Page 151 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

140 Chapter Five

way of saying, “Well done.” To be known (or believed) to lack money makes
one worthless in the eyes of some, and inhibits further interaction. “Money
talks,” and in our culture those without money are often all but silenced.
However, money is not just a message, or an assemblage of messages
(texts); it is also a medium of communication. Economists define money as a
“medium of exchange.” Money mediates exchanges, easing the task of sellers
to dispose of articles of which they have a superfluity and to attain items they
want. Money opens communication among otherwise disinterested parties,
but in so doing the subsequent interactions, if any, may generally retain a pe-
cuniary bias.
Since a great portion of human interaction today takes the form of com-
modity exchange—i.e., since money mediates a preponderance of human in-
teractions—money should be regarded as our preeminent medium of com-
munication. Indeed, much of the mass media routinely studied by media
scholars (newspapers, books, film, radio, TV, Internet) would scarcely exist
were it not for the prior existence and circulation of money. Money may not
be as fundamental to social life as air—the medium of oral communication—
but it is certainly more basic than the aforementioned media. In this light it is
surprising that money has received scant attention from communication/me-
dia scholars. Money as medium of communication is at the heart of the polit-
ical economy of culture, and of the culture of the political economy.

BIASES OF MONEY

It was the prescient thesis of Harold Innis that every medium of communica-
tion is “biased.” By bias, Innis meant that no medium transmits messages
transparently; every medium, rather, has effects over and beyond those at-
tributable to the delivery of the ostensible messages. He wrote:

We may perhaps assume that the use of a medium of communication over a long
period will to some extent determine the character of knowledge to be commu-
nicated and suggest that its pervasive influence will eventually create a civiliza-
tion in which life and flexibility will become exceedingly difficult to maintain
and that the advantages of a new medium will become such as to lead to the
emergence of a new civilization. 4

For Innis, various means of inscription could be arrayed along a continuum
of time/space bias. Stone, papyrus, clay tablets, paper, and the printing press
all tend to reinforce perspectives allied either with time (continuity, hierarchy,
community, ritual, religiosity, sense of meaning or purpose), or with space
(speed, efficiency, empire, change, discontinuity, territorial expansion, mate-