The Frankfurt School is a school of neo-Marxist critical theory, social research, and philosophy. The grouping emerged at the Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung) of the University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany when Max Horkheimer became the Institute's director in 1930. The term "Frankfurt School" is an informal term used to designate the thinkers affiliated with the Institute for Social Research or who were influenced by it. It is not the title of any institution, and the main thinkers of the Frankfurt School did not use the term to describe themselves.
The Frankfurt School gathered together dissident Marxists, severe critics of capitalism who believed that some of Marx's followers had come to parrot a narrow selection of Marx's ideas, usually in defense of orthodox Communist or Social-Democratic parties. Influenced especially by the failure of working-class revolutions in Western Europe after World War I and by the rise of Nazism in an economically and technologically advanced nation (Germany), they took up the task of choosing what parts of Marx's thought might serve to clarify social conditions that Marx himself had never seen. They drew on other schools of thought to fill in Marx's perceived omissions. Max Weber exerted a major influence, as did Sigmund Freud (as in Herbert Marcuse's Freudo-Marxist synthesis in the 1954 work Eros and Civilization). Their emphasis on the "critical" component of theory was derived significantly from their attempt to overcome the limits of positivism, crude materialism, and phenomenology by returning to Kant's critical philosophy and its successors in German idealism, principally Hegel's philosophy, with its emphasis on negation and contradiction as inherent properties of reality. A key influence also came from the publication in the 1930s of Marx's Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts and The German Ideology, which showed the continuity with Hegelianism that underlay Marx's thought. Marcuse was one of the first to articulate the theoretical significance of these texts.
Critical theory
Critical theory, in sociology and philosophy, is shorthand for critical theory of society. It is a label used by the Frankfurt School, their intellectual and social network, and those influenced by them intellectually to describe their own work. The work of the School is oriented toward radical social change, in contradistinction to "traditional theory," i.e. theory in the positivistic, scientistic, or purely observational mode. In literature and literary criticism and cultural studies, by contrast, "critical theory" means something quite different, namely theory used in criticism.
The original critical social theorists were Marxists, and there is some evidence that in their choice of the phrase "critical theory of society" they were in part influenced by its sounding less politically controversial than "Marxism". Nevertheless there were other substantive reasons for this choice. First, they were explicitly linking up with the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant, where the term critique meant philosophical reflection on the limits of claims made for certain kinds of knowledge and a direct connection between such critique and the emphasis on moral autonomy. In an intellectual context defined by dogmatic positivism and scientism on the one hand and dogmatic "scientific socialism" on the other, critical theory meant to rehabilitate through its philosophically critical approach an orientation toward revolutionary agency, or at least its possibility, at a time when it seemed in decline.
Second, in the context of both Marxist-Leninist and Social-Democratic orthodoxy, which emphasized Marxism as a new kind of positive science, they were linking up with the implicit epistemology of Karl Marx's work, which presented itself as critique, as in Marx's "Capital: A Critique of Political Economy". That is, they emphasized that Marx was attempting to create a new kind of critical analysis oriented toward the unity of theory and revolutionary practice rather than a new kind of positive science. Critique in this Marxian sense meant taking the ideology of a society (e.g. "freedom of the individual" or "equality" under capitalism) and critiquing it by comparing it with the social reality of that very society (e.g. subordination of the individual to the class structure or real social inequality under capitalism). It also, especially in the Frankfurt School version, meant critiquing the existing social reality in terms of the potential for human freedom and happiness that existed within that same reality (e.g. using technologies for the exploitation of nature that could be used for the conservation of nature).
The First Phase
The intellectual influences on and theoretical focus of the first generation of Frankfurt School critical theorists can be summarized as follows:
The historical situation: Transition from small-scale entrepreneurial capitalism to monopoly capitalism and imperialism; socialist labor movement grows, turns reformist; emergence of warfare/welfare state; Russian revolution and rise of Communism; neotechnic period; emergence of mass media and mass culture, "modern" art; rise of Naziism.
Weberian theory: comparative historical analysis of Western rationalism in capitalism, the modern state, secular scientific rationality, culture, and religion; analysis of the forms of domination in general and of modern rational-legal bureaucratic domination in particular; articulation of the distinctive, hermeneutic method of the social sciences.
Freudian theory: critique of the repressive structure of the "reality principle" of advance civilization and of the normal neurosis of everyday life; discovery of the unconscious, primary-process thinking, and the impact of the Oedipus complex and of anxiety on psychic life; analysis of the psychic bases of authoritarianism and irrational social behavior, psychic Thermidor.
Critique of Positivism: critique of positivism as philosophy, as scientific methodology, as political ideology, and as everyday conformism; rehabilitation of --- negative --- dialectic, return to Hegel; appropriation of critical elements in phenomenology, historicism, existentialism, critique of their ahistorical, idealist tendencies; critique of logical positivism and pragmatism.
Aesthetic modernism: critique of "false" and reified experience by breaking through its traditional forms and language; projection of alternative modes of existence and experience; liberation of the unconscious; consciousness of unique, modern situation; appropriation of Kafka, Proust, Schoenberg, Breton; critique of the culture industry and "affirmative" culture; aesthetic utopia.
Marxian theory: critique of bourgeois ideology; critique of alienated labor; historical materialism; history as class struggle and exploitation of labor in different modes of production; systems analysis of capitalism as extraction of surplus labor through free labor in the free market; unity of theory and practice; analysis for the sake of revolution, socialist democracy, classless society.
Culture theory: critique of mass culture as suppression and absorption of negation, as integration into status quo; critique of Western culture as culture of domination of external and internal nature; dialectic differentiation of emancipatory and repressive dimensions of elite culture; Nietzsche's transvaluation and Schiller's aesthetic education.
These influences combined to create the Critical Theory of Culture (First Generation): Responding to the intensification of unfreedom and irrationality in industrial, advanced capitalist society---culminating in fascism---critical theory is a comprehensive, ideology-critical, historically self-reflective, body of theory aiming simultaneously to explain and combat domination and alienation and help bring about a rational, humane, democratic, and socialist society. The critical theorists developed an integrated theory of the economic, political, cultural, and psychological domination structures of advanced industrial civilization, and of the dialectic through which the emancipatory potential of modern society is suppressed and its rationality turns into a positivistic rationality of domination leading to barbarism.
Major theorists include: Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowental, Friedrich Pollock, Erich Fromm.
Major works include: Horkheimer and Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment; Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason, Critical Theory; Adorno, Minima Moralia, The Authoritarian Personality, Prisms, Aesthetic Theory, Negative Dialectics, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, Philosophy of Modern Music, Notes to Literature, Hegel, Mahler, Wagner; Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproduction, Theses on the Philosophy of History, The Paris Arcades; Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, Eros and Civilization, One-Dimensional Man, Essay on Liberation, Negations, Soviet Marxism, Studies in Critical Philosophy, Counterrevolution and revolt, Hegel's Ontology; Lowenthal, Literature, Popular Culture, and Society; Fromm, Escape from Freedom.
The Institute made major contributions in two areas relating to the possibility of rational human subjects, i.e. individuals who could act rationally to take charge of their own society and their own history. The first consisted of social phenomena previously considered in Marxism as part of the "superstructure" or as ideology: personality, family and authority structures (its first book publication bore the title Studies of Authority and the Family), and the realm of aesthetics and mass culture. Studies saw a common concern here in the ability of capitalism to destroy the preconditions of critical, revolutionary political consciousness. This meant arriving at a sophisticated awareness of the depth dimension in which social oppression sustains itself. It also meant the beginning of critical theory's recognition of ideology as part of the foundations of social structure. The Institute and various collaborators had a gigantic effect on (especially American) social science through their work The Authoritarian Personality, which conducted extensive empirical research, using sociological and psychoanalytic categories, in order to characterize the forces that led individuals to affiliate with or support fascist movements or parties. The study found the assertion of universals, or even truth, to be a hallmark of fascism. The Authoritarian Personality hypothesis which proceeded from this contributed greatly to the emergence of the counterculture. Erich Fromm, who in its initial period worked with the school, is credited with bringing it a psychoanalytic focus. However, Adorno and Horkheimer belittled Fromm's contributions, even though a central theme, "The Authoritarian Character," developed directly from Fromm's research on the subject.[1]
The nature of Marxism itself formed the second focus of the Institute, and in this context the concept of critical theory originated. The term served several purposes - first, it contrasted from traditional notions of theory, which were largely either positivist or scientific. Second, the term allowed them to escape the politically charged label of "Marxism." Third, it explicitly linked them with the "critical philosophy" of Immanuel Kant, where the term "critique" meant philosophical reflection on the limits of claims made for certain kinds of knowledge and a direct connection between such critique and the emphasis on moral autonomy. In an intellectual context defined by dogmatic positivism and scientism on the one hand and dogmatic "scientific socialism" on the other, critical theory meant to rehabilitate through such a philosophically critical approach an orientation toward revolutionary agency, or at least its possibility, at a time when it seemed in decline.
