Page 41 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

30 Chapter One

Adorno wrote also of “servile intellectuals” 116 who downplay the control
aspects of the culture industry and celebrate instead its fun and democratic
veneer. Uses and gratifications theorists, for example, insist that audiences,
not media companies, are in control as audiences purportedly select from a
vast array of media offerings in accordance with their pre-existing needs and
preferences (the doctrine of consumer sovereignty). One such “need” is to be
entertained, and we just saw Adorno’s riposte to that. Another is to perceive
order or pattern to an otherwise chaotic existence. Adorno acknowledged that
need, too, but claimed the media’s covert response is to inculcate ideology.
He explained:

The concepts of order which it [the culture industry] hammers into human be-
ings are always those of the status quo. They remain unquestioned, unanalysed
and undialectically presupposed. . . . The power of the culture industry’s ideol-
ogy is such that conformity has replaced consciousness. 117

In the face of all this, Adorno contended, the public remains largely placid.
Although not unaware of the deceptions inherent in the proffers of the culture
industry, he suggested, people tend to view the fleeting gratifications as ade-
quate compensation. 118 On the other hand, as noted previously, he also claimed
that people’s “deep unconscious mistrust” keeps them from construing the
world entirely in accordance with the culture industry’s representations. 119

Instrumental Reason
Equally problematic, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, is the instrumen-
tal reason of western culture generally and of modern science in particular.
Whereas philosophical convention since the Enlightenment has counter-
posed reason and domination, due to reason’s capacity to undermine dogma
and superstition, Adorno maintained that reason itself is thoroughly entangled
with domination—not just of nature, as Francis Bacon had proposed, but also
of other people, and even of the self:

Knowledge, which is power, knows no obstacles: neither in the enslavement of
men nor in compliance with the world’s rulers. . . . What men want to learn from
nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men. 120

At this point Adorno again turned to Freudian psychoanalytical theory. The
Enlightenment’s insistence on the rule of reason, he attested, leads to the re-
pression of all sorts of irrational drives, desires, fears, instincts, and sensory
experiences. Horkheimer and Adorno drew on the myth of Odysseus to illus-
trate the conflicted human condition in the age of Enlightenment. 121 The cul-