Levels of economic inequality track the critical stance scholars take toward popular culture

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. Derivative Media is indebted to the Culture Industry model, but with financialization instead of Fordism, empiricism instead of elitism. — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 36

Categorization

• XREF: The U-shaped inequality chart (first peak ~1929, valley mid-century, second peak today) connects to work from the Frankfurt School book already read, and frames the Culture Industry/cultural studies revival debate for this book.
• DEFINE: Positioning the book: updating the Culture Industry model by substituting financialization’s ownership structures for Fordism’s assembly lines, and appealing to empirical method rather than the elitist label.