The Frankfurt School

The Frankfurt School is a school of neo-Marxist critical theory, social research, and philosophy. The grouping emerged at the Institute for Social Research of the University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany when Max Horkheimer became the Institute's director in 1930. The term "Frankfurt School" is an informal term used to designate the thinkers affiliated with the Institute for Social Research or influenced by them. It is not the title of any institution, and the main thinkers of the Frankfurt School did not use the term to describe themselves.
Influenced especially by the failure of working-class revolutions in Western Europe after World War I and by the rise of Nazism in an economically, technologically advanced nation (Germany), they took up the task of choosing what parts of Marx's thought might serve to clarify social conditions which Marx himself had never seen. They drew on other schools of thought to fill in Marx's perceived omissions.
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.

They argue that Enlightenment leads to the 'totally administered society'.
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':
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.

Commodity fetishism

The marketing, advertising and media industries promote a way of thinking where everything, even social relations are objectified in terms of money.
This explains the insane craze for brand name products people have, all the Tommy Hilfiger and Nike they can buy and everything that revolves around that culture.People love things just because they are expensive.

The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof , Das Kapital. Written by Karl Marx. Fetishism is one of the more accessible bits of Marx, and remains compelling even for many capitalist critics of Marx's work. It is also a favorite section of literary theorists, and helped inspire the social criticism of Theodor Adorno,and others.
According to Marx:
· Product:
An object becomes a product when human labor is applied to it. For example, a tree is simply a raw resource, but if a person cuts it down, splits it into planks, and makes a bookshelf, that bookshelf is a product. Marx has no problem with products; in fact, he likes it when people go and make things for their use, or the use of people they know.
· Commodity:
A commodity, on the other hand, is a perverted product. An object becomes a commodity when human labor is applied to it, making it a product, and the worker who created the product is severed, divorced, alienated, etc. from the result of their labor. For example, a worker on an automotive assembly line is not making cars for their own use, or for any specific, knowable person. As a result, the worker is alienated from the result of their labor, and the car is a commodity rather than a product.
· Use-value:The utility of any given object, the physical properties that make it fit for serving a human need or want -- all of this is bound up under the term use-value. A watch has use value because we can use it to tell time. Complicating this term is Marx's willingness to fold aesthetic appreciation -- our emotional liking of beauty -- into his concept of utility. So a diamond can have use-value entirely apart from its monetary worth if we simply like the way it sparkles.

· Exchange-value:
If, on the other hand, we're concerned with the amount of money we can get for the diamond, then we are talking about its exchange-value, which is its value on the market. Exchange-value does not necessarily have anything to do whatsoever with the physical properties of an object. That the diamond is hard and sparkly doesn't affect its exchange-value; that it is a diamond and diamonds are valuable does. Further complicating matters, exchange-value and use-value are often completely different for the same object. For most people, a diamond is almost useless, but you'd be mighty angry if someone stole yours from you. When reading Marx, it's helpful to know that when he says "value," he almost always means "exchange-value."
· Fetishism:
When we desire an object based on its exchange-value and not its use-value, we in fact desire it for something entirely outside itself. This desire is called fetishism, and though it should not be confused with "fetishism" in the sexual sense, it does share certain similarities, most notably that the locus of desire (the location upon which the desire is focused) is not the object but on the exchange-structure surrounding the object (much like the locus of desire in sexual fetishism is not one's sexual partner or even the sexual act but rather the object of the fetish: the whip, high-heel, specific body part, and so on).
The Argument
The noncontentious part: when we look at an object, we tend to assume that its value is something genuine to it, like its size or shape. In reality, the worth we attach is based on exchange-value, and is not at all inherent (intrinsic) in the object as such. Pretty much everyone agrees with this line of thought, which isn't surprising since it has a long philosophical lineage. Kant's take on beauty states that beauty is not a property of an object as such, but rather of our response to an object. Substitute "worth" or "value" for "beauty," and we have Marx's point, albeit with a completely different justification.
(A Dictionary of Law, 1/1/2002. noncontentious business Any business of a solicitor that is not contentious business , i.e. it is business of a non-controversial character.)
The most contentious part of Fetishism is Marx's claim that capitalism necessarily leads to commodification, since the means of production under capitalism -- mass production in factories -- always leads to a disassociation of the laborer from the product of labor. And just as capitalism necessarily separates the producer from the produced, it also necessarily separates the use-value of a commodity from its exchange-value. Consequently, capitalism causes the fetishization of commodities. In Kapital, this is simply another tick mark on the scoresheet against capitalism, and not even a particularly large one. Capitalists, however, are likely to dismiss commodity fetishism entirely as simply the way the world works, and say that it is only a necessary consequence of capitalism because capitalism embraces natural law.
Is Commodity Fetishism a Bad Thing?
Depends on who you ask. According to Marx and the bevy of social critics he influenced, it's bad because it separates us from a real experience of and appreciation for the world. The market becomes the defining factor for our judgments of worth, and when that happens it tends to eradicate more human(e) concerns. According to the maintainers of capitalism, isn't a bad thing at all, since the market is every bit as real and as a tree or gravity. From that point of view, the market doesn't distort reality; it is reality, and to align our perceptions with the market is to bring them into tune with nature.
Social critics and literary theorists don't generally buy this "market as natural" line, preferring instead to see it as one possible social structure among many, and viewing our concept of it being "natural" as a social construction. It's actually critics and theorists, and not economists, who make the most hay out of commodity fetishism, and not for reasons Marx would have expected. Many of these theorists are not so concerned with simply reiterating Marxist critiques against capitalism, but instead focus their energies on the larger questions of how social systems come into being, operate, and perpetuate themselves. Commodity fetishism is a valuable idea here, since it shows how value operates in exchange, the material intercourse between individuals or groups. Theorists like Althusser, Adorno, and Bourdieu also extend this idea to the field of aesthetics, in their attempts to explain how art is valued, by whom, and what the effects of its value are -- in other words, how art operates as a mechanism of social control.

