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Mass media: cultural effects
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Mass media: cultural effects
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The Marxist view is referred to by a variety of terms. Fairly common are the terms 'critical' and 'radical'. In Britain and Europe Marxist approaches to the mass media and, more generally, to culture as a whole ('cultural studies') were dominant from the mid '60s to the mid 80s (approximately). Although less dominant now, Marxism still colours much media research.
Generally, the Marxian view of media influence depends on an understanding and elaboration of the operation of the notion of ideology. Although perhaps in everyday parlance, the term 'ideology' refers to a set of (especially 'political') beliefs and values which is not necessarily related to any particular social class (for example: Marxist ideology, Anglican ideology, proletarian ideology, Conservative ideology, socialist ideology, free market ideology), in the Marxian literature the term is generally used ina an entirely negative sense to refer to a supposedly dominant ideology which supports the interests of the dominant class (see, for example, the quotations). Various thinkers (Mannheim, for example) have examined ideology from a class-neutral point of view, but it is this crucial notion of domination which is central to the Marxian understanding of ideology. Ideology is seen as a tool of the dominant classes, misleading and illusory. For a selection of quotations from major commentators on the operation of ideology, please click here.
Today, it is by no means self-evident that class-relations are the fundamental cause of domination and exploitation. Important though they may be, relations of gender, ethnicity, of the state to the individual, of one nation or nation-bloc (e.g. North/South) to another also need to be taken into account.
As I hope you will understand from what follows, it is not even self-evident what classes are and where their boundaries lie. For Marx, it was pretty clear that classes were determined by objective relations of production and other primarily economic factors. The 'Marxists' in cultural and media studies were generally concerned to develop therories of how relations of domination were developed and maintained, not only or even primarily by economic forces, but by cultural forces. They thus paid far more attention than Marx himself to the way that the circulation of symbolic goods was in itself constitutive and supportive of relations between individuals. (Further comments on ideology) The Frankfurt School
An important source of the left-wing critique of mass culture is the Frankfurt School. Developing Marx's view that the dominant class in society not only owns the means of material production, but also controls the production of the society's dominant ideas and values (dominant ideology), the 'critical theorists' of the Frankfurt School examined the industrialisation of mass-produced culture and examined the economic imperatives behind what they dubbed the 'culture industries'. They saw the products of the culture industries as providing the ideological legitimation of existing capitalist societies and were the first to recognise the importance of the culture industries as significant agents of socialisation. Thus, what is sometimes referred to as 'vulgar Marxism' was developed by the Frankfurt School theorists beyond its rather mechanistic materialism and economic determinism to include consideration of culture as a vehicle of ideology, as well as a critique of science and technology as tools of social domination within capitalism.
The work which is often considered characteristic of the Frankfurt School is Dialectic of Enlightenment (1969/1944) by Adorno and Horkheimer, in which they develop their critique of Enlightenment rationality and of the 'culture industries'. Developing not only Marx's ideas on ideology and domination, but also Max Weber's thoughts on bureaucratization and purposive rationality (Zweckrationalität), they portrayed Enlightenment as 'totalitarian':
For Enlightenment whatever does not conform to the rule of calculability and utility is suspect ... Enlightenment is totalitarian
(1969/1944 : 12)
Human beings pay for the increase in their power with alienation from the things over which they exercise that power. Enlightenment behaves towards things as the dictator towards people. He knows them to the extent that he can manipulate them. The man of science knows things to the extent that he can make them.
