The Frankfurt School and Cultural Theory: An Overview

1. The Frankfurt School and Cultural Theory: An Overview

2. The Highlight of the History of Frankfurt School • Frankfurt School for Social Research was set up in 1923. • Left-wing German, Jewish intellectuals. • Upper and middle class of German society. • The rise of Nazi Party to power in Germany; racist oppression of Jews; totalitarian repression of the left in 1930s meant that members of the school were forced to flee to other parts of Europe and North America. • The school was temporarily situated at New York in early 1940s. • It eventually returned to Germany in the late 1940s.

3. Thinkers of Frankfurt School • Theodor Adorno, 1903-1970. • Max Horkheimer, 1895-1973. • Herbert Marcuse, 1898-1978. • Walter Benjamin, 1892-1940.

4. Functions of Frankfurt School • Development of critical theory and research draws extensively upon Marxist Theory. • This involves intellectual work which aimed to reveal the social contradictions underlying the emergent capitalist societies of the time and their typical ideological frameworks in order to construct a theoretical critique of modern capitalism. • Its theoretical and political perspectives extends to post-war American capitalism.

5. Thus, in the Fascist state of Nazi Germany and American monopoly, consumer capitalism formed crucial features of the context in which the Frankfurt school’s analysis of popular culture and mass media, emerged and developed. • The objective of Frankfurt School has been to explain why working-class, socialist revolution has not occurred and is unlikely to occur in the future.

6. Foundations of Frankfurt School • Critique of Enlightenment: • The promise of enlightenment , the belief in scientific and rational progress and the extension of human freedom, had turned into nightmare, the use of science and rationality in the form of social control to stamp out human freedom. • Adorno (1991) concludes, enlightenment, that is the progressive technical development, become mass deception and is turned into a means of fettering consciousness. It impedes the development of autonomous, independent individuals who judge and decide consciously for themselves.

7. Critique of Marxism: • To get away from the emphasis placed upon the economy,i.e. economic determinism, as the major way of explaining how and why societies work. • Trying to fill in an important part of the picture of capitalism Marx did not get round to, i.e. the position and importance of culture and ideology. • It seems increasingly less optimistic about the prospects for a working-class, socialist revolution in the west as the twentieth century progressed.

8. The social control afforded by scientific rationality offered by enlightenment, undermined the political optimism associated with Marxism. • Fascism represented the political logic of rational domination unleashed by the enlightenment. • This context led to concern with the decline of socialism and working-class radicalism. • Resulted in the increased possibility for centralized control to be exercised over increasing numbers of people by the expanded “totalitarian” power of the modern capitalist state.

9. Adorno’s Theory of Culture Industry • Culture • Basic casual factor in its own right; • Its innovative and original character of the Frankfurt School’s contribution. • Industry • The fundamental productive power of capitalism; • The continuing adherence to Marxism.

10. The Theory of Commodity Fetishism • Features of Marx. • The Theory of Modern Capitalism • Feature of Marcuse.

11. Theory of Commodity Fetishism • Adorno (1991) wrote that the real secret of success …… is the mere reflection of what one pays in the market for the product. The consumer is really worshipping the money that he himself has paid for the ticket to the Toscanini concert (p.34). • According to Marx (1963), the mystery of the commodity form, therefore, consists in the fact that the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective characteristic, a social natural quality of the labour product itself, and that consequently the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour (p.183)

12. Marx (1963) concluded that through this transference the products of labour become commodities …… It is simply a definite social between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things …… This I call the fetishims which attachs itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities (p.183). • “this is the real success”: since it can show how exchange value exerts its power in a speciel way in the realm of cultural goods.

13. Exchange value refers to the money that a commodity can command on the market, the price it can be bought and sold for. • Use value refers to the usefulness of the good for the consumer, its practical value or utility as a commodity. • With capitalism, according to Marx, exchange value will always dominate use value since the capitalist economic cycle involving the production, marketing and consumption commodities will always dominate people’s real needs. • This idea is central to Adorno’s theory of capitalist culture.

14. Cultural commodities, according to Marx, fall completely into the world of commodities, are produced for the market, and are aimed at the market. • What is central to cultural commodities is that exchange value deceptively takes over the functions of use value.