Finally, in the context of both Marxist-Leninist and Social-Democratic orthodoxy, which emphasized Marxism as a new kind of positive science, they were linking up with the implicit epistemology of Karl Marx's work, which presented itself as critique, as in Marx's "Capital: a critique of political economy", wanting to emphasize that Marx was attempting to create a new kind of critical analysis oriented toward the unity of theory and revolutionary practice rather than a new kind of positive science. In the 1960s, Jürgen Habermas raised the epistemological discussion to a new level in his "Knowledge and Human Interests" (1968), by identifying critical knowledge as based on principles that differentiated it either from the natural sciences or the humanities, through its orientation to self-reflection and emancipation.
Although Horkheimer's distinction between traditional and critical theory in one sense merely repeated Marx's dictum that philosophers have always interpreted the world and the point is to change it, the Institute, in its critique of ideology, took on such philosophical currents as positivism, phenomenology, existentialism, and pragmatism, with an implied critique of contemporary Marxism, which had turned dialectics into an alternate science or metaphysics. The Institute attempted to reformulate dialectics as a concrete method, continually aware of the specific social roots of thought and of the specific constellation of forces that affected the possibility of liberation. Accordingly, critical theory rejected the materialist metaphysics of orthodox Marxism. For Horkheimer and his associates, materialism meant the orientation of theory towards practice and towards the fulfillment of human needs, not a metaphysical statement about the nature of reality.
The Second Phase
The second phase of Frankfurt School critical theory centres principally on two works that rank as classics of twentieth-century thought: Horkheimer's and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) and Adorno's Minima Moralia (1951). The authors wrote both works during the Institute's American exile in the Nazi period. While retaining much of the Marxian analysis, in these works critical theory has shifted its emphasis. The critique of capitalism has turned into a critique of Western civilization as a whole. Indeed, the Dialectic of Enlightenment uses the Odyssey as a paradigm for the analysis of bourgeois consciousness. Horkheimer and Adorno already present in these works many themes that have come to dominate the social thought of recent years: the domination of nature appears as central to Western civilization long before ecology had become a catchphrase of the day.
The analysis of reason now goes one stage further. The rationality of Western civilization appears as a fusion of domination and of technological rationality, bringing all of external and internal nature under the power of the human subject. In the process, however, the subject itself gets swallowed up, and no social force analogous to the proletariat can be identified that will enable the subject to emancipate itself. Hence the subtitle of Minima Moralia: "Reflections from Damaged Life". In Adorno's words,
"For since the overwhelming objectivity of historical movement in its present phase consists so far only in the dissolution of the subject, without yet giving rise to a new one, individual experience necessarily bases itself on the old subject, now historically condemned, which is still for-itself, but no longer in-itself. The subject still feels sure of its autonomy, but the nullity demonstrated to subjects by the concentration camp is already overtaking the form of subjectivity itself."
Consequently, at a time when it appears that reality itself has become ideology, the greatest contribution that critical theory can make is to explore the dialectical contradictions of individual subjective experience on the one hand, and to preserve the truth of theory on the other. Even the dialectic can become a means to domination: "Its truth or untruth, therefore, is not inherent in the method itself, but in its intention in the historical process." And this intention must be toward integral freedom and happiness: "the only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption". How far from orthodox Marxism is Adorno's conclusion: "But beside the demand thus placed on thought, the question of the reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly matters."
Adorno, a trained musician, wrote The Philosophy of Modern Music, in which he, in essence, polemicizes against beauty itself -- because it has become part of the ideology of advanced capitalist society and the false consciousness that contributes to domination by prettifying it. Avant-garde art and music preserve the truth by capturing the reality of human suffering. Hence:
"What radical music perceives is the untransfigured suffering of man... The seismographic registration of traumatic shock becomes, at the same time, the technical structural law of music. It forbids continuity and development. Musical language is polarized according to its extreme; towards gestures of shock resembling bodily convulsions on the one hand, and on the other towards a crystalline standstill of a human being whom anxiety causes to freeze in her tracks... Modern music sees absolute oblivion as its goal. It is the surviving message of despair from the shipwrecked."
This view of modern art as producing truth only through the negation of traditional aesthetic form and traditional norms of beauty because they have become ideological is characteristic of Adorno and of the Frankfurt School generally. It has been criticized by those who do not share its conception of modern society as a false totality that renders obsolete traditional conceptions and images of beauty and harmony.
The Third Phase
From these thoughts only a short step remained to the third phase of the Frankfurt School, which coincided with the postwar period, particularly from the early 1950s to the middle 1960s. With the growth of advanced industrial society under Cold War conditions, the critical theorists recognized that the structure of capitalism and history had changed decisively, that the modes of oppression operated differently, and that the industrial working class no longer remained the determinate negation of capitalism. This led to the attempt to root the dialectic in an absolute method of negativity, as in Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man and Adorno's Negative Dialectics. During this period the Institute of Social Research re-settled in Frankfurt (although many of its associates remained in the United States), with the task not merely of continuing its research but of becoming a leading force in the sociological education and democratization of West Germany. This led to a certain systematization of the Institute's entire accumulation of empirical research and theoretical analysis.
More importantly, however, the Frankfurt School attempted to define the fate of reason in the new historical period. While Marcuse did so through analysis of structural changes in the labor process under capitalism and inherent features of the methodology of science, Horkheimer and Adorno concentrated on a re-examination of the foundation of critical theory. This effort appears in systematized form in Adorno's Negative Dialectics, which tries to redefine dialectics for an era in which "philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed". Negative dialectics expresses the idea of critical thought so conceived that the apparatus of domination cannot co-opt it. Its central notion, long a focal one for Horkheimer and Adorno, suggests that the original sin of thought lies in its attempt to eliminate all that is other than thought, the attempt by the subject to devour the object, the striving for identity. This reduction makes thought the accomplice of domination. Negative Dialectics rescues the "preponderance of the object", not through a naive epistemological or metaphysical realism but through a thought based on differentiation, paradox, and ruse: a "logic of disintegration". Adorno thoroughly criticizes Heidegger's fundamental ontology, which reintroduces idealistic and identity-based concepts under the guise of having overcome the philosophical tradition.
Negative Dialectics comprises a monument to the end of the tradition of the individual subject as the locus of criticism. Without a revolutionary working class, the Frankfurt School had no one to rely on but the individual subject. But, as the liberal capitalist social basis of the autonomous individual receded into the past, the dialectic based on it became more and more abstract. This stance helped prepare the way for the fourth, current phase of the Frankfurt School, shaped by the communication theory of Habermas.
Habermas's work takes the Frankfurt School's abiding interests in rationality, the human subject, democratic socialism, and the dialectical method and overcomes a set of contradictions that always weakened critical theory: the contradictions between the materialist and transcendental methods, between Marxian social theory and the individualist assumptions of critical rationalism between technical and social rationalization, and between cultural and psychological phenomena on the one hand and the economic structure of society on the other. The Frankfurt School avoided taking a stand on the precise relationship between the materialist and transcendental methods, which led to ambiguity in their writings and confusion among their readers. Habermas' epistemology synthesizes these two traditions by showing that phenomenological and transcendental analysis can be subsumed under a materialist theory of social evolution, while the materialist theory makes sense only as part of a quasi-transcendental theory of emancipatory knowledge that is the self-reflection of cultural evolution. The simultaneously empirical and transcendental nature of emancipatory knowledge becomes the foundation stone of critical theory.