(1969/1944 : 15)
As Enlightenment rationality leads to domination of nature, so it leads also inevitably to domination over human beings. Adorno and Horkheimer were writing in the last year of the Nazi terror which they had fled in the thirties, so it is not surprising that they argue that that rationality, with its principles of calculability, quantifiability, order and control leads to fascism, but their arguments that Enlightenment leads to the 'totally administered society' applied equally to the United States where they had sought refuge, in part no doubt because the USA of the New Deal and the struggle against Hitler was subjected to methods of propaganda, regimentation and social control not dissimilar in principle from Goebbels's (for comments on Adorno's research into fascism, see the section on the 'authoritarian personality'). The totally administered society produces the 'end of the individual' and encourages conformity; where authentic culture once cultivated the individual, the mass production of the 'culture industries' now eradicates the individual and produces mass society which tolerates only 'pseudo-individuality':
From the standardized jazz improvisation to the original film personality, who has to hang a curl over her eye so that she can be recognized as such, pseudo-individulaity is everywhere. Individuality is reduced to the generality's power to stamp the accidental detail so firmly that it is accepted as such. Precisely the defiant reserve or the sophisticated appearance of the individual on show is mass-produced like Yale locks.
(1969/1944 : 163)
an opinion of media products which Adorno maintained later:
I consider .... that the average television entertainment is fundamentally far more dangerous politically than any political broadcast has ever been
claiming that TV entertainment drummed false consciousness and 'disguising of reality' (Verschleierung der Wirklichkeit) into viewers, 'injecting' (einimpfen) them with ideology.
From The Dialectic of Enlightenment onwards, Adorno and Horkheimer gradually moved away from Marxian categories, a move which Horkheimer completed totally in his later life. However, although they shift the focus away from production, labour and political economy, in Dialectic of Enlightenment they still see society in class terms, capital against the masses using the commodification and reification of culture as a means of the social control of the masses. However, they express little faith in the revolutionary potential of the proletariat, largely because capitalist modernity has succeeded in dominating and mystifying the individual via advertising, mass communications media and new forms of social control; indeed the term 'proletariat' is generally replaced by 'masses' in their work.
The relative élitism of their viewpoint is, nowadays at least, problematic for media and cultural studies. They appeared to distinguish between what they considered 'authentic art' on the one hand and the products of a supposedly debased mass culture on the other, though they did abandon the term 'mass culture', which appears to make the masses themselves responsible for the debasement of culture, replacing it by the term 'culture industries'. This approach is not unproblematic. I might appreciate some of the music which Adorno would accept as authentic, but when I put the B Minor Mass back on the shelf and put on a Henry Rollins CD it doesn't feel to me as if I am suddenly the culture industries' dupe. In any case the emancipatory, revolutionary potential which the Frankfurt School saw in high modernist art has hardly fulfilled its potential when Duchamp's and Dali's works are just another corporate investment. Adorno later discusses (1971/1963 : 145-6) the possibilities of media education which must have appeared quite radical in 1963: a teacher taking his class to the cinema and revealing to his pupils the deception ('Schwindel') in the film, a teacher analysing the 'happy music' of Sunday morning radio, analysing a magazine, showing them how pop music is 'incomparably worse' than a quartet by Mozart or Beethoven or an authentic piece of modern classical music. Here, of course, we say 'Oh, really? Who says?' I suppose we could just accept that Adorno was a highly accomplished classical musician and take his word for it, but that certainly goes against the grain. I can't claim to be any too keen on pop music myself, but his constantly repeated attacks on jazz's 'pseudo-originality' grate with me. Can he really have listened to Parker and found him less original than Mozart? Certainly Parker was churning out music to eke out a living (or buy heroin), but so was Mozart - and as for 'mass production', I know which one's music sounds more like the product of the production line to me. And which one produced music primarily for, commissioned by, and listened to exclusively by, the bourgeoisie? Not Parker at any rate. And even where music does use standardized musical forms and types it can still express rebellion against standardization and commodification. Such oppositional and contestatory uses of popular cultural forms (as examined for example in the 'New Audience Research') are simply not allowed for in Adorno's and Horkheimer's critique of the 'culture industries'. From what I know of Adorno's work, whenever he mentions popular culture, it's always treated as junk, always the culture industries' snare for the false consciousness of the mass public. It's tempting to wonder whether it's not Adorno, rather than a class of students, whose media literacy could do with being improved. From Pound, Eliot, Leavis through Adorno to Baudrillard the same doom-laden jeremiad about the effects of the cyberblitz of modern media. Come on, Theo, lighten up.
