Communication research in the United States has entered the era of cultural studies after the 1960s without much acknowledgment of Leo Lowenthal’s contributions. Yet his ideas about an interdisciplinary approach to cultural practices have become a contemporary modus operandi for the study of culture and communication, while his suggestion of an ideological critique of mass culture has never lost its urgency and timeliness.
A review of his theoretical concerns not only reveals the application of critical theory to communication and media studies during the heydays of US empirical communication research, but it also confirms the place of popular literature, including journalism, in a social critique of society, which is of particular interest and importance to the relationship between communication research and cultural studies in the United States.
A presence of Lowenthal’s ideas during the formative years of US communication studies, however, has been suggested more recently by Gertrude J. Robinson (2006), who refers to his teacher–student relationship with Elihu Katz during the latter’s work at Columbia University, which was also the academic home of Paul Lazarsfeld. Similarly, Simon Frith (2007: ix) had studied at Berkeley with Lowenthal, reinforcing the idea that intellectual links had been developed that placed Lowenthal, the animus of the Frankfurt School, and the insights of critical theory in the realm of communication and cultural studies. This was a time, when positivism ruled the social scientific perspectives on communication and media, particularly in the United States, where it has remained a dominant ideological force shaping public understanding of media and culture.
Since then, especially with the rise of scholarly interests in popular culture and the cultural phenomenon of ‘celebrity’ or ‘entertainment celebrity’, Lowenthal’s reflections on culture, and his exploration of the ‘triumph of the mass idols’, in particular, have provided opportunities for returning to his ideas to help frame a critique of media practices.
For instance, Eva Illouz (2003: 90) furnishes a lucid argument why this work ‘should be read and reread by current and future generations of communication students’. Taylor and Harris (2008: 136–7) emphasize Lowenthal’s take on consumption patterns with their ideologically driven consequences. They effectively conclude that Lowenthal ‘clearly prefigures’ that a ‘decreasing amount of media content can validly claim to be information in any substantive sense’ and that this ‘loss of informational content is exacerbated by the tautologically enframed nature of the data that is provided’.
The context and substance for an assessment of Lowenthal’s position in the development of US communication research are provided by a number of sources, including a four-volume collection of his oeuvre in the United States (Lowenthal 1984, 1986, 1987 & 1989a) and a volume of biographical and autobiographical observations, edited by Martin Jay (1987), which contains valuable background information, insights, and conversations with the author. The relevance of his work for the field of communication research, however, arises not only from considerations of cultural practices, media, and communication in other fields, such as literary criticism or cultural studies, but also from a need to account for a significant cultural critique that operated in the presence of a burgeoning communication research tradition in the United States.
Lowenthal’s writings are part of an intellectual history of this field, offering meaningful theoretical and analytical insights into the nature and role of communication and popular literature in society. His version of critical theory emerged in the presence of American pragmatism and empirical research, both of which emphasize the immediate conditions of society. Lowenthal’s work constitutes an ideological position that has been marginalized (if not rejected) in previous years by traditional communication research but continues to challenge mainstream communication theory in the face of cultural studies and its contemporary demands.
This essay addresses Lowenthal’s work – which ranges from locating the study of literature, culture, and communication in the proximity of communication research to advancing a critical perspective for (mass) communication studies – considering the development of the field and the particular concerns about the role of communication and media in industrialized societies.
The work of Leo Lowenthal is embedded in the tradition of critical theory. Although he rarely makes it explicit, his discussions are based on the theories of contemporaries, notably Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, with whom he maintained a lifelong intellectual and personal relationship, and Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, whose work addressed the topography of modernity through observations about the changing structure of everyday experiences. Lowenthal shared their premise of a cultural critique of bourgeois society that was predicated on the need of a critical attitude or, as Horkheimer summarized it, on ‘the unfolding of a single existential judgment’ (Horkheimer 1972: 227).
Lowenthal’s writings on popular culture and communication remain more accessible contributions to the field of communication research, in terms of their practical application, than the theoretical work of his colleagues. But even the theoretical work of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse has been relied on only indirectly in assessments of critical theory’s impact on the development of social theory and communication research in the United States. More recent versions of critical communication studies may acknowledge the work of the Frankfurt School, but more often than not they rely on the cultural critique of British cultural studies. Similarly, while contemporary American cultural studies may embrace supportive theoretical speculations about communication, popular literature, and the ideological critique of culture, they have by and large remained silent about Lowenthal’s contribution to their own history.
However, there have been special acknowledgments of his work elsewhere. The Berkeley Journal of Sociology dedicated one issue to Lowenthal and Herbert Blumer at the time of their seventieth birthdays, citing how much both have done ‘to counter the positivist drift of American sociology’ (1971–1972: iii). Telos published a scholarly tribute to Lowenthal on his eightieth birthday (1980).
In addition, there have been a number of positive, if not encouraging reviews in the social science literature, mostly during the 1950s, after the publication of Prophets of Deceit in 1949 and Literature and the Image of Man first published in 1957. Wendy Griswold, in her review of the 1986 publication of the latter, notes ‘the distinct unfashionableness of Lowenthal’s thought’, but adds that his ‘fundamentals provide firmer ground for research in the sociology of literature than do any of the current schools’ (Griswold 1990: 940).
On the other hand, his early publications received only scant notice in the review sections of (mass) communication journals. One exception was Hugh Dalziel Duncan’s more extensive discussion of Literature and the Image of Man in Public Opinion Quarterly, where he proposed that Lowenthal may help ‘the young (but hopeful) school of symbolic interactionists by producing a study on methods of symbolic analysis’ (Duncan 1985: 159). But the publication of Lowenthal’s collected works in the 1980s has gone almost unnoticed, despite considerable changes in the approach to studies of communication and society during that decade, confirming his marginal impact on mainstream communication research into the twenty-first century.
