Page 34 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

Genealogy of Political Economy 23

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would ever possess.” Members of the Frankfurt School, in contrast, almost
to the man, were sons of well-to-do European Jewish businessmen (in
Adorno’s case, only one parent was Jewish) who fled German fascism in the
1930s for the United States. In their writings, they often forsook praxis in the
name of theoretical “purity.” According to Martin Jay, Adorno and his coau-
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thor Max Horkheimer combined “a rigorous philosophical mind with a sensi-
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bility more aesthetic than scientific.” Nor did Adorno ever abandon “his cul-
tural elitism,” 59 and “despite the fervent expressions of solidarity with the
proletariat . . . at no time did [Adorno or other members] of the Institut affect
the life-style of the working class.” 60
What the Frankfurt scholars did share with Innis, though, and evidently de-
cisively so, even at the height of their renown, was a lingering sense of mar-
ginality, a condition that might be termed that of the “insider-outsider.” 61
Thorstein Veblen, himself a classic example, described that condition as it ap-
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plied to Jewish intellectuals. Innis, too, however, was resolutely an outsider,
even when acknowledged at the highest echelons of Canadian, if not indeed
international, scholarship. He was a lifelong dissenter who railed against con-
centrations of power, the mechanization of knowledge, and the totalitarian na-
ture of “our way of life.”
Another plausible candidate for point of origin of critical political econ-
omy of media is the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where
Dallas W. Smythe in 1948–1949 began teaching the first course in the
United States on the political economy of communication. 63 Initially
(early-to-mid-1950s), Smythe’s focus in his published work, however, was
confined to content analyses of commercial television programming as un-
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dertaken for the National Association of Educational Broadcasters. While
radical for the time (this was the McCarthy era, after all), this research did
not approach the scope or the radical critique of his later writings, the turn-
ing point undoubtedly being his 1957 monograph, The Structure and Pol-
icy of Electronic Communication. Smythe’s seminal article, “On the Polit-
ical Economy of Communications,” appeared in 1960, and his book on the
political economy of media, Dependency Road, in 1981, many years after
he had left Illinois for the University of Saskatchewan at Regina. Several
of the major constructs developed in Dependency Road—the “conscious-
ness industry,” 65 the commodification of culture, audience-as-commodity,
the consumption of entertainment as extended work time, conflicts be-
tween individual psychological needs and requirements of the socio-eco-
nomic system—are anticipated in Horkheimer and Adorno’s work of the
late 1930s and 1940s. While Smythe without doubt made immense contri-
butions to the political economy of communication, in terms of beginnings
stronger cases can be made for both Adorno and Innis.