Frankfurt School &

Birmingham School
Key Theorists and Concepts
Text Adopted from:
http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/ess
ays/frankfurtschoolbritishculturalstudies.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!