FRANKFURT SCHOOL

Marxist critique of the Culture

Industries
 How come capitalism hasnt
collapsed?
The idea that the mass media and
systems of cultural production have done
a great deal to prevent the collapse of
capitalism predicted by Marx was
developed by the theorists of the
Frankfurt School. This group of
intellectuals were active from the
inception of the Frankfurt Institute for
Social Research in 1923 and their work
has been highly influential in Marxist
approaches to culture in capitalist
societies.
 Pop Culture =
Brainwashing
Through radio, TV, movies and forms of popular
music like jazz, the expanding culture industries
were disseminating ruling-class ideologies with
greater effect than Marx could have envisaged.
The further development of consumer society in
the twentieth century powerfully aided the process
of working-class incorporation by promoting new
myths of classlessness, and wedded the working
class even more tightly to acquisitive and property
owning beliefs. Even oppositional and critical
forms of culture can be marketed (consider Andy
Warhol, the Sex Pistols and Damian Hurst).
Incorporation

Even Anti-fashion is re-cycled as High

Fashion and then High Street fashion
 Do you want to dance?
The Frankfurt School are (on the whole) highly
dismissive of popular culture because they see the
culture industry and the products that it churns
out as being little more than propaganda for
capitalism. This approach leads Theodor Adorno, in
particular, to make some damning indictments of
popular culture. Listeners to pop music are
infantile and fans of the jitterbug dance craze
were described as retarded, their dancing having
convulsive aspects reminiscent of St. Vitus dance
or the reflexes of mutilated animals. What would
he would have made of body popping?
 Standardisation
The very fact that popular culture is neither
difficult nor demanding and that it offers simple
and direct pleasures contributes to its
complicity in capitalist ideology. According to
Adorno, we crave standardised cultural
products because they seem to validate lives
that are themselves standardised. At work we
are alienated by dull, repetitive and
undemanding tasks, but this alienating effect is
relieved by dull, repetitive and undemanding
cultural products (like pop songs) and cultural
pursuits (like dancing).
Does pop culture reflect values
of capitalism?
Self expression? Youre kidding
yourelves
Popular cultural products may seem to offer us
freedom of choice and aid to self-expression, but
for Adorno, this is an illusion; a phenomenon he
terms pseudo-individualisation. In singing along
with a pop song or in recognising a particular
variation on a theme we enjoy the feeling that
we are finding expression for own individual
emotions, but in reality we are simply imitating
others. Our consumption of popular culture
simply makes us docile, apathetic and passive,
hence more susceptible to manipulation by
ruling class ideology.
 Pseudo-individualisation
Bands like Kraftwerk have focused on the
relationship between industry, machines,
robots and popular culture
This is also expressed in many forms of
dance

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1088521/b
reakin_turbos_broom_dance/
Critics of Frankfurt School
Critics of the Frankfurt School analysis of
popular culture have argued that it is just
too negative and too sweeping in its
characterisation of cultural products and
cultural practices as tools of capitalism.
It is difficult to find evidence amongst
todays consumers of popular culture of
the unqualified conformity that Adorno
and Horkheimer argued was responsible
for adjusting us to the norms and values
of the social system.
Critics of Frankfurt School
It would be just as easy to find evidence of
diversity, creativity and, even, resistance to
dominant ideology in contemporary popular
cultural pursuits. This is not to say that cultural
practices have no ideological significance far
from it.
Rather, the critics of the Frankfurt School, still
working in a broadly Marxist tradition, have
suggested a more subtle relationship between
culture and ideology; one which recognises the
active role of consumers and users of cultural
products in creating meanings.
Industrial Chic