PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES            MARK MARUSIC
   
				JUNE 1995

	The Institute For Social Research, also known as the Frankfurt School, because of its association with Frankfurt University, was founded in 1922 for the study of Marxism. Its first director was Carl Grunberg, a Marxist historian of labour. He was replaced by Max Horkheimer in 1931, from which time the Institute changed its emphasis to a less othodox and more philosophical version of Marxism. 
	In 1933, with the Nazis coming to power, the Institute shifted to Geneva, setting up branch offices in Paris and London. The following year it was affiliated to Columbia University in New York, where it was based until returning home in 1949. 
	In this essay I will look at the work and theories of three of its leading figures - Herbert Marcuse, political philosopher, 1898- ;   
Theodor Adorno, sociologist and music critic, 1903-1969; and Walter Benjamin, cultural theorist, 1892-1940. 
	The turn in the Frankfurt School to a more philosophical version of Marxism coincided with the discovery in the early 1930s of some early writings of Marx, in which alienation is a key concept in the analysis of capitalism. They were written in 1844 and called the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. They were published only in 1932 ( a year before the Nazi takeover ).
	In these writings, Marx concentrated on the alienation of labour, underlining three odious facets - 1) loss of control over the processes of work, 2) loss of control over the products of one's labour and 3) the worker becoming a thing. However, as Marx came to focus his attention on social organisation and  class relations, the term alienation came to be replaced by the concept exploitation. 
	The term 'alienation' did not acquire this sense of meaning until the 1940s - prior to that it was used only as a real-estate term or a quality of mental insanity. So it came to mean a sense of estrangement from society, a feeling of powerlessness to affect social change, or a depersonalisation of the individual in a large and bureaucratic society. 
	This new sense of meaning, as well as being influenced by the writings mentioned above, came from other developments of the time - the disorientation from the social upheaval following World War 2; the growth of an intelligensia which found its own position          and status problematic; the increasing influence of German sociologists, such as Max Weber and Georg Simmel, who emphasised bureacratisation and the helplessness of the individual; and the writings of  theologian Paul Tillich, who emphasised the depersonalisation of the individual in modern society. 
	In the 1960s, the French Communist philosopher Louis Althusser launched an onslaught on alienation as a concept central to Marxism. Althusser claimed that Marx had ditched the earlier Hegelian influences and had come to what Althusser called a structuralist interpretation of society. Althusser made wide use of the arguments used by French structuralist writers such as Levi-Strauss, to bring about a new orthodoxy called Structural Marxism. This, in turn, has been critiqued from a variety of fields, including Post-Structuralism, Humanist Marxism, and Sociology.
	The years since World War 2 have seen a number of other combinings of various fields with Marxism - with psychoanalysis (by Erich Fromm), with phenomenology ( by Merleau-Ponty), and with existentialism (by Sartre). It was to the Frankfurt School itself that the term Neo-Marxism was first applied.
	Marxism has also been a contributor to various religious movements, such as liberation theology. Indeed, liberation theologists point out that Marx's vision of society has deep roots in the biblical tradition, and that, in important respects, the Judeo-Christian tradition stands in stark opposition to the values of modern capitalist societies.1   
	So, all round, the Frankfurt School has a more existential than economic emphasis. This reversal of Marx's own evolution goes back further than the Frankfurt School - the philosopher and literary critic George Lukacs, in writings such as 'Historical and Class Consciousness', worked from Marx back to Hegel, substituting for Hegel's Spirit (Geist) Marx's proletariat. 
	The Frankfurt School has made an important contribution to rejuvinating the libertarian aspect of Marx's thought - this can be seen in the influence Marcuse's work in particular had on such movements as the New Left.

He's a real Nowhere Man,
sitting in his Nowhere Land,
making all his Nowhere plans for nobody.
Doesn't have a point of view,
knows not where he's going to,
isn't he a bit like you and me?

		(Nowhere Man, The Beatles.)

Living is easy with eyes closed
Misunderstanding all you see.
It's getting hard to be someone.
But it all works out,
It doesn't matter much to me.

