Page 49 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 39
This, then, was the perspective which informed the Frankfurt theorists’
historical vision. The dialectic of history, the mutually interactive relationship
between the subject (human agents) and the object (the social conditions of their
existence) appeared to have been fractured, the result being a complete social
stasis in conditions which, so far as Adorno was concerned, were little short of
hell. How had this come about? The Frankfurt theorists sought the answer to this
question on the subject rather than the object side of the equation. If the prospect
of radical social change no longer seemed imminent, they argued, this was
substantially because the consciousness of a need for such change had been
eliminated, yielding an ideological climate in which the prospect of a horizon
beyond the limits constituted by the present had been virtually lobotomized.
To do even rough justice to the Frankfurt analysis of the mechanisms whereby
oppositional social and intellectual forces were said to have been thus contained
and brought to heel would be a lengthy undertaking (Jay, 1973, and Slater, 1977,
offer useful general surveys). We can only deal here with those aspects of the
analysis which bear most closely on the media.
One of the more challenging thrusts of Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man
(1968) is the contention that the apparent rationality of production in advanced
capitalism renders the social system as such immune to criticism. The system is
‘sold’ by its success, by its ability to produce the goods:

The productive apparatus and the goods and services which it produces
‘sell’ or impose the social system as a whole. The means of mass
transportation and communication, the commodities of lodging, food, and
clothing, the irresistible output of the entertainment and information
industry carry with them prescribed attitudes and habits, certain
intellectual and emotional reactions which bind the consumers more or less
pleasantly to the producers and, through the latter, to the whole. The
products indoctrinate and manipulate; they promote a false consciousness
which is immune against its falsehood…. Thus emerges a pattern of
onedimensional thought and behaviour in which ideas, aspirations, and
objectives that, by their content, transcend the established universe of
discourse and action are either repelled or reduced to the terms of this
universe. (Marcuse, 1968, pp. 26–7)

This tendency of the system of production to inoculate itself against subversion,
Marcuse argued, has been reinforced by the tendency for the terms in which
political issues are publicly discussed to be limited to the question of determining
which techniques (for example, the debate between Keynesian and monetarist
forms of economic policy) are best capable of managing the system as it is and
of containing its contradictions. For the possibility of scheduling alternative
political ends which qualitatively transcend or are at odds with existing social
arrangements is automatically excluded from the terms of reference established