15. Theory of Modern Capitalism • It argues that modern capitalism has managed to overcome many of the contradictions and crises it once faced, and has thereby acquired new and unprecedented powers of stability and continuity. • Contradictions and crises, such as, economic growth, affluence and consumerism on the one hand, while continued inequality, poverty and racism on the other hand.

16. Frankfurt school does not deny that capitalism contains internal contradictions, but insofar as capitalist societies are capable of generating higher and higher levels of economic well-being for large section of their populations, including their working classes, their eventual overthrow and the rise of socialism appear less likely to occur. • It sees the durability in capitalism others have doubted, and argues that this rests upon affluence and consumerism, and the more rational and pervasive forms of social control afforded by the modern state, mass media and popular culture.

17. Capitalist productive forces are capable of producing such vast amount of wealth through waste production such as military expenditure that ‘false needs’ are created and met. • People can therefore be unconsciously became friends to the capitalist system, guaranteeing its stability and continuity. • The rise of monopoly capitalist corporations and the rational and efficient state management of economy and society, have served to establish firmly this process further.

18. Monopoly allows corporations greater control over their markets and prices and thus their waste production. • State intervention could prevent the periodic eruption of economic crises and further extend the power of rational organization over capitalist societies. • The affluence and consumerism generated by the economies of capitalist societies, and the levels of ideological control possessed by their culture industries, have ensured that the working-class has been thoroughly incorporated into the system. • Its members are more financially secure, and no longer have any conscious reasons for wanting to overthrow capitalism.

19. The idea that the working class has been pacified into accepting capitalism is central to the theory of the School. • Rational domination offered by the enlightenment is the domination of the masses in modern capitalist societies. • Commodities of all kinds become more available and therefore more capable of dominating people’s consciousness.

20. Concept of false needs • It assumes that people have true or real needs to be creative, independent and autonomous, in control of their own destinies, fully participating members of meaningful and democratic collectivities and able to live free and relatively unconstrained lives and to think for themselves. • True needs cannot be realized in modern capitalism because the false needs, which capitalist system has to foster in order to survive, come to be superimposed over them. • False needs work to deny and suppress true or real needs.

21. Concept of false needs • False needs created can be fulfilled at the expense of the true needs which remain unsatisfied in light of consumerism and commodity fetishism. • People do not realise their real needs remain unsatisfied. • The School views the culture industry ensuring the creation and satisfaction of false needs, and the suppression of true needs. • It is so effective in doing this that the working-class is no longer likely to pose a threat to the stability and continuity of capitalism.

22. The concept of culture industry • Commodity fetishism is the basis of theory of culture industry, that stresses cultural forms like popular music, film and television function to secure the continuing economic, political and ideological domination of capitalist societies. • Culture industry reflects the consolidation of commodity fetishism, the domination of exchange value and the ascendancy of state monopoly capitalism. • The commodities produced by the culture industry are governed by the need to realise their value on the market. • Profit motive determines the nature of cultural forms.

23. It shapes the tastes and preferences of the masses. • Thereby, moulding their consciousness by inculcating the desire for false needs. It works to exclude real needs, alternative and radical concepts, and politically oppositional ways of thinking and acting. • Adorno saw culture as something which has imposed upon the masses, and makes them prepared to welcome it given they do not realise it is an imposition.

24. The definition of culture industry • Adorno (1991) wrote, products which are tailored for consumption by masses, and which to a great extent determine the nature of that consumption, are manufactured more or less according to plan. • This is made possible by contemporary technical capabilities as well as by economic and administrative concentration. • The culture industry intentionally integrates its consumers. • The masses are not primary but secondary, they are an object of calculation, an appendage of the machinery. • The customer is not king, though the culture industry would have us believe, not its subject but its object.

25. Techniques of culture industry • Process of standardisation and pseudo-individualisation. • Standardization • products acquire the form common to all commodities, like the Western, familiar to every movie-goer. • Substantial core similarities between popular songs, movie, TV. • It constructs framework. • Pseudo-individualisation • The core is hidden by stylistic variations as uniqueness. • Incidental differences confers a sense of individuality that each products (i.e. popular songs) affects an individual air. • It constructs details.

