Page 63 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

52 Chapter One

82. Adorno, “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening”
(1938; reprint, The Culture Industry, by Theodor Adorno, edited with an Introduction
by J. M. Bernstein, London: Routledge, 1991), 26.
83. Adorno, “On the Fetish Character in Music,” 28–29.
84. Adorno, “On the Fetish Character in Music,” 27.
85. Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” 85.
86. Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” 85; Adorno, “On the Fetish Char-
acter in Music,” 31.
87. Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” 90.
88. Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” 85; and Horkheimer and Adorno,
Dialectic of Enlightenment, 132
89. Benjamin Ginsberg, The Captive Public: How Mass Opinion Promotes State
Power (New York: Basic Books, 1986).
90. Theodor Adorno, “The Stars Down to Earth.”
91. J. M. Bernstein, “Introduction,” 12.
92. J. M. Bernstein, “Introduction,” 14.
93. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 122.
94. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 121; emphasis added.
95. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 144.
96. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 126.
97. Adorno, “Free Time.” 170.
98. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Fox, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitch-
man (New York: Semiotext [e], 1983), 7.
99. Although in The Truman Show, for example, the protagonist eventually exits
his simulated world and the author of that world is identified, it is also the case that
in the movie the television audience lived Truman’s activities vicariously, making
their situation likewise a simulation (as do the viewers of the movie). In the case of
Last Year at Marienbad, the distinction between fact and fancy is never made clear;
the movie presents contradictions all of which seem equally true. The Purple Rose of
Cairo deals with parallel universes that temporarily merge, one of which consists of
a cast of characters in a movie within the movie and the other populated by “real”
people. On the other hand, as Edward Comor has pointed out to me, the film Memento
could be understood as a critique of poststructuralism since the main character must
write down everything in order to remember, and these little scraps of “memory”
thereby become devoid of context, continuity, and meaning. Arguably TV news, too,
helps spread this poststructuralist mindset through constant revision of previously
hyped stories, such as the eventual repudiation of the tearful claim that incubator ba-
bies had been thrown onto hospital floors by Iraqi troops, the Jessica Lynch im-
broglio, and of course media support and then denunciation of the deceitful “weapons
of mass destruction” campaign. See, for example, Paul Rutherford, Weapons of Mass
Persuasion: Marketing the War Against Iraq (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2004); John R. MacArthur, Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991
Gulf War, Foreword by Ben H. Bagdikian (Berkley, CA: University of California
Press, 2004); Eric Alterman, “Afterword: ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom,” in What Liberal
Media? The Truth About Bias and the News (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 268–92.