issue on Ferment in the Field (Vol. 33, No. 3
[Summer 1983]) noted a bifurcation of the field between a culturalist approach and more
empirical approaches in the study of mass-mediated communications. The culturalist

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