By locating the conditions of rationality in the social structure of language use, Habermas moves the locus of rationality from the autonomous subject to subjects in interaction. Rationality is a property not of individuals per se, but rather of structures of undistorted communication. In this notion Habermas has overcome the ambiguous plight of the subject in critical theory. If capitalistic technological society weakens the autonomy and rationality of the subject, it is not through the domination of the individual by the apparatus but through technological rationality supplanting a describable rationality of communication. And, in his sketch of communicative ethics as the highest stage in the internal logic of the evolution of ethical systems, Habermas hints at the source of a new political practice that incorporates the imperatives of evolutionary rationality.
Frankfurt School critical theory has influenced some segments of the Left wing and leftist thought (particularly the New Left). Herbert Marcuse has occasionally been described as the theorist or intellectual progenitor of the New Left. Their critique of technology, totality, teleology and (occasionally) civilization is an influence on anarcho-primitivism. Their work also heavily influenced intellectual discourse on popular culture and scholarly popular culture studies.
Major Frankfurt school thinkers and scholars the Institut in Frankfurt
* Theodor W. Adorno
* Walter Benjamin
* Erich Fromm
* Jürgen Habermas
* Axel Honneth
* Max Horkheimer
* Siegfried Kracauer
* Otto Kirchheimer
* Leo Löwenthal
* Herbert Marcuse
* Oskar Negt
* Franz L. Neumann
* Franz Oppenheimer
* Friedrich Pollock
* Alfred Schmidt
* Alfred Sohn-Rethel
* Karl A. Wittfogel
Critics of the Frankfurt School
Several camps of criticism of the Frankfurt School have emerged. Some critics state that the intellectual perspective of the Frankfurt School is a romantic, elitist critique of mass culture with a contrived neo-Marxist guise. Another criticism, originating from the Left, is that critical theory is a form of bourgeois idealism that has no inherent relation to political practice and is totally isolated from any ongoing revolutionary movement.
Both of these criticisms were captured in Georg Lukács's phrase "Grand Hotel Abyss" as a syndrome he imputed to the members of the Frankfurt School. Karl Popper believed that the school did not live up Marx's promise of a better future:
"Marx's own condemnation of our society makes sense. For Marx's theory contains the promise of a better future. But the theory becomes vacuous and irresponsible if this promise is withdrawn, as it is by Adorno and Horkheimer."[2]
Other notable critics of the Frankfurt School include Henryk Grossman, Umberto Eco and Mike Godwin.
Notes
1. ^ "Origin Myths in the Social Sciences: Fromm, the Frankfurt School and the Emergence of Critical Theory: Horkheimer Builds a School".
2. ^ Karl R. Popper: Addendum 1974: THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL. in: The Myth of the Framework. London New York 1994, p. 80
References
* Andrew Arato & Eike Gebhardt (eds.) "The Essential Frankfurt School Reader" (ISBN 0-8264-0194-5)
* Seyla Benhabib "Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory" (ISBN 0-231-06165-X)
* Tom Bottomore. "The Frankfurt School and its Critics" (ISBN 0-415-28539-9)
* Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner (eds.) "Critical Theory and Society: A Reader" (ISBN 0-415-90041-7)
* Richard A. Brosio. "The Frankfurt School: An Analysis of the Contradictictions and Crises of Liberal Capitalist Societies"
* George Friedman. The Political Philosophy of the Frankfurt School, Ithaca & New York, Cornell University Press, 1981 ISBN 0-8014-1279-X.
* David Held. "Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas" (ISBN 0-520-04175-5)
* David Ingram and Julia Simon-Ingram. "Critical Theory: The Essential Readings" (ISBN 1-55778-353-5)
* Martin Jay. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social Research 1923-1950, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1996 ISBN 0-520-20423-9.
* Marxists Internet Archive. The Frankfort School and "Critical Theory." www.marxists.org
* Neil McLaughlin - Origin Myths in the Social Sciences: Fromm, the Frankfurt School and the Emergence of Critical Theory [1]
* Jeremy J. Shapiro. "The Critical Theory of Frankfurt", in: Times Literary Supplement, No. 3, Oct. 4, 1974, 787. (Material from this publication has been used or adapted for the present article with permission).
* Rudolf J. Siebert. "The Critical Theory of Religion: The Frankfurt School" (ISBN 0-8108-4140-1)
* Rolf Wiggershaus. The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories and Political Significance, Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1995 ISBN 0-262-73113-4.
sumber: Wikipedia
31 Jan 2009
Culture Industry
Culture industry is a term coined by Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895-1973), who argued that popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods to manipulate the masses into passivity; the easy pleasures available through consumption of popular culture make people docile and content, no matter how difficult their economic circumstances. Adorno and Horkheimer saw this mass-produced culture as a danger to the more difficult high arts. Culture industries may cultivate false needs; that is, needs created and satisfied by capitalism. True needs, in contrast, are freedom, creativity, or genuine happiness. This was reference to an earlier demarcation in needs by Herbert Marcuse
The Frankfurt School
Adorno and Horkheimer were key members of the Frankfurt School. They were much influenced by the dialectical materialism and historical materialism of Karl Marx, as well the revisitation of the dialectical idealism of Hegel, in both of which where events are studied not in isolation but as part of the process of change. As a group later joined by Jurgen Habermas, they were responsible for the formulation of Critical Theory. In works such as Dialectic of Enlightenment and Negative Dialectics, Adorno and Horkheimer theorised that the phenomenon of mass culture has a political implication, namely that all the many forms of popular culture are a single culture industry whose purpose is to ensure the continued obedience of the masses to market interests.
The Theory
Although Western culture used to be divided into national markets and then into highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow, the modern view of mass culture is that there is a single marketplace in which the best or most popular works succeed. This recognizes that the consolidation of media companies has centralized power in the hands of the few remaining multinational corporations now controlling production and distribution. The theory proposes that culture not only mirrors society, but also takes an important role in shaping society through the processes of standardization and commodification, creating objects rather than subjects. The culture industry claims to serve the consumers' needs for entertainment, but conceals the way that it standardizes these needs, manipulating the consumers to desire what it produces. The outcome is that mass production feeds a mass market that minimizes the identity and tastes of the individual consumers who are as interchangeable as the products they consume. The rationale of the theory is to promote the emancipation of the consumer from the tyranny of the producers by inducing the consumer to question beliefs and ideologies. Adorno claimed that enlightenment would bring pluralism and demystification. Unfortunately, society is said to have suffered another fall, corrupted by capitalist industry with exploitative motives.
Elements
Anything made by a person is a materialisation of their labour and an expression of their intentions. There will also be a use value: the benefit to the consumer will be derived from its utility. The exchange value will reflect its utility and the conditions of the market: the prices paid by the television broadcaster or at the box office. Yet, the modern soap operas with their interchangeable plots and formulaic narrative conventions reflect standardised production techniques and the falling value of a mass produced cultural product. Only rarely is a film released that makes a more positive impression on the general discourse and achieves a higher exchange value, e.g. Patton (1970) starring George C. Scott as the eponymous American general, was released at a time of considerable anti-war sentiment. The opening shot is of Patton in front of an American flag making an impassioned speech. This was a form of dialectic in which the audience could identify with the patriotism either sincerely (the thesis) or ironically (the antithesis) and so set the tone of the interpretation for the remainder of the film. However, the film is manipulating specific historical events, not only as entertainment, but also as a form of propaganda by demonstrating a link between success in strategic resource management situations and specified leadership qualities. Given that the subtext was instrumental and not "value free", ethical and philosophical considerations arise.
Normally, only high art criticises the world outside its boundaries, but access to this form of communication is limited to the elite classes where the risks of introducing social instability are slight. A film like Patton is popular art which intends controversy in a world of social order and unity which, according to Adorno, is regressing into a cultural blandness. To Hegel, order is good a priori, i.e. it does not have to answer to those living under it. But, if order is disturbed? In Negative Dialectics, Adorno believed this tended towards progress by stimulating the possibility of class conflict. Marx's theory of Historical Materialism was teleological, i.e. society follows through a dialectic of unfolding stages from ancient modes of production to feudalism to capitalism to a future communism. But Adorno felt that the culture industry would never permit a sufficient core of challenging material to emerge on to the market that might disturb the status quo and stimulate the final communist state to emerge.