		(Strawberry Fields Forever, The Beatles)

	Marcuse's One Dimensional Man is subtitled Studies In The Ideology Of Advanced Industrial Society. In Part One he looks at the one-dimensional nature of contemporary society, in Part 2 at this term in regard to contemporary thought, and in Part 3 at the chance of alternatives. 
	In his critique of the "overdeveloped countries" several descriptive terms come up: the Affluent Society ( a term made famous by John kenneth Galbraith), the Happy Consciousness, destructive prosperity, repressive tolerance, enslaving contentment, the mutilated individual. 
	He declares that his book will swing throughout between two contradictory hypotheses - 1) that as far as can be predicted, advanced capitalist society is capable of containing qualitative change, and 2) forces and tendencies exist which may break this containment and explode the society. He doesn't feel a clear answer can be given, but believes there is no hope of change unless human consciousness and behaviour is subverted by the recognition of what is being done and what is being prevented:

A core problem is the productive apparatus (ie. the technical application of production and distribution). It tends to become totalitarian to the extent to which it determines not only the socially needed occupations, skills and attitudes, but also individual needs and aspirations. It thus tends to obliterate the opposition between the private and public existence, between individual and social needs. Technology serves to institute new, more effective, and more pleasant forms of social control and social cohesion. 2 

	With this in mind, he takes issue with the traditional notion of the "neutrality" of technology. Furthermore, he points to the implications of the productivity and growth potential of this system - the stabilisation of society and the containment of technical progress within the fabric of domination. 
	He exposes the deceptively totalitarian aspects of contemporary Western society, pointing to it as increasingly anti-humanist. While the book is concerned mainly with the problems of Western society, he at times refers to parallel ones in the former Soviet Union.
	A key word in the book is 'totalitarianism.' He extends the definition of the term to take in much more than our common understanding of it .  It is also a:

non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests. It thus precludes the emergence of an effective opposition against the whole. Not only a specific form of government or party rule makes for totalitarianism, but also a specific system of production and distribution which may well be compatible with a "pluralism" of parties, newspapers, "counterveiling powers", etc. 3 

	What we have is a system of "subdued pluralism", in which "the competing institutions concur in satisfying the power of the whole over the individual."
	Theologian Charles Kammer points out that our communities have become forces for dehumanisation rather than human fulfilment - and yet human communities are intended to provide a context for all persons to develop fully and freely. He explains that one reason why it is difficult for people to envision communities different from those in which they were born and live is that the radical individualism of Western ideologies repudiates the importance of questions such as "what kinds of communities should we create?" Tied in with this is the tendency to believe that any problems that might arise are individual ones and so should be solved by individualised treatment rather than social reform. 4 
	Kammer acknowledges that individualism is a by-product of Judeo-Christianity, although  its emphasis on the dignity of the individual has  been a humanising force too.  Judeo-Christianity at its best, he adds, always understood the individual "as part of a broader community and as a person who was both nourished by, and responsible for the other members of the community."5 He contrasts this with radical individualism, at the centre of Western culture, which is a product of late nineteenth -century social Darwinism. 
	The reality though with Christianity, Kammer  regrets, is that, for the most part, rather than concern itself with the question, "what kinds of communities should we create?", it has focused on such issues as "how can the individual be saved?; "what is sound doctrine?'; "what forms of liturgy should we adopt?"6 Prominent shapers of Christian theology such as St Augustine and Martin Luther have overlooked the biblical view that salvation is a communal, not a personal event. 
	A number of parallels in Marcuse with the thinking of Wilhelm Reich are apparent. One is recognition of the ability of capitalism to organise and direct desires and to mould moral sentiments. 
	Engels seems to have recognised that the problem was not only one of material relations in production, but also one of the hegemony.7  He wrote: "the greatest failing of Marx and I is that we did not enquire sufficiently as to how the hegemony is formed."8 
	Former Australian Deputy Prime Minister Dr Jim Cairns argues that the hegemony is formed not in, or even through the means of production, but rather:

it is formed biologically and psychologically, when human behaviour and character are formed . . . in the early life of every child. . . . it is the "means of reproduction", not the "means of production" that we must look at . . .to understand how power is formed and how it might be changed. Without significant change in the repressive formation of the hegemony within  repressive society, the 'revolutionary crisis', and opportunity will pass without any change, or if there is a change of those in power, the new "men' will continue to exercise it as repression dictates. 9 

