Page 34 - Communication Commerce and Power The Political Economy of America and the Direct Broadcast Satellite

22 Communication, Commerce and Power

these imperialists are, their motivations, and the complexities of their
efforts to dominate others is missing.
Because culture, as the object of inquiry, is itself under-theorized,
efforts to specify how cultural imperialism works (or does not work)
remain largely unrealized. As long as culture is conceptualized as little
more than something that can be readily manipulated by controlling
information flows or, more generally, as a functional derivative of the
systemic needs of capital, little progress will be made following the
prescient work of Schiller and others. Assuming that human beings
are not intellectual sponges - soaking up, for instance, consumerist
messages sent by corporations and 'the West' - and assuming that
more general capitalist and imperialist processes are complex and
problematic, involving both systemic forces and human agency, our
goal must be the specification of cultural imperialism rather its dis-
missal.
Specificity is essential both to understand the role of culture in
American foreign communication policy and hegemony and for the
political task of locating where and how consent is constructed or
deconstructed. Existing theories of cultural imperialism afford
remarkably little opportunity for such strategic concerns. Given the
monolithic nature of the American state and capital writ large, sign-
ificant opportunities for resistance are present only at the peripheries
of capitalism. A united front of Third World countries or a mass
movement of a disillusioned First World underclass appear to be the
only opponepts to the imperialist tidal wave. Schiller and others
are correct in understanding capitalism to be dynamic and ever-
expanding, systemically orientated toward cultural penetration and
possibly cultural domination. They also are correct in recognizing
the American state to have been its core agent forging the conditions
necessary for its development. This view of cultural imperialism fails,
however, in its comprehension of the problematic nature of 'the
system.' It lacks a theorization of the internal contradictions charac-
terizing capitalism itself. Perhaps most remarkably, it contains little or
no recognition that the American state itself is not, and indeed cannot
be, the monolithic servant of capitalism - even if the complex that
is capitalism could ever be unproblematically represented as an
interest.
Specification of the complex nature of capitalism, cultural imperia-
lism and the workings of the American state constitute primary con-
cerns in this study on DBS. This empirical and theoretical
investigation is concerned with both analytical accuracy and strategic