CRITICAL THEORYmerely ‘‘mimetic’’ or imitative of the surrounding
world of appearances. Making no demands on its
audience to think for itself, the highly standard-
ized products of the ‘‘culture industry’’ reinforce
conformism by presenting idealized and reified
images of contemporary society as the best of all
possible worlds (see Kellner 1984–1985).
The most important contribution of the Frank-
furt School was its investigation of the ‘‘dialectic of
enlightenment’’ (Horkheimer and Adorno [1947]
1972). During the European Enlightenment, sci-
entific reason had played a partisan role in the
advance of freedom by challenging religious dog-
matism and political absolutism. But according to
the Frankfurt School, a particular form of reason,
the instrumental rationality of efficiency and tech-
nology, has become a source of unfreedom in both
capitalist and socialist societies during the modern
era. Science and technology no longer play a liber-
ating role in the critique of social institutions but
have become new forms of domination. Dogmatic
ideologies of scientism and operationalism absolutize
the status quo and treat the social world as a
‘‘second nature’’ composed of law-governed facts,
subject to manipulation but not to revolutionary
transformation. Thus, under the sway of positiv-
ism, social thought becomes increasingly ‘‘one-
dimensional’’ (Marcuse 1964). Consequently, the
dimension of critique, the rational reflection on
societal values and directions, and the ability to see
alternative possibilities and new sources of opposi-
tion are increasingly suppressed by the hegemony
of an eviscerated form of thinking. One-dimen-
sional thinking, as an instrument of the totally
‘‘administered society,’’ thus reinforces the con-
formist tendencies promoted by family socializa-
tion and the culture industry and threatens both to
close off and absorb dissent.
The Frankfurt School’s interpretation of the
domination of culture by instrumental reason was
indebted to Georg Lukacs’s ([1923] 1971) theory
of reification and to Max Weber’s theory of ration-
alization. In the case of Lukacs, ‘‘reification’’ was
understood to be the principal manifestation of
the ‘‘commodity form’’ of social life whereby hu-
man activities, such as labor, are bought and sold
as objects. Under such circumstances, social actors
come to view the world of their own making as an
objectified entity beyond their control at the same
time that they attribute human powers to things.
For Lukacs, however, this form of life was histori-
cally unique to the capitalist mode of production
and would be abolished with socialism.
In the 1950s, as they grew more pessimistic
about the prospects for change, Horkheimer and
Adorno, especially, came to accept Weber’s belief
that rationalization was more fundamental than
capitalism as the primary source of human oppres-
sion. Thus, they located the roots of instrumental
rationality in a drive to dominate nature that they
traced back to the origins of Western thought in
Greek and Hebrew myths. This historical drive
toward destructive domination extended from na-
ture to society and the self. At the same time,
Horkheimer and Adorno moved closer to Weber’s
pessimistic depiction of the modern world as one
of no exit from the ‘‘iron cage’’ of rationalization.
In the context of this totalizing view of the destruc-
tive tendencies of Western culture—the images
for which were Auschwitz and Hiroshima—the
only acts of defiance that seemed feasible were
purely intellectual ‘‘negations,’’ or what Marcuse
(1964) termed ‘‘the great refusal’’ of intellectuals
to go along with the one-dimensional society. Con-
sequently, their interest in empirical sociological
investigations, along with their faith in the efficacy
of mass political movements, withdrew to a distant
horizon of their concerns. Marcuse, like Benjamin
before him, remained somewhat optimistic. Marcuse
continuted to investigate and support sources of
opposition in racial, sexual, and Third World lib-
eration movements.
Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk (Arcades project),
originally titled Dialectical Fairy Scene, was an un-
finished project of the 1930s that culminated in a
collection of notes on nineteenth-century industri-
al culture in Paris. The Paris Arcade was an early
precursor to the modern department store, a struc-
ture of passages displaying commodities in win-
dow showcases; it reached its height in the world
expositions (e.g., the Paris Exposition in 1900).
Through an interpretation of Benjamin’s notes,
Susan Buck-Morss (1995) has brought this unfin-
ished project to life. Benjamin drew on allegory as
a method for analyzing the content and form
of cultural images. In contrast to Horkheimer
and Adorno’s ‘‘iron cage’’ view of mass culture,
his dialectical approach held out hope for the
revolutionary potential of mass-produced culture.
Anticipating aspects of Symbolic Interactionism
and feminist theories of performativity, Benjamin