Page 126 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

The Colloquy Revisited 115

drew Willis, “EnCana’s Breakup a Boon for Bay Street,” Globe and Mail, May 13,
2008, B17.
38. Hall, “The Rediscovery of ‘Ideology,’” 79.
39. Hall, “The Rediscovery of ‘Ideology,’” 80.
40. Grossberg, “Cultural Studies vs. Political Economy,” 77.
41. This claim lies at the heart of the poststructuralism of Mark Poster and Jean
Baudrillard. See chapter 8. See also Frank Webster, Theories of the Information Soci-
ety (London: Routledge, 1995), 163–92.
42. Here it is useful to recall the discussions regarding bias and reflexivity pre-
sented in chapter 1, and the excerpt from Innis, repeated here, in note 217: “But al-
ways the university must foster the search for truth and in its search must always
question the pretentions of organized power whether in the hands of church or state.
. . . It will also insist that any group which pretends to have found the truth is a fraud
against civilization and that it is the search for truth and not truth which keeps civi-
lization alive.” Harold Innis, “The Canadian Situation” (1940, 1952; quoted in Robin
Neill, A New Theory of Value: The Canadian Economics of H. A. Innis, (Toronto: Uni-
versity of Toronto Press, 1972), 90.
43. Graham Murdock noted that the growth in poststructuralist cultural studies “is
almost exactly conterminous with neoliberalism’s dominating economic and social
policy.” In his view, this is not mere happenstance, for poststructuralists aid and abet,
whether intentionally or by inadvertence, neoliberalist “free market” ideals. They do
this, Murdock explained, by “constructing a flat horizon of multiple differences in
identities and life styles, [while] the stark, vertical structures of inequality . . . [are]
bulldozed off this intellectual map”—yet another instance of theorizing in support of
elite power, of what I term, in chapter 4, “the political economy of knowledge.” See
Graham Murdock, “Across the Great Divide,” 91.