Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) and Dallas Smythe (1907–1992) were early expositors of critical political economy approaches to media and communication. Both are considered Marxists, however their Marxisms differed. Here I compare their analyses and methods, and tease out their differing trajectories – particularly regarding their principal constructs, respectively the culture industry and the Consciousness Industry.
Adorno was a German philosopher, sociologist, musician, composer, musicologist and political economist. Son of a well-to-do Jewish wine merchant, he fled Nazi Germany for the USA prior to World War II, resettling in Germany in the early 1950s. Animating much of his work was revulsion at and fear of anti-Semitism, ethnocentrism, authoritarianism, irrationalism, conformity and cultures of compliance. Ominously, he believed he detected disquieting similarities in American commercial (popular) culture and German fascist propaganda. With Max Horkheimer, Adorno invented the construct, the culture industry, to help describe and investigate properties and consequences of culture mass-produced by profit-seeking institutions.
Adorno’s work on the culture industry, although seminal, is but a ‘fragment’ of a larger undertaking. With Horkheimer, Adorno asked how ancient racial and religious prejudices survived and resurfaced in Germany in the 1930s such that ‘great masses of people [could] tolerate the mass extermination of their fellow citizens’. Looking ahead, they inquired also into ‘what tissues in the life of our modern society remain cancerous’, and they asked what within an individual’s psyche remains susceptible to aggressive and totalitarian stimuli (Horkheimer and Flowerman 1982: vii). Their answers to these three questions were, respectively: ‘the enlightenment’,2 ‘the culture industry’, and ‘the authoritarian personality’.
Dallas Smythe’s work, in contrast, became fixated in his mature years on media’s role in sustaining ‘monopoly capitalism’ – for him the ultimate evil. Smythe was born in Canada, son of a hardware merchant, and was for a time a professional economist working for several years in Washington, most notably as chief economist of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC); there he was active in organizing civil servants for collective bargaining. In 1948 he joined the University of Illinois and began teaching the first course in the US on the political economy of communication. He returned to Canada in 1963. With time, Smythe’s radicalism intensified; he came to detest ‘monopoly capitalism’.
Smythe strove to expose the egregious workings of monopoly capitalism by integrating mainstream communication studies (as practiced, for instance by Paul Felix Lazarsfeld, Wilbur Schramm, Elihu Katz, and others) and mainstream economics into a new approach: the political economy of communications (hereafter, PEC). In their mainstream versions, according to Smythe, communication studies paid scant attention to the economic base of communicatory activity,3 and economics neglected the dynamic power implications of media and communications. Smythe’s first major publication in this newly integrating area was The Structure and Policy of Electronic Communication (1957), a suitable title as later Smythe (1960: 564) delineated the central concerns as being (1) the policies by which communication agencies operate, and (2) the structures that these agencies assume. Smythe proposed that PEC addresses two questions: ‘Who gets what scarce [communications] goods and services, when, how and where?’ and second, ‘Who takes what actions in order to provide what scarce [communications] goods and services, when, how and where?’ (Smythe 1960: 564). Smythe’s indebtedness to orthodox economics in formulating these questions is quite evident. In his 1957 monograph he delineated as key such standard economics categories as: barriers to entry, pricing policy, concentration of control, fixed and variable capital requirements, vertical integration, and technological change.
A decade or more lapsed, however, until Smythe recognized in his writings that capitalism needs to produce people ideologically willing to support it, and that control of media (a component of what he came to call the ‘Consciousness Industry’) is essential to that end. Smythe summarized, ‘Control of the means of communication is the basis of political power’ (1981a: 299). In the 1970s Smythe also began investigating the international power dimensions of media.
Adorno and Smythe, along with non-Marxian economic historian, Harold Innis, were primary founders of political economy approaches to media and communication (Babe 2009). Both Adorno and Smythe recognized and addressed in great detail the relationship between control of media on the one hand and political-economic power on the other. At first glance, due to their respective constructs – namely, the ‘culture industry’ and the ‘Consciousness Industry’ – Adorno and Smythe would seem to converge. But their ‘convergence’ is far from total, as we will see. Adorno was certainly first off the mark; as early as the 1930s and 1940s he was addressing mind control aspects of commercial culture and was critiquing the rationalist and systemic drive to extract surpluses from workers and audiences. Smythe’s political economy of communications pursued these topics in earnest beginning only in the 1970s. On the other hand, as early as 1957, Smythe was publishing on the history, structure, and policies of the communication industries – areas quite neglected by Adorno.
Their main difference, though, concerns the two writers’ conceptions of ultimate social evil. For Adorno, this was fascism and other totalitarianisms, and ‘the culture industry’ for him was both harbinger and facilitator of that evil. For Smythe, ‘monopoly capitalism’ was the ultimate evil, and the ‘Consciousness Industry’ was its principle source of power. Whereas Adorno strove for a delaying action and regarded reflexivity and rationality (exposing hidden and irrational mechanisms of authoritarian control) as primary defences against encroaching fascism, Smythe envisaged revolution as the means to resolve the deep inequalities endemic to monopoly capital.
In addition, arguably, they departed company with regard to foundational ethical principles. Adorno was more Kantian, adhering to the categorical imperative that upholds individual dignity; Smythe, in contrast, was more ‘utilitarian’, willing to sacrifice individual welfare for the greater collective good (as he saw it): more on this below.
Two main sections follow. In the first I compare Adorno and Smythe’s media content analyses, as these prefigure their respective treatments of the culture/ Consciousness industries. In the second, I address directly their two primary constructs – the culture industry and the Consciousness Industry. Through these comparisons, readers may be better aware of the stakes entailed in following one or the other of these key, seminal political economists.
Early in their careers Adorno and Smythe shared a penchant for analyzing media content. However, their methodologies, purposes, and presuppositions differed markedly. Adorno favoured qualitative analyses as he was intent to link media content to psychological strategies of message senders and to psychological susceptibilities of audiences. He justified stressing psychological categories rather than ‘objective content’ on the basis that propaganda ‘aims at winning people over by playing upon their unconscious mechanisms rather than by presenting ideas and arguments’ (1994a: 219). Adorno maintained that American commercial media and fascist propaganda both stressed ‘consumer effect’ (1994b: 55) and hence psychoanalytic categories were best suited for discerning strategies. Adorno did not object to quantitative analyses per se, however, and indeed in studying traits of the authoritarian personality he blended psychological insight with formidable statistical tests.
Smythe, in contrast, employed quantitative methods to analyse media content as he wished to expose manifest biases and stereotypes in the programming of commercial broadcasters. His analyses were less speculative as his goal was more directly policy-driven – to show the importance of preserving television channels for public (educational, non-commercial) broadcasting.
