Page 42 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

Genealogy of Political Economy 31

ture industry is, of course, well aware of repressions, and uses this knowledge
to exact compliance on the part of audiences.
Adorno and Horkheimer also associated the Enlightenment with the rise of
selfish individualism, at the expense of solidarity and community, a tendency
most certainly played upon and amplified by the commercial media. “Who-
ever resigns himself to life without any reference to self-preservation,” they
remarked, “would, according to the Enlightenment . . . regress to prehistory
[i.e., to mythic consciousness].” 122 For Adorno, Spinoza’s dictum—the drive
to self-preservation is the primary virtue—was the cardinal rule of Enlight-
enment morality.
Adorno and Horkheimer insisted also that Enlightenment rationality erodes
meaning, as formula (algorithm) substitutes for concept. 123 Moreover, the
“Enlightenment has put aside the classical requirement of thinking about
thought. . . . Mathematical procedure became, so to speak, the ritual of think-
ing.” 124 This is most unfortunate as reflexivity for Adorno should be an im-
portant aspect of scholarship. Contemporary science and reason, then, for
Adorno and Horkheimer, are hardly roads to emancipation. But, unfortu-
nately, in the age of capitalism, neither are the arts, for reasons noted earlier.
As we will see shortly, Harold Innis shared Adorno’s distrust of the En-
lightenment. Ironically, that same distrust characterizes, indeed motivates,
poststructuralists. It is not this overriding concern with regard to the Enlight-
enment, then, that separates the founding political economists from post-
structuralists; rather, as we shall see, it is their dichotomous responses.

Essentials of a Critical Political Economy

Contained in these brief excerpts and summaries are some of the fundamen-
tals for critical political economy of media and culture. These fundamentals
include: the claim of marked asymmetries in the distribution of communica-
tory power; an emphasis on the oppression, manipulation, and control
through media by an elite; the notion of domination of media as a prerequi-
site to attaining and maintaining political-economic power; media as devices
for influencing if not controlling consciousness and limiting resistance; eco-
nomic power as affecting cultural production, including both scholarship and
commercial culture; transformations wrought by commodification (exchange
value suppressing use value); critique of science, technology, and instrumen-
tal reason; creative arts as a possible but waning key to critical understand-
ing; emphasis on the social totality; and the importance of contradiction, re-
flexivity, and dialectics.
The role of dialectics in Adorno’s political economy deserves particular
emphasis. As noted above, Adorno maintained that historically, prior to the