26. Pseudo-individualisation serves to obscure the standardisation and manipulation of consciousness practised by culture industry. • The framework entails standardisation which draws out a system of response-mechanisms wholly antagonistic to the ideal of individuality in a free, liberal society. • The details must provide the listener a sense of this suppressed individuality.

27. Process of culture industry • Adorno (1991) stresses to ignore the nature of the culture industry, is to stop resistance to its ideology. • Popular music offers relaxation and respite from the rigours of mechanised labour because it is not demanding or difficult. • People desire popular music, partly because capitalists hammer it into their minds and make it appear desirable. • Their consumption of standardised products mirrors the standardised, repetitive and boring nature of the work in production. • Standardised production goes hand-in-hand with standardised consumption.

28. Consequences of culture industry • Cultural forms such as popular music act as “social cement”. • Adorno gave awareness to most people in capitalist societies live limited, impoverished and unhappy lives. • Popular music and films do not deny this awareness, but act to reconcile people to their fate. • Adorno (1991) observed “the actual function of sentimental music and film lies in the temporary release given to the awareness that one has missed fulfillment …… it is catharsis for the masses, …… Music and film permits its listeners and audiences the confession of the unhappiness reconciles them, by means of this ‘release’, to their social dependence.”

29. The ideology of culture industry is manipulative, underpinning the dominance of the market and commodity fetishism. • It is conformist and enforcing the general acceptance of the capitalist order. • The concepts of order which the culture industry hammers into human beings are always those of status quo. • The power of ideology of culture industry is that conformity has replaced consciousness.

30. Deviant, oppositional and alternative ways of thinking and acting become increasingly impossible to imagine as the power of the culture industry is extended over people’s mind. • The masses become completely powerless. Power lies with the culture industry. Its products encourage conformity and consensus which ensure obedience to authority, and the stability of the capitalist system. • According to Adorno (1991), its effectiveness lies in the promotion and exploitation of the ego-weakness to which the powerless members of contemporary society, with its concentration of power, are disapproved.

31. What is relevant of Frankfurt Schoolto Social (Youth) Work? • What contexts in which HK social work is emerged and developed? • What’s the product of social work? • The relationship of social workers and its labour? • Does social work satisfying the false consciousness? Does it struggle with its partners for real needs? • The exchange value and use value of social work? • To what extent social work is a kind of culture industry? • The role of social work in securing dominant of ruling groups? • The implication of the missing of working-class analysis and action to nowadays HK social work and its service delivery systems?

32. Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies(CCCS): An Overview

33. The Highlight of History of Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural studies • Late 1950s to early 1960s, writings of Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams. • CCCS was set up with Hoggart became the first leading person. • Late 1960s to 1970s, insights of New Marxism and New Left are employed in to CCCS. • Stuart Hall became the second leading person which employed perspectives of New Social Movement (NSM) and Western Marxism, implied the break from classical theory of Marxism. • Theories of Althusser and French Structuralism were integrated into the field of cultural studies. • 1980s, employed theories of Antonio Gramsci fuelled with Marxist perspectives which developed models to study Thatcherism.

34. The Themes of Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural studies • About the Mass Media • Concerns the textual studies: the process of reproduction of ideologies and hegemonic ideas. • About Everyday Life Practice • Concerns the ethnography of sub-cultural groups. • It attempts to uncover how do the political, power and inequality order in shaping different kind of life-styles and popular cultures.

35. About Political Ideologies • It studies, such as Thatcherism, relationship between nationalism and race and ethnics discrimination. • Attempts to uncover dominant political and cultural codes that the reasons why the mass give support to such discrimination. • About Marxism • It supports Leftist, in general meanings, politically that exerts great influence on the Left.

36. Concepts of Cultural Studies • According to concept of hegemony, media performs an important role in reproducing hegemonic ideologies. • It cultivates false consciousness that naturalizes leftist agendas, such as inequalities and social exclusion. • Industrial dispute was seen as natural order of economic development that ignored the uneven power relationship and distribution of resources. • Hall suggested that there exists relative autonomous of culture, distinguished from economic determinism, that is important in re-shaping social and political lives.

