Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

The Frankfurt School 63
This is one way of reading this TV comedy. But it is by no means the only way.
Bertolt Brecht, Benjamin’s close friend (considered to be ‘crude’ by Adorno), might
have offered another way of reading, one that implies a less passive audience. Discussing
his own play, Mother Courage and Her Children, Brecht (1978) suggests, ‘Even if
Courage learns nothing else at least the audience can, in my view, learn something by
observing her’ (229). The same point can be made against Adorno with reference to the
schoolteacher’s behaviour.
Leo Lowenthal (1961) contends that the culture industry, by producing a culture
marked by ‘standardisation, stereotype, conservatism, mendacity, manipulated consumer
goods’ (11), has worked to depoliticize the working class – limiting its horizon
to political and economic goals that could be realized within the oppressive and
exploitative framework of capitalist society. He maintains that, ‘Whenever revolutionary
tendencies show a timid head, they are mitigated and cut short by a false
fulfilment of wish-dreams, like wealth, adventure, passionate love, power and sensationalism
in general’ (ibid.). In short, the culture industry discourages the ‘masses’
from thinking beyond the confines of the present. As Herbert Marcuse (1968a) claims
in One Dimensional Man:
the irresistible output of the entertainment and information industry [the culture
industry] carry with them prescribed attitudes and habits, certain intellectual and
emotional reactions which bind the consumers more or less pleasantly to the producers
and, through the latter, to the whole. The products indoctrinate and manipulate;
they promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood
. . . it becomes a way of life. It is a good way of life – much better than before – and
as a good way of life, it militates against qualitative change. Thus emerges a pattern
of one-dimensional thought and behaviour in which ideas, aspirations, and objectives
that, by their content, transcend the established universe of discourse and
action are either repelled or reduced to terms of this universe (26–7).
In other words, by supplying the means to the satisfaction of certain needs, capitalism
is able to prevent the formation of more fundamental desires. The culture industry thus
stunts the political imagination.
As with Arnold and Leavisism, art or high culture is seen to be working differently.
It embodies ideals denied by capitalism. As such it offers an implicit critique of
capitalist society, an alternative, utopian vision. ‘Authentic’ culture, according to
Horkheimer (1978), has taken over the utopian function of religion: to keep alive the
human desire for a better world beyond the confines of the present; it carries the key
to unlock the prison-house established by the development of mass culture by the
capitalist culture industry (5). But increasingly the processes of the culture industry
threaten the radical potential of ‘authentic’ culture. The culture industry increasingly
flattens out what remains of
the antagonism between culture and social reality through the obliteration of the
oppositional, alien, and transcendent elements in the higher culture by virtue of which