	Marcuse distinguishes between true and false needs. The latter are those which are superimposed upon the individual by social interests, and they perpetuate drudgery, aggressiveness, misery and injustice. In this category he places "most of the prevailing needs to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate."10 
	He feels that individuals are unable to truly answer the question of what are true and false needs as long as they are not autonomous, are indoctrinated and are manipulated. So, we have a vicious circle - the domination by false needs and satisfactions hinders the consciousness of one's servitude. An implication of this is that free choice among a vast range of goods and services does not mean freedom. 
	This is related to the blurring of class distinctions. He observes that when  bosses and workers enjoy the same leisure activities and so on, this does not indicate the disappearance of classes, but rather the spreading  internalisation of the needs and satisfactions that uphold the status quo. People recognise themselves, find their souls in their commodities.11 
	Aldous Huxley addressed the problem of rampant consumerism in his novel Island  , about a utopian civilisation called Pala, in which false needs do not take root:

They've ( the Palans) been taught from infancy to be fully aware of the world, and to enjoy their awareness . . . they have been shown the world and themselves and other people as these are illumined and transfigured by reality-revealers ( drugs and meditation). Which helps them to have an intenser awareness and a more understanding enjoyment, so that the most ordinary things, the most trivial events, are seen as jewels and miracles . . so why should we resort to scooters or whisky or television or Billy Graham or any of your distractions and compensations. 12 

	Marcuse identifies an individual's consciousness and unconsciousness as a sactuary from  public opinion and behaviour - He observes that this too has been invaded, and that mass production and mass distribution now claims the entire individual. 
	He recognises that it is in the inner dimension that opposition to the status quo can take root, though he speaks here only of the processes of reason and critical thinking. Other writers, such as Huxley, Krishnamurti and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, have pointed to the subversive potential of deeper internal processes, coming about from activity such as meditation.  
	Marcuse is rather pessimistic about this though, feeling it is no longer contradictory to the status quo, rather that it is "quickly digested by the status quo as part of its healthy diet."13 	Another reason for the preoccupation with material goods and well-being, which Marcuse does not seem to mention, is simply the material poverty of the poor. As Hannah Arendt observes, "abundance and material consumption are the ideals of the poor . . . the mirage in the desert of misery."14 
	Theologian and cultural critic Veronica Brady points out that although these ideals are perfectly understandable, they can become tyrannical. She notes that although , as Arendt says, "freedom can only come to those whose needs have been fulfilled", it is equally true that this freedom, as Arendt continues, "will escape those who are bent upon living for their desires."15 
	In this context Brady is concerned that the materialist base from which much  of the Left tends to argue does not  grasp the full force and devastating effects of ideological conditioning. She notes as an example cultural critic John Docker who "castigates those who criticise commercial TV as if they were depriving the poor of their simple pleasures."16 She sees the issue as one of values, which she points out the early Marx did. It is also, she adds, one of belief, of finding the kind of belief that makes for freedom. 
	Postmodernism, with its cultural relativity and indifference to generality, she points out, is too problematic to be an effective answer - it chooses to play with meaning rather than attempt to discover it. Worse still, it can also be seen as an aspect of consumerism, and "turning away to cultivate one's own postmodernist maze may only confirm a cherished premise of the Right, that one of the basic freedoms is freedom from politics."17 
	The way Brady proposes is:  

the recovery of some possibility of religious belief, a redirection of thought away from the merely empirical    and rational towards the intuitive, to 'realities at present unseen', which are beyond rational comprehension and control but can be argued about  rationally . . .18 

	Although I see no explicit evidence of Marcuse affirming the importance of spirituality,  Brady is saying exactly what Marcuse would when she adds, "intellectuals need to rediscover a dialectic sense, to play off the  visible against the invisible, the actual against the possible."19 
	Like an increasing number of theologians, she is aware that Christianity itself needs to recover a sense of the sacred:

secular society tends to be one-dimensional and its religion to be oriented away from the dimension of mystery, defending us rather than opening us out to the challenge of chaos, evil and death20 

	One effect of mass communications Marcuse notes is that it blends together with advertisements different spheres, such as politics, philosophy, art, and religion, by bringing them to their common denominator - the commodity form. Exchange value, not truth value counts. 
	He examines the situation with higher culture, and notes that it too becomes part of material culture - even though its works have often  expressed an alienation from the world of business and industry. In this transformation, the greater part of its truth is lost. 
	 Acknowledging that pre-technological society was not without its uglinesses, he points out though that  it was a world in which humanity and nature were not yet organised as things and instrumentalities. The literature of this culture is "the rhythm of those who wander or ride in carriages,who have the time and the pleasure to think, contemplate, feel and narrate."21 This brings to mind the flaneur  , a theme and lifestyle close to Walter Benjamin.
	Marcuse  looks at the relationship between two worlds -  that of literature and art and that of business. The truth of the former has always been granted, if at all, as one of a "higher" order, which was not to disturb the order of the latter. What is different nowadays though is that: 

the absorbent power of society depletes the artistic dimension by assimilating its antagonistic contents. In the realm of culture, the new totalitarianism manifests itself precisely in a harmonising pluralism, where the most contradictory works and truths peacefully coexist in indifference.22 

