Page 53 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

42 Chapter One

• Erosion of meaning. Innis declared: “The essence of living in the moment
and for the moment is to banish all individual continuity.” 210
• Secular totalitarianism. Innis wrote: “The disappearance of time monopo-
lies facilitated the rapid extension of control by the state and the develop-
ment of new religions evident in fascism, communism, and our way of
life.” 211

In Innis’ view, then, popular culture and science, the vernacular and the
scholarly, are usually cut from the same cloth, more often than not reinforc-
ing one another, emphasizing the present to the neglect of time as duration
and as a sense of the future. There being little or no contradiction between
scholarship and popular culture in this regard, they comprise in combination
the monopoly of knowledge of our day. Together they serve military and
commercial force, and in Innis’ terms, drive out understanding.

INNIS, ADORNO, AND
CRITICAL POLITICAL ECONOMY OF MEDIA

It is unlikely that Innis, who died in 1952, was familiar with the work of
Adorno, and even less likely that Adorno was familiar with that of Innis.
Nonetheless, striking parallels abound. By identifying some of the common
elements, the essentials of a critical political economy of media become man-
ifest. Judith Stamps was perhaps the first to suggest affinities between Innis
and Adorno. 212
To begin, both writers adopted materialist perspectives on media and cul-
ture. Running through Innis’ writings, from his staples thesis to medium the-
ory, is the conviction that material environments affect cultures, including
thought systems and social organization, and that these in turn reshape mate-
rial environments. In contrast to Innis, Adorno’s political economy concerned
mainly contemporary mass media. Nonetheless, Adorno’s analysis is equally
materialist. Like Innis, Adorno maintained that media are inextricably entan-
gled with structures of political-economic power. For Adorno, the culture in-
dustry manufactures and distributes its commodities to integrate the masses
into capitalist-consumer society, a contention with which Innis, when focus-
ing on contemporary media, was in full agreement. For both scholars, the ex-
ercise of political and economic power requires control of culture, which is to
say control over the means of communication, a control which both writers
attested is never absolute.
Adorno and Innis were both dialectical writers. One manifestation pertains
to their analyses of class. Although Adorno abandoned the Marxist division