Page 52 - Culture Society and the Media

42 THEORIES OF THE MEDIA AND SOCIETY
Benjamin who argued that the development of techniques permitting the
reproduction of works of art on a limitless scale, depriving them of their ‘aura’,
the uniqueness of their singular existence, had created the technical
preconditions whereby art, in being freed from the sacredness of its singular
presence, was able to enter the domain of politics in a form in which it could be
both produced and appropriated by the masses (Benjamin, 1970).
This was decidedly not the perspective of the Frankfurt theorists. Art, they
argued, could fulfil its oppositional function only by refusing any compromise
with reality. But, by the same token, it was thereby unable to have any impact on
the consciousness of those whose minds are forged in the midst of a
compromised reality. If art did compromise so that it might be made available to
the masses it would, by the same token, lose its oppositional value. Adorno
summarized this dilemma as follows:

The effect that they [works of art] would wish to have is at present absent,
and they suffer from that absence greatly; but as soon as they attempt to
attain that effect by accommodating themselves to prevailing needs, they
deprive men of precisely that which they could…give them. (Cited in Slater,
1977, p. 141)

The result was the advocacy of a policy of retreatism in relation to the media
which, it was argued, were so compromised that they could not be used by
oppositional social forces:

No work of art, no thought, has a chance of survival, unless it bears within
it repudiation of the false riches and high-class production, of colour films
and television, millionaire’s magazines and Toscanini. The older media, not
designed for mass production, take on a new timelessness: that of
exemption and improvization. They alone could outflank the united front
of trusts and technology. In a world where books have long lost all likeness
to books, the real book can no longer be one. If the invention of the
printing press inaugurated the bourgeois era, the time is at hand for its
repeal by the mimeograph, the only fitting, the unobtrusive means of
dissemination. (Adorno, 1974, pp. 20–1)

How one chooses to assess the Frankfurt School depends on the perspective from
which one views it. Karl Popper once remarked in a radio programme that, so far
as he could see, Adorno had nothing to say, and, what is more, said it in a
Hegelian fashion. This, in an exaggerated way, typifies the response to the
Frankfurt theorists on the part of the mainstream of Anglo-Saxon philosophy
which, rather than criticizing their works in a sustained or rigorous fashion, has
been content to claim that they are simply incomprehensible, Hegelian mumbo-
jumbo at its worst.