Frankfurt School vs Birmingham School on Popular Culture

Introduction: Two Schools, One Critique

The Frankfurt School and the Birmingham School are similar in that both engage in a critique of popular culture. Both have roots in Marxism as well, though the latter ultimately rejected certain 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 that Frankfurt School authors had begun. In another sense, the Birmingham School established its own unique take on popular culture — one that broke with the Frankfurt School's assessment of why the working class failed to rise up and overthrow the ruling class, as Marx had predicted. This paper compares the theories of key authors from these two schools, showing how they oppose one another at times, reflect one another on other occasions, and complement one another overall.

The Frankfurt School and the Culture Industry

The Frankfurt School was founded by Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, and others. They were German intellectuals expelled by the Third Reich who subsequently emigrated to the United States. Their perspective was neo-Marxist, and their focus centered on the question of why the proletariat had failed to rise up in the way Marx had predicted. They developed the theory that a "culture industry" lay behind the working class's impotency — that through mass communication, media production, television, pulp fiction, commercialism, and Hollywood, the working class had come to embody the ideals the ruling class wanted it to adopt in order to better control it.

Adorno and Horkheimer were two prominent voices in this school, and they collaborated on works such as Dialectic of Enlightenment (1948) and The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception (1944). Because of their close collaboration on these texts, they may be treated as a single voice representing the thinking of the school.

Richard Hoggart and the Birmingham School

The Birmingham School was founded by Richard Hoggart, an English professor in the United Kingdom. His breakthrough work, The Uses of Literacy, was published in 1957. Like the Frankfurt School authors, Hoggart deplored the arrival of mass media and the mass consumption of popular fiction and entertainment, and he viewed the collapse of a genuine working-class culture in the UK as a tragic response to twentieth-century Americanization. Just as the Frankfurt School authors struck a nostalgic tone in their writings, Hoggart similarly appealed to nostalgia in his view of folk and working-class culture — what he called the "living culture" (Hoggart, 1973, p. 130) — the culture of the local community displayed at fairgrounds, pubs, and public gatherings, before mass consumerism spread and rendered everywhere virtually identical: artificial breeding grounds of stale thought and superficial expression.

This artificiality was the end result of what Hoggart called "processed culture" — the prefabricated consumer culture of commercialized thought designed to undermine the authentic culture of the working class and reduce it to a level where it could be exploited and controlled through advertising and the projection of values via popular entertainment. In this respect, Hoggart resembled the Frankfurt School authors, and Adorno in particular: both rejected the oversimplification of culture by mass media and commercialists; both abhorred the devaluation of older works that possessed style, substance, and authenticity — genuine human experience and real culture.

Where the two authors diverged, however, 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 a tool in its own oppression, as Freire (2000) has noted. Hoggart, by contrast, believed that the working class was an active participant in this process: it willingly embraced the culture the ruling class produced for it. It preferred crass consumerism to authentic industry and thought simply because consumerism was easier, typically more sensual, more sensational, less challenging, and more capable of producing the feelings the working class wanted to experience. Thus, the popularization of sentimentalism as a commodity came into fashion.

Adorno on Television, Cinema, and Ideological Control

The theory of how the working class is enslaved by the ruling class is elaborated by Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment. They argue that film, news, and radio broadcasts are all designed and controlled by advertisers and commercialists whose interest is to get the consuming public to behave in ways that benefit those commercialists: they want the working class to smoke their cigarettes, buy their cars, wear their clothes, and see their movies. It all serves to make consumers into slaves of consumer capitalism. It was Adorno's particular aim to expose how this enslavement was taking place — hence his criticism of 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).

In order to advance this aim, Adorno and Horkheimer drew distinctions between high and low culture and argued that ideology acts as the foundation of all media culture. Adorno stressed the need to examine television from a critical standpoint and to analyze its many layers to understand how it impacts working-class audiences. He viewed television as a seductive threat — something that had entered the homes of the working class as a friend but was in fact a deadly enemy feeding families poisonous ideology that they then internalized without realizing it. Such was his assessment of television's power to spread ruling-class ideology.

On the question of culture more broadly, Adorno argued in The Culture Industry that culture had survived the loss of established religion — the bedrock of Old World culture — but that no authentic ideology had emerged to replace it. This left a gap that commercialists were able to fill readily through mass media. The culture of the working class today, Adorno argued, comes primarily from the mass media and is produced by the operators of the capitalist system: "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). Adorno thus identifies the deception at the heart of the commercialist enterprise: the culture industry disguises itself as innocent — merely a business — while actively promoting an ideology aimed at oppressing and subjugating the working class without the class's awareness.

Adorno further noted that the culture industry is unified and ruthless — it tolerates no competition within the sector and cultivates no imagination or independent life within the working class. Education is expected to abandon its humanities heritage and serve the ideology of the culture industry, while the working class is directed to identify solely with the representations of humanity offered by television and cinema: "Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies" (Adorno, 1944, p. 3). Even the small space for reflection once offered by silent film — which obliged the viewer to imagine and actively engage — was eliminated by the arrival of sound.

What Adorno criticized was the working class's progressive loss of its capacity to think, overwhelmed by imagination-robbing films and low art that demanded nothing of the audience. The audience needed no effort to engage; it could sit passively, consuming unhealthy food while being inundated with flashing images, sounds, and life-denying doctrines. It was tricked into believing that no rising up was necessary, that no revolution was needed — the ruling class had already taken care of everything. The cinema became the new church, the new site of orientation and indoctrination, and the working class's incentive to act against the ruling class was quietly stolen from it.

Adorno also argued that "one could certainly live without the culture industry," but that the culture industry could not survive without the working class — which is precisely why consumerism was made into an addictive drug, with "advertising [acting as] its elixir of life" (Adorno, 1944, p. 10). Even when the working class "sees through" the empty products designed to make it happy (though they never truly did), it persisted under the delusion that it must continue purchasing them, ensuring that its shackles remained firmly in place (Adorno, 1944, p. 11).

Conclusion

Adorno of the Frankfurt School and Hoggart of the Birmingham School were both rooted in the Marxist tradition concerning the working class. Adorno believed that the reason the working class had not fulfilled Marx's expectation was that it had been tricked by the culture industry into abandoning its mission to overthrow the ruling class. Hoggart, on the other hand, rejected the foundation of Marx's prediction — that revolution was inevitable and forthcoming. Hoggart saw the working class as complicit in its exchange with the culture industry; he viewed it as guilty in its own subjugation, as an audience that chose to chase the empty promises and pleasures of the commercialists because doing so was simply more immediately fun and appealing than engaging with the cultural ideals of the past.

The two authors were thus similar in their disdain for the commercial culture of mass consumerism and in their appreciation for Hoggart's and Adorno's shared Marxist intellectual inheritance. They complemented one another in their critique of modern culture. Where they diverged, however, was in their conception of the audience: Adorno viewed it as largely unaware of what was happening to it — why else would it have failed to start the revolution? — whereas Hoggart saw the audience as a willing and knowing participant in its own cultural subjugation.

References

Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum.

Hoggart, R. (1957). The Uses of Literacy. London: Chatto & Windus.

Hoggart, R. (1973). 'Culture: Dead and Alive,' in Speaking to Each Other, vol. 1: About Society. London: Penguin.

Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. (2002). Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford, CT: Stanford University Press.

Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. (1944). The Culture Industry. London: Routledge.