Page 106 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

FRANKFURT SCHOOL

resulting cultural uniformity that left little room for productive
political action.
The process of investigation for the Frankfurt School theorists had
to be radically different from traditional philosophical idealism. If
idealism had failed, as they believed, to unify separate disciplines
through rational order, then the task of philosophy must be ‘a process
of continuous interpretation’. Interpretation for Adorno involved
constructing historical truths out of the text of the social world
(Pensky, 1997). Like a multidimensional puzzle, everyday articles,
modern art and music, streets, films and dress that appeared to be
randomly positioned could simultaneously be seen to make up a clear
picture. Their encoded messages, Adorno believed, could be
misleading and superficial if read apathetically. In order to see the
true picture – and to bring about the dissolution of the puzzle itself –
the viewer must necessarily take a step back, engage in continual
critique, shattering accepted conceptual systems. This was the task of
the critical theorist, intended to release conceptual thought from the
repressive confines of scientific reason and to point out the gaps and
exits on the pathway to a seemingly unavoidable capitalist type of
‘progress’.
Adorno called this approach negative dialectics. Negative dialectics
is a means of confronting ideologies as they manifest in social relations.
This requires recognising that we only grasp the meaning of objects by
attaching our own conceptual label to them: our history, knowledge,
thoughts and assumptions. ‘Identity thinking’ is therefore bringing our
generalised conceptions to act as a classifying scheme to new
experiences in order to comprehend what would otherwise be
unmediated intuition. If we are able to acknowledge the insufficiency
of this comprehension, then we are able to view the value of the object
as part of a historical process. Only through such ‘immanent’ criticism
can we know its limitations, contradictions and place within the
world. Therefore, rather than seeing society as simply an object (as it is
understood through a scientific approach), it is a subject-object: it is
the object as well as the subject of knowledge. In order to understand
society, we must know its processes, and by doing so we can disclose its
contradictions. Although the Frankfurt School theorists differed
widely in their approaches, their legacy has become that of the power
of critique: ‘with criticising ideology and thus helping to create
awareness of the possibility of a break with the existing structure of
domination’ (Held, 1980: 357).
Perhaps the most significant contribution of the Frankfurt School
was its lasting transformation of the political out of the limited subjects

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