Discuss And Evaluate The Frankfurt School's Critique Of 'mass Culture'.

This essay discusses and evaluates the Franfurt School's critique of 'mass culture'. It starts out with a general outline of the Frankfurt School's perspective, establishing their point of analysis of 'mass culture'. This will be followed by an evaluation of their arguments against contradictory evidence.

Theodor W. Adorno, a major figure of the Frankfurt school who was significantly influenced by Marx, views mass culture and entertainment as a tool for domination in capitalist society. He heavily criticized how far from reality it portrayed society to be, and also shed light on its stupefying effects on people's consciousness and ability to think critically (1991). For instance, he saw films as a mere form of money making that used cheap emotional thrills continuously, lulling the audience to a thoughtless, listless passivity (Adorno, 1970 in Markus, 2006). The passive mind is simultaneously drilled with capitalist agenda through films. Films overstate the possibility of the hardworking protagonist to acquire wealth, their social position and constraints notwithstanding, as if society were meritocratic, with no revolution required to establish equality. Films glorify success according to capitalist reason as the portrayed "images harness joy to the purpose of getting ahead" (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944. p. 96-114).

According to Adorno and his colleague Max Horkheimer (1944), the domination of capitalist reason has become so evasive that films and radio need not even portray themselves as art any more. They overtly refer to themselves as an industry, as the entertainment business. Their social necessity is justified merely by the published figures of their directors' high incomes. Mass culture is controlled as any industry is; under bureaucratic organization from "above" to "below". They promote tried and tested formulas for commercial success in films and TV or radio programs. Artists with different, original ideas are dubbed "amateurs" by the established culture industry and the public that put faith in the industry's authority.

To critics who point out that mass culture is much more diverse than the Frankfurt school makes it to be, Adorno retorts, "parallel to standardization is pseudo-individualization". He takes the example of jazz music, which appears to offer something new and different to popular music by use of improvisation and syncopation. However, these techniques are pursued within standard rules; the musician "is not allowed to leave the beaten path". "A few false notes " on the clarinet, some "dirty notes for atonality" is not enough to equate a popular song to modern art, and respecting mass culture for these reasons is, according to Adorno, "capitulating to barbarism". Similarly, jazz listeners

who consider themselves individualist, rebellious and non-conformist are not so, as they try to identify with the musician and their circle of jazz fans who produce standard reactions to standard procedures perfected over time for a sense of belonging to the "perennial" avant-garde fashion (1953).

The negative influence of pop music on human psychology has support from thinkers outside the Frankfurt school as well. Castells (1996) talks of new age music which includes desert winds and ocean waves as backdrops for repetitive beats. He notes that the droning, lingering essence of this music erases the listener's sense of time. The listener derives relaxation from the escape it provides; an escape from the 'quotidian rat-race' by which Castells is referring to work in a capitalist system. Furthermore, by erasing the sense of real time passing, it disrupts the listener's notions of cause and effect, his/her internal organic growth, maturity and experience.

Pierre Bourdieu (1996) is another outsider to the Frankfurt school that similarly critiques that the current fragmented temporality of television and fast-paced journalism favors what he calls 'fast-thinkers' and fast talkers over thinkers who take more time to reflect on a particular, complex issue and come to a nuanced statement that is as accurate as possible. The former are the ones who are given more airplay and influence. It follows that the current style of television presenting and news reporting discourages slower modes of thinking required for certain lines of reasoning that can only be developed in a continuous fashion. This discouragement is seen, for example, when journalists impatiently disrupt guest speakers and jump from one question to another trying to accommodate it all in the short sections of the programme.

On the other hand, Bourdieu is also critical about what Adorno and the Frankfurt school theorists might call "higher art". Bourdieu not only criticizes mass culture, he is not even convinced by the Frankfurt school theorist's view that painters such as Kadinsky produce works of art that are out of reach of the commercial culture industry. In fact, he argues, that "higher art" or "pure art" only appears to be non-market oriented because the artists are portrayed as a "saint" or a particularly "spiritual soul". Their reputation for an ascetic withdrawal from the world of profit making is preserved by their dealers or gallery owners, responsible for the artist's monetary transactions, thereby dissociating the artist from the vulgar world of money. The "true artist's" market is propagated by an "aristocracy of culture" which, according to Bourdieu, consists of bankers, liberal professionals and higher education teachers. It is neither the quality and affective power of the art work itself nor the public's authentic taste that dictates the artist's success. Instead, success is gained when the art work is certified by the leading critic or these "aristocrats of culture" whose taste are perceived as legitimate and good taste. Its emphatic distinction from mass-produced works by illustrations and designers who sold themselves out to standardized, commercial pursuits grants it a false value of rarity and authenticity (1996: 169). Hence, Bourdieu is pointing out the paradoxical effect of the Frankfurt school's distinction of "higher" and "lower" art.

Adorno himself warns about the impact of cultural criticism in objectifying culture, even though its purpose is the 'suspension of objectification'. While scrutinizing culture the cultural critic is selecting and rejecting art forms according to his own tastes and presenting his own interpretation of their purposes. Looking at culture within the framework of purposes is buying into capitalist rationalization, of deriving

the (monetary) value of 'cultural goods'. For example, when critics of homogenized mass culture enthusiastically promote alternative foreign language and literature, it is, according to Adorno, marred with excitement over a rarity from which profit can be made. Instead, he argues, art can be liberated and free only "on separation from the prevailing realm of purposes". When art becomes associated with culture, be it high culture or mass culture, it degenerates and becomes "confused with its own waste products as its aberrant influence grows" (1953).