Observations
Critics of the theory say that the products of mass culture would not be popular if people did not enjoy them, and that culture is self-determining in its administration. This would deny Adorno contemporary political significance, arguing that politics in a prosperous society is more concerned with action than with thought. Wiggershaus (1994) notes that the young generation of critical theorists largely ignore Adorno's work which, in part, stems from Adorno’s inability to draw practical conclusions from his theories. Adorno is also accused of a lack of consistency in his claims to be implementing Marxism. Whereas he accepted the classical Marxist analysis of society showing how one class exercises domination over another, he deviated from Marx in his failure to use dialectic as a method to propose ways to change. Marx's theory depended on the willingness of the working class to overthrow the ruling class, but Adorno and Horkheimer postulated that the culture industry has undermined the revolutionary movement. Adorno's idea that the mass of the people are only objects of the culture industry is linked to his feeling that the time when the working class could be the tool of overthrowing capitalism is over. Other critics note that "High culture" too is not exempt from a role in the justification of capitalism. The establishment and reinforcement of elitism is seen by these critics as a key element in the role of opera, ballet, etc.
However, despite these problems, the concept has influenced intellectual discourse on popular culture, popular culture studies, and Cultural Institutions Studies.
In popular culture
* The hip hop band Philadelphia Slick titled their 2007 album, Culture Industry in reference to Adorno's work.
References
* Adorno, T. W. Negative Dialectics. New York: The Seabury Press. (1973)
* Adorno, T.W. A Sample of Adorno's ideas on the culture industry and popular music
* Adorno, T., & Horkheimer, M. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford University Press (2002)
* Cook, D. The Culture Industry Revisited. Rowman & Littlefield. (1996)
* Hesmondhalgh, D. The Cultural Industries. Sage. (2002)
* Steinert, H. Culture Industry. Cambridge: Polity (2003)
* Wiggershaus, R. The Frankfurt School: its History, Theories, and Political Significance. MIT Press. (1994)
* Witkin, R.W. Adorno on Popular Culture. Routledge. (2003)
* Scott, Allen J. The Cultural Economy of Cities. Sage. (2001)
sumber: Wikipedia
The Frankfurt School
Adorno and Horkheimer were key members of the Frankfurt School. They were much influenced by the dialectical materialism and historical materialism of Karl Marx, as well the revisitation of the dialectical idealism of Hegel, in both of which where events are studied not in isolation but as part of the process of change. As a group later joined by Jurgen Habermas, they were responsible for the formulation of Critical Theory. In works such as Dialectic of Enlightenment and Negative Dialectics, Adorno and Horkheimer theorised that the phenomenon of mass culture has a political implication, namely that all the many forms of popular culture are a single culture industry whose purpose is to ensure the continued obedience of the masses to market interests.
The Theory
Although Western culture used to be divided into national markets and then into highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow, the modern view of mass culture is that there is a single marketplace in which the best or most popular works succeed. This recognizes that the consolidation of media companies has centralized power in the hands of the few remaining multinational corporations now controlling production and distribution. The theory proposes that culture not only mirrors society, but also takes an important role in shaping society through the processes of standardization and commodification, creating objects rather than subjects. The culture industry claims to serve the consumers' needs for entertainment, but conceals the way that it standardizes these needs, manipulating the consumers to desire what it produces. The outcome is that mass production feeds a mass market that minimizes the identity and tastes of the individual consumers who are as interchangeable as the products they consume. The rationale of the theory is to promote the emancipation of the consumer from the tyranny of the producers by inducing the consumer to question beliefs and ideologies. Adorno claimed that enlightenment would bring pluralism and demystification. Unfortunately, society is said to have suffered another fall, corrupted by capitalist industry with exploitative motives.
Elements
Anything made by a person is a materialisation of their labour and an expression of their intentions. There will also be a use value: the benefit to the consumer will be derived from its utility. The exchange value will reflect its utility and the conditions of the market: the prices paid by the television broadcaster or at the box office. Yet, the modern soap operas with their interchangeable plots and formulaic narrative conventions reflect standardised production techniques and the falling value of a mass produced cultural product. Only rarely is a film released that makes a more positive impression on the general discourse and achieves a higher exchange value, e.g. Patton (1970) starring George C. Scott as the eponymous American general, was released at a time of considerable anti-war sentiment. The opening shot is of Patton in front of an American flag making an impassioned speech. This was a form of dialectic in which the audience could identify with the patriotism either sincerely (the thesis) or ironically (the antithesis) and so set the tone of the interpretation for the remainder of the film. However, the film is manipulating specific historical events, not only as entertainment, but also as a form of propaganda by demonstrating a link between success in strategic resource management situations and specified leadership qualities. Given that the subtext was instrumental and not "value free", ethical and philosophical considerations arise.
Normally, only high art criticises the world outside its boundaries, but access to this form of communication is limited to the elite classes where the risks of introducing social instability are slight. A film like Patton is popular art which intends controversy in a world of social order and unity which, according to Adorno, is regressing into a cultural blandness. To Hegel, order is good a priori, i.e. it does not have to answer to those living under it. But, if order is disturbed? In Negative Dialectics, Adorno believed this tended towards progress by stimulating the possibility of class conflict. Marx's theory of Historical Materialism was teleological, i.e. society follows through a dialectic of unfolding stages from ancient modes of production to feudalism to capitalism to a future communism. But Adorno felt that the culture industry would never permit a sufficient core of challenging material to emerge on to the market that might disturb the status quo and stimulate the final communist state to emerge.
Observations
Critics of the theory say that the products of mass culture would not be popular if people did not enjoy them, and that culture is self-determining in its administration. This would deny Adorno contemporary political significance, arguing that politics in a prosperous society is more concerned with action than with thought. Wiggershaus (1994) notes that the young generation of critical theorists largely ignore Adorno's work which, in part, stems from Adorno’s inability to draw practical conclusions from his theories. Adorno is also accused of a lack of consistency in his claims to be implementing Marxism. Whereas he accepted the classical Marxist analysis of society showing how one class exercises domination over another, he deviated from Marx in his failure to use dialectic as a method to propose ways to change. Marx's theory depended on the willingness of the working class to overthrow the ruling class, but Adorno and Horkheimer postulated that the culture industry has undermined the revolutionary movement. Adorno's idea that the mass of the people are only objects of the culture industry is linked to his feeling that the time when the working class could be the tool of overthrowing capitalism is over. Other critics note that "High culture" too is not exempt from a role in the justification of capitalism. The establishment and reinforcement of elitism is seen by these critics as a key element in the role of opera, ballet, etc.
However, despite these problems, the concept has influenced intellectual discourse on popular culture, popular culture studies, and Cultural Institutions Studies.
In popular culture
* The hip hop band Philadelphia Slick titled their 2007 album, Culture Industry in reference to Adorno's work.
References
* Adorno, T. W. Negative Dialectics. New York: The Seabury Press. (1973)
* Adorno, T.W. A Sample of Adorno's ideas on the culture industry and popular music
* Adorno, T., & Horkheimer, M. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford University Press (2002)
* Cook, D. The Culture Industry Revisited. Rowman & Littlefield. (1996)
* Hesmondhalgh, D. The Cultural Industries. Sage. (2002)
* Steinert, H. Culture Industry. Cambridge: Polity (2003)
* Wiggershaus, R. The Frankfurt School: its History, Theories, and Political Significance. MIT Press. (1994)
* Witkin, R.W. Adorno on Popular Culture. Routledge. (2003)
* Scott, Allen J. The Cultural Economy of Cities. Sage. (2001)
sumber: Wikipedia
Popular Culture Studies
Popular culture studies is the academic discipline studying popular culture. It is generally considered as a combination of communication studies and cultural studies.
Following the social upheavals of the 1960s, popular culture has come to be taken more seriously as a terrain of academic enquiry and has also helped to change the outlooks of more established disciplines. Conceptual barriers between so-called high and low culture have broken down, accompanying an explosion in scholarly interest in popular culture, which encompasses such diverse media as comic books, television, and the Internet. Revaluation of mass culture in the 1970s and 1980s has revealed significant problems with the traditional view of mass culture as degraded and elite culture as uplifting. Divisions between high and low culture have been increasingly seen as political distinctions rather than defensible aesthetic or intellectual ones (Mukerji & Schudson 1991:1-2).
Traditional theories of popular culture
The theory of mass society
Mass society formed during the 19th-century industrialization process through the division of labor, the large-scale industrial organization, the concentration of urban populations, the growing centralization of decision making, the development of a complex and international communication system and the growth of mass political movements. The term "mass society", therefore, was introduced by anticapitalist, aristocratic ideologists and used against the values and practices of industrialized society.