The reasons for such neglect must be sought in the social and political conditions of the era. There was a lingering preoccupation with ‘doing’ empirical communication research without much reflection about its theoretical foundations. Also important in this regard was the power of the ‘dominant’ paradigm, which guaranteed success (in the marketplace) of an ideological perspective that was devoid of a critical, historical dimension, particularly between the 1940s and 1960s, when Lowenthal’s major contributions appeared. In addition, questions of literature and popular culture were hardly considered by the early proponents of (mass) communication research, who defined their concerns narrowly in terms of conventional media and media usage, relying on sociological perspectives shaped by Paul Lazarsfeld and Wilbur Schramm (Hardt 1992).
Yet despite Lowenthal’s failure to become a major voice in the theoretical and methodological discourse of communication research, his writings have survived as politically relevant and culturally instructive statement of an emerging critical social theory in later years. For instance, by legitimating the role of historical explanation in the study of culture, the search of literary history for the formation and articulation of public consciousness in the production of journalism and novels (Davidson 1986, Hunter 1989) as a means of intellectual and emotional participation in a new world provides opportunities for testing alternative propositions about media and society. The rise of cultural studies – in their Marxist and non-Marxist forms – is also a reminder of earlier debates about communication and culture in Lowenthal’s work and that of his colleagues, as well as that of members of the Chicago school, which revealed the potential of literature and mass culture as sources of analyzing everyday life.
Underlying Lowenthal’s contributions to the field of communication research since the 1940s has been a deep-seated, European concern with the humanistic aspects of social theory and an active involvement in promoting theoretical and methodological traditions that originated in classic conceptualizations of culture. When Lowenthal considered the historical contexts for the operation of popular culture as a market-oriented commodity, he found himself ‘caught between the prerogatives claimed by the social sciences and the humanities’ (Lowenthal 1984: xii); he referred specifically to the traditional perspectives of American and European scholarship that Robert Merton once described in terms of concerns with information (or masses) and knowledge (or elites), respectively (Merton 1957: 441). At the same time, in response to Merton’s admission that ‘the American love of technique has often severely limited the scope of inquiries that American sociology make’, Lowenthal observed that Europeans ‘have tended to the other extreme, often taking the whole history as their field’ (Lowenthal 1961: xii–xiii).
From the beginning of his career in the United States Lowenthal had understood better than some of his emigré colleagues how to bridge the differences between the demands of a social scientific analysis of media and society and the need for a historical dimension to inquiries into the nature of culture or cultural productions. He became a mediator between the social and behavioral sciences, on the one hand, and the humanities, on the other, in a rather one-sided struggle over questions of knowledge and experience and of how to define fields of inquiry; his early involvement in communication research and his participation in the American academic enterprise since the 1950s created the cultural-political context for providing alternatives to the reign of social scientific positivism.
During the 1960s, the prevailing ‘provincialism’ of American universities was slowly replaced by a cosmopolitan perspective and by a wide range of social and political ideas that reflected the influence of European thought. Lowenthal, Marcuse, and other refugee intellectuals, together with a younger generation of American scholars who had been trained by them, introduced their own understanding of the world to students and collaborated with them in raising troubling questions about the state of society; questions that revealed the inadequacy of traditional disciplines.
By addressing the need for understanding ideas of culture, literature, or media in the context of existing economic and political conditions, Lowenthal questioned the adequacy of specific disciplinary boundaries, like those of sociology or communication research, as well as the efficacy and exiguity of their particular methodologies. His intellectual contribution rests on the strength of his own philosophical position, which had been shaped by his humanism and his understanding of the opposition of a powerful, mainstream social science establishment.
Throughout his writings, but especially in his contributions to the sociology of literature, Lowenthal advocated a genuine interdisciplinary approach – in the sense of abandoning specific disciplinary claims – that was ‘based on a shared critical fundamental attitude, that applies to all cultural phenomena without ever claiming to be a system’ (Lowenthal 1989a: 112). Such an approach also may help shape a contemporary communication research perspective, which must continue to engage in a ‘critique of the production of commodities and words for a manipulated and manipulatable mass market’ (Barthes 1973: 112) if it is to follow in the direction of critical theory.
Lowenthal’s theory rests on the recognition of separate roles of art and popular culture and incorporated the intellectual interest of a classic European tradition of social thought and the insights of a new American social science. By stressing interdisciplinary work, Lowenthal also provides a rationale for retaining specific perspectives with their potential for discoveries, thus, he concluded that: ‘Approaching sociological research humanistically while retaining a sociological view of the humanities can lead to a new awareness of the communion of the Western mind’ (1971–1972: iv). This is a positioning for a critique of society that depends on the fertility of cultural and historical processes and the recognition of structural or institutional demands on members of society.
On the other hand, he not only rejected the behavioristic sociology of literature in the United States as ahistorical and limited in scope to commercial and political propaganda, but he also disapproved of a narrow Marxist interpretation of art as an ideological manifestation:
Art teaches, and mass culture is learned, therefore, a sociological analysis of art must be cautious, supplementary, and selective, whereas a sociological analysis of mass culture must be all-inclusive, for its products are nothing more than the phenomena and symptoms of the process of the individual’s self-resignation in a wholly administered society (Lowenthal 1989b quoted in Desan et al., 1989: 15).
Instead, he believed in the (revolutionary) potential of the technical conditions for the production of art – that is, its political use – and he joined Kracauer, in particular, in his fascination with popular culture as evidence of social (and political) tendencies in society. According to Lowenthal, autonomous art ‘is the message of resistance, of the socially unredeemed. Art is, in fact, the great reservoir of creative protest against social misery; it allows the prospect of social happiness to shine dimly through’ (Lowenthal 1987a: 124). It is mass culture, however, that ‘reinforces and signals the instructions in the late-capitalist world that promote a false collective’ (Lowenthal 1987b: 177).
This position is reminiscent of Bertold Brecht’s earlier writings on the epic theater’s potential to provide the oppressed with their own means of liberation (Brecht 1964), and it reflects the slogan of worker-photographers during the Weimar Republic, who pronounced the camera a weapon in the struggle against the lies of a bourgeois press (Karin and Hardt 1981). But it also indicates an intellectual proximity to Benjamin, whose own thoughts about art – involving the role of the artist in the transformation of bourgeois techniques (of art, literature, or the press) – have considerably influenced the study of culture during the more recent period of Marxist cultural studies in the United States and elsewhere.
