Page 46 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

What (is) political economy of the media? 25

within capitalist development: ‘technologies and organisational forms; social
relations; institutional and administrative arrangements; production and labour
processes; relations to nature; the reproduction of daily life and the species; and
“mental conceptions of the world”. No one of the spheres dominates even as
none of them are independent of the others’.
CPE writers have insisted that production remains determinant in Raymond
Williams’s sense of exerting pressure and setting limits regarding the interpretation
and use of the cultural goods produced (Murdock 2003: 16–17). A key constraint
in capitalist media systems is the drive to ensure profits. This is a pressure of the
system and a ‘structural’ force; it is beyond the control of individuals’ agency
and constrains how they behave and make choices. The system of production,
and the division of labour, is co-ordinated by money ‘in the form of price signals
on a market’ (Garnham 2000: 42). This is determining in one crucial sense, in
that we have little choice but to participate in a system of monetary exchange for
labour, what Marx (1983 [1867]: 689) called the ‘dull compulsion of economic
relations’. As Garnham (2000: 195; 1990) argues, the capitalist mode of pro-
duction has certain core characteristics (waged labour, commodity exchange)
which ‘constitute people’s necessary and unavoidable conditions of existence’.
These conditions shape, in determinate ways, the terrain of cultural practices –‘the
physical environment, the available material and symbolic resources, the time
rhythms and spatial relations … they set the cultural agenda’. The system is
structurally determining in a further sense ‘because it produces systemic results
which no single economic actor planned or desired’. Yet, as Williams insisted,
agency remains, and so how individuals behave – for instance individual creative
workers – cannot be ‘read off’ from the ‘structure’ alone. Garnham (1990: 6)
refers to Williams’s reformulation as ‘soft’ determinism, ‘not as fixing a simple
causal relationship, but as a setting of limits’. Mosco (1996: 5) quotes Aijiz
Ahmed who refers to determination as ‘the givenness of the circumstances within
which individuals make their choices, their lives, their histories’. Determination
does not mean that human action is predetermined but that ‘some courses of
action are more likely than others, if only because it makes some more difficult
than others’ (Garnham 1990: 6).
These revised conceptions of determinism draw then on cultural theory and
sociological theories of structure and agency (such as Giddens’s structuration
theory and Bourdieu’sefforts to overcome the limitations of structure–agency
formulations in his theories of habitus and field) (Benson and Neveu 2004).
Cultural studies’ dissatisfaction with the supposed remnants of economism, in the
formulation of economic determination ‘in the (lonely) last instance’, led to shifts
from Williams’s ‘soft determinism’ towards concepts such as articulation (Hall 1980)
emphasising discursive construction. Mosco (2009: 185) proposes a conception of
structuration as ‘a process by which structures are constituted out of human
agency, even as they provide the very “medium” of that constitution’. This seeks
to redress the criticisms that CPE adopts an overly rigid structural determinism
(Turner 2002). The sociological problem of the structure–agency duality has