Ich bin Frankfurter

If you're not familiar with Melvyn Bragg, he's a soi-disant public intellectual with massive hair and a smug air of false humility. To me, he rivals Jools (Julian really) Holland in the slappability stakes.

However, his Radio 4 show about the history of ideas, In Our Time, sometimes comes up trumps. Today's discussion was about the Frankfurt School (Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer and others), from whose ideas my own critical theory approach is descended. They were a bunch of radical post-Marxist Germans in the 1930s who tried to work out why the proletariat couldn't see they obvious oppressiveness of capitalism (they weren't keen on the Soviet Union either). They were horrified by the uses to which popular culture could be put (having observed Nazi propaganda) and by the popular culture they found when they fled to the US: to them, popular culture (the Culture Industry as they called it) generated false consciousness, leading the proletariat to consider their lives under capitalism perfect, or at least natural.

They despised pop culture because it wasn't oppositional: true art, they believed, should remind us what's missing, what life could be like. So they were connected with Freud on regression and to the avant-garde literary and musical movements. Like those creative groups, they believed that 'pretty' or sentimental art was conservative and dishonest: how could a composer write pretty tunes after the Somme, or Auschwitz? To do so was to deny reality on a cultural and personal level.

It's a hard message. It suggests that we should never settle for comforting or relaxing cultural products: no It's a Wonderful Life, no Notting Hill (no great loss), no Clueless, no Elgar nor Gilbert and Sullivan. They were for 'high' culture: Berg, modern art and the like. I confess to being an unrigorous Frankfurtian: I'm postmodern enough to enjoy popular culture in some of its forms, but I'm uncomfortable enough to distrust the lazy assertion that pop culture = democracy and high culture = reactionary. I'll certainly be taking a Frankfurt approach for my upcoming Anne of Green Gables paper.

If you're still with me: you can see what they're on about if you consider 'celebrity' culture. The Frankfurters had come from Germany, where film was the primary mode of propaganda, creating an idealised image of a dictator who would solve all Germans' problems. Arriving in Hollywood, they found an art form which wasn't oppositional but seemed to be a conformist dream factory. Central to this was the creation of 'stars' from fairly ordinary people - stars who persuaded audiences to endorse the values of conventional consumerism.

What would the Frankfurters make of Big Brother, Pop Idol or any of the other 'reality' shows (and the papers and magazines which make a living amplifying these shows)? They'd be both unsurprised and horrified. They'd be unsurprised by the dominance of 'celebrity' (is there a single issue which hasn't had a 'celebrity' slapped on top of it and a TV show created?) and they'd be horrified by the extension of 'celebrity' culture to the populace via Big Brother and the like. There's no room for opposition, but there's also no room in popular culture for difference of any kind: we're all assumed to want the same things as 'celebrities' and we know how to get there - by acting the idiot for the amusement of the nation. Even the sporadic bursts of resistance are manufactured: so-called oppositional voices in the media use the same tactics of hype and outrage to get their points over, thus becoming part of the system rather than standing outside it.

Doomed, I tell you, we're all doomed. Just keep reading Heat and I'll go away. Or read Baudrillard, who thinks it's all a game and there's nothing we can (or should) do about it. You could listen to In Our Time though - the podcast will be available in a few days.