	While the truths and aesthetics of the artistic dimension  were accessible, due to a repressive society, only to the few wealthy and educated, he does not believe this shortcoming will be remedied by paperbacks, records and general education (though he hastens to add that as far as they go, they are a blessing.) They now serve as "cogs in a culture-machine which remakes their content."23 	
	A strong concern of Marcuse is the increasing poverty of linguistic representation, that the status quo is developing a 'language of total administrtion.' One facet of this is the unification of opposites. This is one of the ways in which discourse and communication make themselves resistant against the expression of protest and refusal. How can it find the right word, asks Marcuse, when the status quo "admits and advertises that peace is really the brink of war, that the ultimate weapons carry their profitable price tags, and that the bombshelter may spell coziness?"24 In assimilating all other terms to its own, it displays a great tolerance and unity - but a repressive tolerance and unity. 
	Another new linguistic trend Marcuse identifies is false familiarity, stemming from constant repetition and popular directness of communication, which hits one in the informal atmosphere of one's home.25 Marcuse points out to advertising's  use of personalised language - it's "your" newspaper, "your" favourite supermarket; it's brought "to you", it invites "you", etc. As Tony Packard used to scream, "let me  do it right for you !"
	Another deplorable new linguistic feature is "overwhelming concreteness", whereby  "the thing identified with its function" becomes more real than the thing distinguished from its function.26 He cites here the ever-growing use of acronyms (eg. NATO, SEATO). This language, in its immesdiacy and directness,  imposes images and hinders the development and expression of concepts. Abbreviations may help to repress undesired questions. For example, hearing the term North  Atlantic Treaty Organisation, as opposed to just NATO, may prompt one to ask questions about the membership of Greece and Turkey. 
	Functionalised, abridged and unified language is the language of one-dimensional thought. Jungian analyst Peter O'Connor observes that this has to do with the ego realm of mind, "that seeks clarity and non-ambiguity, the level of mind that is comfortable and contented with simplistic linear thinking 'if this, then that.'"27 As Jung said, "non-ambiguity and non-contradiction are one-sided and thus unsuited to express the incomprehensible."28 
	Another effect of this language  is negation of the recognition of the factors behind the facts and their historical content. Marcuse  contrasts this with the universe of critical, abstract thought, where there is a state of sustained tension between "is' and "ought", essence and appearance, potentiality and actality, and so on.  What happens here is that the reality partakes of both of the two antagonistic dimensions, and they are developed by dialectical concepts. 
	The prevailing operational rationality, with its anti-historical functional language, has little time for historical reason. He hastens to add though that the past is still evoked often enough - but in such a ritualised way as to not allow development of the content recalled. Old historical concepts( such as the preconditions of democracy, the content of freedom) are invalidated by up-to-date operational redinitions. Falsehood is transformed into truth. 
	This is a far cry, he acknowledges, not only  from the style of Marxian theory, but from the great conservative ( eg. Edmund Burke) and liberal ( eg. John Stuart Mill) critique of the developing bourgeois society - a language that is demonstrative, conceptual and open. The contemporary closed language does not demonstrate and explain, rather it "communicates decisision, dictum and command." What this involves is:

the spread of a new ideology which undertakes to describe what is happening ( and meant) by eliminating the concepts capable of understanding what is happening ( and meant). 29

	Yet, at the same time, he doesn't feel it's right to assume that people believe, or are made to believe, what they are being told. What's new is that people don't believe it, or don't care, and yet act accordingly. And so an operational concept justifies itself in action - in getting the job done, in selling and buying, in refusal to listen to others, etc.30 
	Social commentator and ABC journalist Caroline Jones observes that we seem to be leading a double life:

at some level we remember that we are unique and dignified beings. We know that we are not merely work units in an economic world machine. Yet few dare to cry 'naked' to the emporers in new clothes, the leaders of our society, who wield power with devastating effect, in the name of Modern Belief31   

