Hoggart and Adorno a Comparison of Ideas

¶ … Authors From the Frankfurt and Birmingham Schools

The Frankfurt School and the Birmingham School are similar in that both partake in a critique of popular culture. Both have roots in Marxism, as well, though the latter rejected the fundamentals of Marxist thought. In one sense, the Birmingham School grew out of the Frankfurt School and expanded or deepened the critical interpretation of popular culture begun by the Frankfurt School authors. In another way, the Birmingham School established its own unique take on popular culture that broke with the perspective of the Frankfurt School and its assessment of why the working class failed to rise up and overthrow the ruling class, as Marx had predicted. This paper will compare the theories of two authors from these two schools and show how they are oppose one another at times, how they reflect one another on other occasions and how they complement one another.

The Frankfurt School was begun by Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm and others. They were Germans, expelled by the Third Reich, who emigrated to the U.S. Their perspective was neo-Marxist and their focus was on the question of why the proletariat had failed to rise up the way that Marx had predicted. They developed the theory that a "culture industry" was behind the working class's impotency, that through the means of mass communication, media production, television, pulp fiction, commercialism, and Hollywood, the working class had come to embody the ideals that the ruling class wanted it to adopt so as to better control it. Adorno and Horkheimer were two prominent voices in this School and they worked together on books like Dialectic of Enlightenment (1948) and The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception (1944). Because of their participation together on these works, they may be taken as a single voice representing the thoughts of the School.

The Birmingham School was founded by Richard Hoggart who was an English professor in the UK. His breakthrough work was published in 1957 entitled The Uses of Literacy. Like the authors of the Frankfurt School, it deplored the arrival of mass media and the mass consumption of popular fiction and entertainment and viewed the collapse of a real working class culture in the UK as a tragic response to 20th century Americanization. Just as the Frankfurt School authors struck a nostalgic tone in their writings, Hoggart too appealed to this tone in his view of folk/working class culture -- the "living culture" as he called it (Hoggart, 1973, p. 130) -- the culture of the local community, displayed at the local fairgrounds, the pubs, the public places and events, before mass consumerism spread and made everything everywhere into virtually the same artificial breeding grounds of the same stale thought and expression of superficiality. This artificiality was the end result of the "processed culture" -- the pre-fabricated consumer culture of commercialized thought made to spoil the authentic culture of the working class and reduce it to a level where it could be exploited and controlled via advertising and the projection of values via popular entertainment. In this manner, the Birmingham School author Hoggart was similar to the Frankfurt School authors and to Adorno in particular: both rejected the over-simplification of culture by the mass media and commercialists; they abhorred the devaluation of the Old World works, which possessed style, substance, authenticity -- human experience and real culture, in other words. But where the two authors differed was in their working thesis: the Frankfurt School believed that the working class was a passive recipient of the ruling class's crippling ideology, that it was unaware of its reduction to being a tool in its own oppression, as Freire (2000) has noted. Hoggart, however, believed that the working class was an active participant in this process, that it willingly embraced the culture that the ruling class produced for it -- that it preferred crass consumerism to authentic industry and thought, simply because it was easier, typically more sensual, more sensational, less challenging and more capable of easily producing feelings that the working class wanted to experience. Thus, the popularization of sentimentalism as a commodity came into fashion.

The theory of how the working class is enslaved by the ruling class is elaborated on by Adorno/Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment. The author states that film, news, radio broadcasts -- all of this is designed and controlled by advertisers and commercialists, whose interest is to get the consuming public to behave in a way that benefits the commercialists: they want the working class to smoke their cigarettes, buy their cars, dress in their clothes, see their movies, etc. It all serves to make consumers into slaves of consumer capitalism. It was Adorno's aim in particular to show just how this enslavement was taking place -- thus he criticized and attacked everything -- from jazz to television -- in order to open the minds of the working class so that it could see how it was being exploited (Horkheimer, Adorno, 2002).

This aim, of course, differed from the aim of Hoggart, who believed the working class was complicit in its own enslavement -- that it wanted to be enslaved to commercialists, because it enjoyed the experience: it was not being duped by the ruling class, it was simply submitting to the ruling class and adopting the views that the commercialists wanted it to adopt to make the spread of Americanization more possible and more palatable. Thus, Adorno and Hoggart disagreed on the role of the working class in the spread of popular culture.

In order to promote his aim, Adorno/Horkheimer made distinctions between high and low culture and pointed out that ideology acts as the basis of all media culture. Adorno highlighted the need to look at the effects of television from a critical standpoint and to examine its many layers so as to see how it impacts the working class audience. Adorno was very critical of television because he viewed it as a seductive killer, one that had entered into the homes of the working class as a friend but was actually a deadly enemy that was feeding the families poisonous ideology that the families then embodied without even realizing it -- such was his view of the power of television and its method of spreading the ideology of the ruling class and the working class's role in that belief system.

