by Thomas Andrae
from Jump Cut, no. 20, 1979, pp. 34-37, http://www.ejumpcut.org/
copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1979, 2005
“The whole is the untrue.”
— Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia
Although concern over the effects of mess culture dates practically from its inception over one hundred and fifty years ago, only recently has it become the subject of widespread debate. Between the two world wars, cultural critics like Wyndham Lewis, F.R. Leavis, and Ortega Y. Gasset took up the century-old concern for the dangers of cultural democratization but were generally isolated figures. In the thirties, U.S. sociologists Robert Parks and Herbert Blumer of the Chicago School conducted the first empirical studies of mass culture. But it was not until the forties and fifties after a group of refugees, with the horrors of fascism fresh in mind, produced an analysis relating mass culture to mass society and ultimately totalitarianism, that the debate on popular culture became commonplace in U.S. academic circles. For the first time, the members of the Frankfurt School — Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse — produced a critique of mass culture from a radical rather than a conservative point of view, demonstrating the crucial significance of the media in forming social consciousness and defining the limits of social change under late capitalism.
The Frankfurt School takes its name from the Institute for Social Research established in Frankfurt, Germany in 1923. Called Critical Theory, the Institute’s theoretical program was initiated largely as a response to failure of the vulgar Marxism of the Second International’s theorists (Bernstein, Kautsky, Plekhanov) to provide a revolutionary alternative in post-WWI Germany. In vulgar Marxism, the superstructure (culture, the state, law, religion, the family, etc.) was assumed to be a reflex of changes occurring in the economic substructure of society. Following this formulation, the possibility of revolution was explained in terms of changes in the economic base (capitalism’s tendency toward economic crisis) and the degree of political organization of the working class. The failure of these conditions to produce a successful revolutionary movement after World War I signaled the necessity of abandoning vulgar Marxism. The attempt to dismantle Marxist dogma began during the early 1920s and was the effort of two major philosophers — Georg Lukács and Karl Korsch, whose seminal works, History and Class Consciousness and Marxism and Philosophy respectively, in conjunction with the rediscovery of Marxism known variously as “Neo-Hegelian Marxism”, “Western Marxism”, or “Marxist Humanism.” [1]