Page 115 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

104 Chapter Three

other, it means to join temporarily, as when a truck is connected to a trailer.
“The two parts are connected to each other,” Hall explained, “but through a
24
specific linkage that can be broken.” As easily, and even more appropriately,
however, he might have used a linguistic example, as when the letters s-c-h
are brought together with other letters to spell school; are “de-articulated’
to form such words as secondary, classroom, and honors; and are “re-
articulated” for schlock. Or when a noun is articulated with an adjective and
a verb to form a sentence. In any event, articulation in poststructuralist cul-
tural studies illustrates well its linguistic bent, and is to be viewed as a major
point of departure from political economy: just how representative, after all,
is the truck and trailer of the ease or difficulty in the material world of forg-
ing and disassembling connections among legal, social, political, and eco-
nomic structures? (And, for that matter, can a given trailer be “articulated” to
all trucks, to an automobile, a bus, or a motorcycle)? I return to this topic near
the end of the chapter.
In light of the preceding, the following conclusions regarding economic de-
terminism in critical political economy and in inaugural cultural studies seem
warranted. First, (as developed in chapter 1), Innis and Adorno, inaugurators
of critical political economy in media studies, while certainly affording pre-
eminence to economic factors, proposed a soft economic determinism. Simi-
larly Garnham, representing contemporary critical political economy, advo-
cates a soft economic determinism. Second, as developed in chapter 2, the
founders of British cultural studies, too, can be characterized as theorizing a
soft economic determinism. Third, contemporary (poststructuralist) cultural
studies, represented here by McRobbie, Grossberg, and to a certain extent
Hall, understate almost to the point of denial the impact on culture that the
founders of British cultural studies ascribed to economic factors. 25

Social Sciences vs. Humanities

In these first three chapters we have seen that, at the outset, media studies was
a seamless whole, integrating arts/humanities (cultural studies) with social
science (political economy). On the one hand, Harold Innis, the economic his-
torian and a founder of what have become known as political economy ap-
proaches to media studies, wrote about such fundamental cultural categories
as time and space, being and becoming, local vs. imperial culture, knowledge
and power, the press as an instrument of culture, literacy and the vernacular,
instrumental reason and the mechanization of knowledge/monopolies of
knowledge. On the other hand, the musician, philosopher, and cultural theo-
rist Theodor Adorno coined the term “the culture industry” to explain what he
perceived to be the deterioration in both high and low culture. Moreover,