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What (is) political economy of the media? 19

analysis with naïve realism since this tends to discount the methods and material
of empirical analysis which are indispensable tools for investigating media and
for any ‘cultural materialism’. Second, debates on realism are ongoing within
contemporary critical scholarship, with notable efforts to provide theoretical
sophistication (Garnham 2000; Fuchs 2011). Third, there are, as Babe examines,
deeper and more irreconcilable divisions between critical realism and
postmodernism.

Politics and political and social theory

Cultural studies has been particularly associated with pluralising what constitutes
the political. This has been influenced by feminist, LGBT, postcolonialist, and
new social movement critiques of the exclusivity, selectivity, narrowness and
hierarchisations of what constitutes the ground of politics. At a theoretical level
Foucault’s rejection of a conception of power as repressive in favour of one
where power is productive, diffused through discursive interactions, has been
particularly influential. Identifying with the marginalised and subaltern, cultural
studies has aligned with radical social movements but has tended to remain
suspicious and disconnected from ‘organised’ labour movement politics, in con-
trast to stronger links within CPE with labour and organised working class
movements. There are, of course, vital debates about the scope, orientation and
organisation of ‘progressive’ political change. Writers in the traditions of cultural
studies and political economy have sought to clarify, and sometimes exacerbate,
these divisions and so this remains fraught territory to navigate, with a legacy of
reductive positioning and caricaturing. For some CPE writers, cultural studies
approaches privilege social identity at the expense of addressing the political and
economic forces that structure entitlements, inequality and oppression under
capitalism (Mosco 2009). Cultural studies writers in turn have challenged CPE
as privileging class-based politics and organised labour movements that are
regarded as complicit with, or less radical in countering, other forms of oppression,
notably those based on gender, sexuality and ethnicity.
One key division has been in regard to the politics of recognition and associated
power dynamics. Much of this is traceable to an older debate about Marxian
class politics and its privileging of social class over gender, race and other divisions
of power. The industrial working class as subject of history was challenged by
both the evident failure of this unified subject to overthrow capitalism and the
ordering of power which displaced other sources of oppression including those
generated by the revolutionary (male) subject. However, it has been an unfor-
tunate characteristic of radical ‘left’ movements to engage in often bitter and
arcane sectarian divisions amongst themselves. The struggle has had added heat
in academia for various reasons. It is much more a ‘war of words’, as shared
commitment to praxis (theory-in-practice) and public–political engagement is more
difficult to realise. Further, the debate strikes at core values and self-images for
avowed radicals. As many now argue, in Euro-America at least, the times