ABSTRACT
Axiomatic to any critical inquiry into mass communication is the question of how the enabling technologies and methods of social discourse may themselves condition, even determine, social life. Before the somewhat Utopian discourses of an emergent global village in the 1960s, and before the liberatory discourses surrounding the Internet today, social criticism of mass society in the twentieth century was almost uniformly wary of the political power of mass media to condition the social body for political domination. For Frankfurt School critics like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the rise of German fascism provided a case study in the power of mass media to “instrumentalize” culture and to “produce” public opinion. Horkheimer and Adorno’s landmark study of the “culture industry” in the United States, Dialectic of Enlightenment, argued that conditions for an incipient fascism were becoming manifest throughout the forms of U.S. mass culture. Whereas Kenneth Burke appears to have been unaware of this study and of other work by the Frankfurt School, his appraisal of the prospects for meaningful public discourse in the media age was similarly bleak; moreover, Burke often extended his social criticism to the same discursive sites that Frankfurt School critics addressed. Both Dialectic of Enlightenment and Burke’s A Grammar of Motives provided a series of “dialectical” readings of twentieth-century culture and both found midcentury, mass discourses on democracy, technological progress, and the triumph of rational man to offer more social containment than expressions of social promise and possibility. Within this irony one finds the dialectical method of social critique common to both Burke’s and the Frankfurt School’s criticism at work: the very instruments that appear to liberate society from nature, from history, even from time-space constraints, in fact turn to deliver that society up, most brutally, to the very world it is thought to have transcended. For Burke and for the Frankfurt School critics, totalitarian fascism and Stalinism were the inevitable outcome of the ongoing perfection of enlightenment ideology. In an age of technological progress, the perpetuation of such “anachronisms” as war, alienation, class division, racism, violence, and the will to political domination had come less and less to appear as holdovers from a benighted age, showing themselves, rather, to be inevitable, dialectical symptoms of a social machinery
that extended domination of nature into all spheres of social experience. As our century draws to a close and the political totalitarianism that impelled this criticism appears to have faded into history, postmodern social criticisms have, of course, called into question the types of “monolithic” social critique common to Burke and the Frankfurt School critics. Yet, in an era of seemingly unchallenged global capitalization and unprecedented ecological destruction, in a world where “media” and “culture” have become nearly synonymous terms, in an era, moreover, that just witnessed the birth of two new “nuclear” powers in India and Pakistan, the dialectical method of social criticism and the cultural prognoses of Burke, Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse seem well worth revisiting at a conference addressing “Rhetoric, the Polis, and the Global Village.”
