Abstract
The Frankfurt School was the first school to discern the roles of the media in shaping human thought, influencing politics, and increasing the insatiable demand of consumers in capitalist societies. The analysis brought to the fore by Adorno and Horkheimer regarding the ‘Culture Industry’ illustrated a model of media as tools of hegemony and social control advanced by Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Jurgen Habermas. The School also examined the repercussions of mass culture and the rise of the consumer society on the proletariat that was aimed to be the instrument of revolution in the classical Marxian scenario. Another thing that was analyzed is how the culture industries and consumer society were considered as stabilizing forces of contemporary capitalism. Therefore, they were among the first to see the expansion of communication and mass media roles in politics, socialization and social life, culture, and the construction of docile subjects as Foucault puts it. In the present article, I review the contributions to media and social theory advanced by the Frankfurt School. The integration of psychoanalysis, aesthetic theory and the critique of mass culture, and the critique of the Enlightenment are the main components discussed in the present article.
Highlights
Re-visiting The History of Consumerism: The Emergence of Mass Consumer Culture as a Distinctive Feature of Capitalist Societies
The School examined the repercussions of mass culture and the rise of the consumer society on the proletariat that was aimed to be the instrument of revolution in the classical Marxian scenario
The Integration of Psychoanalysis What is Critical Theory? Critical Theory is often thought of narrowly as referring to the Frankfurt School that began with Horkheimer and Adorno, which can stretch to Marcuse and Habermas
Summary
Aesthetic Theory and the Critique of Mass Culture After many turbulences, resentment, and disagreement, The Frankfurt school had to relocate itself from Germany. The Frankfurt School theorists examined the ways that the culture industries and consumer society were stabilizing capitalism and sought new blueprints for political change, agencies of political transformation, and models for political liberation that could serve as norms of social critique and goals for political turbulence and unrest. This project required reshaping Marxian theory and executing many important contributions. Horkheimer and Adorno replied to Benjamin's positivism in highly significant scrutiny of the culture industry that was published in their book ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’ They cited that the structure of cultural production dominated by film, radio broadcasting, newspapers, and magazines, was strictly controlled by advertising and commercial imperatives. It transmits an important corrective to more populist findings to the media culture that diminish the way the media industries exert power over audiences and help produce thought and behavior that conforms to the existing society
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