Positivism And Criticism:Approach And Application Of Culture Study

Modern media technology has obtained constant development and innovation and mass culture has risen rapidly and spread widely. Therefore, under this background, human beings’ information mode, cultural form, and lifestyle have undergone fundamental changes. With the coming of era of mechanical duplication, problems about mass culture including media culture, culture industry, and consumer culture have become the hot topic that attracts constant attention from academic and ideological circle. In consequence, many theorists from different schools of thought make broad and deep discussion about mass culture from different value standpoints and aspects. As a newly emerging field of interdisciplinary research, the study of mass culture faces numerous confusion and difficulty. How to select the standpoint of cultural study? What are the applications of cultural study? How to draw the border of cultural study? What are the approaches and applications of culture study? All the above questions haven’t been decided yet.With the emerging and development of mass culture as historical background and the modern academic thought, cultural turn, as intellectual context, this paper takes interdisciplinary research including philosophy, sociology, aesthetics, literature, communication and cultural research as study view to bring us back to the historical scene of methodology debate by studying the debate between Columbia School and Frankfurt School about the methodology of culture study. By doing that, this paper explores internal motivation of school cooperation and reflects dialectical integration of different opinions to demonstrate academic and intellectual significance of the important "theory event" in the history of culture study. Thus, this paper offers referential theoretical perspective to the reflection of the approaches and applications of modern culture study.Centering on the symbolic theory event, the debate between positivism and criticism, this paper interprets the sense of this event in the academic idea history of culture study from the perspective of methodological significance. Due to this event, approaches of culture study begin to be clearly divided into two kinds:one is empirical approach based on experience, facts, data, and survey, the other is critical approach seeking for sense and value on the basis of reflection and criticism. As a result, two approaches and modes of culture study are decided. Through the analysis of the origin of positivism and criticism, this paper reviews the history and procedure of Lazarsfeld’s and Adorno’s academic thoughts and reproduces the original scene of the academic event. On this basis, the final conclusion is made:On the basis of recognizing the divergence of the two schools, binary opposition relation is not existed between positivism and criticism but a trend of dialectical integration is formed in theoretical development and academic practice.During World War II, a great number of European scholars had to come to the United States for the sake of escaping chaos caused by the war. Theodor W. Adorno, a German Jewish scholar, was invited by an exiled Austrian Jewish scholar Paul Lazarsfeld to participate in the project of "Basic Value of Radio on All Types of Audiences" funded by Rockefeller Foundation. In the research process, Adorno firmly stuck to traditional European criticism and its methods, while Lazarsfeld insisted on applying empirical methods which were adaptive to American Pragmatism; consequently, their cooperation broke down because of great dispute in methodology. Later this event has become a famous case in communication studies and has been defined as "the first conflict in communication methodology" which has resulted in "the division between positivistic and critical communication studies".With regard to this theoretical dispute, the paper attempts to present mainly the following views. First, the academic significance of the dispute between positivism and criticism is not restricted to the field of communication study. Instead, it can serve as a logic convergence of theory and practice from which we can look back upon the philosophical origin and development of the dialectical relationship between positivism and criticism and meanwhile deduce the actual evolvement of positivism and criticism and the generation of their respective significance. In our opinion, the dispute between positivism and criticism, in academic practice, has already been extended to a more spacious field, cultural study, and has been exerting a great theoretical significance. Since both of them, positivism and criticism, have a shared research object, namely mass culture (to be more specific in this project, broadcast music) which is characterized by richness, diversity and complexity, the conflict between the two actually represents the opposition between methods for study of mass culture. As we know, mass culture is essentially a type of ideology, and as a form of disseminating ideas, is a type of intellectual communication of human beings in the transition from modern to postmodern period. Therefore, mass culture study reflects the latest and the most heated picture of reality in human intellectual communication; that means relevant study should not be limited to the classical empirical researches based on information transfer in communication study, nor should it be restricted to pure rational speculation of critical theory or any metaphysical philosophical speculation, or meaning-searching and value evolution in literature study. Instead, we should perform mass culture study from a more spacious perspective, a multidisciplinary perspective. In this way, interdisciplinary study combining positivism and criticism can be achieved and previous fragments of theories and methods for mass culture study can be integrated before we finally obtain the research paradigm. Second, this paper puts forward that there is no intrinsic confrontation between positivism and criticism. For one thing, Adorno only holds a negative attitude towards positivism instead of totally rejecting all positivistic approaches, which can be clearly demonstrated by sorting out academic research histories of Frankfurt School and of Adorno himself. For another, it is found that a critical awareness has gone throughout Lazarsfeld’s academic practice, which is