As Alan Swingewood points out in The Myth of Mass Culture (1977:5-8), the aristocratic theory of mass society is to be linked to the moral crisis caused by the weakening of traditional centers of authority such as family and religion. The society predicted by José Ortega y Gasset, T. S. Eliot and others would be dominated by philistine masses, without centers or hierarchies of moral or cultural authority. In such a society, art can only survive by cutting its links with the masses, by withdrawing as an asylum for threatened values. Throughout the 20th century, this type of theory has modulated on the opposition between disinterested, pure autonomous art and commercialized mass culture.
The theory of culture industry
Diametrically opposed to the aristocratic view would be the theory of culture industry developed by Frankfurt School theoreticians such as Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse. In their view, the masses are precisely dominated by an all-encompassing culture industry obeying only to the logic of consumer capitalism.[citation needed] Gramsci's concept of hegemony (see: cultural hegemony), that is, the domination of society by a specific group which stays in power by partially taking care of and partially repressing the claims of other groups, does not work here anymore. The principle of hegemony as a goal to achieve for an oppressed social class loses its meaning. The system has taken over; only the state apparatus dominates.
The theory of progressive evolution
A third view on popular culture, which fits in the liberal-pluralist ideology and is often called "progressive evolutionism", is overtly optimistic. It sees capitalist economy as creating opportunities for every individual to participate in a culture which is fully democratized through mass education, expansion of leisure time and cheap records and paperbacks. As Swingewood points out in The Myth of Mass Culture (1977:22), there is no question of domination here anymore. In this view, popular culture does not threaten high culture, but is an authentic expression of the needs of the people.
Contemporary popular culture studies
If we forget precursors such as Umberto Eco and Roland Barthes for a moment, popular culture studies as we know them today were developed in the late seventies and the eighties. The first influential works were generally politically left-wing and rejected the "aristocratic" view. However, they also criticized the pessimism of the Frankfurt School: contemporary studies on mass culture accept that, apparently, popular culture forms do respond to widespread needs of the public. They also emphasized the capacity of the consumers to resist indoctrination and passive reception. Finally, they avoided any monolithic concept of mass culture. Instead they tried to describe culture as a whole as a complex formation of discourses which indeed correspond to particular interests, and which indeed can be dominated by specific groups, but which also always are dialectically related to their producers and consumers.
A nice example of this tendency is Andrew Ross's No Respect. Intellectuals and Popular Culture (1989). His chapter on the history of jazz, blues and rock does not present a linear narrative opposing the authentic popular music to the commercial record industry, but shows how popular music in the U.S., from the twenties until today, evolved out of complex interactions between popular, avant-garde and commercial circuits, between lower- and middle-class kids, between blacks and whites.
Traces of the theory of culture industry
Still the traditional views have a long life (overview based on Clem Robyns, 1991). The theory which has been abandoned most massively is the monolithic, pessimistic view on the culture industry of the Frankfurt School. However, it is still hotly debated. The criticism raised can be summarized in three main arguments. First of all, the culture industry theory has completely abandoned the Marxist dialectic conception of society. Every impulse, according to this view, comes from above. Resistance and contradiction are impossible, and the audience is manipulated into passivity. Alan Swingewood and others emphasize that the Frankfurt theory has to be seen in the light of left-wing frustrations about the failure of proletarian revolutions early this century, and the easy submission of the European nations to fascism.
A second reproach is that this view may be as elitist as its aristocratic counterpart. Both establish the lonely, autonomous, avant-garde intellectual as the only light in a zombie society. Thus the former Marxists arrive at an uncritical praise of the elitist and antirevolutionary upper-class culture. This brings us to a third argument, already made in the sixties by Umberto Eco (1988). In a state-dominated mass society, the lonely, lucid, intellectual Übermensch can only retreat in his ivory tower. The historicity of the contemporary situation is not taken into account, so its internal contradictions are ignored, and thus revolution can only be seen as purely utopian. The culture industry theory, therefore, would lead to passivity and thereby becomes an objective ally of the system it pretends to criticize.
It is of course mainly the influence exercised by the Frankfurt School which matters here: not all of their texts present the same rigid view. In Das Schema der Massenkultur (1973-86:331), for instance, Adorno discusses a "nucleus of individuality" that the culture industry cannot manipulate, and which forces her to continuously repeat her manipulation.
However questioned this view on popular culture may be, it still leaves some traces, for instance, in theories depicting narrative as necessarily ideologically conservative, like Charles Grivel's Production de l'intérêt romanesque (1973). Such theories see dominant ideology as purely a matter of messages, propagated in this case through the forms of narrative fiction. Thus they easily arrive at an exaltation of experimental literature as necessarily revolutionary. However, they may neglect the fact that the ideology is never simply in the message, but in the position of the message in the general social discourse, and in the position of its producers in the social formation.
Other theories easily yielding to monolithic thought stem from the emancipation movements of oppressed groups. Early feminist theory, for instance, often described society as universally and transhistorically dominated by patriarchy in every aspect of life, thereby presenting a pejorative view of the women they claim to defend. As Andrew Ross (1989) argues, the same remark goes for the widely accepted account of rock history as a continuous appropriation of black music by a white music industry. Only studies analyzing the cultural oppression of homosexuality seem to take a less deterministic position.
Contemporary liberal pluralism
In liberal-pluralist accounts of popular culture, the theorizing on its supposedly liberating, democratizing function is nowadays most often pushed to the background. This type of criticism, often produced by people who are also active in popular literary writing themselves, often amounts to paraphrase and suffers from an uncritical identification with the study object. One of the main aims of this type of criticism is the establishment of ahistorical canons of and within popular genres in the image of legitimized culture. This approach, however, has been accused of elitism as well.
To put it simply: the intellectual, in this view, can fully enjoy junk culture because of his or her high culture background, but the average reader can never raise to the learned intellectual discourse of which he or she is the object. An example of this form of appropriation is Thomas Roberts's An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction (1990). Though Roberts claims to take a distance from studies of canonical fiction, he justifies his (implicit) decision to impose canonical models on popular fiction as follows: "If people who read Goethe and Alessandro Manzoni and Pushkin with pleasure are also reading detective fiction with pleasure, there is more in the detective story than its critics have recognized, perhaps more than even its writers and readers have recognized" (1989:5). This illustrates a frequent strategy: the legitimation of popular fiction on the basis of its use of canonized literary fiction, and of the legitimized public's response to it.
Contemporary apocalyptic thought
Marshall McLuhan caused wide irritation with his statement that the traditional, book-oriented intellectuals had become irrelevant for the formulation of cultural rules in the electronic age.
Equally alive is the aristocratic apocalyptic view on mass culture as the destruction of genuine art. As Andrew Ross (1989:5) writes, a history of popular culture is also a history of intellectuals, of cultural experts whose self-assigned task it is to define the borders between the popular and the legitimate. But in contemporary society the dispersed authority is ever more exercised by "technical" intellectuals working for specific purposes and not for mankind. And in the academic world, growing attention for popular and marginal cultures threatens the absolute values on which intellectuals have built their autonomy.
In the sixties, Marshall McLuhan caused wide irritation with his statement that the traditional, book-oriented intellectuals had become irrelevant for the formulation of cultural rules in the electronic age. This is not to say that they lost any real political power, which humanist intellectuals as such hardly ever had. It does mean, however, that they are losing control of their own field, the field of art, of restricted symbolical production (Pierre Bourdieu). While in the 19th century, intellectuals managed to construct art as a proper, closed domain in which only the in-crowd was allowed to judge, they have seen this autonomy become ever more threatened by 20th-century mass society. The main factor here was not the quantitative expansion of consumption culture, nor the intrusion of commerce into the field of art through the appearance of paperbacks and book clubs. After all, protecting art from simplicity and commerce was precisely the task intellectuals set for themselves.
More important is the disappearance of what has been called the "grand narratives" during this century, the questioning of all-encompassing world views offering coherent interpretations of the world and unequivocal guides for action. As Jim Collins argues in Uncommon Cultures (1989:2), there is no master's voice anymore, but only a decentralized assemblage of conflicting voices and institutions. The growing awareness of the historical and cultural variability of moral categories had to be a problem for an intellectual class which had based its position on the defense of secular but transhistorical values.
