In 1923, a motley collection of philosophers, cultural
critics, and sociologists formed the Institute of Social Research in
Frankfurt, Germany. Known popularly as the Frankfurt School, it was an
all-star crew of lefty theorists, including Walter Benjamin, Theodor
Adorno, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse.
The Frankfurt School consisted mostly of neo-Marxists who
hoped for a socialist revolution in Germany but instead got fascism in
the form of the Nazi Party. Addled by their misreading of history and
their failure to foresee Hitler’s rise, they developed a form of social
critique known as critical theory.
Their ideas took shape when several of the critical
theorists fled Nazism, landed in the US, and turned their gaze on
American culture. They saw the yoke of capitalist ideology wherever they
looked — in films, in radio, in poplar music, in literature. Adorno,
one of the more prominent Frankfurt theorists, warned of an American
“culture industry” that blurred the distinction between truth and
fiction, between the commercial and the political.
Interest in the Frankfurt School has spiked since Donald
Trump burst onto the political scene in 2016. The New Yorker’s Alex Ross
even penned a piece last
year arguing that the Frankfurt School “knew Trump was coming.” “Trump
is as much a pop-culture phenomenon as he is a political one,” Ross
argued, and that’s precisely what you’d expect in age in which “traffic
trumps ethics.”
If the critical theorists do make a comeback, a new book
by Guardian columnist Stuart Jeffries might help lead it. A group
biography of the Frankfurt intellectuals, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School throws fresh light on a tradition of thought that feels depressingly relevant.
I spoke with Jeffries earlier this year about the book
and what he learned from reentering the Frankfurt orbit. A lightly
edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing
What’s the main intellectual contribution of the Frankfurt School?
Stuart Jeffries
I think the main contribution is their insistence on the
power of culture as a political tool, and also the power of the mass
media. They examined as closely as anyone how these instruments became
politically relevant, and what the consequences of that were.
Sean Illing
And how were they influenced by the rise of fascism in Germany at the time?
Stuart Jeffries
In the 1920s, they were wondering why there was no
socialist revolution in a sophisticated and advanced industrialized
country like Germany. Why a successful Bolshevik Revolution a couple
years before in Russia but not in Germany? They concluded that culture
and the use of the media was the primary tool for oppressing the masses
without the masses realizing that they're being oppressed.
This is what they witnessed in Germany, and it became the guiding insight of their work and the main source of their relevance.
Sean Illing
And yet they fell into irrelevance anyhow — why?
Stuart Jeffries
They became irrelevant because people didn't worry too
much about culture — they were too comfortable to realize there was a
problem. “Culture” is a difficult concept; hard to get your hands around
it.
Sean Illing
Theodor Adorno coined the phrase “culture industry.” What did he mean?
Stuart Jeffries
Well, he was distinguishing art from culture. Art is
something that's elevating and challenges the existing order, whereas
culture is precisely the opposite. Culture, or the culture industry,
uses art in a conservative way, which is to say it uses art to uphold
the existing order.
So the culture industry peddles an ideology that supports
the prevailing power structure — in the case of America, that ideology
was consumerism.
Sean Illing
What changed for Adorno and the other critical theorists
when they landed in America? Why did they see American culture as ripe
for fascism?
Stuart Jeffries
Well, Adorno came to the states and was appalled by the
culture industry; it was an utter scandal in his mind. He saw the
culture industry controlling the minds of Americans in much the same way
Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist, controlled the minds of Germans.
So Adorno and the other critical theorists saw culture as
inherently totalitarian, and this was particularly true in America.
This, of course, didn't go over well with the public. You have these
Germans coming to your country with their old attitudes and their
defense of bourgeois art, and they're critical of every aspect of
American culture and regard it as an artistic wasteland.
Americans struggled with this idea that popular culture,
their popular culture, could be subversive in this way. And, to be fair,
many of the critical theorists didn’t get American culture, and so they
undoubtedly overreached at times.
Sean Illing
What was so unique about the culture industry in America?
Adorno seemed to think it was a prop for totalitarian capitalism, and
that it was all the more insidious because it was more camouflaged than
it was in Germany.
Stuart Jeffries
He thought it was so insidious because it didn't appear
to have an ideological message; it was never self-consciously
ideological in the way that German propaganda was. It wasn't that
America was equivalent to Germany or that American propaganda was
equivalently awful; rather, it was that America's culture industry
smuggled its consumerist ethos into its art with a similar goal of
producing conformity of thought and behavior. Having just fled Germany,
Adorno saw this as a precursor to something like fascism.
