The Frankfurt School insisted culture never transcends society’s inadequacies

Evidence

If, as we have seen earlier, the Institut refused to fetishize economics or politics, it was equally reluctant to treat culture as a realm apart in society. Occasionally, this seemed to mean an almost reductionist analysis of art to a reflection of social trends, as when the Institut in one of its official histories wrote: “We interpret [art] as a kind of code language for processes taking place within society, which must be deciphered by means of critical analysis.” 20 Although generally less direct, the Institut was certainly at the opposite pole from the tradition of Geisteswissenschaften (cultural sciences) in Germany, which tended to treat intellectual history in a social vacuum. Members of the Institut never tired of attacking the opposition between culture as a superior sphere of human endeavor and material existence as a lesser aspect of man’s condition. The interrelationship between culture and society was such that the former never fully succeeded in transcending the inadequacies of the latter. Thus, Adorno praised Spengler for demonstrating “the way culture itself, as form and order, is in complicity with blind domination.” 21 And Benjamin stated baldly that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 543

Categorization

• XREF: Benjamin’s ‘document of civilization / document of barbarism’ is the canonical line the reader likely encountered via other critical theory sources; this ties the Institut’s aesthetics stance to that familiar quote.