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According to Frankfurt theorists, human nature was related to the historical conditions in which it emerged. Human’s beings are creative, but their creativity gets dominated by certain conditions under capitalism that appear to be natural and immutable.
The critical theorists argued with the model of the absolute individual consciousness and identity that characterised the era of enlightenment, and liberal thought gave legitimate place to individuals’ subjectivity and their relationships with others.
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In addition to identity, non-identity and multiple involvements of the individual meant that self-identity took many different forms. It was in this that the individual can develop creativity and reach beyond an unchanging individual identity. If society allowed the individual to explore and critique different ideas and situations, this would allow the individual to be free. But more and more the increased sameness and uniformity of society is forced on individuals and prevents this freedom from occurring.
Calhoun notes that critical theorists looked on essential human characteristics as crucial for the pursuit of happiness, the need for solidarity with others, and natural sympathies. These, of course, were developed in particular ways in each specific form of social organisation, since people are products of the historical conditions in which they live. But they connect a critical form of reason to this, with Horkheimer arguing that “a form of reason implicitly critical of civilisation” is part of human nature.
The problem is that administered and totalising societies attempt to stifle and constrain this and channel it in particular directions. Erich Fromm argued that there is an essential human nature that is “repressed and distorted by capitalist patterns of domination”.
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Erich Fromm’s contribution to critical theory involved an analysis of the individual, the family, sexual repression, the economy, and the social context of the individual. His writings outline one way in which the work of Freud and Marx can be integrated. Fromm argues that there are basic instincts of motive forces for human behaviour, but that these are adapted, both actively and passively, to social reality. For Fromm, “psychoanalysis … seeks to discover the hidden sources of the obviously irrational behaviour patterns in societal life in religion, custom, politics, and education”.
In this way, he combined social psychological approaches with the materialism of Marx that is, synthesising the instinctual, psychological forces in humans with the effects of economic and material forces on human life. For Fromm, the nuclear family as it exists in capitalist society is key to understanding the connections between these. That is, the individual is raised in a family, and the family stamps a specific part of the social structure on the child.
This is the manner in which “society reproduces its class structure and imposes its ideologies and practices on individuals”. While individuals growing up in a different society would develop differently, the particular effects of modernity create forms of domination and inner struggles in each individual. Forms of social behaviour such as submissiveness and powerlessness become part of the self in these circumstances.
In contrast to Marxian theories, critical theorists made analysis of art and culture a central focus of their studies, and noted developments in culture that were not purely economic in origin. Rather, the dialectic of enlightenment was used as critique of culture.
Kellner notes that they argued: Culture, once a refuge of beauty and truth was falling prey, they believed, to tendencies towards rationalisation, standardisation and conformity, which they saw as a consequence of the triumph of instrumental rationality that was coming to pervade and structure ever more aspects of life. Thus while culture once cultivated individuality, it was now promoting conformity and was a crucial part of the “totally administered society” that was producing “the end of the individual”.
For the most part, critical theorists developed critiques of mass or popular culture. For example, Adorno “criticised popular music production for its commodification, rationalisation, fetishism and reification of musical materials”. In particular, Adorno attacked jazz as being standardised and commercialised, arguing that “seeming spontaneity and improvisation are themselves calculated in advance, and the range of what is permissible is as circumscribed as in clothes or other realms of fashion”.
While Adorno’s critique has some truth to it, he is unable to explain innovation and new developments using this one-sided approach. Adorno tended to look on traditional forms of “high culture” such as the art of art galleries or the music of German composers as more authentic and creative than were forms of popular culture.
In my view, Adorno adopted a very elitist approach to culture, one that would lead to limiting accessibility to and understanding of culture by large parts of the population. Benjamin considered these to be progressive features of this new development, with the new forms becoming more accessible to more people, becoming more politicised, and possibly leading the situation where many images could be brought to the masses could raise political consciousness. This was particularly the case with film where Benjamin is somewhat reminiscent of Simmel.