These considerations raise questions about the contemporary role of art, its relationship to society, and its importance in studies of culture and communication as a source of gauging the conditions for change. The resulting explanation of the different users of art and mass culture, and their dependence on the history of the social and psychological situation of society and individuals, respectively, could lead to new visions about the role of media.
From the beginning, Lowenthal’s interest had moved beyond traditional notions of literature to include the media, popular culture, such as dime novels, magazines, comics, and film. He realized that the function of media consent was a major issue of communication research, and he demonstrated the effectiveness of historical analyses in his differentiated and time-bound observations about the role of escapism, ideology, and information in the production of mass culture. At the same time, he recognized levels of social stratification and content, which implies the need for investigating the relationship between social class and media use.
Lowenthal’s early work also begins to formulate a theory of reception and effects that is immersed in a critique of ideology. In recent years, popular culture has become the most interesting and by far the largest terrain of critical scholarship. The resulting ideological critique of culture relies on expressions of popular or mass culture for exposing the interests and goals of political and cultural elites and their means of reinforcing conformity through media productions. At the same time, there has been a preoccupation with media effects on specific social groups, in particular the middle class, at the expense of explaining the historical conditions of the working class in media culture. This situation describes Lowenthal’s own understanding that the conditions of the print culture reflect the production and consumption patterns of the middle class and suggest that a general market orientation supports and controls middle-class values and ambitions.
Nevertheless, Lowenthal’s work on popular culture reflects a critical understanding of the role of culture in mass societies, the pervasive attitude toward entertainment, and the manipulation of individuals by media industries. It had emerged from an atmosphere of technological and political domination with the rise of film, radio, and picture magazines, the increasing power of advertising, and the appearance of authoritarian forms of political rule, particularly in the Soviet Union and Germany during the 1920s and 1930s.
Such a concern also addressed the declining autonomy of the individual, the lack of self-expression, and the failure of spontaneous action in mass society, which echoed the cultural critique of Horkheimer, Adorno (1972), and Marcuse (1964). The former argued that the notion of popular culture was ideological and described what they called ‘the culture industry’, which ‘administered a non-spontaneous reified, phony culture rather than the real thing’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1972: 216). For Lowenthal the culture industry entailed ‘more or less constantly manipulated devices to keep people in permanent psychic bondage, to increase and reinforce neurotic and even psychotic behavior culminating in perpetual dependency on a “leader” of institutions or products’ (Lowenthal 1987c: 186). He argued that mass culture or popular culture (terms he used interchangeably) serves to preserve the status quo, since in mass culture ‘nothing is ever redeemed, everything always stays the same because it ought to remain the way it is’ (Lowenthal 1987a: 125). This is a view of mass culture that prevailed among his colleagues and reflects the deep mistrust of a media culture that was, not unlike industrial technologies, under the control of bourgeois elites.
Lowenthal gained acceptance and respectability among US social scientists and communication researchers probably with the publication of ‘Biographies in Popular Magazines’, which appeared with Lazarsfeld’s encouragement, in the 1944 edition of Radio Research (Lowenthal 1944). It was based on his earlier genre work in Germany, where the popular biography as escapist literature produced individuals, who were ‘nothing more than a typographic element’ and created heroes without ‘individual destinies’, who were ‘nothing but functions of the historic’ (Lowenthal 1989a: 121).
In his recollections, Lowenthal remembers Merton’s favorable response to this work as ‘one of the few examples of a synthesis of the European theoretical stance and American empirical research’. Lazarsfeld, on the other hand, ‘in his typically empiricist positivist way, completely failed to see the political and analytical meaning’ of this study (Lowenthal 1989a: 234).
In his analysis, which remains one of the earlier examples of critical communication research in the United States, Lowenthal suggested that attempts to integrate ‘understanding of historical processes and interest in successful people’ (Lowenthal 1984: 207) were abandoned during the 1930s, when ‘the real battlefield of history recedes from view or becomes a stock backdrop while society disintegrates into an amorphous crowd of consumers’ (Lowenthal 1984: 216). His examination of such popular magazines as Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s as ‘indication of social processes’ (Lowenthal 1989a: 233) uncovered a shift from the presentation of ‘idols of production’ to ‘idols of consumption’, when biographies of entrepreneurs, perpetuating the American myth of success, were replaced by stories of celebrities and their private lives. The study reflects the tendencies of modern society to reduce the definition of the social and cultural sphere to the status quo and to reduce the idea of participation to consumption. As Lowenthal concluded, ‘in a society of corporate capitalism the rise of the entrepreneur increasingly becomes a pure fiction; and … bourgeois society turns into a consumer society’ (Lowenthal 1989a: 234).
Lowenthal had realized the importance of cultural surfaces for the study of society and, implicitly at least, defines the role of the intellectual in a critique of society. The more recent work of Roland Barthes (1973), who exposes the stereotypes of mass culture with his description of ‘mythologies’ in contemporary life, Umberto Eco (1986), who ‘travels in hyperreality’ to observe the struggle of popular culture between profit and ideology, and Jean Baudrillard (1988), who describes the cultural consequences of a society without past or future, are prominent examples of the potential for creative (political) intervention by intellectuals, including their use of the media.
Lowenthal’s vision of the field, however, unfolded in a series of essays, written between 1932 and 1967, in which he discussed the sociology of literature, the critique of mass culture, and their proximity to communication research. They subsequently were collected and appeared as ‘Contributions to the Philosophy of Communication’ in Literature and Mass Culture (Lowenthal 1984).
Lowenthal’s interest in the historical and sociological dimensions of literature, which had surfaced early at the Frankfurt Institut für Sozialforschung in Germany, grew out of the recognition of literature as a source of social and cultural processes. He explained the need ‘to use literature to gain knowledge of human and social contexts for which no other sources are available’ (Lowenthal 1989: 244). He also expected that such a ‘historical explanation of literature’ had ‘to address the extent to which particular social structures find expression in individual literary works and what functions these works perform in society’ (Lowenthal 1984: 247).