Culture Industry

Theodor Adorno identified the concept of a culture industry; industries that produce massive amounts of unsophisticated, sentimental products that have replaced true Art. In effect, products of the culture industry are the opposite of art. True art forces people to think, and question social life whereas the junk produced by the culture industry dumbens and mutes the masses.




Katz and Lazarsfeld: Two-Step Flow
The study of the 1940 election campaign
In 1940, Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet conducted the first full-scale investigation of the effects of political mass communication. Their research focused on the 1940 Presidential election campaign and their findings were published in 1944 in The People's Choice after more research had been conducted.
The importance of social influence
Their research was originally based on something like the simplistic hypodermic needle model of media influence, whereby it was assumed that a message would be transmitted from the mass media to a 'mass audience', who would absorb the message. However, their investigations suggested that media effects were minimal, that the conception of a 'mass audience' was inadequate and misguided and that social influences had a major effect on the process of opinion formation and sharply limited the media's effect.
Limited effects
The study by Lazarsfeld et al concluded that only some 5% of people changed their voting behaviour as a result of media messages. Their exposure to election broadcasts turned out to be a relatively poor predictor of their voting behaviour, particularly when compared with other factors such as their interpersonal communication with friends, union members, business colleagues and the political tradition they had grown up in. This view of media effects was confirmed in a variety of other investigations and came to be known as the 'limited effects paradigm' of media influence.
Two-Step Flow: general conclusions
Consequently Lazarsfeld and his colleagues developed the notion of a 'two-step' flow of media messages, a process in which opinion leaders played a vitally important rôle.
This was later developed by Katz and Lazarsfeld and presented in their book Personal Influence (1955). A number of significant conclusions follow from their research:


our responses to media messages will be mediated through our social relationships, the effects of media messages being sharply limited by interpersonal relationships and group membership (this is confirmed also by Hovland who identifies our adherence to group norms as a major factor)

it is misleading to think of receivers as members of a 'mass audience' since that implies that they are all equal in their reception of media messages, whereas in fact some play a more active rôle than others
receiving a message does not imply responding to it; nor does non-reception imply non-response (since we may still receive the message via interpersonal communication)
there are some people amongst the media audience who act as opinion leaders - typically such people use the mass media more than the average, mix more than the average across social classes and see themselves and are seen by others as having an influence on others
Reasons suggested for the greater effectiveness of personal influence over media influence include the following:
The content and development of a conversation are less predictable than mass media messages. Consequently, the receiver cannot be as selective in advance as (s)he is able to be when choosing which media messages to attend to.
In a face-to-face conversation, the critical distance between the partners is less than in mass communication.
By direct questioning of the partner in the conversation, the assumptions underlying the conversation can be rapidly and accurately established, which is not so with mass communication.
In face-to-face interaction the communicator can rapidly adjust to the receiver's personality. (S)he has direct feedback as to the success of the communication, can correct misunderstandings and counter challenges.


Criticisms
1) The model is often presented graphically as shown on the right. In fact, that is somewhat misleading as it suggests that mass media messages flow first to opinion leaders and from them to the rest. Obviously, that's not the case, since individuals can receive messages directly. The messages that individuals receive are then modified through the pattern of their social contacts.
2) Katz and Lazarsfeld are perhaps also somewhat misleading when they suggest that individuals with certain characteristics are opinion leaders. It may be the case that many opinion leaders will have the characteristics they mention, but it is also known that some opinion leaders in some subject areas will not have those general characteristics. No opinion leader is an opinion leader in all aspects of life.
3) Katz and Lazarsfeld may also be misleading in suggesting that people are either active opinion leaders or passive followers of opinion leaders. Apart from the evidence that people can be opinion leaders on some matters and not on others, there is also the objection that some people may be neither leaders nor followers, but quite simply detached from much media output.
Despite those and other criticisms, the fact remains that Katz and Lazarsfeld's research is widely accepted and still highly influential. Advertisers and spin-doctors recognise that 'the best form of advertising is word-of-mouth advertising'.
(In public relations, spin is a usually pejorative term signifying a heavily biased portrayal in one's own favor of an event or situation. While traditional public relations may also rely on creative presentation of the facts, "spin" often, though not always, implies disingenuous, deceptive and/or highly manipulative tactics. Politicians are often accused of spin by their political opponents. A group of people who develop spin may be referred to as "spin doctors" who engage in "spin doctoring" for the person or group that hired them.)