Page 122 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

The Colloquy Revisited 111

structuralists deny the existence of transcendental values whereby material
conditions can even be judged, and hence, arguably, we come again to the real
(i.e., the ontological) source of their dispute with political economists.
In the Colloquy, Garnham maintained that in the absence of a truth some-
how grounded outside of discourse, notions of “emancipation, resistance, and
progressiveness become meaningless. . . . Resistance to what,” he asked,
“emancipation from what and for what, progression toward what?” These are,
indeed, fundamental questions. For a political economist, understanding and
describing what exists is the first step on the road to reform. For poststruc-
turalists, evidently, in contending that we are trapped within language, saying
(“articulating” or “re-articulating”) something is the best we can do.

SUMMARY

The overall conclusions to this point, then, are these: First, taking Harold In-
nis and Theodor Adorno as founders of political-economic studies of media,
and the British cultural theorists plus Adorno as inaugurators of critical cul-
tural studies, there was at the beginning no inconsistency or breach between
the fields. While the emphases of the two founding groups (Adorno straddling
both) certainly differed, their works were largely cut from one cloth and they
complement one another.
Second, in the more contemporary era, critical political economy of media,
represented here by Garnham and Murdock, has remained largely consistent
with its origins (Adorno, Innis), and as well with the cultural materialism of
Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, and E. P. Thompson. However, con-
temporary cultural studies has split in two: there is at the margin cultural ma-
terialism, which persists in the vein of Williams et al, and there is the main-
stream, at least in America—poststructuralist cultural studies, represented
here by Grossberg and McRobbie, with Hall seemingly straddling the two
camps. As editor of the journal Cultural Studies, Grossberg has been highly
influential in defining the boundaries of mainstream contemporary cultural
studies.
Third, the well-publicized antagonisms between critical political econo-
mists and cultural studies theorists actually stem from the bifurcation just
noted within cultural studies itself, with the poststructuralist version being
largely irreconcilable with contemporary cultural materialism, and hence
with the founders’ positions. Indeed, poststructuralist cultural studies has
more in common with neoliberal, Chicago-style political economy than it
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does with cultural materialism. The prospects, then, of reconciling critical
political economy and poststructuralist cultural studies are slim indeed. On