Page 43 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

32 Chapter One

rise of the culture industry, tension or opposition between both high and low
culture on the one hand and established power on the other was continually
in play. In the contemporary period, although the dialectic of capital-labor
may have waned, class conflict—now between elite and mass—continues
apace. Despite the ubiquity and the seeming acceptance of the proffers of the
culture industry, the general public (the mass) possesses at least a latent ca-
pacity to see through the dissimulations and deceptions. Belief in this “un-
conscious distrust” is what motivated Adorno to “expose the socio-psycho-
logical implications and mechanisms [so that] the public at large may be
sensitized to the nefarious effect of some of these mechanisms.” 125 Borrow-
ing from Freud, Adorno insisted that each individual’s psychological needs
and drives are in fundamental conflict with the socio-economic order, that
while the culture industry both “solicits and represses the instincts” in order
to encourage conformity with the prevailing economic system, it can never
be fully successful. 126 Repression, of course, implies latent conflict. Indeed,
by his continual invocation of Freudian psychology, one might say that
Adorno’s analyses are riddled with conflict, which is to say dialectics. For
example, the pervasiveness of commodity exchange tends to transform peo-
ple’s interpersonal relations into relations between things, contradicting
deep-seated needs for meaningful interpersonal contact, if not indeed a sense
of community. 127
Perhaps most fundamentally, though, as Martin Jay suggests, the whole
Frankfurt enterprise was in fact dialectical in the sense of being “contrapun-
tal.” It opposed closed philosophical systems. It was “essentially open-
ended, probing, unfinished.” 128 Critical Theory consisted of “a series of cri-
tiques of other thinkers and philosophical traditions.” 129 In this section we
have reviewed Adorno’s oppositional (dialectical) stance toward classical
Marxism, instrumental reason, scientism and the Enlightenment, popular
culture, and the culture industry. The implication is that even Adorno’s own
analyses should be subject to critique, in accordance with the dynamism of
the dialectic.

INNIS AND MEDIUM THEORY 130

From the mid-1940s to the early 1950s, Canadian economic historian Harold
Adams Innis inaugurated a non-Marxist (institutionalist) stream of critical po-
litical economy within media studies. In fact, Innis made two exceptional
contributions to scholarship. In addition to medium theory, Innis was the ar-
chitect also of what is now known as the staples thesis of Canadian economic
development. I will address each, beginning with the staples thesis.