- guardian.co.uk, Saturday 4 November 2000 03.21 GMT
German philosopher, leading figure in the Frankfurt School. Adorno attacked what he called the "culture industry". "The more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind and the more paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own. Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter. Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric."
Prisms (1955, English translation 1981) The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (1991), ed JM Bernstein
Arnold, Matthew (1822-88)
British critic and Her Majesty's Inspector of Schools. Arnold died over a century ago, but according to EM Forster, writing in 1951, he was "a prophet who has managed to project himself into our present troubles, so that when we read him now he seems to be in the room." (Two Cheers for Democracy)
According to Arnold, "culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light" and "is not satisfied till we all come to a perfect man". Culture "knows that the sweetness and light of the few must be imperfect until the raw and unkindled masses of humanity are touched with sweetness and light." Culture and Anarchy (1869). Arnold defines culture as "the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit." Literature and Dogma (1873) He also wrote poems.
Barthes, Roland (1915-80)
French literary critic and theorist, whose book Mythologies (1957) is about French popular culture. In Mythologies Barthes applies structuralist theories to popular culture, including soap suds. Barthes was killed when he was run over by a laundry truck. He had just had lunch with Foucault and Francois Mitterand.
A Barthes Reader (1981), ed Susan Sontag
Bloom, Allan (1930-1992)
American philosopher and cultural critic. In his controversial and bestselling magnum opus, The Closing of the American Mind (1987), Bloom attacks multiculturalism, cultural relativism and popular culture. His views and his person have been immortalised by Saul Bellow in his novel Ravelstein (2000). "Culture is the unity of man's brutish nature and all the arts and sciences he acquired in his movement from the state of nature to civil society. Culture restores the lost wholeness of ?rst man on a higher level, where his faculties can be fully developed without contradiction between the desires of nature and the moral imperatives of his social life."
The Closing of the American Mind (1987) Giants and Dwarves: Essays 1960-1990 (1990)
Bourdieu, Pierre (1930-)
French sociologist. As well as writing about the sociology of taste, Bourdieu has written about the culture of museums, higher education and television. "It should go without saying that to reveal the hidden constraints on journalists, which they in turn bring to bear on all cultural producers, is not to denounce those in charge or to point a finger at the guilty parties. Rather, it is an attempt to offer to all sides a possibility of liberation, through a conscious effort, from the hold of these mechanisms, and to propose, perhaps a program for concerted action by artists, writers, scholars, and journalists - that is, by the holders of the (quasi) monopoly of the instruments of diffusion."
On Television and Journalism (1996; English translation 1998). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979)
Foucault, Michel (1926-84)
French philosopher. Foucault explores the ways in which "objects of knowledge" are produced and disseminated. His work on power has been a big influence on the development of cultural studies.
The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969)
Frankfurt school
Collective term applied to a critical Marxist school of thought, centered around the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research (founded 1923). Principle members included Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer and Jurgen Habermas. The Frankfurt School theorists espoused a version of Marxism which emphasised the superstructure - or culture - as a factor in social change. The Frankfurt School attended to, but were critical of, popular culture in all its forms.
Greer, Germaine (1939-)
Australian feminist. The Female Eunuch (1970) is famous as a founding text of feminism. It is also a work of cultural criticism. In Slip-Shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet (1995), Greer argues that much poetry by women - what she calls "she-poetry" - is not very good. Should we put the claims of gender above any other consideration in our approach to literature and culture? Greer's answer - perhaps surprisingly - seems to be no.
hooks, bell (1953-)
Black American feminist. bell hooks is the pseudonym of Gloria Watkins. Hooks defends black popular culture and attempts to extend and explore its limits. "Music is the cultural product created by African-Americans that has most attracted postmodernist theorists. It is rarely acknowledged that there is far greater censorship and restriction of other forms of cultural production by black folks
Attempts on the part of editors and publishing houses to control and manipulate the representation of black culture, as well as the desire to promote the creation of products that will attract the widest audience, limit in a crippling and stifling way the kind of work many black folks feel we can do and still receive recognition."
Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics (1991) Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (1994)
Hoggart, Richard (1918-)
British cultural critic, co-founder with Stuart Hall (Jamaican-born cultural critic) of the Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies (1964). In The Uses of Literacy (1957) Hoggart celebrates the working-class culture of his childhood in the Hunslett area of Leeds. At the same time he criticises 1950s popular culture because it is "full of corrupt brightness, of improper appeals and moral evasions". He particularly disliked "milk bars", in which he believed he could detect "a sort of spiritual dry-rot amid the odour of boiled milk". "The hedonistic but passive barbarian who rides in a fifty-horse-power bus for threepence, to see a five-million dollar film for one-and-eightpence, is not simply a social oddity; he is a portent."
The Uses of Literacy (1957) The Way We Live Now (1995)
Leavis, FR (1895-1978) and Queenie Leavis (1906-81)
The Leavises believed that mass culture threatened to "land us in irreparable chaos". FR Leavis was engaged for some years in debate with CP Snow about the meaning and role of "The Two Cultures". Leavis described Snow as "portentously ignorant". The Leavises encouraged resistance to mass culture "by an armed and active minority". Some have argued that this minority was so small as to consist merely of the Leavises and their friends. "The minority capable not merely of appreciating Dante, Shakespeare, Donne, Baudelaire, Hardy
but of recognising their latest successors constitute the consciousness of the race (or a branch of it) at a given time."
Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture (1930)
Orwell, George (1903-50)
British journalist and novelist whose writing both celebrates and despairs of English popular culture. "Yes, there is something distinctive and recognisable in English civilisation. It is a culture as individual as that of Spain. It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes. It has a flavour of its own."
The Lion and the Unicorn (1941) The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, four vols, (1968).
Thompson, EP (1924-93)
British historian, who claimed that "class is a cultural as much as an economic formation" (The Making of the English Working Class, 1963). According to Thompson "the very term 'culture', with its cosy invocation of consensus, may serve to distract attention from social and cultural contradictions, from the fractures and oppositions within the whole
generalisations as to the universals of 'popular culture' become empty unless they are placed firmly within specific historical contexts."
Customs in Common (1991) Thompson admitted that The Making of the English Working Class (1963) was a "clumsy title". In The Poverty of Theory (1978) Thompson criticises French cultural theorists.
Williams, Raymond (1921-88)
British cultural and literary critic. "Culture," writes Williams in Keywords (1976), "is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language." He does not say what the other one or two might be. In Culture and Society (1958), he traces the changing meaning of the term "culture" and shows how these changes reflect the changing condition of England. Culture, writes Williams, is "a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period or a group." (The Long Revolution, 1961) "In certain areas, notably cinema and television production, conditions of relative monopoly, not only internally, but internationally, have led beyond simple processes of export to more general processes of cultural dominance and then of cultural dependence.
These new relations
are not confined to the immediate works that are exported. They have radical effects on the specific signifying systems that are national languages. They carry wide areas of cultural and ideological emphasis. They can be directly related to wider commercial operations, specifically through advertising, and to general political operations
they lead to new forms of 'multinational' cultural combine, including the takeover or implantation of nationally based forms."
Culture (1981)
Zizek, Slavoj (1949-)
"Formidably brilliant" Slovenian, says Terry Eagleton. A follower of Lacan, Zizek has started mixing doctrinal Christianity with Marxist historicism to search for values in a world turned inauthentic. He argues that Marxists and Christians should band together to fight New Age obscurantism. In Fragile Absolute (Verso, 2000), for instance, he attacks the bogus spirituality of Star Wars.