This brings us to a second problem humanist intellectuals face, that is, the fragmentation of the public. 19th-century intellectuals could still tell themselves that they were either writing for their colleagues, or teaching the undifferentiated masses. 20th-century intellectuals face a heterogeneous whole of groups and media producing their own discourses according to their own logic and interests. Thus they cannot control the reception of their own messages anymore, and thereby see their influence on the structuring of culture threatened. Many neo-apocalyptic intellectuals, such as Alain Finkielkraut and George Steiner, emphasize their concern about the growing "illiteracy" of the masses. In practice they seem to be mainly concerned with high culture illiteracy, the inability to appreciate difficult art and literary classics.
The neo-aristocratic defense of so-called transhistorical and universal human values may also often be linked to a conservative political project. A return to universal values implies the delegitimation of any group which does not conform to those values. It is no coincidence, therefore, that attempts in the United States to define a common "American cultural legacy" tend to neglect the cultures of ethnic minority groups. Or that the fight against franglais (French "contaminated" by American English) in France was mainly fought by intellectuals seeing their traditional position in French society threatened by the import of American cultural products, as Clem Robyns (1995) describes.
Recurring issues in popular culture studies
The interactions between popular and legitimized culture
The blurring of the boundaries between high and low culture is one of the main complaints made by traditional intellectuals about contemporary mass society.[citation needed] It is hardly surprising then that a lot of studies deal with this topic. There are, for instance, a number of sociological studies on literary institutions which are held responsible for this mix.[citation needed] Among the first were the commercial book clubs, such as the Book-of-the-Month-Club, appearing from the twenties on. The aggressive reactions they provoked are described by Janice Radway (1989) in "The Scandal of the Middlebrow". According to Radway, the book clubs were perceived as scandalous because they blurred some basic distinctions of cultural discourse. In a society haunted by the spectre of cultural standardization and leveling towards below, they dared to put "serious" fiction on the same level as detective, adventure stories, biographies and popular nonfiction. Book clubs were scandalous because they created a space where high and low could meet.
Soon, the term "middlebrow" was introduced to qualify this phenomenon, and to dismiss it as threatening the authenticity of both high and popular culture. A bit after the book clubs came the paperbacks, and their influence was even more wide-ranging. More about this can be found in Thomas Bonn's book (1989) on New American Library. It shows through what elaborate strategies the respectable hardcover editors had to go in order to hide the fact that, from the sixties on, paperback publishers had taken over the control on the production of serious literature.
The possibility of a "subversive" popular culture
The question whether popular culture or mass culture is inherently conservative, or whether it can be used in a subversive strategy as well, is equally hotly debated. It seems widely accepted that popular culture forms can function at any moment as anti-cultures. "Bad taste" products such as pornography and horror fiction, says for instance Andrew Ross (1989:231), draw their popular appeal precisely from their expressions of disrespect for the imposed lessons of educated taste. They are expressions of social resentment on the part of groups which have been subordinated and excluded by today's "civilized society".
The question whether popular culture can actually resist dominant ideology, or even contribute to social change, is much more difficult to answer. Many critics easily read popular fiction and film as "attacks against the system", neglecting both the exact ways in which the so-called revolutionary message is enacted, and the capacities of dominant doctrines to recuperate critical messages. Tania Modleski in "The Terror of Pleasure" (1986:159), for instance, presents exploitation horror films as attacks on the basic aspects of bourgeois culture. Thus a loving father cannibalizes his child, and priests turn into servants of the devil. Other scholars (e.g. Clem Robyns, 1991) claim that, by presenting their perversion as supernatural, or at least pathological, horror films precisely contribute to perpetuating those institutions.
Similarly, many critics exalt stories which feature a lone hero fighting for his ideals against an inert and amoral system. Thus Jim Collins in Uncommon Cultures (1989:30-31) sees crime fiction opposing a smart private detective and an inefficient police force as a critique of state justice. On the other hand, Thomas Roberts demonstrates in An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction (1990:173-174), a study of the historical background of the private detective model, how the detective story came into existence in the middle of the 19th century, at the time the institution of state police was developed. This force consisted mainly of lower-class people, but nevertheless disposed of a certain authority over the upper class. The fears among the upper classes for this uncontrolled force were eased by domesticating the police in stories explicitly devoted to them. Their inability to pass on correct judgment was amply demonstrated, and forced them to bow for the individual intellect of the detective, who always belonged to the threatened upper class.
Finally, Umberto Eco's studies on Superman and James Bond (1988:211-256, 315-362) as myths of a static good-and-evil world view should be mentioned as very early and lucid examples of a combination of semiotic and political analysis.
Still, there may be ways to wage revolt in an age of mass media. One way could be to introduce small gradual changes in products otherwise conforming to the requirements of a dominant ideology. The problem here, of course, is that isolated messages get drowned in the discourse as a whole, and that they can be used to avoid real changes. Some scholars, however, describe how opposition forces use the logic of the media to subvert them. In No Respect (1989: 123), Andrew Ross mentions the late sixties Yippie movement. Yippies would stage media events, such as the public burning of dollar bills in Wall Street, thereby drawing heavy media coverage. This politics of the spectacle brought the counterculture right into the conservative media and filled their forms with subversive content.
Whether this strategy is effective or not, it points to an important fact: the mass media are not above, but dependent on the public. As Alan Swingewood states in The Myth of Mass Culture (1977:84), the ideological messages the mass media receive are already mediated by a complex network of institutions and discourses. The media, themselves divided over innumerable specific discourses, transform them again. And finally the public meaningfully relates those messages to individual existences through the mediation of social groups, family networks, etc., which they belong to.
References
* Theodor W. Adorno, 1973-1986: Gesammelte Schriften, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.
* Houston Baker, 1989: "Handling Crisis", paper read at the Symposium Cultural Literacy in the Media Age: The Clash of Values, at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, August 1989.
* Roland Barthes, 1957: Mythologies, Paris: Editions du Seuil.
* Thomas L. Bonn, 1989: Heavy Traffic and High Culture. New American Library as Literary Gatekeeper in the Paperback Revolution, Carbondale/Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press.
* Pierre Bourdieu 1971: "Le marché des biens symboliques", in L'année sociologique 22:49-126.
* Pierre Bourdieu: Ce que parler veut dire. L'économie des échanges linguistiques, Paris: Fayard.
* Jim Collins, 1989: Uncommon Cultures. Popular Culture and Post-Modernism, Mew York/London: Routledge.
* Umberto Eco, 1986: Travels in Hyperreality, New York: Harcourt.
* Umberto Eco, 1988 (1964, 1978): The Structure of Bad Taste, Amsterdam: Bert Bakker.
* Alain Finkielkraut, 1987: La défaite de la pensée, Paris: Gallimard.
* Charles Grivel, 1973: Production de l'intérêt romanesque, The Hague/Paris: Mouton.
* Jürgen Habermas, 1981: Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.
* Tania Modleski, 1986: "The Terror of Pleasure. The Contemporary Horror Film and Postmodern Theory", in Tania Modleski (ed.), Studies in Entertainment. Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 155-167.
* Chandra Mukerji & Michael Schudson, 1991 (eds.), Rethinking Popular Culture, University of California Press
* Thomas J. Roberts, 1990: An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction, Athens (Georgia)/London: University of Georgia Press.
* Clem Robyns, 1991: "Beyond the first dimension: recent tendencies in popular culture studies", in Joris Vlasselaers (Ed.) The Prince and the Frog, Leuven: ALW.
* Clem Robyns, 1995: "Defending the National Identity", In Andreas Poltermann (Ed.) Literaturkanon, Medienereignis, Kultureller Text. Berlin: Erich Schmidt.
* Andrew Ross, 1989: No Respect. Intellectuals and Popular Culture, New York/London: Routledge.
* Barbara Smith, 1988: Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory, Cambridge (Mass.)/London: Harvard University Press.
* Alan Swingewood, 1977: The Myth of Mass Culture, London: Macmillan.
sumber: wikipedia
Following the social upheavals of the 1960s, popular culture has come to be taken more seriously as a terrain of academic enquiry and has also helped to change the outlooks of more established disciplines. Conceptual barriers between so-called high and low culture have broken down, accompanying an explosion in scholarly interest in popular culture, which encompasses such diverse media as comic books, television, and the Internet. Revaluation of mass culture in the 1970s and 1980s has revealed significant problems with the traditional view of mass culture as degraded and elite culture as uplifting. Divisions between high and low culture have been increasingly seen as political distinctions rather than defensible aesthetic or intellectual ones (Mukerji & Schudson 1991:1-2).
