Page 162 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

Chapter Six

Time and Space

The previous chapter depicted money as a medium of communication that, in
the Innisian sense, helps form a mind-set and structure social relations. In this
chapter I enlarge on Innis’more general medium thesis concerning time-space
bias and its potential for reintegrating critical political economy and cultural
studies. I do this by turning to two contemporary authors, political philoso-
pher John Ralston Saul and ecologist David Suzuki, both of whom mesh cul-
tural studies and political economy in ways reminiscent of Innis.

JOHN RALSTON SAUL

John Ralston Saul (b. 1947) is a distinguished essayist, award-winning nov-
elist, and political philosopher. He has ruminated for many years on episte-
mology, the nature of the Canadian state, the Enlightenment, and other mat-
ters. He is one of Utne Reader’s 100 leading thinkers. Although there are but
few allusions to Harold Innis in Saul’s writings, he is certainly an admirer, de-
scribing the renowned economic historian and media theorist as “the first and
still the most piercing philosopher of communications.” 1
While this section highlights similarities in the thought of these two giants
of Canadian scholarship, there are differences. Innis was always the social
scientist, seeking explanations through material causes; he maintained that
human culture, organization, and even ideas/knowledge are strongly affected
by the natural and human-constructed material environments. By contrast
Saul, a man of letters, has insisted that freedom and indeterminacy are fun-
damental to the human condition; to propose determinants, Saul maintains, is
tantamount to false consciousness. He goes further, quoting with approval

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