Page 118 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

106 BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES AND THE RETURN OF THE ‘CRITICAL’

for over four decades, constituting a considerable body of literature which
reflected the extent and quality of the modernist debate in a number of
disciplines. The subsequent readings and interpretations by mass
communication research remained peripheral to the field, but reveal an
expressed tendency to appropriate compatible ideas. This practice of
collecting and adapting theoretical propositions and practical applications
for the better ment of society, disregarding cultural or political origins and
ideological foundations, reflects an intellectual process of Americanizing
ideas. It has occurred in the social sciences with the influence of European
knowledge on American scholarship since the beginning of academic
institutions in the United States, and is most clearly visible in American
pragmatism (particularly in Dewey’s instrumentalism), which seemed to
acquire and apply suitable theoretical propositions according to the
interests it served at the time.
Thus, to realize the potential contribution of critical theory to a critique
of contemporary society, mass communication research needed to explore
the rise of critical theory in the cultural and political context of Weimar
Germany. Specifically, its attempts to replace the preoccupation of
traditional philosophy with science and nature by shifting to an emphasis
upon history and culture, and its acute awareness of the relationship
between epistemology and politics, were decisive elements for such analysis.
They offered the basis for an intensive examination of the critique of
modern society, including a discussion of its philosophical (and political)
consequences for mass communication research. Such enquiry, however,
remained uncompleted, and a debate of critical theory as the foundation of
a critical theory of mass communication was limited to sporadic
contributions from other disciplines.
For instance, when Paul Lazarsfeld recognized the political nature of
mass communication research and began to formulate his position vis-à-vis
the reality of economic and political authority in the United States, he
offered a reading of critical theory and the Frankfurt School which ignored
the theoretical premises and their practical consequences (particularly as
suggested in the work of Horkheimer and Adorno). Instead, he produced
his own claims for critical research without leaving, theoretically or
practically (politically), the traditional bourgeois context of the social
science enterprise. The notion of a critical position ultimately meant a
recognition of authority and a reconciliation with power; it also meant
working with the necessity for change within the dominant paradigm and
arguing for the convergence of existing theoretical or practical
perspectives. Thus, the ‘critical’ research of Lazarsfeld is neither based
upon a critique of society nor engaged in a questioning of authority in the
populist, reformist sense of traditional social criticism.
Instead, it represents the repositioning of traditional social science
research within the practice of what C.Wright Mills has called abstracted