Page 16 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

Introduction to Part One 5

Reintegrating cultural studies and political economy is of some urgency.
On the one hand, to study culture without taking into account either the in-
fluence of the political-economic base or the political-economic conse-
quences of cultural activities, is to be naïve in the extreme. These oversights
can cause one to misconstrue oppression as pluralism, persuasion as democ-
racy, and elite control as popular freedom. They also can entail a flight from
lived conditions into the safe haven of language or discourse, making thereby
the pursuit of social justice (as but one example) impossible. On the other
hand, to overemphasize the political-economic determinants to the neglect of
human volition and freedom is equally detrimental. Denying or belittling hu-
man agency is tantamount to denigrating human dignity and to fatalistically
understate the possibility of social reform. This book argues that there is a
balance, a dialectical middle ground, that must be sought after, achieved, and
maintained. And that middle ground is precisely what the writers featured in
this book, Harold Innis, Theodor Adorno, Raymond Williams, Richard Hog-
gart, and E. P. Thompson, all achieved through their cultural materialism.
And, that is precisely what was lost in cultural studies’ poststructuralist turn.
Moreover, that is precisely what needs to be retrieved today, by reintegrating
political economy and cultural studies. I will argue that this retrieval will fa-
cilitate both the pursuit of social justice and the quest for environmental
health.
The antagonisms between political economy and cultural studies are well
known. In a 1987 article in the journal Communication, Kevin Robins and
Frank Webster noted that cultural studies and political economy had become
“polarized, even antagonistic.” The authors added: “There has been a grum-
6
bling, often tacit but occasionally explicit, state of intellectual belligerence
between the advocates of cultural studies and those of political economy.” 7
According to Robins and Webster, from a cultural studies perspective, po-
litical economists engage in economic reductionism: they one-sidedly con-
centrate on economic factors which they presume determine the cultural (ide-
ological) effects of media, without inquiring into the ideological and inter-
pretive practices of audiences. Conversely, to some political economists, cul-
tural studies scholars are mired in hermeneutics, deconstruction, semiotics,
rhetoric, and other modes of textual analysis. Absorbed by their high abstrac-
tions and entangled in their presuppositions concerning the self-referentiality
of language, cultural studies scholars seem aloof from and possibly oblivious
to power plays, injustices, oppression, and suffering in the real, material
world. 8
Rancor surfaced at the 1993 meetings of the International Communication
Association in Washington, D.C., and hostilities continued as a “Colloquy” in
the March 1995 issue of Critical Studies in Mass Communication. There,