Page 53 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 43
The reaction from the left has been more equivocal. For there can be little
doubt that the Frankfurt School has acted as an influential theoretical ginger
group in relation to the mainstream of Marxism. The centrality it accorded to the
study of ideology has played an important role in undermining the economism
which has always been a strong tendency within Marxism. There is also little
doubt that the perspective of containment—the analysis of the ideological means
whereby the contradictions of capitalism are contained or held in check—has
proved influential. Nevertheless, the philosophical premises on which the
Frankfurt critique rested—particularly its philosophical negativity—have been,
by and large, rejected; more so in Britain than in America, however, where the
journal Telos has kept the Frankfurt flag flying. The reasons for this rejection
have principally concerned the role the Frankfurt theorists assigned to the
category of ‘negation’. In opposition to the Leninist construction of the
relationship between theory and practice—that theory must become practical by
gripping the minds and directing the activities of the proletariat through the
mediation of an organized political party—the Frankfurt theorists, particularly
Adorno, argued that theory must give up the endeavour to change the world by
transforming itself into practice. Theory thus became passive, negative in its
function. Theory’s purpose was not to change the world but to oppose to the
world its powers of negation, to refuse to confer on it a Hegelian consecration of
the rationality of its reality. By thus adopting a position of transcendence in
relation to reality, theory was, at the same time, deprived of any means whereby
it might connect with reality in order to change it.
The consequences of this were serious. ‘For in negative fault finding,’ Hegel
argued, ‘one stands nobly and with proud mien above the matter without
penetrating into it and without comprehending its positive aspects’ (Hegel, 1953,
p. 47). This exactly describes the position of the Frankfurt theorists. Although
they condemned reality in round terms, they had no positive suggestions to make
as to how it might be changed. Counterposing to ‘that which is’ an ideal
conception of ‘that which ought to be’, but unable to locate any concrete social
mechanisms whereby the gap between the two might be bridged, the result of their
criticism was merely to leave everything as it is. Our current social reality was
castigated as a ‘bad reality’, indeed as irremediably bad, but, by the same token,
it was simultaneously philosophically immortalized. Their policy of retreatism in
relation to the media aptly symbolized this for, as Brecht argues, its result could
only be to perpetuate the conditions that had prompted the critique in the first
place:

Anybody who advises us not to make use of such new apparatus [the
media] just confirms the right of the apparatus to do bad work; he forgets
himself out of sheer open-mindedness, for he is thus proclaiming his
willingness to have nothing but dirt produced for him. (Brecht, 1964, p.
47)