User:Johnoconnor2/Frankfurt School

History of the Frankfurt School

The Frankfurt School was not an actual place; it was a school of thought that branched off from the Institute for Social Research, a part of the University of Frankfurt in Germany, in 1923. The Institute was established by Félix Weil, a wealthy scholar with leftist political views. The first director of the Institute was Carl Grünberg, who held the position from 1923 to 1929. Grünberg was a Marxist and started off the program as a place to study Marxist political economy and the history of the labor movement.

In 1930, philosopher Max Horkheimer became director of the Institute and kept Marx's theory as the basis for thought in the Institute. Before the group of thinkers could really develop their approach though, the Frankfurt School was exiled in 1933 by the Nazi's rise to power, as many members of the school held leftist political philosophies and were also Jewish. The Institute first relocated in Geneva, Switzerland from 1933 to 1935 before moving to Columbia University in New York. During the 1950s, the Institute's thinkers had more divided views and broke away from Marxist theory, but they were all still very critical of capitalism. Some of the intellectuals returned to Frankfurt, Germany in 1949, were later in 1953, the Institute was formally re-established. It was also during this time that Jürgen Habermas emerged as the Institute's most prominent thinker.

The thinkers of the School developed ideas about society and culture using Marxists views as their basis. This way of analyzing the way society works in a capitalist system became known as "Critical theory". Mostly, the Frankfurt School put a lot of time into theory and social research, but had little action based on their findings.

What is Marxism and How did he view the Media?

Marxism rejects disciplinary boundaries. Marxism is a social theory that spans throughout many subjects including philosophy, history, cultural studies, and many more fields. Karl Marx was a large proponent of class structure being the largest determining factor in society. He believed that there are only two groups in society: the working class and the ruling class. He staunchly sided with the lower class on many issues believing that they were being exploited only to provide a better overall quality of life for the upper classes.

Karl Marx had an extremely negative view of the mass media. He believed that since the media was ultimately controlled by those in power it only served to perpetuate and dissipate the views and beliefs of those in power. He believed that this system more or less brainwashed those who saw no other alternatives than what was presented to them via the media. He believed that media refused to show alternate views that contradicted the ideologies of the ruling class. The following quote shows just how much of a tool of control Marx believed the media to be:

The class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it." —Marx & Engels: The German Ideology

Critical theory

The members of the Frankfurt School used the term "critical theory" to refer to their editied version of Marxism. Over the years they altered the meaning of the term several times, but the main gist of the theory is critiquing the possibility of human freedom and happiness within a society and then comparing it to the reality of that same society. Needless to say, the members of the Frankfurt School were agents of change and believed there were many easily fixable problems within society. They coined the term "critical theory" as a means of separating themselves from other theorists who had come before them. They considered much of the theory previous to them to be "Traditional theory". They believed that too many great thinkers were "armchair men," meaning they would document their thoughts on how to make the world a better place but would seldomly act on them. The founding fathers of the Frankfurt School wanted to act on their beliefs and findings in a concentrated effort to better society in manners they saw fit.

In the late 1960s Frankfurt scholar Jürgen Habermas redefined critical theory in reference to critical knowledge as "knowledge that enables human beings to emancipate themselves from forms of domination through self-reflection and through psychoanalysis as the paradigm of critical knowledge." That being said all major social sciences—such as economics, sociology, history, political science, anthropology, and psychology—were deemed as critical to the "emancipation" of humans.

Social Protest Movements in the 1960s popularized critical theory among radical students and intellectuals. Marcuse publicly critiqued Fromm about his Freudian beliefs saying what were once powerful and radical ideas now lacked originality.

Theorists

The critical theorists of the Frankfurt School in Germany fabricated some of the first accounts of the importance of mass culture and communication within the realm of the critical social theory. The school and its theorists were also the first to make one of the initial models of critical cultural studies. They were theorists who developed studies of the transformations in Western capitalist societies that took place since the classical theory of Marx.

Adorno with Horkheimer

Theodor Adorno was a philosopher, critic, and theorist in Germany after WWII. He produced several works on aspects of society and culture. His interests mainly highlighted topics in philosophy, psychology, music, and sociology. His main writings were Aesthetic Theory, Constellation, Critical Theory, Negative Dialects, and Utopia. One of Adorno's major critiques of our society is that we have a problem of communication, that we talk in order to bring ourselves up, while putting others down. He talks about this in his book, The Jargon of Authenticity.

