Page 33 - Communication Commerce and Power The Political Economy of America and the Direct Broadcast Satellite

US Foreign Communication Policy 21

monopoly and the presumed security needs of the West as expressed
through the Department of Defense (DoD). In fact, the potential
economic and cultural-power benefits of developing and implement-
ing DBS technologies, although occasionally recognized, were more
usually suppressed or diverted to protect these and other interests.

2.2 CULTURE AS THE OBJECT OF INQUIRY

US foreign communication policy, as characterized through the lens
of the cultural imperialism paradigm, is the expression of a complex
and systemic collaboration among media-based conglomerates and
other corporations, the US military establishment and other state
agents. Despite the presence of structural incoherence in this policy
field, proponents of the cultural imperialism paradigm continue to
argue that a conscious and/or systemic strategy has promoted and
continues to promote mass public compliance with the assumed inter-
ests of US-based capitalists. Beyond the vagueness of such positions,
11
theorizations of how the American state does this and how techno-
logies, organizations and institutions facilitate compliance and/or
resistance to US interests remain underdeveloped. Moreover, propo-
nents of the cultural imperialism paradigm have provided little or no
precise explanation of how international consent is maintained or,
directly related to this, how a counter-hegemonic consciousness can
be generated. 12
What generates these and related problems in applying the cultural
imperialism paradigm is its remarkably underdeveloped understand-
ing of the nature of culture itself. For Schiller and other cultural
imperialist theorists, control over the political and economic lives of
others is complemented by control 'over those practices by which
collectivities make sense of their lives.' 13 But beyond this generaliza-
tion, this cultural control apparently has involved specific messages
carried over the mass media, 14 to a more complex promotion of
world-wide consumerism, 15 to the all-encompassing invasion of
capitalism writ large as itself a kind of cultural formation. This latter
position understands capitalism to be an imperialist system and con-
temporary globalization developments as the most recent formulation
of this systemic drive. As mentioned above, this occlusion of agency in
cultural imperialism recently has been embraced by Schiller. Transna-
tional corporations or capital writ large, rather than the United
States, is now the imperialist. Again, a precise explanation of who