| Inquiries into the nature of the relationship between art and society, culture and politics, are potentially fruitful avenues of insight for the political theorist. The Frankfurt School has been a trailblazer in this pursuit; the contributions that Critical Theory has made to the study of aesthetics and politics stand as a valuable legacy, yet one demanding of careful scrutiny.; A key component of Critical Theory as it has been developed by the leading theorists of the Frankfurt School (Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse) is the critique of mass, or "affirmative," culture. Art, once it has come under the dominion of affirmative culture, loses the element of protest that was once implicit in it, and rather, is used to affirm the desirability, necessity, and immutability of the social status quo, regardless of the material reality of social life. Thus, having exonerated society from all responsibility for its own contradictions and antagonisms, art is debased. The "culture industry" is the apparatus which administers the debasement of art, and the dissemination of affirmative culture to its mass audience, who accept it all the more willingly as they are controlled by it. Jazz is said to be a typical product of the culture industry, exhibiting all the essential repressive characteristics of affirmative culture.; This absolute dismissal of jazz manifests a major limitation of Frankfurt School cultural criticism, that is, its incapacity to comprehend that an art form such as jazz can be "popular" without also being affirmative, and moreover, that its popular character can militate against the culture industry's attempts to use it in an affirmative way. An alternative aesthetic analysis of jazz form and content can be developed which both reveals the music's inherent progressive character, and exposes the limitations of the Frankfurt critique, limitations which are rooted in and reflective of the most basic shortcomings of Critical Theory in general, notably its dualistic philosophical assumptions, and its tendency to reach elitist and pessimistic political conclusions. |
