Frankfurt School

Useful links:

The Frankfurt School: this is a useful introductory site, offering biographical and conceptual background for those beginning their study of the Frankfurt school.

Marxist Media Theory: Daniel Chandler's site places the Frankfurt School within the broad range of Marxist media theory, and in contrast with other leading Marxist theorists (Althusser, Gramsci, Stuart Hall and others). This is a balanced and saavy overview.

 

 

"The Dialectic of Enlightenment-the Culture Industry" / Professor Warner Winter 2002

Study sheet. Pages refer to the 1969 edition of Dialectic of Enlightenment. Lead question: How does the Culture Industry (here CI) work dialectically on various Others within the culture to produce the new comprehensive exhaustive array of the CI, so each becomes an object under its rational discipline, having a functional role in its processes?

1: plurality and differences (of history and place and people) within culture

INTO the oneness and sameness of the whole shaped from the center by the CI, supported by new media technologies, and the centralization they enable

  • READ 120: there are specific industry agents of transformation (media industries);
  • 121: rejecting the merely functionalist technological rationale (it's the "rationale of domination itself")
  • 121-122: standardization and mass production are not preordained by technology, but shaped and managed by the CI: example of telephone vs. radio, and the way radio has been developed as an institution.

2: art (the antithesis of parts fused into a whole; with the bourg. showing respect, spending $, overcoming the resistance of difficulty, requiring criticism;)
& popular culture (as low and vulgar, as nonsense, as honky tonk-with no pretensions)

INTO media culture
where form and style (reconciling form and content part and whole) becomes a surface of novel forms and styles as an end in itself; now the "effects predominate," and then, these are corralled into the "formula" which is more like a file for assembling effects, than a whole related in all its parts. READ 125-126

not the genuinely new, but effects of novelty which are relentlessly pursued:

  • high art and light entertainment are absorbed into one medium: in it's avante garde forms art had a difficulty and provocativeness that expresses its antagonism to "light" entertainment of lower sorts; this antagonism is overcome by the CI (135)
  • technological realism (from artistic illusion à "reality", so that the world as "it is" is offered for our consumption)

3: the individual (as having personal emotion; as having economic autonomy; as capable of love; …)

INTO the simulation offered on the screen, which/ who becomes the model for real people : we can trace this change in a long and complex paragraph that suggests the way the CI mediates the values of the individual become consumer as to beauty, sex, desire. READ: 139-142** I would like to read this with you, explicate it together, and discuss whether you buy this argument.

  • the actor who becomes the simulation (a copy without a model) is originally an ordinary average person who got a good "break" (planning and control from the center implies the "chance" that makes positions in the system arbitrary: it is composed of people just like you and me. (e.g. People magazine)
  • READ 145, 146-147 (star and normal person; chance and planning;
  • the CI becomes a compensation for a lost individuality: READ 155-156)

4: enjoyment or pleasure (as festival that overturns ordinary, as libertine excess)

INTO the happiness of distraction, the consumer gratification that leaves you hungry

5: personal ethics as oriented toward a goal, purpose or end

INTO the career measured by the expectations of the organization

  • READ 147 (where one reads through any language of value toward the "reality" of self interest)

6: ideology (as part of conscious political strife with opposing interests or ideas)

INTO acceptance of the status quo, understood to be comprehensive, inevitable

  • READ 147-148 the photograph of facts as requiring acceptance
  • READ 151-152: the revision of tragic fate

7: media (print to film to radio): as requiring literacy and effort, and costing $

INTO media that's free, ambient, antiseptic, homogeneous, and because it appears to be self-complete and self-evident, also immune from criticism, and the development of counter-discourses.

  • READ 158-159; 160-161: irony of the free becoming tyrannical; once it cost money and required criticism, but now art is "thrown in free" by the CI

8: Criticism of art, politics or culture, that stands apart from its object, reads its differences from itself; measures against a tradition; imagines alternatives; strives to be disinterested;

INTO advertisement of culture, culture as advertisement: where everyone has an interest (161)

 

Meet John Doe: the ironic effect of its ambivalent presentation of the hero seems central to the film's ambiguity. How does the film succeed, how does it fail as media critique?

Exposure and unmasking of the creation of John Doe as an effect of deceptive media manipulation: "John Doe" is a "fake"

  • 1: John originates from within the systems of a commercially motivated publicity stunt of the savvy and sassy newspaper girl Ann (Barbara Stanwick): jump off city hall to protest the state of the world
  • 2: Casting of an ordinary (blank, stupid, handsome, ordinary guy) as the charismatic figure John Doe requires many kinds of stage management
  • 5: The popularity of John Doe is described as "nothing less than a prairie fire"(D.B. Norton, 120): that is, it covers the country, is a media event, and as such becomes a channel for manipulation
  • 7: Acting on the threat to expose D.B.'s threat before the John Doe convention, he finds himself in a double bind: to the extent that he stays within his role, he must endorse D.B. Norton; but to the extent that he steps out of his scripted role and acts as an independent agent, he exposes himself as a fake (who never threatened, for example to commit suicide; did not write his own speeches, etc.); D.B. exploits this structural weakness, and uses his own control of newspapers, radio, and the police, to humiliate John Doe by turning the John Does against him.

The turn toward belief, sacrifice, suffering and affirmation: "John Doe is 'real'"

  • 3: His speech is fashioned from the simple truths passed down from father to daughter; the content of the speech is about the centrality of the little guy, offered in a quaint formulation that reaches the ordinary citizen: "The little punks have always counted because in the long run the character of a country is the sum total of the character of its little punks."
  • 4: The formation of "the John Doe club" in Millville is represented as spontaneous movement of the people; e.g. of use and appropriation of media by the people (a la Birmingham school); a staging of the ordinary, glowing, modest, decent 'people' at the heart of America
  • 6: When D.B.'s plot become known to the cynical, tough as nails newspaper editor Cannell, he gets drunk, announces himself "soft" on Washington and Jefferson, and tells John he is a puppet of D.B.' machinations: John then confronts D.B. and speaks in his "own voice"---he has become the John Doe that was merely his role.
  • 8: To counter-act his shaming and exposure as a fraud, John determines to save the media fabrication (the John Doe idea), by committing suicide on Christmas Eve
What would be the Frankfurt school critique of this film? its ending?
 
 

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