Frankfurt School & Birmingham School Key Theorists and Concepts
Text Adopted from: http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/frankf urtschoolbritishculturalstudies.pdf
The Frankfurt School • German-American theorists • Late 1920s & Early 1930s • Key thinkers and theorists: Max Horkheimer, T.W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal, and Erich Fromm
Main Areas of Research Critical cultural studies that analyzes • the processes of cultural production and political economy • the politics of cultural texts, • audience reception and use of cultural artefacts
Movement from Germany to US • Experienced rise of a media culture involving film, popular music, radio, television, and other forms of mass culture (Wiggershaus 1994) • 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 (1972). • Little state support of film or television industries (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)
(Reference: Adorno & Horkheimer(1972). The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass deception)
Frankfurt School Approach - Instances • Adorno's analyses of popular music, television, and other phenomena ranging from astrology columns to fascist speeches (1991, 1994) • Lowenthal's studies of popular literature and magazines (1961) • Herzog's studies of radio soap operas (1941) • Perspectives and critiques of mass culture developed in Horkheimer and Adorno's famous study of the culture industries (1972 and Adorno 1991)
Frankfurt School – Disposition in Nutshell An era of mass production and consumption characterized by uniformity and homogeneity of needs, thought, and behaviour producing a mass society that the Frankfurt school described as "the end of the individual� Work of Frankfurt school - articulation of a theory of the stage of state and monopoly capitalism which became dominant during the 1930s (organized capitalism)
Walter Benjamin -An Alternative Approach from the Frankfurt School The culture industry also produces rational and critical consumers able to dissect and discriminate among cultural texts and performances Creation of alternative oppositional cultures It was progressive that mass-produced works were losing their "aura," their magical force, and were opening cultural artifacts for more critical and political discussion
Walter Benjamin Recognized that film could create a new kind of ideological magic through the cult of celebrity and techniques like the close-up that fetishized certain stars or images via the technology of the cinema Benjamin – One of the first radical cultural critics to look carefully at the form and technology of media culture in appraising its complex nature and effects
Birmingham School of Cultural Studies • 1950s and early 1960s • Articulated conditions in an era in which there were still significant tensions in England and much of Europe between an older working class-based culture and the newer mass-produced culture whose models and exemplars were the products of American culture industries
Key Thinkers and Scholars • • • •
Richard Hoggart Raymond Williams E.P. Thompson Stuart Hall
Main Areas of Research • Interplay of representations and ideologies of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality in cultural texts, including media culture. • First to study the effects of newspapers, radio, television, film, and other popular cultural forms on audiences. • Focused on how various audiences interpreted and used media culture in varied and different ways and contexts
Overlaps with the Frankfurt School Mass culture was playing an important role in integrating the working class into existing capitalist societies and that a new consumer and media culture was forming a new mode of capitalist hegemony. Both traditions focused on the intersections of culture and ideology and saw ideology critique as central to a critical cultural studies
Difference between the two Schools • Frankfurt School: High culture as forces of resistance to capitalist modernity. • Birmingham School: Potential for resistance in oppositional subcultures - working • class cultures, youth subcultures - to resist the hegemonic forms of capitalist domination.
The Difference • Frankfurt School - Engaged in modernist and avant-garde aesthetic movements • Birmingham School - Focusses by and large to products of media culture and 'the popular' which has become an immense focus of its efforts
Towards Postmodern Culture Studies The forms of hybrid culture and identities described by postmodern cultural studies correspond to a globalized capitalism with an intense flow of products, culture, people, and identities with new configurations of the global and local and new forms of struggles and resistance (Appadurai 1990 and Cvetkovich and Kellner 1997)
Dissecting Rambo • Rambo - fits into the genre of war films and a specific cycle of return to Vietnam films, • Also articulates anti-communist political discourses dominant in the Reagan era • Replicates the rightwing discourses concerning PoWs left in Vietnam and the need to overcome the Vietnam syndrome (i.e. shame concerning the loss of the war and overcoming the reluctance to again use U.S. military power).
Dissecting Rambo • But it also fits into a cycle of masculist hero films, anti-statist rightwing discourses, and the use of violence to resolve conflicts. • The figure of Rambo itself became a 'global popular' which had a wide range of effects throughout the world.
Dissecting Rambo • Interpreting the cinematic text of Rambo thus involves the use of film theory, textual analysis, social history, political analysis and ideology critique, effects analysis, and other modes of cultural criticism.
Summing Up • One should not, therefore, stop at the borders of the text or even its intertexuality, but should move from text to context, to the culture and society that constitutes the text and in which it should be read and interpreted.
Madonna and Michael Jackson
At the altar of culture Studies!