Eras of economic inequality produce pessimistic theories of cultural domination

Evidence

I believe it’s worth returning to Adorno and Horkheimer’s “The Culture Industry” with specific attention to the political economic context of its publication. Adorno and Horkheimer came of age during a time of deep economic inequality, monopoly capitalism, and global war. Having fled the Nazis for the United States, they arrived to Fordist assembly lines and vertically integrated film studios in Hollywood, a different kind of domination. Their vision of capitalist culture and power befitted their time. In subsequent years, postwar prosperity led to waves of innovative, occasionally radical popular culture and a field of cultural studies less haunted by the base constraints Adorno and Horkheimer saw all around them. Plotted along the U-shaped chart of the past century’s economic inequality, the Culture Industry was born in the first peak, cultural studies was born in the fertile valley, and we find ourselves on the second peak, again perched atop a daunting level of inequality and cultural power held in the hands of the few. — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 36

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that theories of media power map onto the U-curve of economic inequality — Culture Industry in the first peak, cultural studies in the valley, today on the second peak — is a paradigm-shifting frame for understanding when ‘the culture is controlled’ arguments gain force.