Page 29 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

18 Chapter One

ORIGINS OF CRITICAL POLITICAL ECONOMY OF MEDIA

Within critical political economy of media, there are two major approaches
(see figure 1.1). One stems from Marxism, with Theodor W. Adorno
(1903–1969) of the Frankfurt School, I argue here, being foundational. A
virtue of Adorno’s approach to media studies is that it fully integrates critical
political economy and cultural studies.
Adorno, however, is seldom identified as an inaugurator of critical politi-
cal economy of media. There are likely three main reasons for this neglect.
First, Adorno is (justifiably) associated more with the arts and humanities
than with the social sciences. He was, after all, a musician, a musicologist, a
philosopher, and an aesthete; he ruminated on Beethoven, Wagner,
Kierkegaard, Spengler, Nietzsche, Hegel, jazz, and the philosophy of music.
Hence, he is associated more with cultural studies than political economy, and
indeed is celebrated, with others of the Frankfurt School, as a founder of cul-
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tural studies. In terms of volume, if not necessarily importance, his writings
on aesthetics do indeed dwarf his contributions to political economy. Second,
Adorno’s most renowned essay on the political economy of media, namely
“The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” is a chapter in a
book (Dialectic of Enlightenment, coauthored with Max Horkheimer) dedi-
cated to critiquing instrumental reason. Unfolding the political economy of
media in that book was but a means to a larger end. Third, both the essay and
the book, although written in California, were initially published in German
(1947, with a mimeographed version circulating in 1944); the essay was not
published in English until 1972.
This is not so say, however, that Adorno was without influence with regard
to a nascent literature on the political economy of media. His essay, “The
Stars Come Down to Earth,” on the astrology column of the Los Angeles
Times, was written in English in 1952–1953, and it draws repeated connec-
tions to the larger and more general outputs of the culture industry. Adorno’s
editor, J. M. Bernstein, proposed that “most of the central tenets of his theory
of the culture industry” were formulated in his earlier essay of 1938, “On the
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Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening.” It was noted
previously that Lazarsfeld had Adorno and Horkheimer firmly in mind when
distinguishing in 1941 between administrative and critical media studies.
George Gerbner, C. Wright Mills, and others were likewise influenced by
Horkheimer and Adorno.
But initial influence aside (and after all, the essential point here is that
Adorno was not and is not influential enough!), it is indisputably a fact that
Adorno (with Horkheimer) invented the analytical construct, the culture in-
dustry, and did so to help describe and investigate the consequences of mass