The Frankfurt School presented a postmodern critical theory based on the critique of the systems that dominate Western culture and the undermining of bourgeois consumerist capitalist culture, to change society, ridding man of his alienation and of its reification and of achieving human liberation.
The cultural industry is a major theme in the work of the Frankfurt School. Horkheimer and Adorno presented it for the first time in their article under the title: The Culture Industry, the lights deceive the masses. Through this article, the two writers showed how capitalist ideology uses culture in its various manifestations, by linking it to industry, to impose its domination on the individual and re-educate them by stereotyping the thinking of individuals and accustoming them to conform to dominant ways of thinking, and thus transferring them from a state of relative freedom to pleasant slavery.
With this theory and its concepts, the Frankfurt School paved the way for a new criticism that went beyond aesthetic and artistic literary criticism of texts and was concerned with examining discourses to uncover cultural patterns hidden in the cultural subconscious hidden behind the aesthetic cover and pleading with the aesthetic to pass on their permanence.