Frankfurt vs Birmingham School

Frankfurt School

The earliest concerted effort to theorize popular culture is to be found in the Frankfurt institute for social research, which was founded in Germany in 1923 by neo-Marxist sociologists who pioneered the field of 'critical theory'. Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Eric Fromm. Expelled from Germany by the Nazis, all of them migrated to the US in the early 1930s.

Their founding problem was the puzzling fact that the working class failed to see the wretched conditions in which it labored and consequently failed to overthrow its oppressors.

Marx had predicted that capitalism was an unstable system, on the verge of crisis and a revolution from below. What the Frankfurt school concluded was that the masses had so deeply imbibed the ideology of the ruling class that they were operating out of it and sustaining it without protest. They had been deluded with that Marx called a 'false-class consciousness'.

Ideology refers to the presence in a society of a set of ideas and values that organise people's perceptions and vision of life. These ideas and values are so deeply embedded in their consciousness that they are taken for granted as reflecting what is most true about reality.

In the twentieth century, the capitalist ideology circulated through what the frankfurt theorists came to refer to as 'the culture industries'.

The Culture industries churn out art and entertainment that lull the oppressed into believing that they are actually happy with their lot in life.

These industries are overseen by the powerful heads of economic, political, and military establishments who hire specialists to reiterate through various media the ideology of capitalism.

Lowenthal: 'There is considerable agreement that all media are estranged from values and offer nothing but entertainment and distraction- that, ultimately, they expedite flight from an unbearable reality. Wherever revolutionary tendencies show a timid head , they are mitigated and cut short by a false fulfilment of wish dreams, like wealth,adventure, passionate love, power, and sensationalism in general.'

Adorno- 'On popular Music.'

Adorno converges on the 'releasing element' of popular music that reconciles people to their unhappiness: 'It is Katharsis for the masses but Katharsis which keeps them all the more firmly in line'.

He then concludes that the energy expended on the weekends to master the frenzied histrionics of 'jitterbugging' or simply to like popular music depletes the reserves of energy that might otherwise further one's social transformation 'into a man'.

Kitsch

The Frankfurt school refined the notion of Kitsch into a technical term with both aesthetic and political import. Unlike genuine art, which is difficult to experience, the reception of Kitsch is effortless.

Adorno - a genuine work of art requires effort to understand, 'substantively' because it explores the dialectic of the beautiful and the ugly and formally because it portrays this dialectic through abstract and complex media, all of which demand sustained and disciplined reflection in order to grasp the inspiration behind them. Kitsch, on the otherhand is 'sugary trash' which presents 'the beautiful minus its ugly counterpart.' By concealing the ugly, Adorno argues that Kitsch panders to our longing to 'feel on safe ground all of the time' gratifying 'infantile need for protection'.

Another problem that they have with popular culture isfound in Avant-garde art which is the cultural activity where the resources necessary to revolutionize the consciousness of the masses can be expected to rise. According to Adorno, an expressionist work such as Picassso's 'Guernica' evokes a public outcry that testifies to its power 'to bring to light what is wrong with present social conditions.'

True art -avant garde- enables one to imagine a world different from that in which we live.  

Conclusion of Frankfurt School

Popular Culture is an instrument for maintaining class privilege, its heavy use of kitsch panders to people's infantile wishes for how the world ought to be, and it does not present to its audience a vision of the world thhat is different, and morally better , than the one in which we live. Only the art of avant garde can do this.

Another criticism mass culture vs folk culture. 

Birmingham School

Similar to the frankfurt school is the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of the Birmingham in Britain has been an important influence on the evolving discipline of theorizing about popular culture that are now in use.

Founded by Richard Hoggart in 1964. 

Hoggart

Hoggart wrote 'The uses of literacy' which seemed to adopt the frankfurt school style nostalgic romanticism about the folk culture of the people, what he called the 'lived culture' of the working class- culture found in pubs, singalongs, fairgrounds...

'Most mass-entertaiments are in the end what D.H.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.'   

Hoggart

While he said this, he experimented in his book with using tools of literary criticism, originally developed for the analysis of classical literature, to interpret popular magazines, fiction, pop songs, and advertisements. He did this out of the conviction that popular culture contains and conveys insights about the meaning of life.

Second, he argued that working class people exercise some agency in their reception of the products of popular culture that are pressed upon them by the culture industries.

This was a radical departure from the Frankfurt school that the production side of culture dominated reception and opened up another field of investigation where scholars could explore how consumers receive and make use of popular culture. In other words, the readers or consumers of popular culture negotiate the meanings of texts or products.

Hegemony

Like the Frankfurt school, the Birmingham school borrowed from Marxism. Michael Berube has pointed out that they rejected the fundamentals of Marxism, for example the historical inevitability of class struggle, primacy of class, the notion that 'the ruling class owns the ruling ideas' and that 'ideology is just false consciousness.'

Antonio Gramsci in his book 'Prison notebooks' which appeared in 1971 argued against Marx's economic determinism and class struggle precipitated by catastrophes of violence. In it's place he offered 'Hegemony'

Hegemony is the process whereby the dominant groups in a society seek to win the consent of subordiante groups through all means of persuasion short of coercion and force- such as the police, military, courts. The class structure is also maintained through other institutions such as religion, schools, labor unions and the media which are the real transmitters of ideology. eg) Stoney's example of Rastafari and Bob Marley's music paradox. 

Style

This was another area of interest for the Birmingham School and it started with Paul Willis' field study of motorcycle gangs and hippies which critiqued the Frankfurt belief of consumer passiveness under the onlsaought of the culture industries.

'Oppressed, subordinate or minority groups can have a hand in the construction of their own vibrant cultures and are not merely dupes: the fall guys in a social system stacked overwhelmingly against them and dominated by Capitalist media and commercial provision.'

Dick Hebdige's book 'Subculture:The meaning of style', easily reached the same conclusion but went much further in theorizing how youth subcultures in industrialised societies defy the culture identities. Subculture is an ethnography of skinheads, hipsters, mods, punks, rastas, beats and teddy-boys. He found they exercised their agency through a practice he called 'style'.

Style refers to the way people use commodities in ways that were not intended by their producers and how they reassemble them to convey a deeply encoded meaning. Thus everyday objects take on new meaning and produce a ‘patois’ of consumable goods. Therefore they are not just put to alternative us but reconstituted into an alternative semiotic universe. Each youth subculture exploited consumer goods, advertising images and entertainment and fashions of popular culture by emptying them of their common significations and then attributed meaning.

                                     Bricolage

He drew on ideas from the French anthropologist Claud Levi-Strauss, particularly the idea of bricolage - meaning a makeshift repair or making something work by patching it together with whatever materials are at hand. Levi Strauss used to describe how primitive people think their world by adsorbing new phenomenon into in a scheme by making adjustments to accommodate it. For Hebdidge this improvisation is reflected in subcultures.

Poaching

Another appropriation from French social theory is bracconage. This term was introduced by Michel de Certeau and it means poaching. According to de Certeau, consumers of culture practice the art of “using” it. This is a clandestine activity where users are nomadic wanderers poaching their way across products and text they did not produce.

Style is a form of poaching. Subaltern groups scrounge around in the vast fields of popular culture and put its symbols to use for which they were not intended. There are also overt practitioners such as activists and hackers. In the more sophisticated forms Umberto Eco, describes as “semiotic guerrilla warfare." Decoding poaching is not only understanding its code but also its oppositional decoding or how it has been re-used.