For Adorno, the astrology column of the Los Angeles Times was an instance of a broader program within commercial mass media of emphasizing conformism, psychological dependency, paternalism,4 and the irrational – practices conducive to the rise of fascism (1994b: 46). In his analyses, Adorno made use of ‘psychiatric as well as socio-psychological categories’ (1994b: 51). In his essay, ‘The Stars Down to Earth’, he pointed to the essentially conservative ideology of the astrology column in the Los Angeles Times – its justification of the status quo and its promotion of social conformity. He declared, ‘The column attempts to satisfy the longings of people who are thoroughly convinced that others (or some unknown agency) ought to know more about themselves and what they should do than they can decide for themselves’ (1994b: 52). The column urged readers to adjust themselves ‘to the commands of the stars at given times’, thereby implicitly emphasizing ‘the individual’s powerlessness’ in the face of cosmic design (Bernstein 1991: 12). The ultimate source of power, he added, was unnamed, unapproachable, abstract – and hence was exempt from critique and critical thought.
Yet the idea was fostered by the columnists that by reading the stars correctly individuals could mitigate fate, implying that ‘to be rational means not questioning irrational conditions, but to make the best of them from the viewpoint of one’s private interests’ (Adorno 1994: 58). He summarized that for astrology, ‘freedom consists of the individual’s taking upon himself voluntarily what is inevitable anyway … The empty shell of liberty is solicitously kept intact’ (1994b: 60).
Adorno further surmised that astrology was designed to appeal to an in-group. Astrological devotees shared an arcane knowledge. Like other irrational creeds – such as racism – astrology simplifies complex phenomena, providing cognoscenti with easy formulae for understanding complexities (Adorno 1994b: 61). And like fascist propaganda, astrology obliterates distinctions between fact and fiction, between the rational and irrational. Astrology’s ‘fictitious reasonableness’, Adorno wrote, ‘allows delusional urges to make their inroad into real life without overtly clashing with ego controls; irrationality is covered up very carefully’ (Adorno 1994b: 68).
For Adorno, the most important consequence of astrology is dependency; the astrologer’s aim is to achieve ‘blind acceptance’ by aficionados (1994b: 52–3). Hence columnists lavish praise on readers to capture attention and gain empathy (Adorno 1994b: 74), and combine this praise with claims that the same abstract forces threatening audience members can be mitigated if they just follow sound advice (Adorno 1994b: 77). This ‘threat-help’ pattern, Adorno believed, is common to other products of mass culture, and to fascist propaganda (1994b: 76).
In other content analyses – ‘Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda’ (1994a) and The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas’ Radio Addresses (2000) – Adorno disclosed that American fascist propaganda, too, was ‘primarily of a psychological nature’ (1994a: 218). Adorno had no difficulty identifying blatantly anti-Semitic, fascist radio commentators in the 1930s and 1940s that endorsed Hitler and Mussolini while denigrating as ‘tyrants’ Roosevelt and Churchill.5 Although often touching on economic, political, and social problems, these American fascist propagandists – like the astrologers – played on people’s ‘unconscious mechanisms’. Adorno identified several covert strategies:
• Propaganda was personalized, filled with paternal imagery (1994a: 219). American fascist propagandists presented themselves as being ‘little men’, albeit ones of great caliber. This ‘bi-phasic’ device enabled spokespersons to present themselves simultaneously as one of the people, but worthy of leadership;
• Propaganda tapped ideas or emotions that were with audiences to begin with. For example, propagandists often used innuendos (e.g., ‘those dark forces’) to avoid legal sanctions (libel, slander, hate mongering) and simultaneously to strengthen audience identification: audiences were made to feel like members of an, ‘in-group’, not needing names or explanations to understand (1994a: 228);
• Propaganda substituted means for ends. It glorified action and revival, while the purposes of the action remained obscure or abstract. ‘The entire weight of this propaganda’, Adorno concluded, ‘is to promote the means’ (1994a: 220);
• Propaganda functioned as a kind of wish-fulfillment (1994a: 220). Adorno explained that ‘sexual excesses and atrocities constantly told [were] but a very thin, purposely transparent rationalization of the pleasure these stories convey[ed] to the listener’ (1994a: 220–21). Being pleasured by the propaganda, listeners were prone to accept ‘out of gratitude’ the speaker’s ideology. As well, the fascist propagandists functioned as surrogates for inarticulate listeners, saying what the latter would like to say but could not (1994a: 224);
• Propaganda attacked stereotypes, not realities. ‘It builds up an imagery of the Jew, or of the Communist, and tears it to pieces, without caring much how the imagery is related to reality’ (1994a: 222);
• Propaganda was devoid of logic, causation, or evidence. Connections rested solely on similarity (for example, employing the same word in two logically unrelated statements), thereby circumventing ‘control mechanisms of rational examination’ and making it ‘psychologically easier for the listener to “follow”’ (1994a: 223);
• American fascist propaganda satisfied audience’s demand for ritual. ‘The fascist follower craves … rigid repetition’ (1994a: 227), and this was provided through clichés, stereotypes, and a litany of assertions. Adorno proposed that fascism resonated with by-gone religion: ‘religious language and religious forms are utilized in order to lend the impression of a sanctioned ritual that is performed again and again by some “community”’ (1994a: 227).
As noted above, Adorno discerned close similarities in the strategies of fascist propagandists and contemporary commercial advertisers, making him apprehensive regarding the future of liberal democracy. He maintained that contemporary advertising, like the astrology column and fascist persuasion, indoctrinates audiences into irrationality, conformism, and compliance.
Adorno’s analysis of fascist propaganda should be considered alongside his quantitative work on the authoritarian personality. His co-authored book on the topic focused on ‘the potentially fascist individual, one whose [psychological] structure is such as to render him particularly susceptible to anti-democratic propaganda’ (Adorno et al., 1982: 1; emphasis in original); his article, ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’ (1991a), moreover, made direct links between these two topics.
Although Adorno and co-authors, in investigating the authoritarian personality, presented quantitative results from questionnaires, complete with statistical tests of significance, the questions they constructed were intended to be indirect, premised largely on Freudian-style ego defence theory. Statements to which respondents were to agree or disagree (on a 7 point scale) were intended as ‘rationalizations for irrational tendencies’ (Adorno et al., 1982: 15). To cite but two examples: The survey statement, ‘It is more than a remarkable coincidence that Japan had an earthquake on Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, 1944’ was intended to indirectly measure superstition, defined as ‘a tendency to shift responsibility from within the individual onto outside forces beyond one’s control’. According to Adorno, ‘an important feature of the Nazi program … was the defamation of everything that tended to make the individual aware of himself and his problems … This general attitude easily leads to a devaluation of the human’ (1982: 165, 164). Likewise, the survey statement, ‘What a man does is not so important so long as he does it well’, was designed to indirectly measure conventionalism. Adorno explained: ‘It is a well-known hypothesis that susceptibility to fascism is most characteristically a middle-class phenomenon, that it is “in the culture”, and, hence, that those who conform the most to this culture will be the most prejudiced … Unconventional people tended to be free of prejudice’ (1982: 158–9).
