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Two of Frankfurt
School
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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
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They analyzed all mass-mediated cultural artifacts within the context of
industrial production
•
They argued the commodities of the culture industries exhibited the same
features as other products of mass production:
–
commodification,
–
standardization, and
–
massification
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The culture industries had the specific function, however, of providing
ideological legitimation of the existing capitalist societies and of
integrating individuals into its way of life
The Culture Industry:
"The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture
industry.“ (--Theodor
Adorno and Max Horkheimer from Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)
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Moving through nearly all aspects of the popular culture of their
time--movies, radio, music--they argue that the logic of modern capitalism
deskills labor and concurrently dumbs down culture. The result is a world
in which a mass public has trouble distinguishing between the real world and
the illusory world created by the industry of culture.
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The values perpetuated by the media were contradictory to the values of
the radical Enlightenment tradition. The masses are ‘dumbed’ by the banality of
the media. Their ability to function efficiently as citizens in a democratic
state is replaced by their ceaseless consumption of culture or products, or both.
•
Though the functionalist and Marxist approaches
are radically different in their underlying assumptions, they are similar in
that they both presume audiences to be passive and powerless.
•
They critique society as being in a state of false consciousness, a
consciousness which hides the reality of domination and oppression of the
masses under capitalism. The role of the media in this framework is to
offer to consumers propaganda which lulls them into accepting their
conditions.
•
In their theories of the culture industries and critiques of mass
culture, Adorno and Horkheimer were among the first social theorists to note
its importance in the reproduction of contemporary societies
•
In their view, mass culture and communications stand in the center of
leisure activity, are important agents of socialization, mediators of political
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
•
They argued that the system of cultural production dominated by film,
radio broadcasting, newspapers, and magazines, was controlled by advertising
and commercial imperatives, and served to create subservience to the system of
consumer capitalism
•
Later, critics pronounced their approach too manipulative, reductive,
and elitist.
•
However, it still provides an important corrective to more populist
approaches to media culture that downplay the way the media industries exert
power over audiences and help produce thought and behavior that conforms to the
existing society
•
The culture industry thesis described both the production of massified
cultural products and homogenized subjectivities
•
Mass culture for the Frankfurt
School
•
The culture industry produced cultural consumers who would consume its
products and conform to the dictates and the behaviors of the existing
society
•
Frankfurt school work was an articulation of a theory of
the stage of state and monopoly capitalism that became dominant during the
1930s
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This was an era of large organizations
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The state and giant corporations manage the economy and individuals
submit to state and corporate control
•
This period is often described as "Fordism" to designate the
system of mass production and the homogenizing regime of capital which wanted
to produce mass desires, tastes, and behavior
•
Fordism was an era of mass production and consumption characterized by
uniformity and homogeneity of needs, thought, and behavior producing a mass
society
•
Frankfurt school described it as "the end of the
individual"
•
No longer was individual thought and action the motor of social and
cultural progress
•
Instead giant organizations and institutions overpowered individuals
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During this period, mass culture and communication were instrumental in
generating the modes of thought and behavior appropriate to a highly organized
and massified social order
•
Thus, the Frankfurt school theory of
the culture industry articulates a major historical shift to an era in which
mass consumption and culture was indispensable to producing a consumer society
based on homogeneous needs and desires for mass-produced products and a mass
society based on social organization and homogeneity
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The culture industry fuses the old and familiar into a new quality
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The culture industry is not like mass culture which arises spontaneously
from the masses themselves
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The products are tailored for consumption by masses
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These products and the nature of consumption are manufactured more or
less according to plan