Communication Theory Media, Technology and Society

To take their opening claim:

The sociological theor y that the loss of the support of objectively established

religion, the dissolution of the last remnants of precapitalism, together

with technological and social differentiation and specialization, have led to

cultural chaos is disproved ever y day; for culture now impresses the same

stamp on ever ything. Films, radio and magazines make up a system which

is uniform as a whole and in ever y part. (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1993: 30)

But the culture industry does not only produce standardized content;

it also produces the audience itself by way of ‘a circle of manipulation and

retroactive need in which the unity of the system [of the production and

consumption of meanings] grows ever stronger’ (31). This formulation

places emphasis on the fact that broadcast produces content for audiences

at the same time as it produces audiences for the content – one of the first

statements of how the media themselves are a system of social integration

which, despite its function as servile to the needs of commodity capitalism,

nevertheless facilitates a common culture. In other words the mass is

constituted by broadcast; it is not some kind of pre-given amorphous

body that has broadcast imposed on it.^9

For Adorno and Horkheimer, perhaps the most significant feature of

the culture industry is that it inculcates ‘obedience to hierarchy’ (38). In

the very structure of the few producing on behalf of the many, it discour-

ages the mass from taking initiative or from questioning the initiative

being taken by the elite. It is little wonder that the culture industry pro-

duces a loss of individuality (see 41) – a phenomenon which mass society

theory, as we saw, does not so much describe as promote in its selection

of methodology.

Interestingly, the culture industry thesis shares with the liberal-

pluralist perspective the idea of the media as an extension of social relations.

However, where there is a fundamental disagreement is over what exactly

is extended, which for the Frankfurt School is a replication of obedience to

hierarchy continuous with pre-media social relations. Moreover, for them,

the mass media collude in the reduction of social life to the flat, one-

dimensional intellectual and emotional habits of commodity consumption,

thereby completing the process of the spiritless circulation of commodities.

The media as an apparatus of ideology

For contemporary Marxist perspectives on the media, the culture industry

is an ‘industry’ in itself, but is less important as a site of the production of

‘new’ social relations that might be exclusively derived from mass media than

it is as a site of the reproduction of existing social relations – particularly

class divisions, but also the divisions of gender, ethnicity and race. The

Marxist approach is therefore interested in the meanings that are negotiated

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