Frankfurt School

The “Frankfurt school” refers to a group of German American theorists who developed powerful analyses of the changes in Western capitalist societies that occurred since the classical theory of Marx. Working at the Institut fur Sozialforschung in Frankfurt, Germany, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, theorists such as Max Horkheimer, T. W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal, and Erich Fromm produced some of the first accounts within critical social theory of the importance of mass culture and communication in social reproduction and domination. The Frankfurt school also generated one of the first models of a critical cultural studies to analyze the processes of cultural production and political economy, the politics of cultural texts, and audience reception and use of cultural artifacts (Kellner 1989, 1995). The approach is valuable in that it links the reading and critique of cultural texts with economic analysis of the system of cultural production and social analysis of uses and effects of media culture. This systematic approach combines social theory with cultural criticism in a synoptic approach that overcomes the one-sidedness of many positions within cultural studies and media critique.

Moving from Nazi Germany to the United States, the Frankfurt school experienced firsthand the rise of a media culture involving film, popular music, radio, television, and other forms of mass culture (Wiggershaus 1994). In the United States, where they found themselves in exile, media production was by and large a form of commercial entertainment controlled by big corporations. Two of its key theorists, Max Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno, developed an account of the “culture industry” to call attention to the industrialization and commercialization of culture under capitalist relations of production ([1948] 1972). This situation was most marked in the United States, which had little state support of film or television industries and where a highly commercial mass culture emerged that came to be a distinctive feature of capitalist societies and a focus of critical cultural studies.

During the 1930s, the Frankfurt school developed a critical and transdisciplinary approach to cultural and communications studies, combining political economy, textual analysis, and analysis of social and ideological effects. They coined the term “culture industry” to signify the process of the industrialization of mass-produced culture and the commercial imperatives that drove the system. The critical theorists analyzed all mass-mediated cultural artifacts within the context of industrial production in which the commodities of the culture industries exhibited the same features as other products of mass production: commodification, standardization, and massification. The culture industries had the specific function, however, of providing ideological legitimation of the existing capitalist societies and of integrating individuals into their way of life.

For the Frankfurt school, mass culture and communications therefore stand in the center of leisure activity, are important agents of socialization and mediators of political [Page 291]reality, and should thus be seen as major institutions of contemporary societies, with a variety of economic, political, cultural, and social effects. Furthermore, the critical theorists investigated the cultural industries in a political context as a form of the integration of the working class into capitalist societies. The Frankfurt school theorists were among the first neo-Marxian groups to examine the effects of mass culture and the rise of the consumer society on the working classes that were to be the instrument of revolution in the classical Marxian scenario. They also analyzed the ways in which the culture industries and consumer society were stabilizing contemporary capitalism and accordingly sought new strategies for political change, agencies of political transformation, and models for political emancipation that could serve as norms of social critique and goals for political struggle. This project required rethinking Marxian theory and produced many important contributions—as well as some problematical positions.

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