Indeed, Sayre’s observation that Lowenthal’s work ‘aims primarily at the elucidation of social rather than literary phenomena’ (Sayre 1980: 151) helps locate Lowenthal in the realm of a cultural studies tradition. Such a tradition seeks to establish the significance of an individual’s relatedness to political, economic, and cultural processes. And Lowenthal reminds his readers of the emergence of culture through identifying the role of individuals, who are ‘in specific relations of production throughout (their) history’ that ‘present themselves socially as classes in struggle with each other’, while ‘the development of their relationship forms the real basis for the various cultural spheres’ (Lowenthal 1984: 247). He proceeded to argue for a materialistic explanation of literary history but rejected placing literature within a strictly economic explanation of culture; instead, literature as a means of making culture transparent becomes also a reflection of ideology, making literary studies ‘largely an investigation of ideologies’ (Lowenthal 1984: 248).
In the meantime, Lowenthal had also recognized that the product of mass literature (including journalism), although increasingly popular objects of communication research, had been neglected by literary studies. He felt that academic disciplines in charge of accounting for literature had been ‘caught unaware by the impact of mass literature, the best seller, the popular magazines, the comics and the like, and they have maintained an attitude of haughty indifference to the lower depths of imagination in print’ (Lowenthal 1948: 83). Indeed, his observation is a fitting description of the failure of journalism or mass communication interests that prevailed in universities, where a similarly rigid definition of media had resulted in a rather narrow approach to questions of societal communication. Consequently, Lowenthal outlined a course of sociological action that included a number of suggestions related to communication research. The resulting essay reflects his unpublished remarks made in 1947 at the opening of the Institute of Communication Research at the University of Illinois (Lowenthal 1948).
Although directed at sociologists of literature, Lowenthal’s address constitutes a blueprint for critical communication research, with a commitment to interdisciplinary inquiry. He invited sociologists to join in the experiences of communication research and proposed a series of research projects that would enhance the standing of the discipline and add to its knowledge about culture and communication. He also designated specific areas of analysis that comprise the terrain of communication research.
Lowenthal insisted on placing literature in a ‘functional frame’ within society to gain an understanding of its social relevance. He suggested that locating literary material within a culture and its specific class stratifications, or positioning literature in terms of its escapist or ideological functions, must be enhanced and completed by an analysis of specific forms. His own work on popular biographies provided an example of how media succeed in constructing a topical environment in which the reader ‘can experience the gratification of being confirmed in his own pleasures and discomforts by participating in their pleasures and discomforts of the great’ (Lowenthal 1948: 85).
An analysis of society from a literary perspective must also include the position of writers as intellectuals within their respective cultural milieus. This involves their political and economic standing and their own view of their participation, as well as the literary treatment of social or political problems, which become as important as seeking insights into the conditions of production – that is, into questions of independence from organized and institutionalized efforts of publishing enterprises.
More significantly, Lowenthal agreed with mainstream communication research that scholarly investigations must be related to the impact of the media. He proposed that sociologists move beyond the interpretation of texts to the study of social implications, urging them to make ‘literary hermeneutics a part of the sociology of knowledge’ with the help of transforming ‘the private equation of themes and stylistic means into social equations’ (Lowenthal 1948: 87).
But knowledge about media content is central to understanding people’s expectations, and Lowenthal called for ‘qualitative and quantitative inventories of the contents of popular works on a comparative scale’ (Lowenthal 1948: 96). He also realized that explanations of the manifest content of the media raise additional questions about authors or producers, including journalists, and their (more or less conscious) manipulation of ideas. He therefore proposed a ‘standardized ideological questionnaire’ to explore the attitude and visions of authors and to ‘learn much about the self-identification of these agents of mass communication and of the potential influence of these hidden self portraits on the readers’ (Lowenthal 1948: 98). However, the question of effects involves more than an empirical analysis of consumption; according to Lowenthal, it stimulates and encourages theoretical explanations that will help define the ‘social determinants’ of effects (including specific knowledge about the influence of ‘all-embracing social constellations on writing and the reading public’), create an understanding of ‘the influence of formal (and informal) controls of production and reading’, and yield an assessment of ‘technological change and its economic and social consequences’ (Lowenthal 1948: 92–3).
The importance of social and technical determinants in the study of communication remains a constant theme in Lowenthal’s work, ranging from the impact of changing political or economic conditions on media products to the effects of other audiovisual media on the abilities of individuals to ‘read’ and retain content matter. In this connection, he insisted on the need for an analysis of marginal media, meaning those expressions that ‘under the guise of everyday misery or everyday enjoyment’ reveal values that were associated with experiences of earlier times (Lowenthal 1948: 99).
Lowenthal’s Illinois manifesto, a remarkable statement of intent for critical communication research, has been virtually ignored since its publication in 1948. For instance, Schramm did not republish the essay in his later collections of communication research literature, an omission that may have reflected Lowenthal’s standing as a communication theorist and researcher in an emerging field with rather narrow definitions of its interests. Schramm’s activities as an effective compiler and editor of standard communication research literature helped reproduce a Lazarsfeldian understanding of communication research, however, including a reluctance to embrace a critical, if not oppositional, view of communication studies that relies on the force of history and the conditions of culture (Hardt 1992).
As communication research moved out of the academic realm and into the marketplace, it began to focus on the perceived interests and needs of institutions, dealing with language and communication within the realm of political and economic demands for information. Its purpose was to help create and maintain the necessary conditions of the social environment, including the quality of the democratic experience in the United States. At the same time, communication research was transformed into a science, consisting of ‘audience measurement, public opinion sampling, content study, and the measurement of social effect’, according to Schramm (1948: 5). It also became preoccupied with methodologies rather than with issues of participation, individual autonomy, and the struggle for emancipation in the context of the cultural or historical conditions of communication and media in modern society.
