Page 128 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

Chapter Four

Genealogy of Poststructuralist Cultural
Studies, and the Political Economy

of Media Scholarship

Although the early French proponents of postmodern/poststructural dis-
courses may well have envisaged their project as constituting a radical break
1
with the past, and although contemporary poststructuralists often view their
2
work as challenging existing power and as extending critical theory, in prac-
tice poststructuralism can be and often is supportive of established power.
Indeed, as it penetrates further into the mainstream, one should expect it to
increasingly support status quo power arrangements for, as political philoso-
pher C. B. Macpherson observed, mainstream scholarship, almost by defini-
3
tion, supports established power. Through his concept of monopolies of
knowledge, Harold Innis, too, can be regarded as forwarding that position. If
Macpherson and Innis are correct (and I review here substantial evidence in-
dicating that they are), then one should expect poststructuralist thought in the
years ahead to become even more “domesticated.”
The first part of this chapter reviews the century-long refusal of main-
stream American media/communication/cultural studies scholars to deal with
issues relating to disparities in communicatory power. This section substanti-
ates empirically the Macpherson-Innis hypothesis concerning the political
economy of mainline scholarship. The second part of the chapter focuses on
contemporary poststructuralist scholarship, and proposes that it already fits
the pattern established in the first part.
The continuous neglect of power in mainstream American media scholar-
ship is evident despite the fact (or more accurately, one suspects, due to the
fact) that communication and culture have long been central to American
wealth generation, governance, and foreign policy. To draw attention to inter-
national asymmetries in communicatory and cultural power would be, for ex-
ample, to question implicitly the legitimacy or justness of those asymmetries.

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