Page 137 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

126 Chapter Four

Schramm served as director of the education division of the Office of Facts
and Figures (OFF). There he helped draft Roosevelt’s “fireside chats” and
other speeches. He also helped institute major propaganda campaigns for do-
mestic and foreign consumption, and through surveys assessed the effective-
50
ness of the campaigns. Recall, too, Schramm’s declaration, cited earlier, that
“experimental research on opinion change showed that one-third to one-half
of an audience is significantly affected by even a single exposure to a per-
51
suasive message.” On their own, these antithetical positions are irreconcil-
able; in the context of the political economy of scholarship, Schramm’s con-
tradictions, like those buzzing around the limited effects model generally,
become quite comprehensible.
Much else could be addressed here, space permitting: the media transfer
model of Schramm, Lucien Pye, Ithiel de Sola Pool, Everett Rogers, and
52
Daniel Lerner, for instance; the apolitical social constructionism of Peter
Berger and Thomas Luckmann; 53 the agenda setting model of Maxwell
55
McCombs; and the paradox of First Amendment freedoms. The conclu-
54
sion, though, would be the same: obfuscation or outright denial of media
power on the part of mainstream American media scholars, even as many
of them were investigating means of augmenting media power through
funding from the U.S. military and intelligence services. The remainder of
this chapter argues that contemporary poststructuralist scholarship has
much more in common with this conservative, ostensibly apolitical, status
quo-affirming mainstream scholarship than it does with critical political
economy—as it must (according to the Macpherson-Innis thesis) if post-
structuralism is now mainstream.

POSTSTRUCTURALISM AS MAINSTREAM SCHOLARSHIP

From the beginning, through foundational texts by writers like E. P. Thomp-
son, Raymond Williams, and Richard Hoggart, political economy was a
mainstay—even the driving force—of British cultural studies. By contrast,
56
mainstream cultural studies in the United States, even from the outset, largely
eschewed incorporating political-economic considerations. “Questions of
power and politics, class and intellectual formation, so fundamental to the
British exponents of cultural studies, lost their significance in the United
States,” reported Sardar and van Loon. 57
Intellectual historian Richard E. Lee dates the inception of American cul-
tural studies to a 1966 international conference at John Hopkins University
entitled, “Criticism and the Sciences of Man/Les Langages Critiques et les
Sciences de l’Homme.” It was there that Paul de Man (1919–83), newly ar-
58