Page 159 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

148 Chapter Five

On the other hand, however, a critique of money would strike at the very heart
of the current power system—at the present-day “monopoly of knowledge.”
To critique money as a medium of communication is to risk the ire of mon-
eyed interests, and damage the career of the author.
The thrust of this chapter has certainly been negative in the sense of cri-
tiquing the biases of money as a medium of communication. However, to end
on a more positive note: money is potentially a major portal for dialogue be-
tween cultural studies and political economy. Certainly, the bearing money
has on the concerns of political economy are apparent enough. Perhaps less
obvious are the cultural consequences of money, which this chapter has ad-
dressed. By considering money both as a medium of exchange/store of value,
and as a space-biased medium of communication, political economy and cul-
tural studies can be reintegrated into a coherent discipline of media studies.

NOTES

1. See chapter 1.
2. Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776; reprint, edited by Edwin Cannan with an Introduction by Max Lerner, New
York: The Modern Library, 1937), book 1, chapter 4.
3. Jack Weatherford, The History of Money: From Sandstone to Cyberspace (New
York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1997).
4. Harold A. Innis, “The Bias of Communication” (1949; reprint, The Bias of
Communication by Harold Innis, with an Introduction by Marshall McLuhan,
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), 34.
5. Robert E. Babe, Culture of Ecology: Reconciling Economics and Environment
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006).
6. Herman E. Daly, Steady State Economics, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Island
Press, 1991).
7. Anita Gordon and David Suzuki, It’s A Matter of Survival (Toronto: Stoddart,
1990), 3.
8. André Picard, “Blue-plate Specials Indeed a Swell Deal: It’s Now Official:
Those Food Portions Are Getting Larger, But We’re Heaping It On at Home Too,”
Globe and Mail, 25 January 2006, A6
9. William Stanley Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy, 3rd ed. (London:
Macmillan and Co., 1888), 164.
10. Melissa Bateson and Alex Kacelnik, “Risk-Sensitive Foraging: Decision-Mak-
ing in Variable Environments,” in Cognitive Ecology: The Evolutionary Ecology of
Information Processing and Decision Making, ed. Reuven Dukas (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1998), 316.
11. Oren Lyons, “An Iroquois Perspective,” in American Indian Environment: Eco-
logical Issues in Native American History, ed. C. Vecsey and R. Venables (Syracuse,