Adorno attributed the increased prevalence of the fascist and potentially fascist personality to ‘narcissism and ego problems’ (Adorno 1991a: 115), and more abstractly to by-products of the Enlightenment, namely industrialization and the culture industry. For socio-economic reasons (e.g., mass production, mass consumption, subsumptive reasoning whereby individuals are recognized only as instances of broad categories for administrative purposes), there had been ‘a decline of the individual’ resulting in ‘his subsequent weakness’ (Adorno 1991a: 116); ‘fascist agitation’, Adorno continued, took up the slack, emphasizing strong leadership: ‘the all-powerful and threatening primal father’ (Adorno 1991a: 119). Furthermore, ‘By making the leader his ideal, [the follower] loves himself, as it were, but gets rid of the stains of frustration and discontent which mar his picture of his own empirical self’ (Adorno 1991a: 121). According to Adorno, therefore, two major aspects of the cult of the leader are identification by the people with the leader and idealization of the leader.
Adorno speculated also on what forces, blind or otherwise, transform rational and enlightened individuals into a ‘mass’, which by definition is ‘largely de-individualized, irrational, easily influenced, prone to violent action’, and regressive (Adorno 1991a: 116). This, he remarked, is ‘the fundamental issue of fascist manipulation’ (Adorno 1991a: 117). Citing Freud, Adorno proposed that the bond uniting a mass ‘is of a libidinal nature’ (Adorno 1991a: 117); there are pleasures to be had in surrendering to the mass, in throwing off the repression of unconscious instincts. This, too, is part of the regression within Enlightenment; fascist propaganda seeks to awaken ‘a portion of the subject’s archaic inheritance’ (Adorno 1991a: 119).
The melding of the individual within the mass ties in to individuals’ idealization of and identification with strong leadership, which Adorno declared are also collective activities. Identification touches ‘vast numbers of people with similar characterological dispositions and libidinal leanings’. He continued: ‘The fascist community of the people corresponds exactly to Freud’s definition of a group as being “a number of individuals who have substituted one and the same object for their ego ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego”’ (Adorno 1991a: 121).
Finally, fascist (and more generally authoritarian) propagandists, according to Adorno, make use of audiences as they find them:
The true children of today’s standardized mass culture [are] largely robbed of autonomy and spontaneity … Fascist propaganda has only to reproduce the existent mentality for its own purposes; it need not induce change … It relies absolutely on the total structure as well as on each particular trait of the authoritarian character, which is itself the product of an internalization of the irrational aspects of modern society (Adorno 1991a: 129).
Despite his heavy emphasis on irrationality and psychoanalytic categories, Adorno remained forever the realist, the materialist, in brief, the political economist:
Fascism as such is not a psychological issue … Although the fascist agitator doubtlessly takes up certain tendencies within those he addresses, he does so as the mandatory of powerful economic and political interests. Psychological dispositions do not actually cause fascism: rather, fascism defines a psychological area which can be successfully exploited by the forces which promote it for entirely non-psychological reasons of self-interest (Adorno 1991a: 130).
Much of what Adorno had to say about fascist strategies of persuasion applies to contemporary commercial advertising. Indeed, it is well known that Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, admired and studied closely the publications of Edward Bernays, a pioneer of Freudian-type persuasion strategies and America’s father of public relations (Ewen 1996).
Dallas Smythe’s analyses of content were more straightforward and were undertaken for entirely different purposes. As noted by Thomas Guback, through quantitative analyses of commercial television programming in the early 1950s, Smythe became ‘instrumental in helping noncommercial educational interests establish the principle of channel reservations’ (1994: 59). Interviewed years later, Smythe insisted he had refrained in these early content analyses from making interpretations:
It has always seemed to me that the textual approach, the exegesis of text in media, is an excellent way of devoting an awful lot of energy, from an awful lot of people, for no purpose worth a damn – because it ends up where it began, with speculation … It doesn’t give rise to any action, except the waste of energy on the part of the people who do it (Guback 1994: 60).
Some of Smythe’s quantitative findings were summarized in his 1954 article, ‘Reality as Presented by Television’. There he defined ‘reality’ as ‘the flow of representations of the human condition’ (Smythe 1994a: 61). In his introduction to the article he was insistent, though, that there is no single meaning attached to media representations, that while audience members ‘act on the explicit layer of meaning in the content’, they also mould it in ‘the image of their individual needs and values’ (1994a: 61). Smythe continued that there is nonetheless value in objectively identifying what these explicit or superficial representations are. He added that the key to rigour in content analysis lies in the careful formulation of content categories whereby both contextual and superficial meanings can be measured. He added, however, that content categories should be conceived as relating integrally to theories of perception, motivation and learning. Hence, prior to category formulation, assumptions are required regarding audience interpretive processes which give ‘their more or less unique meanings to the stimulus fields’. Using a wrestling match for illustration, Smythe suggested several ‘contexts’ for interpretation: wrestling as (1) a sport, (2) a form of folk-drama or morality play, (3) a ‘fixed’ spectacle where some in the audience superciliously gain satisfaction from observing the antics of the more gullible fans (Smythe 1994a: 62). Smythe, then, was not so far removed from interpretive analyses (and hence from Adorno’s approach) as his late interview would indicate.
In his actual analyses of content, however, Smythe did indeed refrain from explicitly proposing theories of perception or interpretation; he focused instead on the manifest (‘superficial’) content. For one week of commercial television programming in each of 1950, 1951 and 1952, he proposed three broad programming types – entertainment, information, and orientation. He defined entertainment ‘pragmatically’, as denoting those programs ‘whose ostensible purpose is only to amuse, entertain and otherwise occupy the attention of audiences’ (Smythe 1994a: 65), noting pointedly that information and orientation programs, too, given the commercial context, are likewise expected to ‘entertain’. Observing that the ‘entertainment’ category accounted for 75 per cent of program hours, Smythe added insightfully, ‘One might say that the chief element in television programs is the representation of reality as entertainment – a matter of diversion or occupying time’ (Smythe 1994a: 66).
As another part of his ‘macro-analysis’, Smythe measured the prevalence of violence. There were on average 6.2 acts and threats of violence per hour in 1953 on New York City television. Drama contained 87 per cent of television violence, averaging about 10 acts per hour. He found also that children’s programming was the most violent of all programming categories – containing ‘more than three times the frequency of violent acts and threats which was found in general audience drama (22.4 as against 6.0 per hour)’ (Smythe 1994: 68–9). Smythe continued: ‘About one-fourth of all acts and threats of violence were committed in a humorous context, and humorous violence was more common in programs for children than in those for the general audience. About one-sixth of the acts and threats were committed in the general interest of “law and order”’ (Smythe 1994a: 69).
Largely on the bases that commercial television was predominantly entertainment as opposed to information or orientation, that it was rife with violence (especially in children’s programming), and that violence was often made to seem humorous, Smythe concluded that ‘the world presented to American television viewers has little participation from educational institutions’ (Smythe 1994a: 69). Indeed, ‘in the full week of programming from seven New York stations in 1953 there were 12 programs identified with recognized educational institutions for a total of less than 1 per cent of total program time’ (Smythe 1994a: 69).
