Page 116 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

The Colloquy Revisited 105

textual analyses by Raymond Williams and literary approaches to the study
of lived culture by Richard Hoggart constituted empirical documentation con-
cerning the cultural life of the British working class and changes to notions
of culture attributable to that, complementing E. P. Thompson’s historical
analysis; all three of the foundational British cultural theorists integrated
seamlessly economic and cultural matters, which is to say political economy
and cultural studies. All three emphasized cultural production, as well the
consumption or interpretation of cultural artifacts.
Of course, scholars have their areas of expertise, their favored methodolo-
gies, and their foci of attention. Compared to his voluminous writings on aes-
thetics, for example, Adorno spent precious little time addressing the culture
industry. Similarly, Innis’ training in economics meant that he grounded his
depictions of culture on materialist categories and spent little if any time on
nuanced interpretations of texts. Of all the writers we have reviewed, Ray-
mond Williams exhibited the greatest facility for balancing cultural, political,
and economic categories to arrive at a comprehensive picture of material and
symbolic structures affecting everyday life. All of these aforementioned au-
thors, however, can be considered “models” for media scholarship today—if
one believes that the integration, or re-integration, of political economy and
cultural studies—of production and consumption, of causation and interpre-
tation, of the material and symbolic realms—is a goal worth striving for.
Not everyone agrees, however, that integration or reintegration is possible
or is desirable. It is sometimes noted, for instance, that political economy of
media evolved from eighteenth-century social science, whereas cultural stud-
ies derives from the humanities—from literary studies, aesthetics, philoso-
phy, art history, and so forth. Graham Murdock, for one, pointed to this as an
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important point of departure. However, this difference, significant though it
may be, is certainly not insurmountable. In the inaugural years, as Murdock
pointed out, media studies seamlessly integrated political economy and the
study of culture.

Class
Another point of departure, it is sometimes claimed, is “class.” Garnham
maintained that a fundamental difference between political economy and cul-
tural studies concerns the importance attributed to class. He wrote: “Political
economy sees class—namely, the structure of access to the means of produc-
tion and the structure of the distribution of the economic surplus—as the key
to the structure of domination, whereas cultural studies sees gender and race,
along with other potential markers of difference, as alternative structures
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of domination in no way determined by class.” Grossberg took Garnham’s