	Marcuse identifies the "mutilated, false consciousness" as having set itself up as the true consciousness that arbitrates the meaning and expression of that which is, while shunting the rest off into the worlds of fiction and mythology. 31a 
	When the status quo announces that our common wordstock incorporates "all the distinctions people have found worth drawing", one must ask whether it includes Plato's "idea", Aristotle's "essence", Hegel's Geist, Marx's Verdinglichung32, the key words of poetic language and surrealist prose33 , and, if so, whether it contains them in their "negative connatation - that is, as invalidating the universe of common usage." 34 
	He identifies a new form of social control  as having been welded together by scientific-technical rationality and manipulation. At the same time as having skyrocketed the standard of living, it has justified and absolved even its most destructive and oppressive features. 
	Technological rationality, divested of its exploitative aspects, though, feels Marcuse, would be vital to the alternative society. It would be the principle for planning and developing the availability of resources for all, rather than self-determination, which he feels would have wasteful consequences. Centralised control would be acceptable if it secures the preconditions for meaningful self-determination.  
	The power and efficiency of this system, as well as militating against the emergence of a new Subject, he believes, also knocks on the head any hope that replacement of the current controlling force over the process of production by "control from below" would bring about qualitative change. That idea would only be valid were the workers "the living denial and indictment of the established society."35  However, he feels that, for the most part, they have become a prop of the established order - from previously being the ferment of social change, they are now the ferment of social cohesion. 
	This is one of the most contoversial areas of his writings, as it flies in the face of much of the Left's estimation of the working class. One figure on the Left though who did take on board this thinking was Australian novelist Frank Hardy, in his satire on the affluent society, The Outcasts of Foolgarah. It was denounced by many of his comrades as "a libel on the working class"36 , as well as belittling Unionism and the Communist Party37 . 	
	Hardy prefaces the novel with a quote from the last page of One Dimensional Man, where Marcuse identifies the revolutionary hope, a substratum underneath the "conservative popular base." They are "the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colours, the unemployed and the unemployable"38 , who exist outside the democratic process, and whose opposition therefore hits the system from without and so is not deflected by the system. When they start refusing to play the game, it could mark the beginning of the end for the system. 
	Such a scene is the climax of the novel, when the garbos, shit-carters, bottle-ohs, pensioners and the Koori defend their street against all authority, the piss-cart ( the effluent of the affluent)  gets tipped over the silver tails' party, and, very Rabelaisian, we see "what happens to the well-dressed body if the bowels and bladder go on strike."39 Overall, Hardy is saying, as does Marcuse, that the workers are merely hostile dependents unless they are made outcasts when the crunch come

Full fathom five thy father lies
   Of his bones coral are made
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
   Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange39a 

		(W. Shakespeare, The Tempest,1,2.)

 	Walter Benjamin is perhaps best known for his adaptation of Marxism to cultural criticism. He wrote extensively on art and literature, and a primary concern was with their political and ethical tasks. He was not unaware of his own position - he tried to work out what class consciousness means in the context of academic work, looking at the function and impact of such labour. 
	He was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Berlin, and died in1940 at the age of 48 in fleeing from the Nazis. His association during the 1930s with the Frankfurt School coincided with him being an unemployed academic, and to a large extent he was financially dependant on their goodwill. 
	One area of Benjamin's work was his essays on particular writers and groups of writers - Proust, Baudelaire, Kafka, Kraus, Jochmann, the Surrealists, and modern French writers. He always made a point here of showing that the events he described relate to  the historical processes the intelligensia faces today. 
	Then there was the theory side of his work. These include pieces on Edward Fuchs, on Brecht, on 'The Author As Producer',  'The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction',  and, what has been regarded as the centrepiece of his work - 'Theses On The Philosophy of History.' 
	Benjamin came to be critical of the theory of progress in Marx: 

"There ( in Marx) progress is defined by the development of the forces of production. But human beings, or the proletariat, are part of these. Because of that, the question of the criterion ( that is, of progress) is only pushed back a step."39b

