Page 38 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

Genealogy of Political Economy 27

As a means of promoting conformity, Adorno and Horkheimer remarked
that radio was clearly an advance over the telephone, as it turns “all partic-
ipants into listeners. . . . No machinery of rejoinder has been devised.” 93
(Since Adorno’s time, of course, talk radio—ostensibly a two-way forum—
has become the rage; arguably listeners who call in, however, are often lit-
tle more than sounding boards for the radio host.) For Adorno and
Horkheimer, technological innovations of all sorts, not just mass media,
deepen elite control over society: “A technological rationale is the rationale
of domination itself.” 94
Curtailing controversy by controlling discussion of basic issues is not the
only means whereby the culture industry strengthens the already powerful.
Also important is the diversionary function of entertainment. According to
Horkheimer and Adorno, in what might be seen as an unduly puritanical dec-
laration but one nonetheless pinpointing an important elite strategy and typi-
cal audience response:

Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even
where it is shown. Basically it is helplessness. It is flight; not, as is asserted,
flight from a wretched reality, but from the last remaining thought of resistance.
The liberation which amusement promises is freedom from thought and from
negation. 95
According to Adorno, the culture industry constructs reality for its audi-
ences. Referring to the movies of the 1940s but anticipating by decades the
enculturation studies of George Gerbner and colleagues (see chapter 4 in this
volume), Horkheimer and Adorno remarked on “the old experience of the
movie-goer, who sees the world outside as an extension of the film he has just
left. . . . The illusion [prevails] that the outside world is the straightforward
96
continuation of that presented on the screen.” Adorno later qualified these
remarks, writing:
What the culture industry presents people with in their free time . . . is indeed
consumed and accepted, but with a kind of reservation, in the same way that
even the most naïve theatre or filmgoers do not simply take what they behold
there for real. . . . It is not quite believed in. It is obvious that the integration of
consciousness and free time has not yet completely succeeded. 97

Regarding the more contemporary scene, a development, arguably, has
been the culture industry’s frequent depictions of poststructuralist positions:
for instance that artifice, simulation, or hyperreality are everywhere and are
virtually indistinguishable from the real, or have displaced the real. Such is
the common thread linking otherwise disparate movies like Last Year at