Traditional theories of popular culture
The theory of mass society
Mass society formed during the 19th-century industrialization process through the division of labor, the large-scale industrial organization, the concentration of urban populations, the growing centralization of decision making, the development of a complex and international communication system and the growth of mass political movements. The term "mass society", therefore, was introduced by anticapitalist, aristocratic ideologists and used against the values and practices of industrialized society.
As Alan Swingewood points out in The Myth of Mass Culture (1977:5-8), the aristocratic theory of mass society is to be linked to the moral crisis caused by the weakening of traditional centers of authority such as family and religion. The society predicted by José Ortega y Gasset, T. S. Eliot and others would be dominated by philistine masses, without centers or hierarchies of moral or cultural authority. In such a society, art can only survive by cutting its links with the masses, by withdrawing as an asylum for threatened values. Throughout the 20th century, this type of theory has modulated on the opposition between disinterested, pure autonomous art and commercialized mass culture.
The theory of culture industry
Diametrically opposed to the aristocratic view would be the theory of culture industry developed by Frankfurt School theoreticians such as Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse. In their view, the masses are precisely dominated by an all-encompassing culture industry obeying only to the logic of consumer capitalism.[citation needed] Gramsci's concept of hegemony (see: cultural hegemony), that is, the domination of society by a specific group which stays in power by partially taking care of and partially repressing the claims of other groups, does not work here anymore. The principle of hegemony as a goal to achieve for an oppressed social class loses its meaning. The system has taken over; only the state apparatus dominates.
The theory of progressive evolution
A third view on popular culture, which fits in the liberal-pluralist ideology and is often called "progressive evolutionism", is overtly optimistic. It sees capitalist economy as creating opportunities for every individual to participate in a culture which is fully democratized through mass education, expansion of leisure time and cheap records and paperbacks. As Swingewood points out in The Myth of Mass Culture (1977:22), there is no question of domination here anymore. In this view, popular culture does not threaten high culture, but is an authentic expression of the needs of the people.
Contemporary popular culture studies
If we forget precursors such as Umberto Eco and Roland Barthes for a moment, popular culture studies as we know them today were developed in the late seventies and the eighties. The first influential works were generally politically left-wing and rejected the "aristocratic" view. However, they also criticized the pessimism of the Frankfurt School: contemporary studies on mass culture accept that, apparently, popular culture forms do respond to widespread needs of the public. They also emphasized the capacity of the consumers to resist indoctrination and passive reception. Finally, they avoided any monolithic concept of mass culture. Instead they tried to describe culture as a whole as a complex formation of discourses which indeed correspond to particular interests, and which indeed can be dominated by specific groups, but which also always are dialectically related to their producers and consumers.
A nice example of this tendency is Andrew Ross's No Respect. Intellectuals and Popular Culture (1989). His chapter on the history of jazz, blues and rock does not present a linear narrative opposing the authentic popular music to the commercial record industry, but shows how popular music in the U.S., from the twenties until today, evolved out of complex interactions between popular, avant-garde and commercial circuits, between lower- and middle-class kids, between blacks and whites.
Traces of the theory of culture industry
Still the traditional views have a long life (overview based on Clem Robyns, 1991). The theory which has been abandoned most massively is the monolithic, pessimistic view on the culture industry of the Frankfurt School. However, it is still hotly debated. The criticism raised can be summarized in three main arguments. First of all, the culture industry theory has completely abandoned the Marxist dialectic conception of society. Every impulse, according to this view, comes from above. Resistance and contradiction are impossible, and the audience is manipulated into passivity. Alan Swingewood and others emphasize that the Frankfurt theory has to be seen in the light of left-wing frustrations about the failure of proletarian revolutions early this century, and the easy submission of the European nations to fascism.
A second reproach is that this view may be as elitist as its aristocratic counterpart. Both establish the lonely, autonomous, avant-garde intellectual as the only light in a zombie society. Thus the former Marxists arrive at an uncritical praise of the elitist and antirevolutionary upper-class culture. This brings us to a third argument, already made in the sixties by Umberto Eco (1988). In a state-dominated mass society, the lonely, lucid, intellectual Übermensch can only retreat in his ivory tower. The historicity of the contemporary situation is not taken into account, so its internal contradictions are ignored, and thus revolution can only be seen as purely utopian. The culture industry theory, therefore, would lead to passivity and thereby becomes an objective ally of the system it pretends to criticize.
It is of course mainly the influence exercised by the Frankfurt School which matters here: not all of their texts present the same rigid view. In Das Schema der Massenkultur (1973-86:331), for instance, Adorno discusses a "nucleus of individuality" that the culture industry cannot manipulate, and which forces her to continuously repeat her manipulation.
However questioned this view on popular culture may be, it still leaves some traces, for instance, in theories depicting narrative as necessarily ideologically conservative, like Charles Grivel's Production de l'intérêt romanesque (1973). Such theories see dominant ideology as purely a matter of messages, propagated in this case through the forms of narrative fiction. Thus they easily arrive at an exaltation of experimental literature as necessarily revolutionary. However, they may neglect the fact that the ideology is never simply in the message, but in the position of the message in the general social discourse, and in the position of its producers in the social formation.
Other theories easily yielding to monolithic thought stem from the emancipation movements of oppressed groups. Early feminist theory, for instance, often described society as universally and transhistorically dominated by patriarchy in every aspect of life, thereby presenting a pejorative view of the women they claim to defend. As Andrew Ross (1989) argues, the same remark goes for the widely accepted account of rock history as a continuous appropriation of black music by a white music industry. Only studies analyzing the cultural oppression of homosexuality seem to take a less deterministic position.
Contemporary liberal pluralism
In liberal-pluralist accounts of popular culture, the theorizing on its supposedly liberating, democratizing function is nowadays most often pushed to the background. This type of criticism, often produced by people who are also active in popular literary writing themselves, often amounts to paraphrase and suffers from an uncritical identification with the study object. One of the main aims of this type of criticism is the establishment of ahistorical canons of and within popular genres in the image of legitimized culture. This approach, however, has been accused of elitism as well.
To put it simply: the intellectual, in this view, can fully enjoy junk culture because of his or her high culture background, but the average reader can never raise to the learned intellectual discourse of which he or she is the object. An example of this form of appropriation is Thomas Roberts's An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction (1990). Though Roberts claims to take a distance from studies of canonical fiction, he justifies his (implicit) decision to impose canonical models on popular fiction as follows: "If people who read Goethe and Alessandro Manzoni and Pushkin with pleasure are also reading detective fiction with pleasure, there is more in the detective story than its critics have recognized, perhaps more than even its writers and readers have recognized" (1989:5). This illustrates a frequent strategy: the legitimation of popular fiction on the basis of its use of canonized literary fiction, and of the legitimized public's response to it.
Contemporary apocalyptic thought
Marshall McLuhan caused wide irritation with his statement that the traditional, book-oriented intellectuals had become irrelevant for the formulation of cultural rules in the electronic age.
Equally alive is the aristocratic apocalyptic view on mass culture as the destruction of genuine art. As Andrew Ross (1989:5) writes, a history of popular culture is also a history of intellectuals, of cultural experts whose self-assigned task it is to define the borders between the popular and the legitimate. But in contemporary society the dispersed authority is ever more exercised by "technical" intellectuals working for specific purposes and not for mankind. And in the academic world, growing attention for popular and marginal cultures threatens the absolute values on which intellectuals have built their autonomy.
In the sixties, Marshall McLuhan caused wide irritation with his statement that the traditional, book-oriented intellectuals had become irrelevant for the formulation of cultural rules in the electronic age. This is not to say that they lost any real political power, which humanist intellectuals as such hardly ever had. It does mean, however, that they are losing control of their own field, the field of art, of restricted symbolical production (Pierre Bourdieu). While in the 19th century, intellectuals managed to construct art as a proper, closed domain in which only the in-crowd was allowed to judge, they have seen this autonomy become ever more threatened by 20th-century mass society. The main factor here was not the quantitative expansion of consumption culture, nor the intrusion of commerce into the field of art through the appearance of paperbacks and book clubs. After all, protecting art from simplicity and commerce was precisely the task intellectuals set for themselves.
