Page 121 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

110 Chapter Three

sentence or making a new metaphor, there is a monumental discrepancy be-
tween critical political economy and poststructuralist cultural studies. Politi-
cal economists view structures of domination and oppression as not only ser-
vicing concentrated political and economic power, but as being supported and
defended by these centers of power, and as blocking new structures which
might challenge that power. “Articulation” for political economists (should
they ever choose to use the term) is closely related to restructuring political,
economic, military, and cultural power. Political-economic power, these ana-
lysts insist, must be understood as lying behind and motivating “articula-
tions” in the material world—for example, mergers and acquisitions, changes
in the terms of trade, layoffs, copyright act revisions, law enforcement, taxa-
tion, war and annexations, weaponry, advertising and PR, and so on. On the
other hand, Hall did mention that from a cultural studies perspective, articu-
lations and rearticulations normally entail relations of dominance and depen-
dence. To the extent, therefore, that these relations of dominance and de-
pendence are given full consideration, and the “articulations” forged are
themselves related back to power struggles, one could argue that political
economy and poststructuralist cultural studies could begin to reconcile
through a modified concept of articulation.
Second, although articulation according to Hall is a term meant to encom-
pass both the realm of language (signs) and the material or nonverbal world,
41
poststructuralists normally claim that these two realms are disengaged, that
by living inextricably in the world of language we can know little if anything
of the material world. Political economists certainly recognize difficulties in
connecting the symbolic realm to lived conditions: Innis’ medium theory, af-
ter all, was devoted to exploring inherent biases in the media of communica-
tion! Nonetheless, neither Innis, nor Garnham, nor political economists gen-
erally, are willing to give up the effort to compensate for or neutralize the
biases of media and language, and by dint of these efforts to view the non-
verbal world afresh, and in light of the new awareness to help remove adverse
conditions in that material realm. 42 Likewise, Raymond Williams, E. P.
Thompson, and Richard Hoggart strove to align the verbal world more
closely to the lived conditions of the majority population. The concern of all
these writers was primarily to improve the connectivity between media/lan-
guage on the one hand, and material conditions/lived experience on the
other, whether by recognizing and then compensating for biases, by targeting
political-economic-power controlling media, or by reformulating the verbal
(discursive) world so as to align it more closely with lived conditions. All
these writers had their eyes cast steadfastly on goals, values, and criteria
which transcended mere verbal articulations and rearticulations, and which
they saw as guides to social improvement. Fundamentally, however, post-