COMS 371 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse, Culture Industry

• School: University of Calgary
• Department: Communications Studies
• Course: COMS 371
• Professor: Jessalynn Keller

Document Summary

Lecture 3: the culture industry: the frankfurt school and their critics. Groups of interdisciplinary german-jewish intellectuals inspired by marxist thinking, 1920s 1970s. Key figures: max hokheimer, theodore adorno, herbert marcuse, walter. Concerned with questions that emerged from interwar germany: failure of working class revolution in western europe, russian. Revolution/stalin, emergence of nazism and fascism, suppression of political dissent (power!) Emphasis on the importance of the economy in shaping social, cultural, and political life. Key reading: the culture industry: enlightenment as mass deception . Individual creation: multi-dimensional, active consumption, challenges existing power hierarchies. Mass culture : american, false, mass production, one-dimensional, passive consumption, distraction, legitimates existing power hierarchies. Deeply concerned by the commercialization, or commodification, of culture by (american) industries such as hollywood. 1944: coined the term culture industry to theorize the products and processes of mass culture. Culture industry as a system of economic and cultural practices and processes that produces mass culture, marked by homogeneity and predictability.