More important is the disappearance of what has been called the "grand narratives" during this century, the questioning of all-encompassing world views offering coherent interpretations of the world and unequivocal guides for action. As Jim Collins argues in Uncommon Cultures (1989:2), there is no master's voice anymore, but only a decentralized assemblage of conflicting voices and institutions. The growing awareness of the historical and cultural variability of moral categories had to be a problem for an intellectual class which had based its position on the defense of secular but transhistorical values.
This brings us to a second problem humanist intellectuals face, that is, the fragmentation of the public. 19th-century intellectuals could still tell themselves that they were either writing for their colleagues, or teaching the undifferentiated masses. 20th-century intellectuals face a heterogeneous whole of groups and media producing their own discourses according to their own logic and interests. Thus they cannot control the reception of their own messages anymore, and thereby see their influence on the structuring of culture threatened. Many neo-apocalyptic intellectuals, such as Alain Finkielkraut and George Steiner, emphasize their concern about the growing "illiteracy" of the masses. In practice they seem to be mainly concerned with high culture illiteracy, the inability to appreciate difficult art and literary classics.
The neo-aristocratic defense of so-called transhistorical and universal human values may also often be linked to a conservative political project. A return to universal values implies the delegitimation of any group which does not conform to those values. It is no coincidence, therefore, that attempts in the United States to define a common "American cultural legacy" tend to neglect the cultures of ethnic minority groups. Or that the fight against franglais (French "contaminated" by American English) in France was mainly fought by intellectuals seeing their traditional position in French society threatened by the import of American cultural products, as Clem Robyns (1995) describes.
Recurring issues in popular culture studies
The interactions between popular and legitimized culture
The blurring of the boundaries between high and low culture is one of the main complaints made by traditional intellectuals about contemporary mass society.[citation needed] It is hardly surprising then that a lot of studies deal with this topic. There are, for instance, a number of sociological studies on literary institutions which are held responsible for this mix.[citation needed] Among the first were the commercial book clubs, such as the Book-of-the-Month-Club, appearing from the twenties on. The aggressive reactions they provoked are described by Janice Radway (1989) in "The Scandal of the Middlebrow". According to Radway, the book clubs were perceived as scandalous because they blurred some basic distinctions of cultural discourse. In a society haunted by the spectre of cultural standardization and leveling towards below, they dared to put "serious" fiction on the same level as detective, adventure stories, biographies and popular nonfiction. Book clubs were scandalous because they created a space where high and low could meet.
Soon, the term "middlebrow" was introduced to qualify this phenomenon, and to dismiss it as threatening the authenticity of both high and popular culture. A bit after the book clubs came the paperbacks, and their influence was even more wide-ranging. More about this can be found in Thomas Bonn's book (1989) on New American Library. It shows through what elaborate strategies the respectable hardcover editors had to go in order to hide the fact that, from the sixties on, paperback publishers had taken over the control on the production of serious literature.
The possibility of a "subversive" popular culture
The question whether popular culture or mass culture is inherently conservative, or whether it can be used in a subversive strategy as well, is equally hotly debated. It seems widely accepted that popular culture forms can function at any moment as anti-cultures. "Bad taste" products such as pornography and horror fiction, says for instance Andrew Ross (1989:231), draw their popular appeal precisely from their expressions of disrespect for the imposed lessons of educated taste. They are expressions of social resentment on the part of groups which have been subordinated and excluded by today's "civilized society".
The question whether popular culture can actually resist dominant ideology, or even contribute to social change, is much more difficult to answer. Many critics easily read popular fiction and film as "attacks against the system", neglecting both the exact ways in which the so-called revolutionary message is enacted, and the capacities of dominant doctrines to recuperate critical messages. Tania Modleski in "The Terror of Pleasure" (1986:159), for instance, presents exploitation horror films as attacks on the basic aspects of bourgeois culture. Thus a loving father cannibalizes his child, and priests turn into servants of the devil. Other scholars (e.g. Clem Robyns, 1991) claim that, by presenting their perversion as supernatural, or at least pathological, horror films precisely contribute to perpetuating those institutions.
Similarly, many critics exalt stories which feature a lone hero fighting for his ideals against an inert and amoral system. Thus Jim Collins in Uncommon Cultures (1989:30-31) sees crime fiction opposing a smart private detective and an inefficient police force as a critique of state justice. On the other hand, Thomas Roberts demonstrates in An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction (1990:173-174), a study of the historical background of the private detective model, how the detective story came into existence in the middle of the 19th century, at the time the institution of state police was developed. This force consisted mainly of lower-class people, but nevertheless disposed of a certain authority over the upper class. The fears among the upper classes for this uncontrolled force were eased by domesticating the police in stories explicitly devoted to them. Their inability to pass on correct judgment was amply demonstrated, and forced them to bow for the individual intellect of the detective, who always belonged to the threatened upper class.
Finally, Umberto Eco's studies on Superman and James Bond (1988:211-256, 315-362) as myths of a static good-and-evil world view should be mentioned as very early and lucid examples of a combination of semiotic and political analysis.
Still, there may be ways to wage revolt in an age of mass media. One way could be to introduce small gradual changes in products otherwise conforming to the requirements of a dominant ideology. The problem here, of course, is that isolated messages get drowned in the discourse as a whole, and that they can be used to avoid real changes. Some scholars, however, describe how opposition forces use the logic of the media to subvert them. In No Respect (1989: 123), Andrew Ross mentions the late sixties Yippie movement. Yippies would stage media events, such as the public burning of dollar bills in Wall Street, thereby drawing heavy media coverage. This politics of the spectacle brought the counterculture right into the conservative media and filled their forms with subversive content.
Whether this strategy is effective or not, it points to an important fact: the mass media are not above, but dependent on the public. As Alan Swingewood states in The Myth of Mass Culture (1977:84), the ideological messages the mass media receive are already mediated by a complex network of institutions and discourses. The media, themselves divided over innumerable specific discourses, transform them again. And finally the public meaningfully relates those messages to individual existences through the mediation of social groups, family networks, etc., which they belong to.
References
* Theodor W. Adorno, 1973-1986: Gesammelte Schriften, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.
* Houston Baker, 1989: "Handling Crisis", paper read at the Symposium Cultural Literacy in the Media Age: The Clash of Values, at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, August 1989.
* Roland Barthes, 1957: Mythologies, Paris: Editions du Seuil.
* Thomas L. Bonn, 1989: Heavy Traffic and High Culture. New American Library as Literary Gatekeeper in the Paperback Revolution, Carbondale/Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press.
* Pierre Bourdieu 1971: "Le marché des biens symboliques", in L'année sociologique 22:49-126.
* Pierre Bourdieu: Ce que parler veut dire. L'économie des échanges linguistiques, Paris: Fayard.
* Jim Collins, 1989: Uncommon Cultures. Popular Culture and Post-Modernism, Mew York/London: Routledge.
* Umberto Eco, 1986: Travels in Hyperreality, New York: Harcourt.
* Umberto Eco, 1988 (1964, 1978): The Structure of Bad Taste, Amsterdam: Bert Bakker.
* Alain Finkielkraut, 1987: La défaite de la pensée, Paris: Gallimard.
* Charles Grivel, 1973: Production de l'intérêt romanesque, The Hague/Paris: Mouton.
* Jürgen Habermas, 1981: Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.
* Tania Modleski, 1986: "The Terror of Pleasure. The Contemporary Horror Film and Postmodern Theory", in Tania Modleski (ed.), Studies in Entertainment. Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 155-167.
* Chandra Mukerji & Michael Schudson, 1991 (eds.), Rethinking Popular Culture, University of California Press
* Thomas J. Roberts, 1990: An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction, Athens (Georgia)/London: University of Georgia Press.
* Clem Robyns, 1991: "Beyond the first dimension: recent tendencies in popular culture studies", in Joris Vlasselaers (Ed.) The Prince and the Frog, Leuven: ALW.
* Clem Robyns, 1995: "Defending the National Identity", In Andreas Poltermann (Ed.) Literaturkanon, Medienereignis, Kultureller Text. Berlin: Erich Schmidt.
* Andrew Ross, 1989: No Respect. Intellectuals and Popular Culture, New York/London: Routledge.
* Barbara Smith, 1988: Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory, Cambridge (Mass.)/London: Harvard University Press.
* Alan Swingewood, 1977: The Myth of Mass Culture, London: Macmillan.
sumber: wikipedia
30 Jan 2009
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