37. Hall further suggested that ideologies are ‘anchored’ in specific class interests, history and alliances. • Theories of Semiology are employed to study detailed and hidden operation of mass media in 1980s. • Textual analysis: Denotation and connotation. • Denotation: the happenings, e.g. demonstration and strikes. • Connotation: the implied meanings, e.g. the greedy workers threatens stability. • Power of ideologies are spread through detailed operations, rather than coercive force, that the mass will receive, and at the same time, are not aware of this implicit ideologies.

38. Concepts of Encoding and Decoding • According to Hall (1980), encoding and decoding is an important attributes to media studies. • Senders, Messages, Receivers. • The everyday life symbols will be used to adopt ideologies, in TV, popular music, films etc, into common senses. • Hall, therefore, suggested that the symbols used in popular culture are opened to re-interpreted, subject to the structural position of audiences. • Agencies of audience implied.

39. Dominant or preferred reading • Support hegemonic and ruling groups ideas that are not aware of. • Negotiated reading • Support and accept part of hegemonic and ruling groups ideas with situational understanding according to class position, and are unaware of the hegemonic ideas. • Oppositional reading • Aware the hegemonic ideas embedded in the messages. • Alternate and opposite method in decoding the hegemonic ideas that reveals the truths , and the attempts of the dominant class.

40. Implications of Encoding and Decoding • Agencies and active roles of media producers and consumers in creating and reading different kinds of ideas. • The possibilities of oppositional readings.

41. Subcultures • Studies of CCCS concerns working-class youths. • They viewed the working-class youths are class is being constructed and therefore is an imagined communities. • They concerned the relationship between hegemonic ideas in shaping working-class youths and youth subcultures. • They identified mainstream culture, parent culture, youth culture, leisure culture, consumer culture, yet they are all in conflict with blurred boundaries.

42. Youth subcultures are sub-ordinate to mainstream adult and parent cultures. • Viewed as folk devils or deviant. • Working-class youths are subjected to uncertainty position. • Youths are anchored into different social class. • The appearance of youth subculture acts as symbolic resistance to dominant social order. • Youths are viewed as active agents in theories of subculture.

43. Cohen (1997) defines three level of subculture analysis: • Social Structure • Power structure: gender, class that is uncontrollable. • Human beings are anchored into different positions according to the social structure they situated. • Choices and chances are limited to the determined position. • Agencies are limited to those structural positions.

44. Culture • Constructed related to the determined social class. • Everyday life practice, such as meaning, tradition, cultural practice and rituals, behaviours, language used. • Different kinds of youth subculture represent its symbolic meaning and relation to dominant class and ideas. • Personal autobiography • Personal experiences of culture and structure. • The specific meaning of subcultural life to the person or class.

45. Cohen (1997) said, Marxism viewed this three levels of cultural analysis as ‘determined criteria’ (individuals are thrown into the world involuntarily), subculture is one of responses of working-class to those determined criteria. • Hebdige (1979) suggested the style of subculture inherited flourish meaning that disrupted the process of normalization. Social activities are viewed ascreative resistance to oppressive social order. • The everyday life practice of subcultural groups, such as activities, fashion codes, drug-use, is rooted in the cultural resistance of social class relationship. • Response to structural unemployment and consumerism.

46. Paul Willis (1977) studied reproduction of working-class lads. • The fundamental aspects of anti-school culture is the opposition to authorities, it is individual attitude …… the resistance viewed as a style that is represented in many micro ways …… To the lads, it is rituals of everyday structure. • The objectives of working-class lads, is to leave school as early as possible, and engaged in a low skilled, working-class manual job. • Paul concluded that lads, in this sense, hinder the upward mobility of social ladder. • They resist school culture of success-oriented on the one hand, and prepare themselves engaged in working-class jobs.

47. What is relevant of CCCSto Social (Youth) Work? • To what extent social (youth) work reproduce hegemonic ideologies that cultivates and satisfies false consciousness? • Denotation and connotation of service delivered? • What kinds of ideologies are spread through social (youth) work? • How do we, as a social worker, engaged in different readings of social phenomenon? • To what degree social workers, as a group, enjoy agencies? • What kinds of subculture social work as well as service users are performing? • What is being resisted by social work and service users?