Max Horkheimer, co-author of Dialect of Enlightenment, shared many of the same ideologies as Adorno, although in the beginning of the the Frankfurt school, Horkheimer worked closely with Erich Fromm. Horkheimer knew very little about psychoanalysis, which happened to be Fromm's strength. After years of working with Adorno, Horkheimer began to see Critical Theory and Freudian Theory at the same level as Adorno. Shortly after, Fromm was pushed out of the history of the Frankfurt school despite his critical role in founding it.

Horkheimer argues that everything wrong in modern society is because of a misuse and misinterpretation of reason. Another one of his books, The Eclipse of Reason, deals with the problems associated with reason, by showing the difference between objective reason and subjective reason and how society has switched from objective to subjective. Objective reasoning focuses on the fact that an action is either right or wrong; there is no gray, while subjective reasoning takes elements like circumstance into account. It is because of this move to subjective reasoning that the ideals of society are not seen as universal truths and become dependent on what the the people think.

Herbert Marcuse

Herbert Marcuse claims that Freud's writings are "full of irony, insight and a willingness to squarely face the inevitable conflict between instinctual necessity and society." Neo-Freudians, on the other hand, accentuate the positive, preach about the inner strength and integrity, turn social issues into spiritual concerns and define neurosis as a moral problem. Marcuse believes in the "power of positive thinking" and rejects therapy and traditional radical politics as solutions to modern dilemmas. Marcuse draws upon Marxism simply because of his belief that the economy limits the freedom of people. He was actually highly critical of both communism and capitalism though. He believed that because people are functioning inside of a system, like the economy, they are not truly free. Our economy also offers a range of choices, most of which are not needed. We see them as necessary because they give us a choice, thus providing the illusion of freedom in the set social norm. In reality, there are no choices in a set system, because every choice will still reinforce the set social norms. Marcuse feels that if a society can learn to use technology in a way that will not actually restrict citizens, problems will be solved.

Erich Fromm was a psychoanalyst who trained under Sigmund Freud and then applied Freudian principles to social problems, hoping that by doing so he could create a psychologically balanced society. Fromm used psychoanalytic techniques in his book Escape from Freedom (1941) to explain why people are not used to the freedoms gained since the Middle Ages, and hence find protection with totalitarian movements, like Nazism.

He also later argues in 1955 that people have become separated from themselves because of the consumer society. Fromm believes that people are not balanced and are unhappy because in the group mentality of the society, their individual needs are not fulfilled and the idea of mass media, or something that attends to all the people at once, is not helping society.

But because Fromm veered away from the original way of Marxist thinking, the Frankfurt School rejected Fromm as a conformist liberal and they canonized Horkheimer and Adorno as critical thinkers. After the war, both Horkheimer and Adorno left Marxism and radical traditions.

Jürgen Habermas

Jurgen Habermas was part of the second generation of Critical Theory, but he continued what the original Frankfurt School thinkers began and contributed more to Marxist theory than any of the others. He sees the biggest problem with society is that people do not have freedom. He believed that individual's needs were not being met and that the institutions of society were manipulating the people. Through use of his theory of Communicative Action, which says that the crisis in society is how individual needs are not being met so people will interact to respond to this crisis, Habermas says that society will be able to move from a Capitalist to a Communist society.

Perspectives on the Media

The theories of the Frankfurt thinkers give a specific theory that explains their views on the effects of the media. In 1933, when the Nazis came to power in Germany, the members of the Frankfurt School fled to the United States. The idea of "culture industry" was thought up and claimed by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, two writers of the Frankfurt School. Adorno and Horkheimer coined the term "culture theory" in order to replace the perception of "mass culture." Culture industry is another term for mass culture or pop culture. Culture industries exist to enforce and reinforce the capitalist philosophy.

Modern mass media impeded the common people's ability to create socialist political consciousness, also considered a different way of thinking than that of the Nazis. The economic changes that took place lead to mass deception and domination because the culture industry was taking over. The art and popular culture was brought down to being just being a reproduction and support for an economic base. The culture industry, integrated into capitalism, in turn integrates consumer. Its goal is the production of goods that are profitable and consumable. It operates to ensure its own reproduction and the cultural forms it circulates must be compatible with this aim.

Adorno says that mass media is a contradiction; he is quoted saying "the masses get not what they want but what it is decided to give them." In other words, the people have no control over what the media is feeding them, but the term "mass media" implies that it is something for the people. It was believed that people can succeed and become successfully by obeying and following social norms that media provides.