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Genealogy of Cultural Studies 87

logical rationale is the rationale of domination itself.” 158 Williams certainly
agreed that technological innovation is undertaken with the intent of extend-
ing and deepening control for those with the capacity to innovate, but he also
emphasized that technological innovations usually have unforeseen and unin-
tended consequences, some of which may be to challenge existing power. He
was also less pessimistic than Adorno in that he felt newer media (such as the
cinema) could actually increase the creative capacity of artists. That having
been said, the essential point remains that both Adorno and Williams empha-
sized that technological innovation often further empowers the already pow-
erful, and hence can be quite undemocratic.
Adorno and Williams also were alike in insisting that one cannot properly
understand or describe culture without affording prominence to political-
economic factors. Although Williams explicitly repudiated the base/super-
structure model whereby the economic system is generally held to “deter-
mine” (in the hard sense) the cultural, cognitive, or symbolic sphere, like
Adorno he maintained that in capitalist societies the economic sphere exerts
decisive control over the production of culture. Adorno, Hoggart, and
Williams all maintained, however, that people do resist the “realities” pre-
sented by commercial media on account of the manifest inconsistencies with
their experiences and conditions.
Like Adorno, Horkheimer, and Innis, Williams critiqued scientific (or “in-
strumental”) reason. For Adorno, instrumental reason destroys value and
meaning, results in alienation or anomie, and is a prime source of elite power.
For Williams, science is false in claiming objectivity or value-neutrality and
is used primarily to strengthen the elite.
Adorno, Hoggart, and Williams had much to say about the “mass.” Adorno
claimed that labor had essentially melded with the bourgeoisie to form a new
mass class, which was in conflict with the elite class. For Williams, to the
contrary, the mass was not a class at all, but merely an aggregation of self-
interested individuals bereft of a sense of solidarity. Whereas Adorno saw
class conflict continuing at a new level (between elite and mass), Williams
saw the advent of the mass as an elite strategy to deprive common people of
their group identity; elite success in this regard had stopped the long revolu-
tion in its tracks, and major tools in the hands of the elite to propagate the no-
tion of the mass were the mass media. Williams undoubtedly agreed with
Adorno, however, that the interests of common people are generally contrary
to those of the ruling elite. Hoggart was closer to Williams than Adorno in his
understanding of the mass, as he viewed the emerging mass culture as pro-
moted particularly by commercial television as a “soft mass-hedonism” dis-
placing class consciousness. An associated aspect of this new mass culture
was the “temptation to live in a constant present.”