Page 45 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

24 Mapping approaches and themes

complex, contested and incomplete. Culture was rescued from its derivative,
epiphenomenal position and granted ‘relative autonomy’ from the base.
However, amongst its deficiencies, notably in the influential account of
Althusser (1984), structuralist Marxism shared two features with earlier accounts.
First, it tended to infer from the study of output of media (texts) the assumed
intentions and deliberations of the producers. Second, following Althusser’s
account of the mass media as ‘ideological state apparatuses’ (ISA), it tended to
generalise the ideological function and effects of media without regard for variations
in their organisation and composition within different sections of the media and
across different media systems. Amongst other things this collapsed together vital
differences between state-controlled media, public service and private media –
and tended to ignore historical specificity. Althusser’s own account needs to be
read in terms of the French State’s grip on national broadcasting under De
Gaulle which informed the construction of a more abstract and totalising general
theory of ISAs.
Both these points were made in a seminal essay by Golding and Murdock (1977):
‘Capitalism, Communication and Class Relations’. Likewise another influential
figure, Nicholas Garnham (1990: 23), in an essay first published in 1979, warned
that a political economy of culture must avoid the ‘twin traps of economic
reductionism and of the idealist autonomization of the ideological level’.Garnham
argued that the material, economic and ideological are ‘analytically distinct, but
coterminous moments both of social practices and of concrete analysis’ (23).
Few CPE scholars would wish to defend base–superstructure in its mechanistic
Marxist formulation, but CPE is defined by the claim that culture is linked to
economic structures and that any attempt to understand the products of media
needs to include understanding of how they are produced and how that relates
to broader structures of society. As Golding and Murdock (2000: 74) put it: ‘we
can think of economic dynamics as playing a central role in defining the key
features of the general environment within which communicative activity takes
place, but not as a complete explanation of the nature of that activity’. At the
other extreme, however, are those theories – for CPE ‘idealist’ thought – which
delink culture from the economic. In place of base–superstructure, a favoured
approach – which retains the central concept of determination – is to focus on the
economic as constraint. This was the influential approach taken by Raymond
Williams in Marxism and Literature (1977: 83–89). Williams interpreted determination
as setting limits and exerting pressures. This affirmed human agency while retaining
stress on examining the conditions shaping how such agency could be exercised,
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at both individual and societal levels. For Williams (1961), this reformulation
was linked to a broader claim of a ‘long revolution’ in Britain involving three
main processes: an industrial revolution, the extension of democracy and the
expansion of education and cultural systems, all of them interacting and with no
single sphere of activity exercising a determining influence on the others. Concepts
of co-evolution and interaction also aid routes out of mechanistic models of
determinism. Harvey (2011: 123) proposes seven distinctive ‘activity spheres’