When Lowenthal commented on the narrow theoretical and intellectual perspective of the new field of mass communication research, he remarked – in a veiled reference to Lazarsfeld’s radio research – that it had not attracted attention outside the field ‘due to the reluctance of theorists and research specialists to relate their work to the general intellectual discussion of modern mass culture on the one hand and to its historical antecedents on the other’ (Lowenthal 1961: xvi–xvii). He noted that the ‘ascetic life’ of modern communication research was limited ‘to closely defined problems of content analysis, effects, audience stratification, problems of inter- and intra-media relations, and so on’ (Lowenthal 1961: xvii). Lowenthal attacked the ‘applied asceticism’ of the empirical research tradition, which ‘refuses to enter the sphere of meaning’, takes much of social life (including the mass media) at ‘face value’, and rejects ‘the task of placing them in a historical and moral context’. And he asked, ‘to what extent, if at all, is modern social science equipped to deal with modern social culture?’ (Lowenthal 1961: 7).
Lowenthal developed his own expectations of communication research to move beyond the description and analysis of the obvious conditions of media activities. He asserted that, despite the growth of the media, people were lonelier than ever, because of a continuing ‘deterioration of our intellectual and moral heritage’ (Lowenthal 1967: 335). He also suggested that, because discussion about communication had been reduced to considerations of the media, communication research has ‘seriously jeopardized productive discourse between social scientists and humanists’ (Lowenthal 1967: 335). Lowenthal recounted how, in a media culture that relied ‘on the ideological sanction of individual autonomy in the very process of exploiting individuality to serve mass culture’, communication ‘has been almost completely divested of its human content’ (Lowenthal 1967: 336). When individuals are made into instruments of persuasion and used to sell consumer goods and services, their appearances in the media separates them from their humanity. Under such conditions, communication has been ‘annexed’ by the press and journalism, and corrupted by a media industry, whose ‘images have penetrated perniciously and painfully the private realms of individuals in their most intimate spheres of discourse’ (Lowenthal 1967: 337).
Lowenthal held communication research responsible for aiding such societal trends. The ‘splendid isolation’ of social research, he proposed, reinforces the suspicion that social research is ‘nothing but market research, an instrument of expedient manipulation, a tool with which to prepare reluctant customers for enthusiastic spending’ (Lowenthal 1961: 9). In addition, he accused social scientists of having evaded their moral commitment ‘by pretending to engage in value free research-something that exists neither in logic or in history’ and he insisted, in the spirit of an applied and active critical theory, that in ‘an era of increasing positivistic infatuation … the inalienable birthright of the intellectual as a critic, trivial as it may sound, must be energetically asserted’ (Lowenthal 1967: 337).
Thus, for Lowenthal, a critique of communication research involves a reflection about its rising importance and its impact in an age of mass production, including the use of mass media to promote and organize social formations and economic expectations. It exposes the demands on communication research to participate in the agenda of industrialization, to cater to the needs of individuals in their relations in society, and to help resolve the emerging contradictions between the reality of mass society and the ideals of community.
Lowenthal also confronts the dangers of blatant ignorance and the calculated risks of expert knowledge when he lamented the fact that contemporary social science literature showed no awareness of the ‘voluminous writings produced on both the left and the right wings of the political and cultural fronts in the nineteenth century’ (Lowenthal 1961: 7). He suggested, at least by implication, that a study of contemporary media remains a ‘meaningless’ activity without a historical framework relating the press to the emancipatory struggles of the middle classes and the critical assessment of culture. He pointed to the work of Karl Kraus, an Austrian writer and social critic, who had elaborated on the relationship between the ‘hollowing out’ of language and the disappearance of the ‘autonomous individual’ in modern culture (Lowenthal 1961: 7).
Lowenthal’s ‘theses on Critical Theory and empirical research’ (Lowenthal 1961: 11–13) – coauthored with Adorno – confirm his belief in the importance of popular culture as a field of inquiry. They also guide his mediation between literary studies and communication research by positing a relationship between communication and culture that is historically grounded in the relations of individuals and institutions. He focused on the processes of producing and reproducing society, not only anticipating the importance of communication and media but also speaking to their integral role in any vision of culture.
Therefore, he argued that a critical approach to (popular) culture must begin with the question: ‘What are the functions of cultural communication within the total process of society?’ (Lowenthal 1961: 11). He also insisted that an analysis of the production and reproduction of ‘the objective elements of a social whole in the mass media would reveal the rise of mass tastes as a consequence of technological and political conditions and the interests of producers and, ultimately, would result in the replacement of taste ‘by the quest for information’ (Lowenthal 1961: 12).
In this connection, Lowenthal called into question any assumptions about the differentiation between ‘serious’ and ‘nonserious’ communication, challenging the idea, for instance, that ‘serious’ programming will lead to ‘“progress” in educational and social responsibility’. He proposed analyzing aesthetic qualities and studying whether they are ‘subject to change under conditions of mass reproduction’ (Lowenthal 1961: 12). Similarly, he noted that the concept of ‘standardization’ depends on insights about ‘the psychological and anthropological character of popular culture’, which are needed to understand its consumption. Lowenthal thought that there was sufficient evidence to identify ‘mechanisms of interdependence between the pressures of professional life and the freedom from intellectual and aesthetic tension in which popular culture seems to indulge’ (Lowenthal 1961: 12–13); but he always insisted on recognizing the historical process in the definition of cultural stimuli, and he remarked that the relationships between stimulus and response are always ‘pre-formed and pre-structured’ by their ‘historical and social fate’ (Lowenthal 1961: 13). He identified and acknowledged an existing commitment to a historical perspective by Robert E. Park and Louis B. Wirth, for instance, who had ‘kept alive the conscience of a historical civilization’ (Lowenthal 1961: 8), and to the work of Kenneth Burke and Hugh Dalziel Duncan, whose interests in communication and society reflected parallel concerns.
