Page 163 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

152 Chapter Six

William Pitt: “Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom;
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it is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.” Innis was no “deter-
minist” either, but one senses a difference in emphasis here, with Innis
searching out key forces and influences, and Saul tending to dismiss the
same. Although Innis (like Saul) railed against mainstream economics as a
system of thought, for example, and in particular against its purported uni-
versality, Innis nonetheless set about constructing a “system” of his own,
even making allusion in the process to Toynbee, Spengler, Sorokin, Marx,
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and other system builders. Saul, in contrast, seemingly objects in principle to
theoretical systems, and in this we see an affinity with poststructuralism’s re-
jection of “grand narratives.”
On the other hand, and this is of course the central point, striking similari-
ties in the approaches of these two scholars abound. Consider the following:
Like Innis, Saul contrasts societies with memory (“time-bound” in Innis’
terms) with our own present-mindedness (again, Innis’ term). Indeed, Saul
makes an Innisian plea for time, declaring: “If you cannot remember, then
there is no reality,” and again: “We are faced by a crisis of memory, the loss
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of our humanist foundation.” He sympathetically quotes Cicero: “He who
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does not know history is destined to remain a child.” 6
What has destroyed memory in our time, Saul maintains, is technocratic in-
sistence on applying abstract models (he calls them “structures,” “systems,”
and “ideologies”) to real life situations. These systems, structures, and mod-
els, Saul claims, are essentially ahistorical, proposing fixed relations among
key variables. Innis likewise referred to formulaic, abstract knowledge, using
the derogatory phrase, “monopolies of knowledge,” maintaining such knowl-
edge erodes memory and understanding of time as duration.
For Saul, each verbal structure (whether mainstream economics, account-
ing, political science, Marxist theory, even fascism) is an inflexible frame of
reference which selects/bends/creates facts to fit its internal logic. He attrib-
utes amorality on the part of today’s elites (“technocrats”) to an absence of
memory, explaining that memory “is always the enemy of structure;” this is
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because memory brings forth the details and the feelings that confound the
strict logic that structures impose. These comments and declarations seem to
accord well with Innis’ plea for time (memory), and his distress at the grow-
ing ties between the universities and the military.
Regarding the history of modern, western civilization, Saul proposed a
“great divide” between 1530 and 1620. At that point, he wrote, “Reason be-
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gan, abruptly, to separate itself from and to outdistance the other more or less
recognized human characteristics—spirit, appetite, faith and emotion, but
also intuition, will and, most important, experience.” Although the Age of
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Reason was promoted by Voltaire, Diderot, and others to challenge the exist-