Page 108 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

Chapter Three

The Colloquy Revisited

THE COLLOQUY

As noted in the Introduction, the Colloquy of 1995 pitted cultural studies
against political economy in a written debate involving four scholars.
Nicholas Garnham and Lawrence Grossberg represented the poles of the po-
litical economy-cultural studies spectrum, while Graham Murdock (political
economy) and James Carey (cultural studies) assumed hostile but somewhat
intermediary positions. While representations from all four scholars are noted
here, the chapter focuses particularly on the main event, namely the contesta-
tion between Garnham and Grossberg. 1
Garnham’s paper, “Political Economy and Cultural Studies: Reconcilia-
tion or Divorce?” opened the Colloquy by proposing “a narrowing of vi-
sion in cultural studies . . . a drift into an uncritical mode of interpreta-
2
tion.” One issue, then, is whether since the time of Adorno, Hoggart,
Williams, and Thompson, there has in fact been a narrowing of vision
within cultural studies, a lessening of critical perspectives, a drift into un-
critical modes of interpretation. Although as we will see in detail below,
Grossberg largely agreed with Garnham’s assessment, Stuart Hall and An-
gela McRobbie (as cited by Garnham) certainly did not. Let us turn first to
their assessments.
Both McRobbie and Hall claimed, essentially, that cultural studies had re-
mained faithful to its critical roots. For McRobbie, British cultural studies at
its beginnings was “a form of radical inquiry which went against reduction-
ism and economism, which went against the base and superstructure
3
metaphor, and which resisted the notion of false consciousness.” If correct,

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