Although he concluded that ‘expediency and the lack of a historical or philosophical frame of reference make a sorry marriage of convenience’ (Lowenthal 1961: 10), he remained attracted to an empirical aspect of communication research identified with Lazarsfeld and mainstream sociology. He may have seen real possibilities for his own work and its impact on communication research. In particular, his insights about the nature of inquiry were based on his professional experience as a teacher and social worker who had to work with ‘concrete things’ and who ‘was just more concerned with social reality than Adorno was’ (Lowenthal 1987d: 140). What is more important, perhaps, is the acknowledged relationship between theory and empirical research that underlies critical theory, a relationship that may have conditioned Lowenthal’s response to the empirical research tradition in the United States. In any event, he defined ‘mass communications’ as the key area of his theoretical and practical, work and at one time ‘one of the most important themes of American social science’ (Lowenthal 1987d: 140).
In addition, however, there was the influence of the specific social and economic conditions of a time when many European refugees depended on the influence and generosity of established emigré colleagues and their organizational connections. For instance, Jay reported that Lazarsfeld was able to supply Lowenthal with ‘secretarial and office assistance’, which allowed him to conduct ‘analyses of news commentators and news programs in Philadelphia’ (Jay 1973: 212). Lowenthal also admitted (in a letter to Adorno) that Lazarsfeld represented ‘our strongest personal tie to the [Sociology] Department and is going to some trouble (among his connections) to make something of it, both for you and for me’ (Jay 1987: 129). Adorno also recognized such relationships and Lowenthal’s dilemma of representing ‘our theoretical interests’ while making his manuscript (‘Biographies of Popular Magazines’) promising enough so that ‘Lazarsfeld can swallow it’ (Jay 1987: 131). Subsequently, Lowenthal contributed to the empirical work of critical theory with a series of content analyses. These ranged from his biographical studies of popular magazines to his collaborative effort on Prophets of Deceit a few years later.
Lowenthal’s idea of communication research was also informed and probably shaped by the radicalization of thought, aided by the polarization of political ideas and the potential of violent confrontations in the United States. It was a topic of considerable interest among European emigrés, particular Jewish refugees, and resulted in a number of publications dealing with questions of personality and mass manipulation. In an attempt to cope with the demagoguery of the time, the group around Horkheimer began to analyse the practice of agitation as a reflection of underlying social and psychological problems of society. These studies were also aided by the wartime experiences of emigrés in government service. For instance, Lowenthal had been involved in psychological warfare activities during the 1940s, when he and other emigré scholars had joined government efforts. He had worked for the Office of War Information and later for the Bureau of Overseas Intelligence before he became involved with the Voice of America, where he engaged in effects research. In this context of professional and existential concerns he collaborated with Norbert Guterman on Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator, which appeared in the series on Studies in Prejudice in 1949, preceding Adorno’s contribution in The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al., 1950).
The book, concentrating on the techniques, appeals, and meaning of demagoguery, became a significant contribution to the study of mass society and served as a popular resource in the field of mass communication research. In his foreword to the 1970 edition, Horkheimer suggested that under contemporary conditions of industrialized societies the ‘manufacture’ of attitudes and reactive behaviour must lead to a study of the specific techniques of agitation in their political and social contexts, since modern agitators seek to transform the individual into a ‘deindividualized, incoherent, and fully malleable personality structure’ (Horkheimer 1987: 2).
The volume also confirmed Lowenthal’s own position among critical theorists; it remains a remarkable document of their participation in the surveillance of the political and social environment of the United States. Its purpose was to unmask ‘aggressive and destructive impulses hidden behind that rhetoric’ on the basis of textual analyses that were designed to reveal unconscious mechanisms of agitation (Lowenthal 1989a: 234) and to address the question of latent trends within American society. When Lowenthal analysed the techniques of agitation by ‘turning psychoanalysis on its head’, he suggested that public agitation would result in neurotic and psychotic behavior and create an undesirable dependence on so-called leadership.
Lowenthal reminded his readers of the importance of the notion of totality in any explanation of how individuals exist in their cultural context. He rejected the ‘isolation of a social fact’, arguing that ‘In reality all individual facts are woven into the dialectic of totality’ (Lowenthal 1987: 257).
The serious political engagement of Horkheimer, Lowenthal and others an the potential role of their work in the enlightenment process of American society are perhaps best illustrated by Lowenthal’s revelation that Horkheimer intended to reproduce the Studies in Prejudice series as a set of pamphlets for distribution to ‘so-called multiplicators’ in a ‘given situation of anti-Semitic political outbreaks’. He added that, in the spirit of critical theory, the group wanted ‘to accomplish scientifically meaningful work in a manner that would allow its application to political praxis’ (Lowenthal 1989a: 235). The first five volumes of the series offered mostly psychological analyses, and were called by Dennis Wrong ‘certainly the fullest and most far reaching contribution to our knowledge of prejudice which has ever been made’ (Wrong 1950–1951: 279).
Lowenthal’s involvement of The Prophets of Deceit project was also consistent with his long-standing interest in questions of media effects to which he returned in the 1960s. His outline of a theory of popular culture specifically called for the study of ‘patterns of influence’ within concrete class relations and concrete historical periods across the shifting focus from art to popular culture, or from individual creation to mass production, at a time when the concerns of producers concentrate ‘on filling channels and competing with rivals’ rather than ‘on expressing their own ideas’ (Lowenthal 1961: xxi). As a result, audience wants dominate the content of the media.
Indeed, Lowenthal suggested that a social theory of popular culture must trace the history of the media in an attempt to locate the ‘transitions in critical concerns from oral and ethical criteria to problems such as determinism, gratifications, escape, mediocrity, and conformism’ and their relations to ‘changing social, political, and technological conditions’ (Lowenthal 1961: xxii). He also advocated the study of particular standards of producers and audiences, their evolution and their impact on each other, entertaining the possibility that in time ‘media will allegedly come to be produced by the masses and except for a very few avant gardists and classicists, people would then be talking to people about their own everyday affairs and there would be no need for, or concern with, standards, artistic or otherwise’ (Lowenthal 1961: xxii). Published in 1961, his observations are prophetic, anticipating the popular rush into alternative uses of the available communication technologies, which is to change the traditional notion of information.
