Page 41 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

20 Mapping approaches and themes

demand that those seeking to sustain and advance critical work find common cause
against neoconservatism (Hesmondhalgh 2007: 47), and the threat to criticality
arising from marketisation pressures in higher education.

Cultural theory

A core organising tenet for cultural studies is to challenge the condescension,
elitism and cultural hierarchism that justifies denigrating or disregarding ordinary,
everyday culture. Here cultural studies identifies elitist perspectives from the
political left, as well as right-tending conservatism, with the Frankfurt School’s
critical pessimism ritually condemned in textbook accounts. Within cultural studies
a reading of contemporary culture emerged that challenged at key points the
critical perspectives of CPE. Cultural studies ‘had a fairly positive perspective,
counting on the potential resistance of working-class culture in the face of capitalist
domination’ (Christians et al. 2009: 185). The critical concerns with mass media
power and influence were mitigated and minimised by counter-assertions.
Commercial mass media dominance was less consequential because its content
was raw material used for refashioning into more autonomous and oppositional
cultures and meanings (Jenkins 1992). For Lull (1995: 73) ‘Popular culture … is
empowering. The mass media contribute to the process by distributing cultural
resources to oppressed individuals and subordinate groups which they use to
construct their tactics of resistance against hegemonic strategies of containment’.
This perspective became dominant in a more optimistic version of cultural studies
variously described as ‘cultural populism’ (McGuigan 1992) and ‘celebratory
cultural studies’ (Babe 2009). A key dynamic in cultural studies was to reject the
assumed passivity of audiences and emphasise instead the interpretative capabilities
of ‘active audiences’, the productive refashioning of cultural texts by subcultures and
fans, and more recently interactivity and co-creation online. Cultural studies has
foregrounded issues of ‘textuality, subjectivity, identity, discourse and pleasure in
relation to culture’ (Hesmondhalgh 2007: 42). The ‘new’ audience researchers
emphasised the active construction of meaning and the appropriation of media
products to fashion independent, even oppositional, cultures.
The CPE critique is that cultural studies progressively abandoned attention to
the structural factors that influence the production of media content (McChesney
2004a: 43). CPE scholars have charged that the relative absence of analysis of
capitalism and the structuring influence of class relations restricts the explanatory
reach of cultural studies and contributes in some versions to an uncritical
account of market provision (‘cultural populism’). In some areas of enquiry what
began as an informed criticism of economism and reductiveness in analysis
ended up as an evasion of problems of power in all but the most micro of
contexts.
The problems of corporate control over communications, emphasised by
critical political economists, could be answered by a more consoling account
that granted independent creativity and agency to audiences. Political