A Study About The Critical Theory Of Consumer Culture In The Early Frankfurt School

The Early Frankfurt school is one of the most important schools of Western Marxism,and the critical theory of consumer culture was an important part of the critical theory of the school's culture.The early Frankfurt School's critical theory of consumer culture was gradually formed on the basis of Horkheimer,Adorno,Marcuse and Fromm,which were based on the historical tradition and reality,and adopting the research method of interdisciplinary integration.The early Frankfurt school was a research group composed of many theorists with different personalities,but the academic theme of opposing capitalist rule through the criticism of theory remained unchanged.Horkheimer and Adorno thought that although Enlightenment rationality opposes myth,it leads itself to "myth".When Enlightenment rationality penetrates into cultural production,it forms a cultural industry.In this cultural industry,people's consumption is single and blind,consumption becomes the means of the ruling class to deceive and deceive the public.People's personality,subjectivity and even human emotions are all lost in this kind of cultural industry.Marcuse believes that consumption is a kind of alienated consumption in the developed industrial society,and the repressed psychological mechanism is the internal mechanism of the consumption problem,the depressive psychological mechanism is the internal mechanism of consumption problems,and the one-way living mode of human is the prominent manifestation of the alienated consumption.Such a society is a one-way consumption society.Fromm pays attention to the analysis of the individual's psychological and character structure generation process,thinks that alienation has been generalized to all aspects of human life,the consumption has now become the purpose of human itself which should be to achieve human happiness.The external performance of human beings is greedy consumption machine,while the deep inside is actually an alienated cultural mode.The early Frankfurt School's critical theory of consumer culture is profound,but it is not universal.Their consumption culture critical theory is not only a kind of multidimensionalview,close to reality,with the cultural critique of humanistic concern,but because the main theorists of this school highly promote elite culture,excessive devaluing their independence,adopted romanticism totally negative position,this school theory is a kind of one-sided rational criticism,put forward to save consumption solution existence reality.