The perspective of Frankfurt School

Why, according to the Frankfurt School, can’t we come up with a plan for a rational society and implement it?

The "Frankfurt School" refers to a group of German-American theorists who developed powerful analyses of the changes in Western capitalist societies that occurred since the classical theory of Marx. Working at the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute of Social Research) in Frankfurt, Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s, theorists such as Max Horkheimer, T.W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal, and Erich Fromm produced some of the first accounts within critical social theory of the importance of mass culture and communication in social reproduction and domination. The Frankfurt school based its theories on the work of Karl Marx, who in turn relied heavily on Hegel’s dialectic. (www.gseis.ucla.edu) However, more importantly, Freud’s theory of Psychoanalysis has had a major impact on sociological theory. It suggests that ‘civilization’ is fragile and prone to breakdown. It provides a distinctive explanation of Nazism and the Holocaust. Some members of the Frankfurt School argue that we fail to resist exploitation and domination under capitalism because the ‘pleasure principle’ no longer acts as a point of resistance, as Freud thought. Rather, pleasure has been colonised by capitalism and therefore chains us to it. They think that this argument, which proposes a novel relationship between pleasure and power, provides a better account of our failure to resist than the classic Marxist concept, ideology. Other members of the Frankfurt School argue that breakdowns in rationality as Freud would put it, such as Nazism, stem from the impact of breakdowns in ‘authority’ on the psychic structures and processes described by Freud. (http://www.city.londonmet.ac.uk/~rhodes)

Firstly, the essay will look at the influence of Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis on Frankfurt school. Then it will focus on Frankfurt school’s criticism of capitalism by incorporating Marx’s ideas. In terms of main argument, this essay will try to focus on the work of two of the Frankfurt school’s key theorists, Max Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno, to explain why creating a plan for a rational society and to implement it, is very difficult. In order to explain the argument, their work on culture industry will be look at in details.

According to Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis, society can never be what people want it to be. He argued that we can never bring society under rational control. He argued that, civilisation is built on an irresolvable contradiction between eros/the pleasure principle and the need to sacrifice gratification for survival, ego and superego. As a result society is never stable. In addition, stability is further undermined by ‘Thanatos’ which refers to death drive. Thanatos is associated with a Nirvana principle which tries to get back to a pre-sensate through self-annihilation. Freud argues that society or civilisation is inherently unstable due to the fact that the id/eros/pleasure principle is never entirely held down by the ego/superego/reality principle. Eros and Thanatos are locked in a struggle that can never be resolved. The Frankfurt School writers pick these ideas up and use them to explain societal domination in the world. Thus, the out come is called ‘critical theory’. The critical theory has used ideas from Marx, Hegel and Weber. (www.city.londonmet.ac.uk/~rhodes)

Here the essay will try to look at the influences of Marxist ideas on Frankfurt school. Frankfurt school develops a particular critique of capitalism by incorporating Marx’s ideas. The school argues that capitalism blocks the emergence of true individuality and a social world. In arguing so, they choose those parts of Marx’s writings where Marx is clearly heavily influenced by Hegel. Where as Hegel argues that, there is a tension between the knowledge that exists now and what it is becoming, Marx gave a twist by taking human beings as his starting point instead of knowledge. He argues that the way, we as human beings are- the inferior way of being human- is the product of social relations under capitalism. However, Marx believes that capitalism will be repudiated because of the contradictions within it. According to him, the proletariats will bring this change. Critical view argues that in order to understand the individual we need to look at society as the way humans are is the product of social relations. (www.city.londonmet.ac.uk/~rhodes) There is a source of optimism that people will bring changes in the society.

In contradiction to that, the Frankfurt school rejects the idea that we can assume that society necessarily progresses. This idea sets then apart from Hegel and Marx. The school dismisses the idea that the proletariat is a great collective agent with the mission of emancipating society. They reject the idea that people will bring the revolution. Thus they show a pessimistic view of the process.

Marx argues that capitalism controls us by confusing our perception of what is going on. We get taken in by false consciousness or ideology. However, Freud offers another account. He argued that, the id/eros/pleasure principle is never entirely held down by the ego-superego/reality principle. But the Frankfurt school argue that this is not transcendentally true. Under certain circumstances the id/eros/pleasure principle can be tamed. For example, sometimes we can witness this happened in popular support for fascist regimes. Moreover, in present time it is happening in our consumerist culture. (www.city.londonmet.ac.uk/~rhodes)

Frankfurt theorists were writing during the collapse of liberal democracy and the rise of the Nazis in inter-War Germany. Frankfurt school theorists tried to find the answer about why we can’t create a fundamentally rational social order. After explaining Freud’s idea on civilisation and Marx’s work, now the essay will try to focus on Adorno and Horkheimer’s work in this respect.

The two theorists examine the impact of bureaucratised, rationalised forms of domination. Horkheimer argued in his critique of Instrumental Reason that traditional patriarchal authority in the family was in decline. The patriarchal father is no longer the source of ego-ideal. Consequently, abstract ideas of right and wrong were in decline too. Rather, something is right or wrong depends on whether it gives pleasure or works in a pragmatic sense. In relation to it, Adorno argues that in fact we feel virtuous if we pursue the ‘right’ life style. Adorno argues in his book ‘Minima Moralia’:
“What a state the dominant consciousness must have reached, when the resolute proclamation of compulsive extravagance and champagne jollity… is elevated in deadly earnest to a maxim of right living… Prescribed happiness looks exactly what it is ; to have a part in it (we) must forfeit the last vestige of reason left to (us) by repression and regression;” (1974, p.62) (www.city.londonmet.ac.uk/~rhodes)

