Page 64 - Culture Society and the Media

54 THE REDISCOVERY OF ‘IDEOLOGY’
media. A very specific historical image came to dominate this scenario: the
breakdown of European societies under the double assault of economic
depression and fascism: the latter seen in terms of the unleashing of irrational
political forces, in which the propaganda media had played a key role.
The Frankfurt School gave this critique its most biting philosophical
elaboration. (Their work and the mass culture debate is more extensively
discussed in the previous essay in this volume.) When, in the wake of fascism, the
Frankfurt School was dispersed, and its members took refuge in the United
States, they brought their pessimistic forebodings about mass society with them.
Briefly, their message was: ‘it can happen here, too’. In a way, American
behavioural science—which had already taken issue with the early versions of
this mass society critique—continued, in the 1940s and 1950s, to develop a sort
of displaced reply to this challenge. It argued that, though some of the tendencies
of mass society were undoubtedly visible in the United States, there were strong
countervailing tendencies. Primary groups had not disintegrated. Media effects
were not direct, but mediated by other social processes. Essentially, to the charge
that American society displayed symptoms of a sort of creeping totalitarianism,
American social scientists made the optimistic response: ‘pluralism works here’.
Perhaps more important than the distinction between ‘pessimistic’ and
‘optimistic’ social predictions about media effects, were the distinctions between
the theoretical and methodological approaches of the two schools. The European
approach was historically and philosophically sweeping, speculative, offering a
rich but over-generalized set of hypotheses. The American approach was
empirical, behavioural and scientistic. In fact, hypotheses proposed within one
framework were often tested, refined and found wanting in an altogether different
one. It is little wonder that hypotheses and findings were not commensurable. Only
those who believe that there is a given and incontrovertible set of facts, innocent
of the framework of theory in which they are identified, which can be subject to
empirical verification according to a universal scientific method, would have
expected that to be so. But this is exactly what American behavioural science
offered itself as doing. There are some intriguing transitional moments here
which are worth remarking—in lieu of a fuller account. They can be
encapsulated in the history of two emigrés. Lazarsfeld, a distinguished European
methodologist, linked with, though not a subscribing member of, the Frankfurt
School, became in fact the doyen and leading luminary of behavioural
methodology in the American context. (It has been speculated that his success at
the latter task may have had something to do with his early sensitization to more
speculative European questions: certainly, he was a more theoretically
sophisticated methodologist than his more technical colleagues.) Adorno, on the
other hand, the most formidable of the Frankfurt School theorists, attempted,
without any conspicuous success, to adapt his speculative critique to empirical
procedures. The Authoritarian Personality (1950) was a hybrid monster of just
this kind—the product of a mixed but unholy parentage.