One might also disagree with Adorno and Horkheimer over whether or not society is 'totally administered'. Is it more or less 'administered' now than it was when they wrote? Was it more or less 'administered' when they wrote than it had been, say, a hundred years before? And, even supposing it is, in the sense of greater bureaucratization, does it necessarily follow that that leads to the 'death of the individual' and increasing conformity? It's not at all clear to me how you could begin to determine that, but it certainly doesn't seem to me that, say, the apparent increase in uniformity which one finds with globalization is entirely unidirectional. We may well find MacDonald's in Moscow and Coca-Cola in Shanghai, but it doesn't follow that all sources of social instability and all voices of dissent have been smothered, nor is it apparent to me that individuals in modern societies are necessarily more integrated than they were a hundred or two hundred years ago. Certainly, to conclude that individuals are more fully integrated because of their reception of the messages of the culture industries is too simplistic.
The failure to differentiate between individuals in the so-called mass is also often a shortcoming of the 'cultural effects' approach to mass media influence, whether in the Marxian or lit-crit tradition. Commonly, such commentators highlight the linearity of communication flow in the mass media, emphasizing that the receivers of mass media messages are not generally in a position to reply. But it does not follow from this inability to reply that the receivers have no control over media messages and that the act of reception is not participatory. There is a wealth of research to suggest that audience members actively choose which messages they attend to and how they interpret them. Further, their experience of media content can be participatory in two senses: first, in the sense that media reception is not entirely linear, audience's reactions are fed back to the media producers, if not directly through 'phone-ins and surveys, then at least through the ratings; secondly, and perhaps more importantly, experience of media messages is participatory in that it is a social activity, even for those who receive the message on their own. The messages are elaborated on and interpreted through social interaction and the scope for such elaboration and interpretation is arguably much greater than it was before the development of mass media.
For in-depth discussion of critical theory past, present and future, see Douglas Kellner's 
Illuminations site.
At the time that the Frankfurt School were developing their ideas in exile in America, at the prestigious Columbia Bureau American investigation of media effects was largely in what we might refer to as the empiricist tradition. That was generally concerned with laboratory experiments or field experiments to try to establish, say, the effects of media violence on behaviour or the influence of political campaigns in the media on voting behaviour. Inevitably, although some experiments or surveys may have been large-scale, they tended to be limited in their time-scale and could at best establish only short-term effects.
If mass culture does have the effect of, say, replacing spiritual values by consumerist ones or undermining the values of the 'Great Tradition' and supplanting them with superficiality and sentimentalism (the sort of effect claimed by critics coming from the direction of literary criticism), then empirical research in the American tradition is unlikely to pick up those effects. In fact, given that research in American universities was often commissioned by political parties or major companies, who wanted to know whether their campaigns were having an effect, then it's unlikely that most empiricist research would be designed to pick up such longer term cultural effects.
In Great Britain, the non-empirical work of the Leavises (see the section on literary criticism) did not go unnoticed, but the fact that the Frankfurt School's work was mainly written in German coupled with the fact that their work was non-empirical and therefore out of sympathy with the American traditions meant that they went largely unnoticed in the USA and Britain until the late 60s and 70s.
Some of the Frankfurt School's conclusions are not dissimilar from the Leavises, though the Frankfurt sociologists were naturally more concerned with genuine art as a redeeming force for a revolutionary socialism, rather than for an intellectual élite.
In recent years something of a split has opened up between students of 'communication' and students of 'cultural studies'. By 'communication' I am referring to more empiricist approach and by 'cultural studies' I mean a more culturalist approach. I think it is fair to say that the Frankfurt School largely avoided that split, analysing as they did cultural artefacts within the context of industrial production, introducing the results of reception studies and so on and integrating these within their overall framework of critical theory. I think it is safe to say that their work represents the first major project in communication studies to attempt to bring the 'empiricist' and 'culturalist' approaches together. Unfortunately, however, it seems that their very introduction and development of the concepts of a culturalist approach has led to a later split. A shortcoming of the Frankfurt School's analysis is that encoding (if we assume they are right in their understanding of what was encoded) and decoding are isomorphic. It is quite possible for the decoding of a cultural artifact to differ radically from the author's intentions. We now see a recognition of that, as well as a welcome move towards the re-integration of the empiricist and culturalist approaches in the New Audience Research.