This quote indicates the Adorno and Horkheimer’s argument that the pleasure principle/id has been harnessed to social domination. The id/ pleasure is no longer a source of resistance. While Marx argued that we are dominated by our mind in the era of capitalism, the two Frankfurt theorists are saying that we are controlled through our ids. As long as capitalism placates our ids with mass consumption tat, we go along with it. (www.city.londonmet.ac.uk/~rhodes) Our id is controlled by various elements, among them Adorno and Horkheimer discussed broadly about culture industry. Culture industry with its different elements is active in the process of capturing our id to make the process of capitalism smooth and productive. Adorno in particular produced a vast amount of work on literature, music and popular culture. His analysis covers all forms of culture, from highbrow to lowbrow. The central theme is: human beings have certain capabilities and potentialities which are taken away from them in modern societies. (Craib, 1992, 216)

In The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer explained the failure of proletarian revolution in the advanced capitalist countries as the result of a conformist mass culture and control over social consciousness through the ‘culture industry’. Following Weber, Adorno and Horkheimer argued that Western culture was dominated by instrumental (formal) rationality, its goal the control over human action and society through a dehumanised science and technology. The theorists tried to explain why the ideals of the Enlightenment of freedom, justice, autonomy of self, led to a social world structured in conformism, the totalitarian systems of fascism and communism and the alienated administered world of modern capitalism. They have argued that the answer lay in the inner tension of Enlightenment rationalism, between the universal ideals of science which freed individuals from the constraints of mythology and unreason and the positivist, quantitative and pragmatic goals of science empirically realised in the culture of utilitarianism. This tension is mirrored in the development of bourgeois society itself: the principles of calculations and systemisation have the effect of rationalising culture, transforming science and reason into modes of technological domination which signal the eclipse of the autonomous individual. (Swingewood, 1991, 288) People seem to have no control over their own life as almost everything is planed for them by the system of capitalism.

The Frankfurt School's position broadly was that people are easily fooled by capitalism ("false consciousness") and the culture industry Frankfurt School idea of "reality" was that of bourgeois society controlling almost everything under capitalism -- culture is processed through the “culture industry". It criticized Enlightenment ideas of progressive culture, harmony, authenticity, and culture encompassing the best creative efforts of people who are authentically free. Culture industry is intricately linked with the present-day dominant models of the economy/culture; e.g. capitalist production, distribution, exchange, consumption. So culture is produced in just the same way as, say, automobiles or refrigerators
(http://www.geneseo.edu/~bicket/panop/subject_F.htm)

Moving from Nazi Germany to the United States, the Frankfurt School experienced at first hand the rise of a media culture involving film, popular music, radio, television, and other forms of mass culture. In the United States, media production was by and large a form of commercial entertainment controlled by big corporations. 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. This situation was most marked in the United States that had little state support of film or television industries, and where a highly commercial mass culture emerged that came to be a distinctive feature of capitalist societies and a focus of critical cultural studies. 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. The critical theorists analyzed all mass-mediated cultural artefacts within the context of industrial production, in which the commodities of the culture industries exhibited the same features as other products of mass production: commodification, standardization, and massification. 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. (http://www.gseis.ucla.edu)

In their view, mass culture and communications stand in the centre 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 which were to be the instrument of revolution in the classical Marxian scenario. They also analyzed the ways that the culture industries and consumer society were stabilizing contemporary capitalism and accordingly sought new strategies for political change, agencies of political transformation, and models for political emancipation that could serve as norms of social critique and goals for political struggle.(www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/fs.htm)

Victims of European fascism, the Frankfurt school experienced first hand the ways that the Nazis used the instruments of mass culture to produce submission to fascist culture and society. While in exile in the United States, the members of the Frankfurt school came to believe that American "popular culture" was also highly ideological and worked to promote the interests of American capitalism. Controlled by giant corporations, the culture industries were organized according to the strictures of mass production, churning out mass-produced products that generated a highly commercial system of culture which in turn sold the values, life-styles, and institutions of "the American way of life." Max Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno, in their book Dialectic of Enlightenment, 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. While later critics pronounced their approach too manipulative, reductive, and elitist, it 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 behaviour 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 produced desires, dreams, hopes, fears, and longings, as well as unending desire for consumer products. The culture industry produced cultural consumers who would consume its products and conform to the dictates and the behaviours of the existing society. (www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/fs.htm)

In this way, id is colonised by culture industry and people are forced to accept whatever the industry has to offer. Horkheimer and Adorno states in their essay ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’:
“There is nothing left for the consumer to classify. Producers have done it for him. Art for the masses has destroyed the dream but still conforms to the tenets of that dreaming idealism which critical idealism baulked at. Everything derives from consciousness: for Malebranche and Berkeley, from the consciousness of God; in mass art, from the consciousness of the production team. Not only are the hit songs, stars, and soap operas cyclically recurrent and rigidly invariable types, but the specific content of the entertainment itself is derived from them and only appears to change. The details are interchangeable.” (http://www.marxists.org) For Adorno, the Marxist belief that capitalist forces of production when unfettered from capitalist relations of production will generate a free society is illusory. Capital does not possess such immediately emancipatory forces or elements; the drift of capitalist development even the underlying or implicit drift of such development is not towards freedom but towards further integration and domination. (Adorno, 1991, 3) Adorno argues that, people’s resistance capability is checked by elements of capitalism such as culture industry. This is why Adorno argues that coming up with a plan for a rational society is a very difficult process.

In the conclusion in can be argued that, Frankfurt school theorists especially Horkheimer and Adorno believe that as the people’s id is colonised by elements of capitalism such as culture industry, it becomes difficult to create a plan for a rational society. They argued that capitalism dominates people’s thoughts and creates an illusion of happiness and satisfaction while capitalism itself benefits from it to a great extent. As a result it becomes difficult for men to think in a way that would motivate him or her to build a true rational society.