	He believed that the quantifiable elements of the 'forces of production' ( technology, machinery, economic statistics ), which 'scientific socialism' had overemphasised, are ultimately inseparable from the human element; and therefore 'progress' can still not be defined until there is a criterion for the human factor. He realised that the overlooking of this leads to a technocratic ideology which is manifest in Fascism, as well as in socialism.40 
	Benjamin was a firm critic of the universities. He felt that their structures prevented them from achieving the goals they claimed to have set for themselves.41 In fact, a major concern of his was the exploration of alternative organisations of intellectual authority. This would no doubt have the full approval of  Marcuse, who would view educational institutions as "cogs in a culture-machine."
	Benjamin was criticised by Adorno, his first and only disciple, for his "wide-eyed presentation of actualities." But this is exactly what Benjamin was doing and wanted to do - "attempt to capture the portrait of history in the most insignificant representations of reality, its scraps, as it were." 42 
	The doctrine of the superstructure, an area that Marx only briefly elaborated on, was a central fascination of the Frankfurt School. But Benjamin, as his former pupil Hannah Arendt notes, used this doctrine only  as a heuristic-methodological stimulus:

what fascinated him about it was that the spirit and its material manifestation were so intimately connected that it seemed permissible to discover everywhere Baudelaire's correspondances , which clarified and illuminated each other if they were properly correlated, so that finally they would no longer require any interpretative or explanatory commentary. He was concerned with the correlation between a street scene, a speculation on the stock exchange, a poem, a thought, with the hidden line that holds them together and enables . . . to recognise that they must all be placed in the same period. 43 

	This passion, notes Arendt, derived from a worldview which had a huge influence on him - Goethe's belief in the factual existence of an  Urphanomen , an archetypal phenomenon, a concrete thing to be discovered in the world of appearances in which significance (Bedeutung) and appearance, word and thing, idea and experience, would coincide. So, overall, what fascinated him was a phenomenon rather than an idea. The wonder of appearance was  at the centre of all of his concerns. 
	Benjamin is noted as being a quoter.44 He believed that the transmissibility of the past had been replaced by its citability.45 "Quotations in my works are like robbers by the roadside who make an armed attack and relieve an idler of his convictions", he said.46This technique he felt was born out of despair of the present and the desire to destroy it, and looked to their power as "not the strength to preserve but to cleanse, to tear out of context, to destroy."47 
	Benjamin had a great passion for collecting, and he saw this passionate attitude as akin to that of the revolutionary. Like the revolutionary, the collector "dreams his way not only into a remote or bygone world, but at the same time into a better one in which, to be sure, people are not provided with what they need any more than they are in the everyday world, but in which things are liberated from the drudgery of  usefulness."48 
	He was greatly attracted by theology and the theolgical type of interpretation for which the text itself is sacred - even after he gave up his theological background. This manifested itself in his digging to obtain the essential in the form of quotations, a method Arendt identifies as like a modern equivalent of ritual invocations. She observes that for Benjamin "to quote is to name, and naming rather than speaking, the word rather than the sentence, brings truth to light."49 
	The basic approach for his literary studies was not to investigate the utalitarian or communicative functions of linguistic creations, but "to understand them in their crystallised and thus ultimately fragmentary form as intentionless and noncommunicative utterances of a 'world essence.'"50 In short, he understood language as an essentially poetic phenomenon. 
	The concept of time is important in Benjamin's conception of history. He distinguished between clock time and calender time. The former, continuing indefinitely, was forever accomodating, indifferently, events and processes that  fell into it. The latter, rather than just rolling on mechanically, punctuated existence with 'days of remembrance', moments that 'gather up' into points of concentration. The latter, he believed, was the proper character of historical time - the sudden pause of impassioned recollection, making things topical and re-enter existence, rather than the cold advance of infinite progress. He disapproved of the historian who viewed time as empty and continuous - this would condemn one to deal with history as an empty vessel waiting to be filled with a 'mass of facts.'  The approach  he urged  was,  instead of looking at something as having once happened, and now gone, to concentrate on it having happened as part of a universe which is still here, now. 
	His critique of 'marching in step'51 with time ( a one dimensional approach to time) would correspond well with Marcuse's critique of one dimensional humans, society, language and thought.52 	
	Benjamin opposed the notion of absolute, objective,  'successive' time with what he referred to as the 'monad'53 - a transcendent present containing the integrated ideal truth. Devoted remembrance would be a technique to bring about awareness of it. 
	A big influence on Benjamin's thinking was philosopher Ludwig Klages.  He took over Klages's conception of the instant and momentary perception of fundamental truths inaccessible to contemplative rationality. Benjamin's use of the 'picture' reflects Klages's use of it. Pictures were to Klages a means of representing knowledge as something independent of language and the conceptual mechanism of the mind.53a He opposed 'unsayable pictures' ( which flash momentarily) , the more fundamental level of knowledge, to 'sayable things' ( which operate by analytical continuity).  And, like Benjamin, he proposed that the former ( 'the ecstatic vision')  is better directed than the latter to remembrance of the  past.) 54 
	The concept of time is also important to Benjamin's concern with the interpretation of art. For example, he compares the effect a painting has with that which a film has:

the painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is is already changed. 55 
	
