Frankfurt and the television. Premise of a utopian use of the mass media

Adorno’s criticism of the culture industry and his repeated attacks upon television have fostered the image of a Critical theory hostile to mass media. It is this very hostility Hans Magnus Enzensberger tries to override in his famous article “Constituents of a Theory of the Media” (1970). In this essay, the writer and Marxist thinker develops a plea for a utopian transformation of television “from inside” which will lay the groundwork of the militant video movement in Germany in the 1970’s. At the same time, Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt make a similar suggestion by putting forward their notion of “oppositional public sphere” and asserting that a political revolt always relies upon modes of expression used by the capitalist opponent. Summed up this way, the intellectual history of the relationship between Critical theory and television stresses the picture of an Adorno hostile to the mass media. This picture has to be questioned by a closer reading of several late essays in which Adorno seems to believe in the educational virtues and the critical potentialities of a media capable of turning a society marked by the death of the critical subject upside down.