Page 56 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

Genealogy of Political Economy 45

ample, the reintegration of political economy and moral philosophy—a reso-
lution of Adam Smith’s previously discussed “mistake.” 218 Innis also believed
that local and regional histories should serve to qualify abstractions and ab-
stract social “laws” posited by mechanized social science, a recommendation
with which Adorno could agree since for him awareness of lived experience
is one of the best protections against elite indoctrination. For Adorno, too,
instrumental/abstract reason was to be counterbalanced by the critical arts and
scholarship, by authentic popular culture, and by what Lazarsfeld termed
enduring “human values.” (By contrast, Lawrence Grossberg, representing
poststructuralist cultural studies in the Colloquy, insisted that we must aban-
don dialectical thinking altogether, to instead focus on “articulations,” “de-
articulations,” and “re-articulations.” Articulation is addressed in chapters 2
and 3. Poststructuralist Mark Poster, who is compared with Innis in chapter 8
of this book, likewise rejects dialectical thinking).
The indebtedness of Innis and Adorno to the classics is found not only in
their reflexivity (their thinking about thinking), in their dialectical mode of
analysis, and in their critical understanding of knowledge as power and
knowledge vs. power, but also in their literary allusions: Innis cited the flight
of Minerva’s owl and, of course, made detailed references to ancient civiliza-
tions; Adorno-Horkheimer made extended metaphorical reference to
Odysseus steering a midcourse between Scylla and Charybdis. 219 In the pres-
ent book, scholars are urged to set a course between the Scylla of an undue
determinism characteristic of fundamentalist or “vulgar” political economy
and the Charybdis of overextended linguistic-interpretative analyses charac-
teristic of poststructuralism.
Both writers were at least implicitly influenced by Freud. Both saw media
as entering subconscious regions of their audiences’ minds to exert influence.
Both authors, consequently, set about warning the public of these nefarious
practices.
Finally, neither writer adopted a position of inevitable progress through
technological change. Adorno wrote famously, “No universal history leads
from savagery to humanity, but one indeed from the slingshot to the H-bomb;
it culminates in the total threat of organized humanity against organized hu-
man beings, in the epitome of discontinuity.” 220 Innis, too, toward the end of
his life, became quite apocalyptic, declaring for example: “The conditions of
freedom of thought are in danger of being destroyed by science, technology,
and the mechanization of knowledge, and with them, Western civilization.” 221
But these unquestionably pessimistic thoughts ought not to obscure these
writers’ optimism. Adorno stated explicitly that his goal as an author was
to shine light upon the hidden operations of the culture industry in order
that people could more ably defend themselves against its machinations. A