Page 30 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

Genealogy of Political Economy 19

producing culture for purposes of profit. As Andrew Fagan notes, Adorno was
likely the first to identify the entertainment industry as a major site of elite
domination within contemporary capitalist societies, and first to connect that
domination with broader structures of political-economic power. 39 Adorno
himself, years later, affirmed that the term culture industry likely was used for
the first time in The Dialectic of Enlightenment. In brief, Adorno inaugu-
40
rated political economy studies of media.
Deborah Cook concurs: “Adorno’s attempt [was] to develop one of the first
critiques of the political economy of the culture industry using Marx’s ideas
41
about capitalist modes of production and the commodity form.” Cook char-
acterizes Adorno’s culture industry as being “geared to profit-making, con-
trolled by centralized interlocking corporations, and staffed with marketing
and financial experts, management, and production teams, technicians, ‘star’
reporters, writers, actors, musicians, and other creative talent.” 42
J. M. Bernstein, who compiled several of Adorno’s essays on the culture in-
dustry into a book, described culture industry this way: “The culture industry,
which involves the production of works for reproduction and mass consumption,
thereby organizing ‘free’ time, the remnant domain of freedom under capital in
accordance with the same principles of exchange and equivalence that reign in
the sphere of production outside leisure, presents culture and the realization of
the right of all to the gratification of desire while in reality continuing the nega-
43
tive integration of society.” Why “negative integration”? Because the culture
industry effects a series of falsifications: pseudo-individuality replaces individu-
ality, pleasure is confused with happiness, consensus is mistaken for freedom. 44
Adorno understood commercial mass media as inculcating and reinforcing ten-
dencies of psychological dependence and social conformity.
Although certainly inspired by Marxism, and today still generally considered
45
a Marxist, in the present book I refer to Adorno as “neo-Marxist”—due to his
heightened attention to the symbolic or cognitive superstructure, to his aban-
doning such basic tenets as class warfare between capital and labor to focus in-
stead on elite-mass conflicts, and to his denial of the doctrine of inevitable
progress through the working out of the materialist dialectic. For Adorno, the
fulfillment of capitalism was not socialism or communism, but fascism, since
fascism “continued reason’s work of domination through integration and unifi-
46
cation.” As noted by Stephen Crook, “Adorno saw the commodified American
culture of mass-consumption, movies, jazz and radio serials as putting into play
the same basic psychodynamic principles that formed the basis of fascism: psy-
47
chological dependency and social conformism.” If some contemporary critical
political economists have reverted to a more “vulgar” Marxism since the time of
Adorno, that does not gainsay the point that at this point of origin (Adorno-
Horkheimer), critical political economy of media was “neo-Marxist.”