Smythe also explored character stereotyping (‘micro-analysis’). His sample consisted of 476 characters from 86 drama programs from New York television in 1953. He found:
• Twice as many males as females;
• Characters concentrated in the age brackets of ‘peak sexual attractiveness’, males averaging 38 years and females 33 years;
• Less than 25 per cent of the TV population were under 20 or more than 50, whereas according to the Bureau of the Census more than 50 per cent of the US population was within those underrepresented age brackets;
• Heroes averaged 32 years, villains averaged 43 years and supporting characters averaged 37 years;
• Male heroes were older than female heroes (34 vs. 29 years on average), but female villains were older than male villains (47 vs. 42 years);
• 83 per cent of heroes were white Americans but only 69 per cent of villains were white Americans; Europeans provided 10 per cent of heroes but 24 per cent of villains;
• Over-representation (again, compared to Census data) of workers vs. the unemployed, and an over-representation of professionals compared to blue collar workers.
Although Smythe eschewed delineating any particular theory of perception or interpretation, assuredly behind his content categories were implicit theories. A decade or so later, George Gerbner made explicit through ‘enculturation studies’ what in Smythe had been implicit, namely the hypothesis that continuous repetitions of particular media representations – of violence and of stereotypes, particularly – are imprinted in viewers’ minds and help condition their understanding of, and approaches to, non-television reality (Gerbner 2002: 175–342).
Smythe’s unarticulated theory differs substantially from Adorno’s explicit one. Premised on Freudian psychoanalysis, Adorno adduced patterns of persuasive media strategies appealing to the unconscious or subconscious, whereas Smythe focused on manifest representations, not necessarily believing that the repetitions he uncovered were intentional strategies to persuade audiences into adopting ageist, racist, sexist or violent attitudes, but implying nonetheless that repetitious media content might produce or reinforce undesirable attitudes and behaviours. Whereas Adorno was primarily concerned with what media content might do internally to the psychological make-up of audience members, Smythe was most interested in the consequences for audience’s understanding of external reality. Smythe was always policy-driven (here, advocating that more channels be reserved for educational broadcasting), whereas Adorno’s aim consistently was to help individuals defend themselves against the covert machinations of the power elite. Adorno’s faith and hope lay with increased rationality, albeit subject always to reflexivity.6 Smythe’s faith, in contrast, lay with political-economic restructuring of institutions.
Adorno and Smythe were agreed that knowledge is gleaned, in the first instance, by observation. They were materialists in this sense – in contrast to idealists (more on this below). Moreover, they were agreed that media content is strongly influenced by political-economic power. Third, they concurred that this content has effects – claims that mainstream communication researchers like Lazarsfeld, Katz and Schramm persistently and insistently denied (Babe 2006).
It is interesting to speculate on what Adorno might have made of Smythe’s content analyses. Smythe’s overall conclusion, namely that ‘the chief element in television programs is the representation of reality as entertainment – a matter of diversion or occupying time’, would certainly have resonated with Adorno in contending that commercial culture paves the way for fascism. For Adorno, to make horrendous events seem entertaining (as in making violence seem humorous, for instance) is tantamount to surreptitiously inculcating compliance and passivity in audiences. He contended that ‘pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown. Basically it is helplessness’. He added, ‘The liberation which amusement promises is freedom from thought and from negation’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1991: 144). Even popular anti-war protest songs of the 1960s, such as those by Joan Baez, according to Adorno, prepared the way for authoritarian rule:
The entire sphere of popular music, even where it dresses itself up in modernist guise is to such a degree inseparable from the Warencharakter [the commodity character], from consumption, from the cross-eyed transfixion with amusement, that attempts to outfit it with a new function remain entirely superficial. And I have to say that when somebody sets himself up, and for whatever reasons [accompanies] maudlin music by singing something or other about Viet Nam being unbearable … I find in fact, THIS SONG unbearable, in that [it erroneously suggests that] by taking the horrendous and making it somehow consumable, it ends up wringing something like consumption-qualities out of it.7
Furthermore, as we saw previously, like Smythe, Adorno expressed great interest in stereotyping. Whereas Smythe focused on stereotypes of heroes and villains in terms of their age, sex and race, Adorno’s primary interest was in the stereotyping of Jews and communists. Nonetheless, the two analysts were evidently in accord in regarding stereotyping as a means of marginalizing certain groups in society.
In their content analyses, moreover, both analysts were at least implicitly interested in persuasion, and both concluded that persuasion is not always direct. For Adorno, Freudian psychoanalytic categories are key to comprehending persuasive strategies, whereas for Smythe repetition of stereotypical character traits and violent behaviours is the primary means of (perhaps unintended) persuasion. Being often below the surface, persuasion bypasses rationality as a defensive strategy, and hence for resistance extraordinary efforts on the part of audiences are required. Finally, for both Adorno and Smythe, persuasion was an outcome and manifestation of political-economic power, and functioned to reinforce this power.
Adorno’s content analyses of fascist commentaries and astrology columns, and his profiling the authoritarian personality, segue seamlessly into his seminal construct, the culture industry, which is comprised of agencies mass producing and distributing for profit artistic and other symbolic works. Film and television production companies, radio broadcasters, newspapers, sound recording firms, advertising agencies, book and magazine publishers, according to Adorno, are similar in structure, ‘ordering themselves into a system almost without a gap’. He explained, ‘this is made possible by contemporary technical capabilities as well as by economic and administrative concentration’ (Adorno 1991b: 85).
According to Horkheimer and Adorno, a principal aim of the culture industry, given its profit motivation, is to achieve economies of scale. Consequently, production is concentrated in few centres serving large, widely dispersed audiences. Also contributing to scale economies is product standardization, as modified by superficial differentiations to help tap market segments: ‘The same babies grin eternally out of the magazines … The bread which the culture industry offers man is the stone of the stereotype’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1991: 121, 123, 148).
An important consequence of media’s endless repetition of stereotypes is pseudo-individuality of audience members. The culture industry provides categories into which consumers fit themselves: ‘The lives of every single person are transformed by the power of the generality … The culture industry as a whole has molded men as a type unfailingly reproduced in every product’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1991: 154–5, 127).
Creative artists in the employ of the culture industry become little more than specialized industrial workers. ‘What completely fetter[s] the artist’, Horkheimer and Adorno declared, is ‘the pressure … always to fit into business life … Not to conform means to be rendered powerless … to be “self-employed”’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1991: 133).
The assembly-line production of cultural commodities complements advertising. Like advertised goods, Horkheimer and Adorno wrote, cultural commodities are interchangeable, omnipresent, and ‘technically alienated from any connected meaning … In the most influential American magazines, Life and Fortune, a quick glance can now scarcely distinguish advertising from editorial picture and text’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1991: 163).
However, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, the culture industry serves purposes other than simply marketing commodities and amassing profits: it must appease ‘the real holders of power … if [it] is not to undergo a series of purges’. They continued: ‘The dependence of the most powerful broadcasting company on the electrical industry [NBC on GE], or the motion picture industry on the banks, is characteristic of the whole sphere, whose individual branches are themselves economically interwoven’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1991: 123). Regrettably, Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis of the lines of control over the culture industry by broader systems of political-economic power both began and ended with these brief remarks (Cook 1996: 35). Where they were strong, however, was in detailing various methods whereby the culture industry supports elite interests, presaging fascism. Here are ten of these methods:
1. Compliance of workers. The culture industry creates a compliant workforce by organizing workers’ ‘free time’; it occupies workers’ ‘senses’ from the time they leave the factories in the evening until they return the next day. Significantly, the culture industry also makes leisure ‘akin to work’ by transforming it into an ‘after image’ of work (Horkheimer and Adorno 1991: 127). An apt example is professional sports. Adorno speculated that the star athlete plays the role of the boss, inflicting on his ‘slave’ (his own body) ‘the same injustice he [the worker] has already endured at the violent hands of society’ (Adorno 1991c: 77, 1977: 168).
2. Subsumptive reasoning. Cultural commodities encourage subsumptive reasoning (the unification of the many under the one), thereby discouraging creative thought and reflexivity. For the culture industry, the formula is all important: ‘As soon as the film begins, it is quite clear how it will end, and who will be rewarded, punished, or forgotten; in light music, once the trained ear has heard the first notes of the hit song, it can guess what is coming and feel flattered when it does come’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1991: 125).
3. Obliterating goals and ideals. The culture industry replaces striving for a better future with the notion that utopia has already arrived. Masquerading as progress is the ‘incessantly new’, which for Adorno is really a disguise for ‘an eternal sameness’ (Adorno 1991b: 86). Instead of ideals, ‘amusement itself becomes an ideal’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1991: 144). As seen previously, for Horkheimer and Adorno, ‘The liberation which amusement promises is freedom from thought and from negation’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1991: 144).
4. Delusion. Fascism depends on irrational flights of fancy, and hence it concocts pseudo-environments, as documented for instance in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. Adorno, however, pointed instead to Orson Welles’ broadcast, War of the Worlds (1938), which for him was but ‘a test … which showed that the elimination of the distinction between image and reality [had] already advanced to the point of a collective sickness’ (Adorno 1991c: 56). For Horkheimer and Adorno, the culture industry ‘skillfully steers a winding course between the cliffs of demonstrable misinformation and manifest truth, faithfully reproducing the phenomena whose opaqueness blocks any insight and installs the ubiquitous and intact phenomenon as ideal’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1991: 147).
5. Conformity. Fascism demands submission of the individual to the leader and his/her melding into the mass. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the culture industry helps accomplish both these requirements. It standardizes taste, thereby melding the individual into the mass, doing this so thoroughly that ‘the arrogantly ignorant’ reject anything new and instead ‘demand the one dish they have once been served’ (Adorno 1991d: 45). These standardized culture commodities, moreover, are selected from above and imposed on the masses. Success in music, Adorno claimed, stems primarily from ‘the command of publishers, sound film magnates, and rulers of radio’ (Adorno 1991d: 31). For authenticity, Adorno insisted, modern music must resist market forces and exhibit ‘a dissonant expression’ reflective of the ‘contradictions of society’ (Müller-Doohm 2005: 152); melodious music, contrarily, lulls audiences into complacency and incapacitates the ‘thinking individual’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1991: 149).
6. Diversion. Fascism requires the public’s attention be diverted from real issues and problems, precisely what the culture industry does best. For example, by recounting individual narratives, films ‘obscure the monstrousness of the system’ (Adorno 1991c: 57). Also, fixing attention onto particular cultural artifacts causes a ‘diversion of interest from the whole’ (Adorno 1991d: 44). Even more iniquitously, the culture industry constitutes a total environment – a milieu – from which there is little avenue of escape. According to Adorno, ‘together with sport and film, mass music and the new listening help to make escape from the whole infantile milieu impossible’ (Adorno 1991d: 41).
7. Voice of authority. Fascism demands absolute obedience, and the culture industry again paves the way. Horkheimer and Adorno observed: ‘The culture industry tends to make itself the embodiment of authoritative pronouncements, and thus the irrefutable prophet of the prevailing order (Horkheimer and Adorno 1991: 147). Moreover, broadcast media continually ‘suggest’ products audiences should buy, ‘suit[ing] Fascism admirably’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1991: 159). ‘The flood of detailed information and candy-floss entertainment’, they advised, ‘simultaneously instructs and stultifies mankind’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1991: xv).
8. Depersonalizing human relations. Fascism requires rigid hierarchy, unmodified by humanistic sentiments. Adorno located a dehumanization of social relations in the ubiquity of commodity exchange and the fetishism of the commodity. With commodity fetishism, relations between people are experienced as relations among things.
9. Models of comportment. Horkheimer and Adorno developed a model of social/ individual control whereby ‘the countless agencies of mass production and culture’ establish social norms. Individuals in turn face the prospect of social disapproval, even ostracism, if they transgress these norms. For Horkheimer and Adorno, however, social conformity within the mass is really conformity to expectations of the power elite as modeled through the mass media: ‘Conventionalized modes of behavior are impressed on the individual as the only natural, respectable, and rational ones … Everything else, idea and crime, suffers the force of the collective, which monitors it from the classroom to the trade union’. Again, we see that for Horkheimer and Adorno the culture industry is primarily a political economy construct; they explain: ‘But even the threatening collective belongs only to the descriptive surface, beneath which are concealed the powers which manipulate it as the instrument of power’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1991: 28).
10. Dulling critical faculties. The abundance of superficially differentiated commodities dulls people’s critical faculties – a necessity for fascism to attain and retain power. ‘In an unjust state of life’, they wrote, ‘the impotence and pliability of the masses grow with the quantitative increase in commodities allowed them’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1991: xv). And again: ‘… the technical easing of life [through industrialization and the division of labour] … brings about a fixation of the instincts by means of heavier repression; imagination atrophies’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1991: 35). For Adorno, ‘the chaining of people to consumption’ is an index of both their conformism and their apathy toward all political matters except those affecting them directly (Adorno 2006:7).
For Dallas Smythe, mass media (a particularly important component of the ‘Consciousness Industry’) were a systematic invention of monopoly capitalism. Its function, he claimed, ‘is to set a daily agenda of issues, problems, values, and policies for the guidance of other institutions and the whole population’, adding ‘they mass produce audiences and sell them to advertisers; these audiences work on, and are consumed in, the marketing of mass-produced consumer goods and services to themselves’ (Smythe 1981a: xii).