	Benjamin was critical of the regularities ( such as progress, causal sequence)  that derive from absolute time.56 In the monadic theory of time, temporal extension is 'internal.' His treatment of time is a key aspect of his critique of the philosophical basis of Bolshevism ( and indeed of all other political systems). Revolution to him was not just a political but also an epistemological break. 
	In fact, he was scornful of ordinary, secular politics, which he saw as merely a cycle of deluded self-interest. He described it as "a sequence of mutually hostile groups, each in turn erecting its own structures of law, merely consigning humanity to a futile chain of oppressions."57 These impositions he recognised as serving those who happened to gain supremacy through political violence. He believed that the only way to overcome this cycle of instrumentalist law was to break it entirely and replace it with the principle of divine justice, which would lead in the 'new historical epoch', the messianic utopia. 
	This ties in with his concern with the interpretation of works of art - his emphasis on illuminating them in light of ideas would 'rescue' them in a way that anticipated the general rescue of nature in the messianic moment. 

	

	Television: drug of the nation
	Breeding ignorance and feeding radiation 
	. . . . .Fed by a cathode-ray nipple
	the only wet nurse that would create a cripple

						( Rap band, Poets Of Hip-ocracy). 

	Theodor Adorno, who, as literary executor, played a big part in Benjamin's rennaissance after 1945, straddled the  fields of sociology and philosophy.  He was also a prolific music critic and did some literary criticism ( such as on Kafka and Huxley). 
	Like Marcuse and Benjamin, Adorno was sceptical about the value of organised political intervention, certainly as institutionalised in the Communist Party. A key concept in his thinking was 'negative dialectics', its purpose being to provide a permanent self-undermining of philosophy and recognition that the concept is always inadequate to the object. 
	This brings to mind Kantianism, in which it is considered that the categories of knowledge are the property of the subject, and not of the thing itself. This, observes literary critic and political thinker Julian Roberts, can be extended into the idea that it is permissible to speculate on the basis of the categories alone, without having regard for specific material co-ordinates of time or space. He considers Adorno's negative dialectics to be a variation on this:

for him it was precisely the eternal failure  of the mind to grasp its object adequately that made it legitimate for the mind to extend itself beyond the brutally empirical. Only in utopianism could the mind break its enslavement to a failed conception of the object, and thus be potentially more   realistic than in drab delusions of empiricism.58 
	
	This has a parallel in Judeo-Christianity, in the belief that creation can enter new life through the redeeming intercession of the Messiah - with the 'idea' and the 'object' finally becoming identical. The utopian illumination of the empirical object has a parallel too in Benjamin's passion for collecting - the idea that to a true collector, whose relationship to the object does not emphasise its functional, utalitarian value, but rather its intrinsic worth, the acquisition of an old object is its rebirth, its redemption. 
	Adorno, a dialectical materialist, was critical of much of Benjamin's thinking, condemning it as "undialectic", and moving in "materialistic categories, which by no means coincide with Marxist ones."59 Benjamin's correspondance theory of truth did not sit easily with Adorno. He also seems to have felt uneasy about Benjamin's commentary on intellectuals and the class struggle. 
	Rejection of any faith in technological progress ( made clear in Dialectics of Enlightenment, 1947, written with Max Horkheimer) was another key principle in Adorno's thinking. This is bound up with his criticism of the mass-media, which he saw as inherently authoritarian, as it transforms people from active participants in culture to passive recipients of the dominant ideology. 
	On television, Adorno argued that the crucial thing was not the content of individual programmes, but rather the form of television itself. He was concerned that:

the majority of television shows aim at producing or at least reproducing the very smugness, intellectual passivity, and gullibility that seem to fit in with totalitarian creeds even if the explicit surface message of the shows may be anti-totalitarian.60 

	The technological and organisational conditions of television, he argued, made the use of stock, stereotypical characters inevitable. This, he noted, had worrying implications for mass psychology and the politics of modern society - people being less likely to change their preconceived ideas, losing insight into reality, and having their capacity for life experience dulled. 
	Media analyst Keith Windshuttle points out to a fundamental flaw in Adorno's ( and the Frankfurt School's in general) thinking on the ideological effect of popular culture - that it interprets ideology as one-way traffic:

