Critical theory is a field of intellectual endeavour announced by Max Horkheimer at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, of which he was the Director, in 1937. Owing to the importance of this centre and publications arising from it to the movement, critical theory is also known as the Frankfurt School.
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As Bertolt Brecht remarked, recorded in conversation with Walter Benjamin (p.97): “There can’t be any doubt about it any longer: ‘the struggle against ideology has become a new ideology.’” This struggle has continued until the twenty-first century and does not seem likely to be resolved any time soon. In the realm of aesthetics, it is most commonly witnessed as the struggle between art which is committed and art which is aimed at pleasing the masses (and which is often mischaracterized as high-brow versus low-brow art).
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As a refugee from Nazi Germany, Theodor Adorno was well aware of the evils of fascism–the emergence of which is an indication, as Walter Benjamin observed, of a failed revolution. That the revolution seemed further away than ever, of course, did not make the analysis of society that called for it invalid and neither did it make the alternative, the capitalist system, any more palatable. Attention turned towards other aspects of society and how it was being affected by what had become known as “late capitalism”–that is, so to speak, the kind of capitalism that had emerged after the revolution had failed to materialize around the world.
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The conceit underlying the TV series Dollhouse, which has recently been meandering to the end of its second and final season, is that the rich and well-connected can obtain access to an individual who is perfectly matched to their requirements. Owing to some form of not terribly well described technology, it is possible to reprogram the ‘actives’ or human puppets into whatever form is desired and can be envisaged
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