Possibly Smythe’s first use of the term, consciousness industry, was in a 1973 report to the Chinese government. There he noted that ‘it is becoming common to refer to the “consciousness industry” as that grouping of industries which produces consumer goods and services and which operates the communications institutions, vocational education, marketing and advertising’ (Smythe 1994b: 240). He referred to the consciousness industry, too, in a conference paper of 1974 – the same year that Hans Magnus Enzensberger published The Consciousness Industry. There is no indication that Smythe had read that book at the time of his conference, nor for that matter any of Enzensberger’s work. Enzensberger, though, is generally credited with originating the term, and in Dependency Road Smythe so acknowledged him (Smythe 1981a: 5, note 1).
In 1977 Smythe wrote a highly critical review of Enzenberger’s The Consciousness Industry for the Journal of Communication. There he described the author as an ‘anarcho-liberal … an idealist … a bourgeois writer of poetry and literature’, and as ‘speaking in the West German social democratic scene to fellow intellectuals’ (Smythe 1977: 199). (Enzensberger, it is to be noted, is generally considered to be a second-generation member of the Frankfurt School). It is worthwhile expanding on Smythe’s critique, as this will help illuminate Smythe’s position and facilitate comparison with Adorno.
On the one hand, Smythe agreed with Enzensberger that ‘every social system’s communications policy serves the controlling class interest in perpetuating that system’.8 On the other, he dismissed unreservedly what he took to be Enzensberger’s conclusion: that the consciousness industry should therefore be resisted. According to Smythe: ‘To jump from this fact [that all political-economic systems have a consciousness industry which endevours to secure compliance of the people] to indiscriminate condemnation of all communications systems betrays [Enzensberger’s] individualistic point of view’ (Smythe 1977: 199). Smythe continued: ‘Passionate individualism pervades Enzensberger’s treatment of the arts … [For him] poetry is not [to be] at the disposal of politics and … every poem must be defended as against the power of the state’ (Smythe 1977: 197). By implication – for Smythe – poetry, and more generally artistic works, should (at least in some cases, if not all) be at the disposal of the state. Smythe complained that Enzensberger adhered to ‘the liberal concept of the possibility of pure, unmanipulated truth’, the implication being that Smythe denied that possibility. Smythe continued: ‘In supposing that freedom from control is the solution … he [Enzensberger] is in the same camp as the [libertarian] University of Chicago economists’ (Smythe 1977: 201).
Smythe was disaffected, too, because Enzensberger was critical not just of commercialization of the arts under capitalism, but also of Eastern Socialist practice, singling out particularly ‘Stalinist Russia’ and ‘Red China’ (Smythe 1977: 199). Smythe concluded: ‘Whatever its specific forms, a socialist theory of the media will be characterized by new collective relations rather than anarchy’ (Smythe 1977: 201).
According to Guback (1994: 263), Smythe’s 1977 article, ‘Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism’, was likewise animated by Enzensberger’s book. There, Smythe began elaborating what ‘a socialist theory of the media’ might look like. He deemed this necessary because, according to him, communications had been a ‘blindspot’ among western Marxists: ‘The blockage in recognizing the role of the consciousness industry’, he explained, ‘traces back to a failure to take a materialist approach to communications’ (Smythe 1994c: 267). According to Smythe, on those rare occasions when radical scholars did address media and communication, they did so from an ‘idealist’ perspective:
[They] locate the significance of mass communications systems in their capacity to produce ‘ideology’, which is held to act as a sort of invisible glue that holds together the capitalist system. This subjective substance, divorced from historical materiality, is similar to such previous concepts as ‘ether’; that is to say, the proof of its existence is found by such writers to be the necessity for it to exist so that certain other phenomena may be explained. It is thus an idealist, pre-scientific rather than a non-scientific explanation (Smythe 1994c: 266–7; also Smythe 1981b: 117).
Smythe explained that western Marxists failed utterly to consider the consciousness industry ‘from the standpoint of its historical materialist role in making monopoly capitalist imperialism function through demand management (concretely through the economic processes of advertising and mass communications)’. This, he added, ‘is precisely the blindspot of recent western Marxism’ (Smythe1994c: 287, note 1). Elsewhere he claimed, similarly, that the Frankfurt School ‘conspicuously’ held a ‘subjective and superficial view of the [audience] commodity produced by the media of communication under monopoly capitalism’ (Smythe 1981b: 117).
There are three major claims being made here: First, that previous work – Adorno’s, Enzensberger’s, and others’ – was idealist, non-materialist, and pre-scientific. Second, that all western Marxists, except Smythe, were oblivious to how mass media supported monopoly capitalism’s agenda of selling commodities and supporting armaments by assembling and transforming audiences. Third, Consciousness Industry is more materialist than ideology and ether. Several comments seemed warranted.
First, to the contrary, Adorno did not emphasize ‘ideology’ as the ‘glue’ holding capitalism together; Adorno’s main point, rather, was that the liberal social order was falling apart on account of the ‘dialectic of enlightenment’, precluding fascism. Second, Adorno was only tangentially concerned with the marketing of products under capitalism, his main unease, rather, concerned subconscious manipulations inducing conformism and compliance. Mass media, two outcomes of enlightenment, he argued, contributed to this malaise by discouraging critical thinking and by promoting superstition, authoritarianism, and hedonism. Third, Smythe’s Consciousness Industry is, arguably, every bit as idealist as ‘ideology’ and ‘ether’. Smythe’s definitive definition is provided in Dependency Road:
Consciousness Industry [his capitals] must include all consumer goods and services … Although the mass media began the mass production of information, they are linked through interlocking business organizations and a complex of largely managed, i.e., oligopolistic, markets with a much broader base of information production and exchange. The whole complex is Consciousness Industry [sic]. Advertising, market research, photography, the commercial application of art to product and container design, the fine arts, teaching machines and related software and educational testing, as well as the formal educational system, are all a part of it. The mass media are also linked through corporate ties and intersecting markets with professional and amateur sports, the performing arts, comic books, toys, games, the production and sale of recorded music, hotels, airlines, and a wide variety of consumer goods industries (automobiles, clothing, jewelry, cosmetics, etc.) through ‘tie-in’ contracts and their advertising service to these industries (Smythe 1981a: 5–6).
Smythe then added, as other components of the Consciousness Industry: telecommunications (both equipment manufacture and transmission), computer industries, research and development firms engaged in electronics, physics and chemistry, the information sector of the government and military, banking, finance, insurance, gambling (illegal and legal), and both organized and white collar crime. He summarized: ‘The primary information sector plus the consumer goods industries constitutes Consciousness Industry’ (Smythe 1981a: 6).