According to Lowenthal, the popular arts emerged as a topic of ‘intellectual or moral controversy’ (Lowenthal 1964: 28) only during modern times and as a result of contacts between elites and masses. Such an encounter caused media activities to leave the realm of private interests for the benefit of the few and enter the public arena with its potential of providing unlimited circulation and access to people. Consequently, the production of mass media was guided by the demands of readers, and newspapers offered information and entertainment to a diverse audience. This change was accompanied by intense discussions of the impact of the press on public morality, since its ability to penetrate society and its impact on the definition of culture constituted the undisputed reality of industrialized society.
Lowenthal relied on the experience of literature, philosophy, and art to promote a humanistic meaning of communication, which referred to genuine productive imagination, free from instrumental concepts of language and communication as technologies of information, and required intellectual effort and participation. He turned to those who keep the ‘communication conscience’ alive, namely those who communicate ‘the very breakdown of communication’ (Lowenthal 1967: 341). He engaged in a humanistic critique, which always ‘turns against instrumentalist language (as means to an end) and advocates the autonomous character of the human word as an end in itself’. Lowenthal concluded that ‘the patterned communication mechanism has as its logical and psychological end the switching off of the projector, the radio set, and the television box or the final mute grimace of the singer’ (Lowenthal 1967: 341). These are the failure of a modern media culture, whose presence dictates the way things are and denies the freedom of individual autonomy; they are also the boundaries of communication research that fails to search beyond the world of media to gain an understanding of the human condition.
In fact, Lowenthal reminded his readers of the human dimension of communication by citing Dewey’s definition of communication at a time when communication had become part of an industrial culture that hardly distinguished between consumers and producers, ‘because they are both the serfs of a life style of conformity and regulation’. Lowenthal also noted the paradox of modern civilization:
the ideology of education and persuasion through the spoken and printed word has become the reality of insensibility and numbness to meaning, and that the professed belief of the powers that be in all spheres of public life-political, cultural, economic-in the persuasive influence of the worded message is answered by increasing skepticism if not outright disbelief in the word itself (Lowenthal 1967: 344).
Lowenthal’s commitment to exploring mass culture from a sociohistorical perspective was also confirmed in his reaction to the publication of The Lonely Crowd (Riesman et al., 1950), which addressed the nature of American culture. He praised the humanistic orientation of the book and used the opportunity to remind the field of the location of American social science practices between the humanities and the natural sciences without adequate provisions for defining such an interrelationship. Lowenthal predicted (without much success) an ‘era of clarification of the relation between the scientific and the intellectual universe’ in an atmosphere of ‘experiencing again the old craving for a new concept of a scientia universalis’ (Lowenthal 1984: 276–7).
He also credited The Lonely Crowd with helping reverse the dominant pattern of the social sciences, which had consisted of ‘a preeminent concern with methodology and with the construction of theoretical models’ (Lowenthal 1984: 279). Lowenthal felt that David Riesman, Reuel Denney, and Nathan Glazer had drawn attention to ‘the humanistic implications of social theory’ and to the work of Wilhelm Dilthey, in whose conception ‘the net woven of individual expression, cultural institutions, and political and religious modes was a manifestation of unique historical periods’ (Lowenthal 1984: 279). At the same time, he acknowledged the difficulty of ‘interpreting within one conceptual framework the uniqueness of a historical period and the general features of human behavior prevailing in it’, a difficulty that must be faced ‘if one wants to understand uno actu individuals both in their social roles and in their personal imagery’ (Lowenthal 1984: 280).
In addressing this dualism, Lowenthal pointed to the failures of communication research, which had most commonly remained closed to creative, intellectual risk taking by relying on the promises of empiricism. Alternative visions of individuals, culture, and communication offered in the writings of Burke and McLuhan, for instance, had remained largely outside the realm of communication research during the 1960s and would remain marginalized in the decades to come, modified perhaps by the lure of British cultural studies.
Lowenthal’s work continues to remind the field of communication research of its own failures during those early years to recognize the need for a critical approach to the problem of media and society (see also Hardt 1992). Thus, the rise of literary history as ideological critique marks a potential starting point for a critique of journalism as popular culture and of newswork as the production of media cultures in a society where the ‘large confusing issues in the political and the economic realm and the antagonisms and controversies in the social sphere are all submerged in the experience of being at one with the lofty and powerful in the sphere of consumption’ (Lowenthal 1989a: 122).
Problems of consumption of mass culture are tied to the history of a dominant technological bureaucracy and the deteriorating psychological condition of individuals who have lost self-confidence and trust. Similarly, inquiries into the production of media content, in the form of a sociology of writers or newsworkers, for instance, are bound to include questions about the impact of the cultural and political environment, economic decision making, and the effects of role consciousness on the performances of these producers of mass culture. Such inquiries are also related to intellectuals’ loss of control in their assigned media roles.
By disagreeing with Adorno and Horkheimer and by insisting that media technologies cannot be held responsible for the decline of culture, Lowenthal proposes to consider at least the inherent potential of the media. Since the appropriation of technology has been ‘a consequence of the capital structure within which these media are used, [and] a consequence of the political-economic form’, he concluded that ‘the aesthetic and cognitive potential of film, radio, and television hardly gets a chance’. In this spirit he called for a ‘continued advancement of the technical and aesthetic possibilities of the media’ and for a ‘consistent effort analytically to grasp that which is cheaply propagandized and which ultimately harms us all’ (Lowenthal 1987: 255).
His position confronts the traditional celebration of the symbiotic relationship between technology and democracy and, more specifically, a vision of the media as expansions of a democratic technology that promotes institutional power at the expense of individual freedom of newsworkers and their audiences (Hardt 1990). Lowenthal seems to encourage alternative models of media and media use; he seeks the aid of artistic expression in a search for democratic forms of communication by promoting the notions of production, in the sense of creative participation, and of prestige, in the ranking of such activities, in society. Such a vision needs the involvement of the ‘unattached’ intellectual (Mannheim 1936), whose identification with the practical aims of parties or classes may lead to alternative interpretations, break the monopoly of the social scientific explanations of communication, media, and society, and result in an engagement in the social and political struggle.