proven by his cooperation with Merton and application of relevant results at the level of knowledge sociology. Therefore, in the conflict between positivism and criticism, the encounter of Lazarsfeld and Adorno is both of inevitability and contingency. It is inevitable because positivism and criticism as the two evolution shapes of reason are bound to collide with each other in their respective development; it is accidental because specific academic backgrounds, social experiences and personalities of different scholars will make the academic dispute dramatic and unique under personal influence. Besides, the descriptive introduction of positivism and criticism by the communication circle has also led to the exaggeration of the opposition between the two. Third, positivism and criticism is integrated with each other. As we know, the integration of positivism and criticism in cultural study is established against the background of knowledge sociology, and in the process of restoring academic history, the establishment of this social relation is closely related to partners of Lazarsfeld and Adorno which include Merton, Horkheimer, Lowenthal and Habermas etc. Among them, Merton, under the influence of Mannheim’s knowledge sociology, has intrigued the positivistic and critical awareness of cultural study and thus exerted relevant academic significance in its application through proposing "middle-range theory" and "sociology of science"; in this way, he offered us a more open perspective and manner of cultural study. Similarly, during the later stage of development for Frankfurt School’s theory of criticism, researches by Lowenthal and Habermas have further followed the perspective and manner of integrating positivism and criticism to different extent. For instance, Habermas later paid full attention to the conversation between social critical theory and other representative contemporary theories of philosophy and sociology, and by absorbing beneficial elements from it, he enriched the contemporary implication of critical theory and expanded the interpretation horizon of social critical theory.In view of the abovementioned opinions, it is clear that today with the flourishing of mass culture, if we still hold positivism and criticism in binary opposition in studying and investigating mass culture, we are bound to arrive at a binary judgment on mass culture with a positive or negative attitude against it, instead of looking at it through a diversified and open academic perspective. Moreover, the relation between positivism and criticism is not only related to the issue of methodological orientation, but it is also the repositioning of ideological criticism, cultural value judgment and study perspective of social science. Nowadays a crisis commonly presents in mass culture study, namely the fragmentation of cultural study. Since mass culture has evolved into a new type of ideology as forced by the development of information technology, with advanced technologies, it can quickly permeate into every corner of people’s life and thinking and thus gradually plays a central role in the thinking of modern people. As a result, academic study under the background of a technology-leading mass culture naturally demonstrates a positivistic tendency stronger than ever before. That is mainly manifested by the wide use of positivistic approaches; some positivistic researches are simply made with the "positivism for positivism’s" sake since a large number of statistic methods and data mining techniques are employed blindly in these researched for calculation and verification, while there is no critical thinking in presupposition of the questions. Actually the current situation only confirms Adorno’s previous concern about study of the effects of broadcast music, and it is in no way consistent with Merton’s original intention of constructing sociology of science. On the one hand, those positivistic researches manifest the popularizing and mechanizing trend of the academic environment under an era of cultural reproduction. If we equate positivism with science and in the name of science, carry out cultural study with the lack of a critical awareness, then the ecological value of academic society will be hugely impacted. On the other hand, the application of critical theory was once considered outdated so that at the mention of criticism it would be quickly related to criticism of class struggles; that actually has distorted, misread and solidified the theoretical implication of criticism. Without criticism, human reason will simply hang over an ideal world of nothing. Therefore, it is theoretically necessary for scholars to restore the theoretical efficacy of criticism in contemporary culture study. There is no denying that some scholars have already consciously adopted critical and positivistic approaches in mass culture study; however, due to the restriction of subject scope, we have not yet established specific cultural study subject, and most researchers only combine the two subjects, literature and communication, to get a blended and encompassing view on cultural study. Generally critical approach is preferably adopted in literature study, but that is often without support of experience; in the communication field, impacted by the great popularity of positivism, researches demonstrate a more significant preference of positivistic approach in cultural study, and the opposition between positivism and criticism as formed by human division will continue to exist in the long term. That is a rigid separation of research approaches for humanities; what’s worse, it deprives cultural study of the comprehensive assessment from perspectives of literature, philosophy, communication, sociology and psychology. Apart from that, we do not further pay enough attention to positivism and criticism in mass culture study. Both sociology of science and knowledge sociology included the value factors of culture into consideration, which is also necessary for the existence and development of humanities; therefore, obviously mass culture, with its great significance has exerted a huge impact on society and thus is an unavoidable cultural theme of this era. In a word, this paper is aimed at establishing a research perspective integrating positivism and criticism in mass culture study, which should also become the academic awareness of scholars in social sciences and humanities.