Page 48 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

What (is) political economy of the media? 27

industry complex formed part of a broader investigation of processes of dom-
ination. He was amongst the earliest theorists to assert that the entertainment
industry was a key site of elite domination and to connect that domination with
broader structures of political–economic power in contemporary capitalist
societies. Yet Adorno also brought a theory and valuation of aesthetics that
resulted in an account subsequently read and condemned as elitist, overly pessi-
mistic and ‘conservative’ by later writers in Marxist and critical cultural theory.
Adorno viewed the commercialised American culture of mass-entertainment and
consumption as instituting the same kinds of psychological dependency and
conformism realised under fascism. This work then occupies an ambivalent
position in critical media studies and its influence was also complex and uneven,
with key works such as the Culture Industry essay, from Dialektik der Aufklärung,
not published in English until 1977 (Babe 2009: 18). Culture has been thor-
oughly industrialised and commodified in a total system of standardisation, yet,
anticipating the emphasis on differentiation and segmentation in late twentieth
century media, Adorno and Horkheimer (1997: 123) see the emergence of
market stratification:

Something is provided for all so that none may escape … The public is catered
for with a hierarchical range of mass-produced products of varying quality,
thus advancing the rule of complete quantification. Everybody must behave
(as if spontaneously) in accordance with his previously determined and
indexed level, and choose the category of mass product turned out for his type.

For Adorno artistic expression (‘high art’) was capable of serving critique
through ‘negative knowledge’. The culture industry collapses together both high
and low art, generating a system that produces commodities for profit, sustains
conformist art and hinders individuals from coming to critical consciousness,
substituting pseudo-individuality and co-option for freedom. Adorno and
Horkheimer’s perspective was notoriously bleak and totalistic, despite its affir-
mation of a resistant criticality. Media culture manipulated and acculturated
mass audiences into obedience (Kellner 2009: 9). Yet Adorno’s work requires a
sophisticated reading which textbook narratives have unjustly caricatured,
including its rich, sardonic humour and effort to pursue ‘negative dialectics’ (see
Peters 2002; Jay 1996). For the ‘Western Marxist’ Adorno the optimistic Marxist
teleology of the inevitable triumph of the proletariat over the capitalist class had
been replaced by a bleaker account of elite domination and control, yet via
Freud, Adorno sees ongoing conflict generated between the repressive demands
of the system and the individual’s psychological needs and drives.
British scholars Graham Murdock and Peter Golding (1977) drew on the
Frankfurt School’s work in their efforts to develop a critical theory of mass
communications. Yet, while they applauded the Frankfurt School’sefforts to
trace the roots of cultural domination in the economic dynamics of the ‘culture
industry’ they criticised the tendency ‘to assert that the capitalist base of the