Page 138 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

Cultural Studies and the Political Economy of Media Scholarship 127

rived at Yale, listened intently to a paper delivered by Jacques Derrida, and
the Yale School of deconstruction was born.
Yale deconstructionists, according Terry Eagleton, proposed a literary the-
ory “notable for its belief that meaning is indeterminate, language ambiguous
and unstable, the human subject a mere metaphor.” For de Man and the Yale
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poststructuralists, there were “no facts, only interpretations; no truths, only
expedient fictions,” and they applied their axioms not only to literature but
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also to the human sciences. The impossibility of political economy, given
these presuppositions, is readily apparent. Whereas Derrida’s intention in pro-
posing deconstruction may have been, in part, to liberate people from op-
pressive verbal structures, de Man’s influence was “profoundly conserva-
tive.” Eagleton writes,
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De Man’s discontinuous career . . . manifests a remarkable continuity: a resolute
opposition to emancipatory politics. The early extreme right-wingism [de Man
was a Nazi collaborator in World War II] mutates into a jaded liberal scepticism
about the efficacy of any form of radical political action. 62

In their emphasis on the ambiguity of texts and meanings we see a conver-
gence between poststructuralist cultural studies and the doctrine of the active
audience/active reader in communication studies. The distances separating
Derrida, de Man, Fish, and Schramm (sometimes) are not large.
There is, then, a dialectic to postmodernist/poststructuralist thought. On the
one hand, postmodernist discourses undermine the Enlightenment project,
perhaps more thoroughly than any other critique. Here, “reality” is merely a
product of language, ever-shifting in meanings, particularly as new digitized
signs refer to one another with little, if any, correspondence to the “real
world.” Thus categories that realists have taken for granted—capital and la-
bor, progress, gender, ethnicity, intelligence, sanity, and on and on—
categories that in their seeming givenness have often “justified” outcomes
like those bemoaned by writers like Marx, Durkheim, and Thoreau, are here
seen to be the result merely of linguistic conventions, which are themselves
not unrelated to the distribution of power. By this understanding of post-
structuralism, there could be an alignment with political economy, as lan-
guage and culture become recognized as sites of struggle.
On the other hand, though, the seeds of the destruction of the poststruc-
turalists’ radical bent are clearly evident. First, if “reality” is indeed merely a
fabrication of language, then one might conclude that the concerns raised by
Marx, Durkheim, Thoreau, and their successors are likewise mere fabrica-
tions, mere phantasmagoria, bearing no necessary relation at all to material
existence. Indeed, the very criteria whereby social arrangements are to be
judged (equity, human dignity, environmental health, peace) become mere