Page 40 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

Genealogy of Political Economy 29

one of several portals whereby Adorno introduced Freudian categories into
his analysis. Whereas layers of meaning are used by the culture industry to
“handle” audiences, multiplicity of meanings also implies that the culture in-
dustry can never take for granted the effects intended for audiences. 110
Matters for Adorno, however, are yet more complex. For example, whereas
“heterodox ideology” is often used by the culture industry to attract interest,
in the end orthodoxies are invariably promoted. Often the more sensational-
ist a newspaper is, for example, the more conservative its orientation. Adorno
remarked that tabloid newspapers often use excesses to attract circulation, but
in the end affirm a conventional “moral of the story.” 111 Likewise, many fea-
ture films today contain “excesses” to attract audience interest, but in the end
they support existing distributions of political and economic power (Pearl
Harbor, Armageddon, and Independence Day, for example). It is also likely,
however, that a critical cinema is much more evident in our day than it was
in Adorno’s—Fahrenheit 911, The Corporation, Blood Diamond, Syriana,
and Manufacturing Consent being prime examples.

Political Economy of Art and Knowledge

While cultural monopolies may appear to be strong, according to Adorno and
Horkheimer, in fact they are weak: they “cannot afford to neglect their ap-
peasement of the real holders of power if their sphere of activity in mass
society . . . is not to undergo a series of purges.” 112 The authors here may have
had in mind purges against critical artists in Nazi Germany (Bertoldt Brecht,
Fritz Lang, the Berlin Dadaists and Expressionists, for instance), but closer to
home they became only too familiar with American intolerance during the
Red Scare of the 1950s and beyond.
In addition to political/military repressions and pressures, of course,
there are also the corporations—what Raymond Williams termed “extra-
parliamentary formations of political and economic power,” 113 which in-
clude the great financial institutions and transnational corporations. In-
deed, Horkheimer and Adorno provided a rudimentary description of the
entanglement of cultural monopolies and larger political-economic struc-
tures: “The dependence of the most powerful broadcasting company
[NBC] on the electrical industry [GE], or of the motion picture industry on
the banks, is characteristic of the whole sphere, whose individual branches
are themselves economically interwoven.” 114 In making these claims
Horkheimer and Adorno were prescient, as one of the major activities of
present day critical political economy is mapping lines of control over con-
centrated media by advertisers and large industrial structures, by the mili-
tary, and by governments. 115