Page 35 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

24 Chapter One

ADORNO

Through their concept of the culture industry (that is, enterprises engaged in the
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mass production, reproduction, and distribution for profit of cultural artifacts ),
Adorno and Horkheimer laid the foundation for neo-Marxian analyses of media.
For these authors, to adequately understand culture, it is insufficient merely to
depict general relations between various cultural products (say, musical genres)
and social life. Rather, one needs to explore how cultural products help organize
society (allocate leisure time and promote passivity and conformity in audiences,
for example), and address in detail the production, reproduction, distribution, ex-
change, and consumption of cultural commodities. 67
In what follows, I summarize Adorno’s seminal contributions to a nascent
political economy of media. Some of his descriptions will seem dated, refer-
ring as they often do to media products of the 1940s and earlier, but the con-
nections he forged between cultural production and power remain as pertinent
as ever. The goal here is not to canvass the full corpus of Adorno’s work. 68
Nor is Adorno presented necessarily as an archetype for the entire Frankfurt
tradition. Rather, the point is simply that in formulating and forwarding the
culture industry as an important analytical category, Adorno (with
Horkheimer) helped introduce a Marxian-inspired political economy mode
of media analysis, major aspects of which were later elaborated by successor
political economists, and he did so in such a way as to integrate what are to-
day regarded as critical political economy and cultural studies.

Commodification of Culture

In his 1944 essay with Horkheimer entitled “The Culture Industry” (published
in English in 1977), and in articles compiled posthumously as a book bearing the
same title, Adorno claimed that cultural production had by then become an in-
dustrial process akin to other industrial processes. The “culture industry,” like
other industries, he proposed, produces and purveys commodities for profit in re-
sponse to market conditions, including revenues, costs, market structures, mar-
keting/advertising, competition, and so on. For Adorno, “Culture now impresses
the same stamp on everything; films, radio and magazines make up a system
which is uniform as a whole and in every part.” 69
Adorno is criticized these days for insisting that the culture industry pro-
duces sameness in cultural commodities. Postmodernists particularly point
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to the seemingly enormous range of cultural commodities from which indi-
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viduals can select to construct and reconstruct personal “identities.” How-
ever, as noted by Stephen Crook, using mass-produced commodities to con-
struct “identities” or “lifestyles” actually entails a good deal of conformity,