Page 62 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

Genealogy of Political Economy 51

throughout: “What is the relationship between power and rationality? Can there ever
be a kind of thinking which does not live off the suffering of others?” Simon Jarvis,
Adorno: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 1–2.
69. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New
York: Continuum, 1991), 120; (originally published in German in 1944). Statements
of this sort have attracted critique. J. M. Bernstein suggests, for example, that Adorno
overemphasized the culture industry’s goal of homogenization. J. M. Bernstein, “In-
troduction,” 23. See also, Douglas Kellner, “Critical Theory and the Culture Indus-
tries: A Reassessment,” Telos 62 (1984–1985): 196–206.
70. The terms postmodern and poststructural will be used throughout this book al-
most interchangeably. However, while agreeing there is significant overlap, Ben Ag-
ger distinguishes between them, writing: “Poststructuralism (Derrida, the French fem-
inists) is a theory of knowledge and language, whereas postmodernism (Foucault,
Barthes, Lyotard, Baudrillard) is a theory of society, culture, and history.” Agger at-
tributes the advent of poststructuralism to Jacques Derrida and his deconstructionist
claim that “language produces meaning only with reference to other meanings against
which it takes on its own significance; thus, we can never establish stable meanings
by attempting correspondence between language and the world addressed by lan-
guage.” We are destined, in other words, “to remain locked up in the prison house of
language.” Agger traces postmodernism, on the other hand, to Jean-François Ly-
otard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1984). There, Lyotard
rejected totalizing perspectives on history and society (“grand narratives”). Lyotard
maintained that “one cannot tell large stories about the world but only small stories
from the heterogeneous ‘subject positions’ of individuals and plural social groups.”
See Ben Agger, “Critical Theory, Poststructuralism, Postmodernism: Their Sociolog-
ical Relevance,” Annual Review of Sociology 17 (1991) www.uta.edu/huma/illumina-
tions/agger2.htm (accessed June 10, 2008).
71. Grant McCracken, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Sym-
bolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington, IN: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1988).
72. Crook, “Introduction,” 35.
73. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 126.
74. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 85.
75. Adorno, quoted in Cook, The Culture Industry Revisited, 27.
76. Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change (Lon-
don: BBC, 1980), 66–80.
77. Horkheimer and Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, 131.
78. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 86.
79. Horkheimer and Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, 158. Horkheimer
and Adorno’s analyses of high art/low art are amplified and extended, under the terms
culture and entertainment, by Hannah Arendt in “The Crisis in Culture,” Between Past
and Future (1954; reprint, New York: Penguin, 2006), 194–222.
80. Cook, The Culture Industry Revisited, 3
81. Adorno, quoted in Cook, The Culture Industry Revisited, 3.