Frankfurt School and Critical Theory
Typified by the philosophical and theoretical orientations of Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Leo Lowenthal, and Herbert Marcuse, the Frankfurt school contributed greatly to the development and application of critical theory in media studies. Their Marxist critique of market-driven media was critical of its atomizing and leveling effects.
The Frankfurt school also lamented the effects of the “culture industry” on the production and appreciation of art. For example, in A Social Critique of Radio Music, Adorno asserts:
“…music has ceased to be a human force and is consumed like other consumers’ goods. This produces ‘commodity listening’…The listener suspends all intellectual activity.”
As the Frankfurt school lamented on the effects of the "culture industry" they also began to identify mass culture and high culture as two distinct entities. Scholars like Benjamin (1936) and Adorno (1945) can be credited with what would eventually become known as popular culture and high culture. Their finite distinction of equating original production with ritualistic behavior as compared with mass culture that finds its identifying symbols in reproductions. These reproductions are souless and lacking in definition and originality.
Read more about this topic: History Of Media Studies
Famous quotes containing the words school, critical and/or theory:
“The child to be concerned about is the one who is actively unhappy, [in school].... In the long run, a child’s emotional development has a far greater impact on his life than his school performance or the curriculum’s richness, so it is wise to do everything possible to change a situation in which a child is suffering excessively.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)
“I know that I will always be expected to have extra insight into black texts—especially texts by black women. A working-class Jewish woman from Brooklyn could become an expert on Shakespeare or Baudelaire, my students seemed to believe, if she mastered the language, the texts, and the critical literature. But they would not grant that a middle-class white man could ever be a trusted authority on Toni Morrison.”
—Claire Oberon Garcia, African American scholar and educator. Chronicle of Higher Education, p. B2 (July 27, 1994)
“Everything to which we concede existence is a posit from the standpoint of a description of the theory-building process, and simultaneously real from the standpoint of the theory that is being built. Nor let us look down on the standpoint of the theory as make-believe; for we can never do better than occupy the standpoint of some theory or other, the best we can muster at the time.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)