In defining ‘Consciousness Industry’ in this way, Smythe drew explicitly from a seminal 1977 study for the US Department of Commerce by Marc Porat, who estimated that the ‘information sector’ accounted for about 46 per cent of US GNP (Rubin 1983: 15). However, Porat acknowledged problems with his (and hence Smythe’s) approach. He declared: ‘Information is by nature a heterogeneous commodity’, and ‘there is no single definition of information that embraces all aspects of the primary sector’, and again ‘information cannot be collapsed into one sector – like mining’ (Porat 1983: 16–18). Like other economists, Porat was unable to provide a materialist definition of information that he could apply to all components of the ‘primary information sector’. Smythe’s ‘Consciousness Industry’ then is as idealist as ‘ideology’, or for that matter ‘ether’. Like ‘ether’ and ‘ideology’, ‘information’ is defined not by what it is, but by what it does or is thought to do.
It is also ironic that Smythe based his purportedly ‘materialist’ analysis of communication on ‘information’ being defined as a commodity. In the absence of commodification, which forms a central aspect of Smythe’s critique, Smythe’s ‘information’ becomes obviously amorphous.
Finally, Smythe emphasized as part of his ‘materialist’ analysis that mass media produce audiences for purchase by advertisers: ‘As collectivities these audiences are commodities’ he explained (Smythe 1994c: 270). He continued that in economic terms audience is ‘a non-durable producers’ good which is bought and used in the marketing of the advertiser’s product; the work which audience members perform for the advertiser to whom they have been sold is to learn to buy particular “brands” of consumer goods, and to spend their income accordingly’ (Smythe 1994c: 272). Consequently, according to Smythe, ‘leisure time’ is really work time. He declared: ‘“free time” and “leisure” belong only in the monopoly capitalist lexicon alongside “free world”, “free enterprise”, “free elections”, “free speech”, and “free flow’ of information”’ (Smythe 1994c: 279).
Interestingly, in the same year that Smythe’s ‘blindspot’ article appeared, Adorno published in German a parallel piece, ‘Free Time’, referenced above. There Adorno maintained that ‘free time is nothing more than a shadowy continuation of labour’, that leisure ‘is shaped by the very same forces which [workers] are seeking to escape’, that ‘“free time” is tending toward its own opposite’, that there is now a ‘leisure industry’, and that ‘in accordance with the predominant work ethic, time free of work should be utilized for the recreation of expended labour power’ (Adorno 1991e: 167). Long before ‘Free Time’ appeared, however, Horkheimer and Adorno had noted that leisure ‘is akin to work’, and that ‘amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1991: 127, 137). It is through the entertainments, Horkheimer and Adorno explained, that workers are ‘molded’ into accepting that they are completely replaceable by other identical, mass-produced workers. They added, ‘No independent thinking must be expected from the audiences … Any logical connection calling for mental effort is painstakingly avoided’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1991: 137).
To summarize, Smythe’s ‘materialist’ analysis was anticipated by Horkheimer and Adorno three decades prior to his work on the audience commodity, belying his contention that western Marxism heretofore had been idealist.
For both Adorno and Smythe, disgust at abuses by power elites, and empathy for oppressed peoples, motivated much of their scholarship. Adorno, though, was certainly more personally and involuntarily threatened by elite cruelty and insanity than Smythe, helping perhaps to explain significant differences in their understandings of political economy. Adorno did not define conflict and injustice solely or even primarily in traditional Marxian categories of capital-labour. Rather, his dialectic was elite/non-elite, authority-compliance. Ever mindful of the desirability of fostering and preserving the dignity of each individual, Adorno distrusted all mass movements and all mass leadership, including ones on the ‘left’.9 Toward the end of his life, referring to German student anti-Vietnam war protesters, he spoke of ‘left-wing fascism’ (Müller-Doohm 2005: 453). Smythe, in contrast, steadfastly focused on the contradictions between capital and labour.10 His object of derision was not fascism or authoritarianism, but ‘monopoly capitalism’. Smythe was not as apprehensive as Adorno at possible or likely abuses stemming from any or all authoritarian leaderships and mass movements, and toward the end of his life he was so enamoured with Maoism that he sprinkled quotes from the Chairman in his articles. One thinks Smythe would have agreed with war-time propagandist John Grierson, that ‘You can be “totalitarian” for evil and you can also be “totalitarian” for good’ (Grierson 1941: 130) – which is in marked contrast to Adorno, who understood authoritarianism to be evil in and of itself.
Both Adorno and Smythe spent considerable time addressing American popular culture and both were fixated on mind control. As we have seen, Adorno’s main concern was the incipient fascism that he believed he had detected in American popular culture. He saw the culture industry creating a mass of mindless conformists – superstitious, irrational, prepared to follow an authoritarian father figure. For him, monopoly capitalism, had he used the term – he spoke, rather, of ‘late capitalism’ – was a likely prelude to fascism. Horkheimer and Adorno wrote:
One day the edict of production, the actual advertisement (whose actuality is at present concealed by the pretense of a choice) can turn into the open command of the Führer. In a society of huge Fascist rackets which agree among themselves what part of the social product should be allocated to the nation’s needs, it would eventually seem anachronistic to recommend the use of a particular soap powder. The Führer is more up-to-date in unceremoniously giving direct orders for both the holocaust and the supply of rubbish (Horkheimer and Adorno 1991: 160).
Smythe, on the other hand, emphasized merely or mostly the consciousness industry’s goal and role of indoctrinating people into the ethic and behaviours required by the marketing aspect of monopoly capitalism. He wrote: ‘The prime item on the agenda of Consciousness Industry is producing people motivated to buy the “new models” of consumer goods and services and motivated to pay the taxes which support the swelling budgets for the Military Sales effort’ (Smythe 1981a: 3).
The two scholars parted company also regarding what postmodernist critics call ‘economism’, or simply ‘determinism’. Adorno disavowed economic determinism with regard to audience reception, if not regarding the production of cultural commodities. He declared:
To explain why it is that people of the same socioeconomic status often have very different ideologies, while people of a different status often have very similar ideologies, we must take account of other than purely economic needs. More than this, it is becoming increasingly plain that people very frequently do not behave in such a way as to further their material interests … When it comes to the ways in which people appraise the social world, irrational trends stand out glaringly (Adorno et al., 1982: 8).
The key to Adorno’s analysis of audiences, then, was not class but psychological predispositions, and he presumed the culture industry and fascist propagandists alike were adroit in making their hidden, irrational appeals to various audience groupings.
Smythe, on the other hand, seemed to adhere to a rather simple model of audience indoctrination; he wrote, for example, ‘the American people are constantly brain-rinsed with this rigid ideology’ (Smythe 1994d: 166), his play on words referring implicitly the sentiment common in America at the time that communist regimes ‘brain-washed’ their populaces. Moreover, Smythe recommended a policy of ‘cultural screening’, particularly for emerging socialist countries, in order ‘to protect the seedlings of socialist culture from being overwhelmed by the individualistic-ethic which permeates capitalist culture’ (Smythe 1994b: 242). Smythe occasionally moderated his determinism by acknowledging that the consciousness industry is not monolithic: he wrote in Dependency Road that individuals, families, labour unions, and churches may resist the pressures of the capitalist system to commodify every possible aspect of life; he then quickly added, however, that ‘for about a century the kind of human nature produced in the core area has, to a large degree, been the product of Consciousness Industry’ (Smythe 1981a: 9).