One of the conclusions of the Frankfurt School was that the consumer society certainly offered a better material standard of living and certain comforts and gratifications which were welcomed by the workers. However, in their view, it also in fact encouraged social and political apathy. That apathy is to the advantage of the groups who control capitalist society. From this perspective, then, the mass media are seen as the instruments of oppression and social control wielded by the groups who control society.
Marcuse was a member of the Frankfurt School who, unlike Adorno and Horkheimer, retained his analysis of society through Marxian categories as well as his commitment to revolution. He accepted that capitalism had succeeded in raising the living standards of most of the population. However, in his view, the manipulation of false needs established by capitalist advertising is repressive. It leads to one-dimensional thought. It blocks people's ability to realise that they are being controlled. Thus, in the United States at least the proletariat has lost its revolutionary potential, whereas in France and Italy, where the standard of living has not reached the same level as in the US, the proletariat retains radical potential. A great supporter of student movements of the 1960s, Marcuse considered that the coming revolution of the twentieth or twenty-first century would not be primarily motivated by material need, but rather by the general dehumanization, disgust with waste and the overproduction of the consumer society. While reforms should be attempted and achieved, reforms would eventually cut into the roots of capitalist production, namely the profit motive. At that point, where the system is forced to defend itself to ensure its own survival, revolution becomes necessary. (1971 : 17-18)
His view was that one of the most important mechanisms of control in capitalist societies is the manipulation of the conscious and unconscious. New needs have to be created to encourage people to buy the new goods which are produced. People have to be convinced that they really do have a need for these goods and that possession of the goods satisfies the needs they have. Thus, in attempting to satisfy their needs people reproduce the capitalist system. The false need to purchase these goods sustains social controls over a life of toil and fear.
Generally, Marcuse tends, like the other Frankfurt School members, to portray audiences as passive victims and, like them he laments the decline of the individual and the demise of authentic culture, a demise promoted by the rubbish produced by commercial radio and television. The central problem in the analysis provided by such theorists as the Frankfurt School is that they must base their condemnation of consumer society on something, some kind of values, which they consider to be authentic. Marcuse, as we have seen, bases his critique on the distinction between false and authentic needs. There is a double bind here in that the critic establishes his own notion of authenticity as somehow outside society, presenting a concept of the human being which is ahistorical and essentialist. The double bind, of course, is that this is just as ideological a project as the project of the supposedly dominant culture. Post-structuralism and post-modernism would certainly criticize such a totalizing project and treat it with considerable suspicion since we have seen in the command economies of the former eastern bloc just what a supposedly scientific recognition of authentic human needs can lead to. Opposition to functionalism
What we have referred to above as 'empiricism' and the 'American approach' to media effects research might also be referred to as a 'pluralist' approach.
Sociologists might broadly refer to it as a 'functionalist' approach (though note that I am no sociologist). Functionalism seeks to explain social institutions in terms of their cohesiveness within an interconnected social system. Thus, there is little room in functionalism for explanation of social conflict. Since functionalism sees society (my apologies to any sociologists who consider I've got this wrong) as something like a very large person replete with needs and desires which need to be kept in equilibrium, then, from a functionalist point of view, ideology would be seen as operating to fulfil those needs.
The American researchers tended to see American society as having reached a broad consensus. What they were investigating boiled down to the question of how much the media might threaten that consensus, for example through the possible contribution of media violence to 'juvenile delinquency'. By and large they came to the conclusion that the media did not pose a strong threat.
Marxists come at the problem from a very different angle. They ask the questions: where does the consensus come from? whose purposes does it serve? what rôle do the mass media play in creating and sustaining it? Looked at form this angle, the media may be examined from the point of view of the rôle they play in class conflict and in constructing a view of the world which suits the powerful. From this point of view, the media may be seen as having very powerful and far-reaching effects.
