Page 166 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

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democratic, contemptuous of the citizen.” Whether or not one accepts fully
Saul’s depictions of Socrates and Plato—Innis, an admirer of Plato, would
have been unlikely to have done so—his general position on orality and writ-
ing is quite in accord with Innis.
However, Innis remained an Enlightenment scholar. Despite his trenchant
critiques of monopolies of knowledge, of the mechanization of knowledge,
and of space bias, he never abandoned the quest for large-scale truth. How-
ever, Innis also was a “classicist,” as he urged that scientific/instrumental
knowledge systems be countervailed, challenged, and ultimately directed by
moral, intuitive, religious, and historical knowledge. Like the ancient Greeks,
moreover, Innis maintained that the researcher should always be reflexive,
striving to take into account and compensate for her own biases. Saul, in con-
trast, criticized the Enlightenment on grounds that it pushed all other ways of
knowing to the sidelines. Saul seems to believe that no continuing dialectic is
possible as scientific/instrumental reason overpowers and destroys
moral/time-biased knowledge, and as they share (in his view) no common
ground. Rather than suggest we steer a mid-course between time-binding and
space-binding knowledge, as did Innis, Saul seems more poststructuralist,
suggesting there are many knowledges, none necessarily consistent with the
others, but all useful.
Saul, then, is rather unique as a theorist insofar as his writings contain more
than mere traces of poststructuralism, yet nonetheless he is able to incorpo-
rate astutely elements of political economy and makes an Innisian plea for
time. He does this by elaborating a version of the dialectic of time vs. space,
by linking knowledge to power, by focusing on media (the means of commu-
nication) as a key site in the struggle for power, and by insisting that without
memory we are lost.

DAVID SUZUKI

Even more congruent with Innis’ communication thesis are the media writ-
ings of broadcaster, author, geneticist, and environmentalist David Suzuki.
Suzuki holds a PhD in genetics from the University of Chicago and was for-
merly professor at the University of British Columbia. While likely unaware
of Innis as an intellectual forebear, Suzuki nonetheless has consistently ap-
plied the Innisian time-space media dialectic in addressing people’s relations
with the environment. Whereas Innis illustrated the time-space media dialec-
tic through myriad examples culled from world history, Suzuki does this by
contrasting the mind-sets of indigenous peoples with the modern west. Like
Innis, Suzuki draws connections between differences in culture (differences