Page 50 - Culture Society and the Media

40 THEORIES OF THE MEDIA AND SOCIETY
by such debates. It was this tendency that Marcuse had in mind when he referred
to the media’s role in effecting a ‘closing of the universe of discourse’.
In an analysis of the presentation of prominent public figures in the American
popular press, for example, Marcuse argued that the language used tended
toward an ‘authoritarian identification of person and function’ (Marcuse, 1968,
p. 83) resulting in a ‘functionalized, abridged and unified language’ (ibid., p. 85)
which militated against conceptual thought. Commenting on the use of
‘hyphenized abridgement’ in the following phrase: ‘Georgia’s high-handed, low-
browed governor…had the stage all set for one of his wild political rallies last
week’, he argues:

The governor, his function, his physical features, and his political practices
are fused together into one indivisible and immutable structure which, in
its natural innocence and immediacy, overwhelms the reader’s mind. The
structure leaves no space for distinction, development, differentiation of
meaning: it moves and lives only as a whole. (ibid., p. 83)

Marcuse’s objection is thus to the ‘overwhelming concreteness’ of newspaper
copy: ‘This language, which constantly imposes images, militates against the
development and expression of concepts. In its immediacy and directness, it
impedes conceptual thinking; thus, it impedes thinking’ (ibid., p. 84).
The media, then, define for us the very terms in which we are to ‘think’ (or
not ‘think’) the world. Their influence has to be assessed not in terms of what we
think about or this or that particular issue, but in terms of the way in which they
condition our entire intellectual gestalt. The threat they embody is that they inhibit
thought itself by inducing us to live, mentally, in a world of hypnotic definitions
and automatic ideological equations which rule out any effective cognitive
mediation on our part. (Pateman, 1975, offers a useful and interesting extension
of this argument.)
It was, however, perhaps in their assessment of the cultural consequences of
the mass media that the negativity of the Frankfurt theorists’ vision received its
most acute expression. For they did not limit their concerns to the more obvious
manifestations of pulp culture produced by the American film and music
industries. True, they did devote considerable attention to these, describing their
mechanisms and effects, which they regarded as being virtually wholly narcotic
or, worse, lobotomic, in some detail (see especially, Horkheimer and Adorno,
1972). More distinctively, however, they also argued that the media had invaded
and subverted the world of traditional high or bourgeois culture, making it more
widely available only at the price of depriving it of the ‘aura’ of its separateness
upon which its critical function had depended.
According to the Frankfurt theorists, the bourgeois culture of the nineteenth
century had always been, if only equivocally, an oppositional culture. Sealed off
from the everyday world of business and commerce, it had spoken for the ideals
and aspirations which remained suppressed within the work-a-day world of the