Sean Illing
The goal of German propaganda at the time was obvious,
but what was the goal of American propaganda? To manufacture consent by
way of mass distraction?
Stuart Jeffries
Manufacturing distraction is exactly what it is. If you read Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man,
you see him struggling with this problem. He sees in 1964 that everyone
is getting too comfortable to revolt against oppression of any kind.
People are distracted by the sexual revolution, by popular music, by
virtually every aspect of mass culture.
As you can see, it's really hard to sympathize with these
guys, because they're bringing such a sweeping critique that it's,
frankly, hard to believe. But I'm convinced there's some truth in it.
Sean Illing
One thing I appreciate about the critical theorists was
their willingness to identify totalitarian tendencies on the left and
the right. They recognized that ideological single-mindedness was the
real danger.
Stuart Jeffries
They were true critics in that sense, and that resonated
with me as well. I used to be involved in the Communist Party, and very
often the "left fascism" that Habermas, one of the more famous Frankfurt
scholars, described is what I saw — the shutting down of debate in
particular. While they incited hatred on both sides of the aisle, you
have to admire their intellectual consistency.
Sean Illing
Why did you write this book about the Frankfurt School
now? It seems strangely relevant given what’s happening in our politics
at the moment, but obviously you undertook this project a few years ago
when things were quite different.
Stuart Jeffries
After the economic crisis in 2008, books like Karl Marx's Capital
were suddenly best-sellers, and the reason was that people were looking
for critiques of contemporary culture. So it seemed like a good time to
dust these guys off and revisit their work. And then someone like Trump
comes along and proves it even further.
Sean Illing
A lot of people are fumbling for constructive ways to
think about what’s happening right now, both politically and culturally.
I’ve watched Trump bulldoze his way to the presidency for over a year
now, and I still can’t quite believe it.
Stuart Jeffries
There's a lot of similar factors operating in the UK,
where I live, and in America. You see this with Brexit and with Trump.
There's a resurgence of racism and a kind of contempt for liberal
democracy.
From the perspective of critical theory, Trump is clearly
a product of a mass media age. The way he speaks and lies and bombards
voters — this is a way of controlling people, especially people who
don't have a sense of history. I saw the same thing in the months
leading up the Brexit vote earlier this year: the lying, the
fearmongering, the hysteria. Mass media allows for a kind of collective
hypnosis, and to some extent that is what we’re seeing.
Sean Illing
I’ve thought a lot about what Trump’s success says about
our culture — mostly how empty and decadent it is. But I wonder if
that’s too easy, if I’m missing something deeper.
Stuart Jeffries
That's interesting. I had a friend involved in Democratic
politics in Pennsylvania this year, and he kept asking people if they
were going to vote for Hillary, and they'd often say, "No, I can't do it
— God will decide." I find that sense of fatalism and that failure to
take one's responsibility seriously terrifying. And yet it's been
brought to life in the most vivid way imaginable, and I have to hope
that the consequences of this will force people to reengage.
Sean Illing
It’s hard not to see Trump’s election, and really the
state of discourse in general, as an indictment of our broader culture, a
culture nurtured by the very instruments of control the critical
theorists worried about.
Stuart Jeffries
I think things have become more heightened by mass media,
but I'm not sure anything has fundamentally changed. Look, I’m doing my
best to be optimistic here, but I mostly share your angst. Like the
critical theorists themselves, I don’t have the solutions. That we have
problem, however, is rather obvious.
Sean Illing
Here’s the thing: If Trump’s rise represented an actual
substantive rebellion, that at least would suggest a revolution in
consciousness. But it’s not that serious. There’s no content behind it.
Trump is just a symbol of negation, a big middle finger to the
establishment. He’s a TV show for a country transfixed by spectacle. And
so in that sense, Trumpism is exactly what you’d expect a “revolution”
in the age of mass media to look like.
Stuart Jeffries
Sadly, I agree. If you listen to Trump speak, it's all
stream-of-consciousness gibberish. There's no real thought, no real
intellectual process, no historical memory. It's a rhetorical sham, but a
kind of brilliant one when you think about it. He's a projection of his
supporters, and he knows it.
He won by capturing attention, and he captured attention
by folding pop entertainment into politics, which is something the
critical theorists anticipated.
Sean Illing
The Frankfurt School lost its luster decades ago. Do you
see their ideas making a comeback given all these political and cultural
transformations?
Stuart Jeffries
Definitely. There's a lot to learn from the critical
theorists, whatever your politics might be. They have a lot to say about
modern culture, about what's wrong with society, and about the
corrupting influence of consumerism.
That alone makes them essential today.
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