As far as culture was concerned, Adorno in The Culture Industry viewed that culture had survived the loss of established religion (the basis of the Old World culture -- the Christian ideology in the West that was rejected following the Protestant Reformation and the onset of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, which eventually gave way to Industrialism). In short, those no real ideology for the working class to make its own -- there was a gap or hole to fill -- which is why the commercialists were able to fill it so readily via mass media. The culture of the working class today comes primarily from the mass media and is produced by the operators of the capitalist system in America, according to Adorno: "Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce. They call themselves industries ..." (Adorno, 1944, p. 1). Thus, Adorno identifies the lie that the commercialists give to the working class: they view that the industry is disguising itself as innocent, as just a business even as it is in the business of promoting an ideology that aims at oppressing and subjugating the working class without the class's realizing it. Adorno even notes that the "culture industry" is unified and ruthlessly so -- it does not allow competition within the sector. There is to be no competing interests -- and, moreover, there is to be no imagination or life left within or cultivated by the working class: education is to renounce its humanities heritage and to focus solely on promoting the ideology of the culture industry; and the working class is to identify solely with the displays of humanity that are presented it via television and cinema: "Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies" (Adorno, 1944, p. 3). What avenue there was towards reflection is killed by the arrival of sound film (at least silent film obliged the viewer to imagine some aspect of the art -- just as in a play).

What Adorno here is criticizing was the fact that the working class was losing its ability to think by being hit over the head with imagination-robbing films, works of so-called art -- or low art -- that required no effort or thought from the audience. This was why the audience was so passive -- it needed to do nothing to engage with the work. It could sit in the audience and gorge itself on unhealthy sodas and buttery popcorn. The audience was enslaved by flashing images, sounds and life-denying doctrines propagated by the culture industry. The working class was tricked into believing that no rising up was necessary, that no revolution was needed. It had to put no effort into life because the ruling classes already had everything taken care of: the working class could have its starter home, its car, its line of credit, its college education, its cake -- and it could eat it, too: all it had to do was go to the movies as people had once gone to church for its religious education. The cinema was the new church, the new place of orientation and indoctrination. The working class was educated to be idle by the culture industry and thus its incentive to act against the ruling class was stolen from it as by a thief creeping in and out during the night. And television was like a thief that simply stayed on in the home as a happy and welcome guest. The poor working class had no idea what had happened.

Hoggart's view of what had happened to the working class was different, however. Hoggart did not believe that the working class had simply been duped. It still had intelligence. It could discern what was happening to it. The problem was that it did not care. Hoggart (1957) wrote that "most mass-entertaiments are in the end what DH Lawrence described as 'anti-life'. They are full of corrupt brightness, of improper appeals and moral evasions. To recall instances: they tend towards a view of the world in which progress is conceived as a seeking of material possessions, equality as a moral leveling, and freedom as the ground for endless irresponsible pleasure" (p. 306). In this regard, he agreed with Adorno in The Culture Industry. Where they differed was in just who was responsible. Adorno wrote that the culture industry was to blame because it was deceitful in its practices. Hoggart did not agree: he did not view it as deceitful but judged that the audience could easily discern what the mass producers were doing -- it was simply that the audience bought into it: it wanted the "irresponsible pleasure" of experiencing seduction -- it wanted a cheap ideology to believe, if only to have something to call its own. It did not care for inherent contradictions or the fact that it was being oppressed; it had "stuff" to make it happy. The working class was possessed of a cheap, materialistic, sentimental vision of itself -- that it could be happy so long as it consumed and had the credit whereby to achieve that consumption (as it certainly did not have the monetary means). It viewed itself not as enslaved but as free -- and, in fact, it did not really care which it was, after all.

Adorno (1944) viewed the movie industry as primarily the means of enslavement alongside television, stating that the film industry was as regimented and obsessed-over as any Old World school of architecture: "everything down to the last detail is shaped accordingly" (p. 4). Adorno (1944) pointed to the "unity of style [of every historical era as it] expresses in each case the different structure of social power" thus conveying the ultimate message that "obedience to the social hierarchy" is good (p. 5). The working class was being indoctrinated in this belief without realizing it because the culture industry was so effective at offering this single vision and this vision alone. There was no competing vision allowed. Thus, the audience picked up its cues from the cartoons and movies and accepting the beating -- or "thrashing" that it received with a kind of non-thinking acceptance (Adorno, 1944, p. 8).

Adorno judged that "one could certainly live without the culture industry" but that the culture industry could not live without the working class, which was why consumerism was made into a kind of addictive drug with "advertising [acting as] its elixir of life," hooking the working class on consumption (Adorno, 1944, p. 10). The marketplace was thus cornered by the culture industry and was victorious in its enslavement of the people, which Adorno judged to be the case because even though the working class "sees through" the empty products designed to make it happy (though they never did), the working class still persisted under the delusion that it must purchase them, ensuring that its shackles remained in place (Adorno, 1944, p. 11).

Hoggart did not agree: the people did not feel that they must continue the charade: the people wanted to continue the charade -- it was fun. The working class would rather sacrifice its own identity, culture, integrity and intellect for the ability to purchase a little pleasure at the popcorn counter, to indulge in a little thoughtless entertainment for a couple hours. This was far easier than laboring to read, to expand one's thought processes, to engage in consideration of the past or in serious reflection that could lead to transcendence. Thus, while Adorno and the other members of the Frankfurt School opined that the culture industry dominated the exchange and forced its reception onto the public, Hoggart of the Birmingham School suggested otherwise: the culture industry existed because the working class wanted it to exist. It supplied the demand. It had a will and was using it to keep the culture industry in place.