We cannot simply read the meaning of a television message and then assume this meaning is injected straight into the minds of working people. The perception of any cultural process . . . is necessarily an active process. People have to work at absorbing any television, no matter how 'mind-dulling' it might be . . . bringing to bear a complex nexus of influences that one has derived . . . Popular culture is not written on atabula rasa   but on the individual's whole life process.61 

	Indeed, as Windshutle points out, the institutions of popular culture do not reflect passively the interests of the ruling class. Even when there is a close identification with the interests of capital, there is still a partial autonomy in content. In many cases popular culture actually arises out of the working classes, rather than the ruling class. 
	Were Marcuse to hear these criticisms, I'm sure he would nod to their validity and then go on to say that what counts at the end of the day is that even if  much culture does stem from the working classes, and even if much of it is critical of the status quo, it is still steeped in the hegemony of the status quo, and furthermore, gets co-opted to unwittingly serve the status quo. 

	In conclusion, I should state first of all that I have not set out to do an exhaustive study of the Frankfurt School. To do so would be to look at more recent developments in the School, and the contributions of prominent figures such as Jurgen Habermas. It would also require going into more detail about the ideas of the three Frankfurt School thinkers I have concentrated on. 
	A common theme running through this essay has been to show how these thinkers have theorised about everyday life, cognition, identity, culture, meaning, desire, and power. It is not surprising such concerns should have been important to them, given the School's emphasis on the dynamics of consciousness, rather than the economic determinist slant of orthodox Marxism.  
	Of course, these thinkers far from avoid economic factors - Marcuse and Adorno perhaps more so than Benjamin. Marcuse examines, for example, the productive apparatus ( which, in fact, he points to as negating the opposition between the private and public) and technical rationality, and Adorno examines the role that technology itself plays in determining the types of characters we see on TV. 
	I had no intention of examining the ideas of these thinkers in isolation. I believe it is far more interesting to study these ideas in relation to people they have influenced (such as Frank Hardy and Jim Cairns), people who have exposed their shortcomings ( such as Keith Windshuttle), and people whose thinking often has parallels ( theologians such as Veronica Brady and Charles Kammer, people as varied as Aldous Huxley, Mircea Eliade and Carl Jung). 
	It's quite apparent that the 'additional references' I've used  reveal my particular areas of interest, and I'm certain that other people would have been able to tie in their areas of interest too. For example, someone with an interest in French literature could have looked at Benjamin's writings on Proust and Baudelaire, two writers with a big emphasis on  everyday experience. There could be some comic relief here with a look at  the Monty Python 'Summarise Proust Contest' sketch! 
	I'll leave the last words to T.S. Eliot, words which I think Benjamin would resonate with:

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning
the end is where we start from

	

					BIBLIOGRAPHY

_ Adorno, Theodor, 1967, Prisms, London: Neville Spearman
_ Benjamin, Walter, 1955, Illuminations ( edited by Hannah Arendt), translated by Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc, 1968, London: Jonathan Cape Ltd
_ Brady, Veronica, 1994, Caught In The Draught, Sydney: Angus & Robertson
_ Bullock, Alan and Stallybrass, Oliver, 1977, Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, London: Fontana
_ Cairns, Jim, 1980,Human Growth; Its Source and Potential, Canberra: Down to Earth Foundation
_ Eliade, Mircea, 1976, Myths, Rites, Symbols - A Mircea Eliade Reader, Vol 2, ed. by Wendell C. Beane and William G Doty, New York: Harper Colophon
_ Hardy, Frank, 1971, The Outcasts of Foolgarah, Melbourne: Allara Publishing P/L
_ Huxley, Aldous, 1963, Island
_ Jones, Caroline, 1990, The Search For meaning, Vol 2, Sydney: ABC Enterprises in association with Collins Dove. 
_ Kammer, Charles L., 1988, Ethics and Liberation, New York: Orbis Books ( Catholic Foreign Mission Society)	
_ Marcuse, Herbert, 1964, One Dimensional Man, London: Routledge& Kegan Paul Ltd 
_ O'Connor, Peter, 1985, Understanding Jung, Understanding Yourself, Sydney: Methuen Haynes
_ Roberts, Julian, 1982, Walter Benjamin ( Theoretical Traditions In The Social sciences series), London: Macmillan Press Ltd
_ Windshuttle, Keith, 1984,1988, The Media: A New Analysis of the Press, Television, Radio and Advertising in Australia, Melbourne: Penguin.