It is interesting that Adorno mentioned the cultural critic's biased taste as he has himself been criticized for his apparent fondness of classical music and literature and blatant dismissal of pop culture. One could question Adorno's reasoning in referring to the guitar and banjo as 'infantile' compared to the piano, fans of the jitterbug dance craze as 'retarded', their dancing having 'convulsive aspects reminiscent of... the reflexes of mutilated animals.' The irrational nature of his argument makes it seem that Adorno simply detested popular music (Paddison, 1982). The way he uses "popular music" as a blanket term, without distinguishing commercial hit songs from other forms of music, for example the dance band craze from what would be associated with the term "jazz" today, suggests "blind spots" in Adorno's perspective, possibly due simply to his personal distaste for the music. Furthermore, he wrote virtually nothing on folk music of cultures outside the tradition of Western music. This can be taken as another sign of his preoccupation with essentially German cultural values leading critics to point out his tendencies of elitism.

However, it is hard to tell how Adorno categorizes even "high art" as distinct from mass culture. Works that are commonly considered to be examples of "high" or "serious" art, such as Tchaikovsky, Puccini, Elgar and Reger, to name a few, are for Adorno representatives of the culture industry. They work within the standards of classical music (like the tonal system or the sonata form) while failing at 'internal coherence' and 'developing variation' replacing musical exploration with static, repetitive series of well-calculated effects (vol. 16: 288-9 in Markus, 2006). It becomes difficult then to view Adorno as a proponent of the elite tradition.

It seems it is difficult to tell what Adorno's true beliefs are at all. According to Paddison (1982), the reader can easily lose sight of Adorno's argument and broader context because at every point Adorno is changing perspective and presenting statements that are contradictory to each other. He formulates on the opposite poles with similar exaggeration and the contradiction is left unreconciled. Without reconciling the contradictions, the Frankfurt school has also not offered solutions to the problems of homogenization and commercialization of culture, as many critics have pointed out. Adorno seems to view the invasion of the market into the realm of art as an inevitable process. He maintains that "serious changes in program policy are angrily rejected in reality. The population is so accustomed to the drivel it gets that it cannot renounce it, even when it sees through it halfway". The public accepts the social behavior dictated by the culture industry because it provides them an escape from harsh, everyday reality and it does so with much enthusiasm to validate mass culture which they see as their own even though, in reality, it is designated by the system. Adorno views this "fashion" as "eternal" and a continuous vicious circle (1953).

Writers such as Ien Ang (1985), who did not directly critique the Franfurt school, provide evidence against the complete passivity of media consumers. In her investigation into the viewership of American TV show "Dallas" across continents, she attributes the show's success to its ability to connect with "the melodramatic imagination" rather than the internalization of the lifestyle portrayed. She presents evidence for the perception of and distaste for the capitalist and sexist ideology of the show among the viewers in their questionnaire responses. For example, a respondent is cited saying, "Dallas. God, don't talk to me about it. I'm hooked on it! But you wouldn't believe the number of people who say to me, 'Oh, I thought you were against capitalism'. I am, but Dallas is just so tremendously exaggerated, it has nothing to do with capitalists anymore, its just sheer artistry to make up such nonsense" (p. 97).

In conclusion, the Frankfurt school, and Adorno especially, critiques mass culture with an extraordinary effort to dialectical thought. It presents the phenomenon as loaded with contradictions. Eagleton (1992) defends Adorno and Horkhiemer's logic behind preferring high art over mass culture. They saw it to be the force of resistance against the universalisation of mass culture, but as Eagleton argues, they never underestimated its origins in privilege, its social impotence and political complicity. Indeed, Adorno seems highly aware of this in his book Aesthetic Theory wherein he points out that high art, despite all its seeming autonomy, has been reified. When it freed itself from the church, state and patron it became a 'private affair' of the market. Though critics present evidence for the public's ability to restrain from blindly internalizing the ideology of mass culture, the Frankfurt school theorists remain pessimistic in those terms. Despite their doubts about the social potency of higher, autonomous culture, their critique itself has the potential to inform and caution the public against the evasiveness of mass culture.

References:

Adorno, T.W. & Horkheimer, M. (1944) Dialectic of enlightenment: Philosophical fragments (2002 edition) USA: Stanford University Press

Adorno, T.W. (1989). "Perennial Fashion-Jazz" in Critical Theory and Society. USA: Routledge

Adorno, T.W. (1991). The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. London: Routledge

Ang, I. (1985) Watching Dallas: Soap opera and the melodramatic imagination. London: Methuen

Bourdieu, P. (1996). The rules of art: Genesis and structure of the literary field. USA: Stanford University Press

Castells, M. (1996). The rise of the network society: The information age: Economy, society and

culture. Volume 1. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, Inc.

Eagleton, T. (1992). "The culture industry: Selected essays of mass culture-Adorno, T". Sociology: The journal of the British Sociological Assosciation. Vol. 26:1 (p.126-127). UK: British Sociological Assosciation

Markus, G. (2006). "Adorno and mass culture: Autonomous art against the culture industry". Thesis Eleven, Vol. 86 no. 1. (p. 67-89) [online]. Available at http://the.sagepub.com.ezproxy.mdx.ac.uk/content/86/1/67.full.pdf+html Accessed: 16 December 2012

Paddison, M. (1982). "The Critique Criticised: Adorno and Popular Music". Popular Music, Vol. 2, Theory and Method (p. 201-218) [online] Available at http://www.revalvaatio.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/paddison-the-critique-criticised.pdf Accessed: 16 December 2012