Implicit in Lowenthal’s approach is a recognition that journalism must be investigated within a more encompassing theory of culture and society. The study of journalism cannot be defined merely by its proximity to specific media or market interests, as a professional career rather than an intellectual endeavour. Without a cultural companion, journalism and even ‘mass’ communication research may result, more often than not, in the production of a consensus history of property rights that champion the cause of media ownership and an explanation of communication that relies on notions of information processing.
An ideological critique of journalism and the media, on the other hand, studies journalism as an aspect of popular culture, whose terrain is defined by questions about its historical origins, not only in terms of its producers, its content, or its consumers, but also in terms of cultural contexts, social processes, and economic relations. It is not a critique of particular journalistic forms or practices, but a critique of the system that produced journalism and the media. If the current crisis of the media is a reflection of a bourgeois society that has lost its authority in the process of celebrating the rule of specialists, being controlled by the rationale of consumption, and adjusting to the power of a technical-bureaucratic system, then cultural explanations are necessary to distinguish between authoritarian and democratic uses of media and information.
The recent impact of technological changes and the decline of a print culture only intensifies the need for a cultural-historical explanation. When social and political solutions emerge from an understanding of history, the demise of class consciousness, and the place of the media within the structure of bourgeois society, they may lead to alternative practices, which ultimately reside in the creative abilities of individuals to transform contemporary (journalistic) techniques and adapt the media apparatus to the real needs of participation in society.
This is particularly true in light of the banality of much of the contemporary media content, a conclusion Lowenthal had shared with Adorno, which becomes more obvious in contemporary work, like in a collection edited by Redmond and Holmes (2007). Yet, dozens of newer books, for instance, on celebrity as a cultural phenomenon seem to rely on descriptive narratives rather than on theory- or history-grounded analyses.
At a time when the return of an instrumentalist language marginalizes a critical, humanistic approach to issues of influence and effects, Lowenthal’s earlier recognition of a failing contemporary media culture, prophetic at times, may have resonated in a rising public disillusionment with established media practices, specifically regarding the definition and production of information.
For instance, in the United States one can think of the emergence of the citizen/ journalist with an understanding grounded in the information needs and desires of the local as an autonomous position vis-à-vis an established media culture. In other parts of the world, like in the Middle East and North Africa, emerging revolutionary movements have been based on the availability of private, individualized means of communication outside of and in opposition to official media sources. Lowenthal’s (1961: 11) observation, some time ago, that ‘whenever revolutionary tendencies show a timid head, they are mitigated and cut short by a false fulfillment of wish-dreams …’ aptly describes what became unsuccessful attempts by the respective power structures in these regions to ease public pressure.
In both cases, these are responses to changing political, social and economic conditions and to substantial generational differences, resulting in the rise of a collective consciousness regarding the potential of communication after ‘switching off’ the established media coupled with the realization of having a voice. The latter has revealed itself in new forms of personal communication, which are dialogical structures that rely on participation, also called ‘blogging and twitting’.
The current changes in the nature of social communication also signal the end of a particular historical period in which the definition of Western media and journalism, the meaning of information, and the relations of individuals to the world have shifted decisively. In fact, they challenge the traditional symbiotic relationship between technology and democracy, which had worked in favour of expanding the ideological domination of traditional media. Instead, an alternative model of communication empowers individuals to help define their democratic aspirations and free their imagination, which is vital for the growth of human communication and the evolution of cultural practices.
Implicit in this evolution of public communication is the recognition that the local entity, or smallness, provides a better foundation for a human dimension of communication than the industrialization of the contemporary media culture. One thinks of John Dewey’s idea of community, but one is also reminded of Leopold Kohr’s (1941: 542) argument, often echoed by contemporary social movements, that ‘true democracy … can only be achieved in small states. Only there the individual can retain his place and dignity’. A social theory of communication based on these principles seems to meet the expectations embedded in Lowenthal’s work.
Lowenthal’s contribution lies not only in his insistence on a critical discourse that involves the field of communication research, but also in his concrete demands for attacking the suppression of the imagination and the results of a mass culture, which promotes a false collective. This comes at a time of an erosion of cultural possibilities; according to Lowenthal, earlier media used to offer a ‘certain amount of free play for the imagination’ to escape oppressive conditions, while ‘the present-day phenomenon of the mass medium really doesn’t leave any freedom at all for the imagination’ (Lowenthal 1987e: 239). He expressed the need for a type of social and political criticism that confronts the problems of industrialized societies: the loss of community, the dilemma of authenticity, and the increasing instrumental rationalization of society.
At a time of paradigm shifts, reassessments of theoretical positions, and ideological movements during the 1990s within the field of communication research, Lowenthal’s work renewed confidence in the potential of critical communication studies and reinforced ideas about an interdisciplinary approach to the study of individuals, their culture, and society that speaks to the totality of social practices.
Today such an approach, however, must first overcome the resistance of traditional communication research, fortified behind the barriers of disciplinary interests and self-sufficient expertise, to reach a genuine state of cooperation on questions of human needs and institutional changes to be accepted in the spirit of a critique that builds on the strength of subjectivity, the relative nature of truth, or the dependence of theory on everyday life. These are also the conditions of a social theory which offers the necessary flexibility for incorporating new insights and meeting methodological demands vis-à-vis sustained criticism from traditional communication research.
On the other hand, one should heed Jean Baudrillard’s words that ‘History and Marxism are like fine wines and haute cuisine: they do not really cross the ocean, in spite of the many impressive attempts that have been made to adapt them to new surroundings’ (Baudrillard 1988: 79). The arrival of British cultural studies on the academic shores of the United States and its reception by communication research, may serve as an appropriate example of the migration of particular ideas.
Perhaps Lowenthal also realized after years of working in the American environment the truth of Baudrillard’s remark; if he did, he continued, nevertheless, confirmed in his position of marginality and committed to the spirit of a theory that expresses confidence in the individual, encourages critique, and aspires to be the conscience of society.
Hanno Hardt died in the autumn of 2011.
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1 A version of this article was previously published in the Journal of Communication 41:3 (1991), 65–85. We are grateful to the publishers for their permission to re-use material from this article.