Page 112 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

The Colloquy Revisited 101

who has produced a text or a symbolic form believe that interpretation is en-
tirely random or that pleasure cannot be used to manipulative ends?” 11
Surprisingly, in his rejoinder, Grossberg again gave qualified support to
Garnham’s pronouncements, agreeing, for example, that “perhaps cultural
studies has paid too much attention to consumption,” and that it may even
have lost some of its critical edge by having “overemphasized the pleasure,
12
freedom and empowerment of consumption (and reception).” As a riposte
to Garnham, though, Grossberg suggested that what really motivated Gar-
nham in raising these points was his wish to belittle the importance of recep-
tion compared to production and to “dismiss” cultural studies, 13 charges
which Garnham emphatically denied. Indeed, perhaps Garnham’s central ar-
gument was precisely the opposite—namely, that production and consump-
tion need to be integrated in our thought.
Grossberg next endeavored to justify cultural studies’relative inattention to
production by invoking the scholarly division of labor:

[Garnham asks] “Where in contemporary cultural studies are the studies of the
cultural producers and the organizational sites and practices they inhabit and
through which they exercise their power?” On the one hand, I am tempted to an-
swer that they are in political economy; that is, after all, what political econo-
mists do, so why should they want cultural studies to do it? One could, after all,
just as easily ask of political economy: “Where are the studies of consumption
and everyday life?” 14

Grossberg next claimed that production is treated by writers not cited by
Garnham, for example by McRobbie (although clearly she was cited), by
Hobson, Nixon, and Jody Berland. Berland is an interesting selection here
15
since one of her projects, in stark contrast to Grossberg, is reconciling politi-
cal economy and cultural studies, so of course she refers to production.
Where political economy falls short, and where cultural studies is strong,
in Grossberg’s view, is that the former has little to say about how people come
to give their consent to domination, whereas the latter has much to say. In
16
other words, in downplaying reception/consumption, political economy is
inattentive to the means whereby “false consciousness” is inculcated by
elites. 17 Garnham agreed with this assessment, and complimented cultural
studies on its sophisticated theories of textuality and on extending the notion
of domination from class to gender and to race. To agree with Grossberg on
this point, however, is surely not to support the continued segregation of po-
litical economy and cultural studies, but rather to press for reconciliation.
Finally, Grossberg recalled that the inaugural British cultural theorists em-
phasized “the self-production of culture,” 18 whereas, he argued, political
economists give undue emphasis to commercial production. What Grossberg