Page 93 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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78 Then
confronted in America by a mediascape whose centre was occupied
by radio. This was radio’s ‘golden age’. It was woven into the fabric
of everyday life, a source of instruction, entertainment and informa-
tion, metonymically captured in the image of nuclear family gath-
ered around the wireless. During his residence in America, Adorno
became involved in the Princeton Radio Project, headed by Paul
Lazarsfeld, which attempted to quantify through empirical research
the role of radio in society. Adorno’s treatment of radio was,
however, little influenced by empirical research. Instead he saw in it
a confirmation of his already established theory of the culture
industry (Witkin 2002: 177). The Dialectic of Enlightenment presented
radio as the realization of the general logic of the culture industry:
as a ‘progressive latecomer of mass culture’ radio drew ‘all the
consequences at present denied the film by its pseudomarket’,
consequently ‘it is a private enterprise which does really reflect the
sovereign whole and is therefore some distance ahead of the
individual combines. In America it collects no fees from the public,
and so has acquired the illusory form of disinterested, unbiased
authority which suits fascism admirably’ (Adorno and Horkheimer
1997: 159).
Adorno and Horkheimer argued that radio’s development as a
medium reflected the culture industry’s systemic nature. Moreover, it
was not that radio having been realized as a medium then came to
serve the dictates of an already established industry. Instead, the
evolution of radio as a technical medium was steered by the industry
that would utilize it; in particular, the clear separation of transmis-
sion and reception:
The step from the telephone to the radio has clearly distin-
guished the roles. The former still allowed the subscriber to
play the role of subject, and was liberal. The latter is demo-
cratic: it turns all participants into listeners and authoritatively
subjects them to broadcast programs which are all exactly the
same. No machinery of rejoinder has been devised, and private
broadcasters are denied any freedom. They are confined to the
apocryphal field of the ‘amateur,’ and also have to accept
organisation from above.
(Adorno 1991: 121)
In this fashion radio become a medium ideally structured to create
and maintain the passive consumer who would sit and receive both
explicit (political broadcasts and official statements) and implicit
instruction from the wireless. Indeed, radio’s fusion of intimacy (its
sensuous contact with interiority of the subject) and authority (its
voice issues from technology itself like some deus ex machina)
ensured it an unprecedented capacity for control. As Adorno and
Horkheimer put it: ‘the inherent tendency of radio is to make the

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