Study On The Modernity Standpoint Of Frankfurt School’s Mass Culture Theory

The booming mass culture is an attractive cultural phenomenon in contemporary society.When the masses enter the cultural life,the most critical problem is how to make the right choice among the cultural products with different quality.The significance and function of mass culture has also attracted more and more attention in the academic world.Mass culture originated from western developed countries,and the Frankfurt school’s theory of mass culture is an indispensable part of many cultural research thoughts.This paper aims to make a comprehensive analysis and interpretation of Frankfurt school’s theory of mass culture from the standpoint of historical materialism.As the main school in the Western Marxist camp,the theorists of the Frankfurt School found the cultural crisis in German society under fascist totalitarianism and American society monopolized by mass cultural phenomena.Inheriting Marx ’s alienation theory,Lukacs’ materialization theory,Gramsci’s cultural hegemony thought and Freud’s psychoanalysis,The Frankfurt School began its exploration of popular culture and founded the popular culture theory represented by Horkheimer and Adorno.The Frankfurt School has always taken popular culture as the main research object of the institute,but members within the school have reached different conclusions about popular culture.Habermas believes that the theorists of the Early Frankfurt school lack the standard of evaluation for the exploration of mass culture,so he completed the modernization reconstruction of mass culture theory start from the "life world" and base on the "ideal communication situation".But at the same time,Habermas also pointed out that modernity is still the direction of human development and is being designed.Although the Frankfurt school’s theory of mass culture has deficiencies in pessimism and elitism,it can’t erase its theoretical value.The current cultural construction should draw nourishment from the theory of Frankfurt school so as to better promote the construction and research of socialist culture in China.