Prepare the individual ego for the relations of domination within society, and to repress the individual instinct for freedom and liberation.

         In Freud these repressed desires re-emerge in alternative guises, such as in dream images, “Freudian” slips of the tongue, or, more seriously, in neuroses. In Eros and Civilisation Marcuse attempted a psychoanalysis of capitalism, identifying what he called a repressed life-impulse(“eros”) forced into the service of capitalist production. This was a more general application of what Weber had described as the Protestant work ethic behind the success of capitalism, but it carried with it the implication that repressed desired might once again be unleashed. The realm in which these desires could be expressed was, for Marcuse, that of artistic activity, where images of a non-repressive society might yet inspire the kind of revolution needed to fulfill them. As he wrote, quoting Adorno, on art as a realm of critique:

         Art is perhaps the most visible ‘return of the prepressed’, not only on the individual but also on the generic-historical level. The artistic imagination shapes the ‘unconscious memory’ of the liberation that failed, of the promise that was betrayed. … Art opposes to institutionalized repression ‘the image of man as a free subject; but in a state of unfreedom art can sustain the image of freedom only in the negation of unfreedom’.19

This positive conclusion on the function of art in the Frankfurt School’s thinking on ideology was further supported by Marcuse’s later book The Aesthetic Dimension which was published in 1978, the year before his death.

Ideology in France – Althusser, Foucault and Debord 

On the more recent attempts to come to terms with ideology, not all have remained faithful to Marx’s thinking – in particular the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, who was a student of Louis

problem was the German philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who also despaired of the “culture industry”. As he wrote in One-Dimensional Man(1964), which also had a great influence on the student protests a few years later:

         The means of mass transportation and communication, the commodities of lodging, food and clothing, the irresistible output of the entertainment and information industry carry with them prescribed attitudes and habits, certain intellectual and emotional reactions which bind the consumers more or less pleasantly to the producers and, through the latter, to the whole. The products indoctrinate and manipulate; they promote a false-consciousness which is immune against its falsehood.18

         The “iron cage” of modernity that Weber was attacking was also the target of Adorno and Horkheimer, in terms of its basis in enlightenment rationality. In their book, they described the workings of what they termed the “culture industry”, where enlightenment had become “mass-deception” through the products of technological culture. Where Hollywood movies, pulp fiction, popular music and so on are all produced under the aegis of capitalist financing and marketing systems, any form of resistance is prevented from ever reaching a mass audience by the mechanisms which are set up to distribute the dominant message. As they describe it, this homogenization is driven ultimately by technical imperative:

         Interested parties explain the culture industry in technological terms. It is alleged that because millions participate in it, certain reproduction processes are necessary that inevitably require identical needs in innumerable places to be satisfied with identical goods. The technical contrast between the few production centres and the large number of widely dispersed consumption points is said to demand organization and planning by management. … The result is the circle of manipulation and retroactive need in which the unity of the system grows ever stronger.17

To try to escape this manipulation they recommended the strategy of “negation” and “transcendence”, where the former involved a critique of the system and the latter an attempt to see beyond it.

         To step outside the process of conditioning is the fundamental problem for the radical philosopher; how to prevent any revolutionary thinking being merely absorbed within the present system. If there is no “Archimedean point” from which a neutral observer can merely observe – uncontaminated by the distorting filter of ideological influence upon their thinking – how can a strategy of resistance begin to suggest alternative ways of living, and thereby succeed in persuading the masses to demand the changes necessary to achieve it? Another member of the Frankfurt School who tried to address this intractable

the work of the Frankfurt School provides an alternative, more abstract approach, with its strategy of theoretical analysis and an emphasis on “high-cultural” critique. The Institute for Social Research (as it was originally titled) started life in Frankfurt in 1923, although it soon moved from Germany following Hitler’s rise to power, to restart at Columbia University in New York. The leading figures in the Frankfurt School (who incidentally supported Benjamin with the payment of a stipend and the offer of teaching in New York) were Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno – as mentioned in Chapter 1, discussing the “ideology” of functionalism in architecture. Adorno’s studies in modernist music and his general interest in avant-garde culture left him unsympathetic to the critical possibilities of more populist forms of art. This is in marked contrast to Walter Benjamin, with whom he frequently argued on this point, who rated the accessibility of a Charlie Chaplin film over the obscurity of a Dadaist performance.

         Adorno and Horkheimer collaborated on an important work entitled the Dialectic of Enlightenment, which extended the debate on ideology begun by Lukács and Gramsci. They were also inspired by the writings of the sociologist Max Weber and his work on the historical development of what he called the “capitalist spirit”. Weber had claimed the origin of capitalism lay in the Protestant work ethic, the doctrine of selfless asceticism preached by northern European churches. This has led, according to Weber, to the triumph of rationality in the quest for efficiency above all other concerns:

         Now the peculiar modern Western form of capitalism has been, at first sight, strongly influenced by the development of technical possibilities. Its rationality is today essentially dependent on the calculability of the most important technical factors. … On the other hand, the development of these sciences and the technique resting upon them, now receives important stimulation from these capitalistic interests in its practical economic application.16

… the attempt to capture the portrait of history in the most insignificant representations of reality, its scraps as it were.14

         In his essay on the philosophy of history he took a similarly radical view, recommending the revision of the grand narratives – or the “history of the victors” – in favour of the “forgotten” history of ordinary lives:

         According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.15

In Benjanmin’s conception of an alternative writing of history, the popular culture of the arcades would have played a significant role. There is also a nagging ambiguity, however, in much of Benjamin’s thinking, between a nostalgia for the traditional “crafts”, such as storytelling, painting and theatre, and the excitement at the prospect of a liberating politics being ushered in by the new arts of photography and cinema. This is especially evident in what is perhaps his single most famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”

The Critique of the “Culture Industry” – Ideology and the Frankfurt School 

In contrast to Benjamin’s studies of “low-cultural” resistance, and Gramsci’s active involvement with Communist politics at party level,