Smythe always insisted on combining theory with praxis. He did this in his own life as a union organizer in the 1940s and peace activist in the 1950s and 60s. He told students that all the theory in the world gets you nowhere until you apply it in real life. Adorno, in contrast, seemed much more quiescent; he was a scholar who refused to join any mass movement – out of principle, to be sure. On the other hand, writing – or at least the critical type of writing Adorno engaged in – is a form of activism. That being said, the difference between the two remains and this may help explain the heavy pessimism, even despair, that runs through Adorno’s work; condemned to recognizing the falsities, absurdities, and injustices about him, he felt impotent to do much – beyond exposing them through his writings and advising readers to think critically about all that comes their way. But this must have seemed insufficient, as fatalism permeates his writings. He wrote famously, for instance, ‘No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb’ (Adorno 2007: 320). As noted by Rolf Tiedemann, Adorno (unlike Smythe) was never one to play off a ‘wretched reality against the idea of utopia’ (Tiedemann 2006: xvii). After Auschwitz, Adorno insisted, ‘all talk of progress towards freedom seem[s] ludicrous’ (Adorno 2006: 7). Smythe’s utopianism stands in marked contrast to Adorno’s pessimism – and paradoxically so, given Smythe’s vociferous repudiations of any and all idealisms!
Adorno’s overarching ethical principle, too, differed from Smythe’s; it was the moral inviolability of human dignity; a ‘categorical imperative’. Reading Smythe, in contrast (for example, his paper ‘After Bicycles, What?’), one confronts continuous comparisons between the current malevolent political-economic order and the beneficent future if proper steps are taken. Smythe weighted the advantages to be attained from approaching that new order very highly, meaning that for him derogation of an individual’s rights and freedoms, and the possible abuses inherent to authoritarian leadership, paled in comparison. In a way, consistent with his training as an economist, Smythe was ‘utilitarian’ – weighing benefits against costs, as he saw them.
To conclude, Adorno and Smythe both complement and contradict one another in their political economy approaches. Smythe certainly fills some immense gaps in Horkheimer and Adorno’s treatment of the culture industry by addressing market structures and historical details of the industries and firms. Smythe also emphasized, unlike Horkheimer and Adorno, that media are tools for international domination. Adorno, on the other hand, went beyond Smythe in treating the culture industry not just as the persuasion element of late (‘monopoly’) capitalism, but as harbinger and cause of future totalitarianism.
Smythe took exception to what he viewed to be an undue idealism in media critics preceding him – including Adorno; and as well to what he perceived as their undue liberalism, which he referred to derisively as ‘anarchism’. Adorno’s riposte, however, might well have been that Smythe’s construct, the ‘Consciousness Industry’, is far less ‘materialist’ than he made out and that Smythe was naïve and unduly optimistic concerning the presumed beneficence of mass movements and authoritarian governance. Whereas the sole solutions Adorno could envisage for totalitarian tendencies in the polity were heightened non-conformity, rationality, and reflexivity on the part of individuals, Smythe supported both propaganda and indoctrination – provided they were practiced by authoritarian regimes of which he approved.
Adorno and Smythe, though, were totally agreed on one thing: control of the means of communication is an important basis of political power. Together they provide powerful analyses of the control function of the culture/consciousness industry. They constitute convincing counterweights to the limited-effects literature by Lazarsfeld, Schramm, Katz, and other mainstream American writers.
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1 Many thanks to Professor Edward Comor for commenting sagely on a previous draft, and to my astute and dedicated copy editor, Michael J. Babe.
2 Horkheimer and Adorno defined enlightenment as ‘the philosophy which equates the truth with scientific systematization’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1991: 85). For them, science is a tool or method, whereas enlightenment is the outlook holding that tool as being the only means to truth. On the one hand they insisted, ‘social freedom is inseparable from enlightened thought’ (1991: xiii); science, as is well known, helped historically to challenge authority based on magic, myth, and superstition. On the other hand, however, enlightenment is ‘totalitarian’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1991: 24). To be or remain consistent with freedom, they maintained, the totalitarian tendencies or trajectory of enlightenment must be overcome or neutralized by reflexivity: one must hold humane values and purposes firmly in mind, for example, when applying instrumental (scientific) knowledge, for science itself provides no meanings, no goals, no values, and can be used to undermine freedom.
3 This being because communication studies, among the social scientists, had been developed mostly by sociologists and psychologists; economists had largely ignored the area, likely because ‘communication markets seldom exhibit the characteristics for which their theories appropriate for standardized commodity markets were designed’ (Smythe 1960: 563).
4 For example, ‘communion with the stars is an almost unrecognizable and therefore tolerable substitute of the forbidden relation with an omnipotent father figure’ (Adorno 1994b: 58).
5 The most popular and infamous of these was the Catholic prelate, Father Charles E. Coughlin (1891–1979), who for several years had a network show on CBS with audiences in the tens of millions. At the height of his popularity (through the 1930s), he received on average 80,000 letters a week. According to The Holocaust Encyclopedia, Coughlin vigorously denounced ‘international bankers’, defended Nazi violence as justifiable retaliation for Jewish persecution of Christians, ‘promoted fascist dictatorship and authoritarian government as the only cure to the ills of democracy and capitalism’, and ‘denounced the entry of the United States into World War II, claiming that the Jews had planned the war for their own benefit and had conspired to involve the United States’ (Holocaust Encyclopedia 2010).
6 Horkheimer and Adorno wrote: ‘We are wholly convinced … that social freedom is inseparable from enlightened thought’. Immediately they added, however, the dialectical dimension: ‘If enlightenment does not accommodate reflection … then it seals its own fate’ (H&A 1991: xiii).
7 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xd7Fhaji8ow.
8 Enzensberger wrote: ‘This service [of the mind industry] is essentially the same all over the world, no matter how the industry is operated: under state, public, or private management, on a profit or nonprofit basis. The mind industry’s main business, and concern, is not to sell its product: it is to “sell” the existing order, to perpetuate the prevailing pattern of man’s domination by man, no matter who runs the society, and by what means. Its main task is to expand and train our consciousness – in order to exploit it’ (Enzensberger 1974: 10).
9 To cite but one of many possible substantiations: Adorno wrote that massive cruelty, as at Auschwitz, raises questions ‘whether the consolation of philosophy that the death of individuals is the price paid by the great movement of history was not always the swindle it is today; whether the sufferings of a single human being can be compensated for by the triumphal march of progress’ (Adorno 2006: 8).
10 Smythe wrote, for example: ‘The principal contradiction is between workers and capital, but a number of massive contradictions exist within it: those between dominant and subordinated races and ethnic groups, between men and women, between broad age groups … between religious faiths; there are also significant contradictions within the ruling class’ (Smythe 1981a: 3).