Despite the criticisms I have made of Adorno's, Horkheimer's and Marcuse's views of the operation of the 'culture industries', their importance in cultural studies is not in doubt. They had a considerable influence on New Left thought (Marcuse especially), whose investigation of the consumer society and commodity culture influenced and was influenced by the work in France of Barthes, Lefebvre, de Certeau, Baudrillard and others who have contributed to the indictment of commodification and the impoverishment of everyday life. Nevertheless, the fact remains that
One major flaw of many neo-Marxist theories of the consumer society, evident sometimes, but not always, in Critical Theory, is a totalizing view and denunciation of the commodity, consumer needs and consumption. On this view all commodities are uniformly seductive instruments of capitalist manipulation, which engineer homogeneous false needs and consciousness. ..... Commodity fetishism and false needs, then, supposedly enchain willing consumers into the institutions, practices and values of consumer capitalism. .... Commodities and consumption are negatively presented, simply as means of class domination, and the model also assumes a magical, diabolical power on the part of capital to create unreal false needs which it is then able to manipulate in its own interest.
Kellner (1989b : 158-9)
This does not mean, though, that Critical Theory is a dead end. Far from it. As already remarked, the work of the early Critical Theorists fed into and informed into much of the later work of cultural studies and the current work of Jürgen Habermas has developed Critical Theory further. Kellner observes that
the theoretical framework, categories and methods of Critical Theory make it especially appropriate to addressing such issues as new technologies and their impact on social and class structure, politics and culture and the crises of techno-capitalism. Every era must develop its own radical social theory and politics, and I believe that the tradition of Critical Theory provides an excellent starting point for a new theory of today's techno-capitalism, its crisis tendencies and its potential for emancipatory social transformation.
Kellner (1989b : 231)
For a glimpse of where Critical Theory might be going from here, take a close look at Douglas Kellner's excellent Illuminations website
There are many different institutions in our society which socialise us into acceptance of these dominant ideas and values . The mass media are one such institution. The French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser referred to such institutions as Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs), which operate alongside the Repressive State Apparatus of courts, police, prisons, military and so on. Althusser argued that all of these ISAs are bits of apparatus for the state to use in order to manage the consent of society's members, to persuade us to accept as legitimate for the whole society that ideology which in fact best serves the interests of the dominant class. According to him, the ISAs are:
The fact that many of the organs within these apparatuses are within what we would normally think of as the private (rather than state) domain is no objection since any ISA can perfectly well function as a state apparatus, whether it is owned by the state or not; as Althusser see it, they all communicate and support the ideology of the dominant class, which exercises control over the ideological state apparatuses
Althusser developed the classical Marxist notion of a dominant ideology, breaking away from the concern with the economic base and arguing that ideology is the medium through which we experience the world. Ideology is seen as a determining force in its own right. Althusser's focus was on questions of how we come to 'internalize' ideology, how ideology 'interpellates' subjects and constructs 'subject-positions' for them. This focus fed into marxist-oriented psychoanalytic interpretations of the operation of ideology.
Although Althusser was highly influential in the development of Marxist approaches to the media, he does come close to suggesting that virtually nothing other than the 'dominant ideology' could ever be reproduced in discourse. To some extent as a result of Althusser's influence there was a tendency in cultural studies during the 1970s for theorists to concentrate on the analysis of media texts, uncovering the ideological meanings within them and assuming that readers (despite the activity implied in the term 'readers') as compliant victims of ideology. The focus on culture as a site of social struggle was to enter cultural and media studies through the influence of Gramsci.
Althusser's thoughts on the 'individual' in society are complex and so we shall not deal with them here. If you are studying Communication Studies, then his ideas are also important for an understanding of the notion of the 'self' and we have therefore dealt with his ideas under that heading. If you wish to follow those up, please click here: 
Hypodermic needle model
Empiricism
Uses and gratifications
Recent developments
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