Frankfurt School

• initially founded in 1966, home base was “The Institute of Social Research @ the University of Frankfurt)
• Founded in the wake of the successful soviet union in 1917.
• Firstly to observe the developments of communism through Marxist ideas, consider the developments of Marxism in western society.
• Key theorists include:
  • Theodore Adorlo
  • Jurgen Habermas
  • Hebert Marcuse
  • All of them left-wing German-Jewish
  • Take the oppressive outlook
  • Fascism in America, 1933 (occupation)
• The way in which the media had been manipulated by Hitler. Made very popular propaganda films inculcating a vision of a German nation. Used radio media as propaganda to build national support for their movement. Wary of this and began to develop negative ideas about mass media.
• Exiled to the United States, America was a neutral nation. The widespread appeal and the omnipresence of popular culture, FS discovered a sinister aspect of mass culture branching into capitalism
• Marx suggested working class oppressed by social relations of capitalism – man was ‘a mere appendage to the machine’
• According to FS mass entertainment took over from labour as a means of oppression by:
  • Polarizing individuals into single units of consumption
  • Transforming individuals into a homogenous mass audience
  • Regarding leisure time in a similar way to the regulation of work time
• More leisure time means more consumption means the spread of popular culture and the manipulation of workers.
• Dwight McDonald suggested mass culture was fabricated by the higher-ups. Audience are passive consumers, limited to the choice of either buying or not buying. That was your only choice in the late capitalism. Pre-made, pre-organized choices.
• Frankfurt’s school’s critique didn’t just suggest that mass media was an economic exploitation, there was an ideological exploitation going on. It suggested that mass entertainment took over labour as a form of oppression. Increasing hours of leisure. The choice of having to watch the same thing over millions of people was an easy form of oppression on a mass scale. Mass produced films were made to make uniform specifications to people. A new form of oppression.
• According to Marx, ‘the ruling ideas are in every age the ideas of the ruling class.’
• New technologies – more systematic dissemination of ruling ideas
• According to Frankfurt School…. Technology and technological consciousness have themselves produced a new phenomenon in the shape of a uniform and debased ‘mass culture’ which aborts and silences criticism (Bottomore: 1984, p. 19)
• New technologies – a new form of domination
• Information flows through one-way, no time to criticize what you are reading and therefore oppressing your desire to criticize.
• Each of them had a slightly different take on how this domination process happened. Something did happen, something negative did happen to audiences by accepting these new forms of mass entertainment.
• Adorno
  • Classical paintings, once they were subject to mechanical reproduction, the aura that surrounded the original painting was lost and became meaningless. There was no appreciation of it, no understanding of it. No understanding of it at all, simply mass produced. The ideas of FS suggested that this mass production ruined high-art, everything became dull.
  • Filming down on art, they suggested that it amounted to impoverishment.
  • Suggested that once they are massified, they lose their quality.
  • If you read a detective novel, the detective is always going to foil the criminal.
  • Popular music is standard, factory music. It is written through popularity, not through soul.
• Influenced a whole school of thought.
• According to the FS, what we have in this automated world is a form of systemization, a form of order, control, a symbolic prison cell which was impressive in itself as in the workplace. Marx suggested that work robbed the human age of creativity, capacity of rational thought. The FS suggests that once you clock off work and you go into a world of leisure, your leisure time is dictated by the length of time a film to be viewed, music is played. When you’re watching a film, you’re watching it in its standardized form (clichés). This kind of mass culture also results in a social reduction.
• Cartoons –> Simple ideological control.

Problems of Frankfurt School

• Tempted to describe an individual as a cultural dew, that they have no control about what is posed on them or how they react to how they are imposed to.
• They believed too much in the idea of mass culture affecting the individual
• Audiences are uniform, robot, no reception of popular culture, or the forces that play (FS) which is the incentive of a new system mass media analysis—cultural studies.
• Put too much emphasis on socio-economic force of capitalism. Deciminate the information in a way that everyone becomes passive, absolutely no reflective dimension of culture.
• Cultural studies influenced by work of British literary Theorists:
  • T.S. Elliot – Pessimistic about effects of mass culture on traditional culture
    • T.S. Eliot was in a way dissimilar of the FS. Was very critical about the spread of capitalism and the infrastructure of popular culture. Suggested that communities of traditional notions of community would disappear under late-modern capitalism. Cultural appropriation key. A discourse of activeness.
  • F.R. Leavis – Shared Elliot’s concern but regarded this as potential rather than actual affect of the mass culturalisation of society.
    • Suggested there was some other meaning of culture and that was the culture of the everyday. Suggested that culture wasn’t that ordinary thing, it was traditions, past-times, conventions, not things that people bought, not things that people watch. Culture was something people just did as a course of their lives. Culture is all around us, ordinary, a part of the life that we live in.
  • For Leavis, mass culture could also have potentially subversive effects when creatively appropriated by individuals. What is the effect on capitalism if that’s the case? CCSC
• Hegemony = moral and intellectual power
• According to Gramsci…. History is a process of conflicts and compromises where one fundamental class will emerge as both dominant and directive not only in economic but in moral and intellectual terms. Italian cultural Marxist. Blah blah blah…
• Active audience – suggests that rather than being passive recipients
  • Active audience: rather than being passive recipients audiences are active participants in construction of meanings attached to mass culture products.
  • Key theorists: David Morley, Ien Ang, John Fiske
  • Key Ideas:
    • Audience not a homogenous mass but highly heterogeneous
    • Audience not passive recipients of a text but active in creation of texts
      • Intertextuality – way in which audience members receive text and read their own meanings into it
        • Use texts in active/creative ways
        • Challenge originally intended meanings
• Dallas is a continuous fictional television serial which can, in principle, go on ad infinitum. The story centres around the very rich Ewing family who live in the luxurious Southfork Ranch situated a few miles outside the city of Dallas (Texas)… The dramatic complications always revolve around the weal and woe of this family. J.R. plays a central role in this; he runs the family concern, Ewing Oil, in a villainous manner, treats his wife like dirt and only shows respect for his parents when it suits him.
  • What is it about Dallas that makes it a favourite form of entertainment?
  • What precisely does its entertainment value consist of?
  • In order to answer these questions we need to ‘ask ourselves what happens in the process of watching Dallas’
  • “The good thing about it (Dallas), I think, is that lots of things happen in it taken from real life, so to speak. Such as… Sue Ellen with her marital problems, though I do find in the longer run that is a bit overdone, she makes a game out of it. I think the serial writers do it deliberately, because lots of men find it terrific to watch her. And would even like to help her (Ang, 1982: Watching Dallas, p.48)”