Page 169 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

158 Chapter Six

and more our sources of information are no longer connected to the natural
world and its limits.” 36
Like Innis, who pleaded for “balance” between time and space in order that
society would neither become stagnant nor fall into chaos, Suzuki insists that
we need to integrate these rival ways of understanding time. By conceiving
time as a spiral, rather than as a circle or as a straight line, we could synthe-
size the cyclical or mythic with the linear, scientific notions, making us more
aware than at present of the “simultaneous spin of nature’s seasons within
time’s trajectory,” a necessity, he concludes, if we are to survive. 37
Suzuki, like Innis, connects control of media to culture as manifested in
conceptions of time. According to Suzuki, media are purposefully propagan-
distic in imparting a worldview consistent with the short-term interests of
their controllers. He explains:

In our view, the media pour out stories that are full of assumptions and values
in the guise of objective value-free reporting. Most programming on television
simply takes for granted our right to exploit nature as we see fit, to dominate the
planet, to increase our consumption, to create more economic growth, to dump
our wastes into the environment. Few object to these assumptions because they
are so deeply set in our culture that they are accepted as obvious truths. How-
ever, they are biases nevertheless. Yet the minute a natural history film takes a
strong environmental position that questions these beliefs, it is immediately crit-
icized and bombarded with the demand to present “the other side.” 38

The foregoing account, albeit brief, may nonetheless suffice to show that
the contemporary writings of David Suzuki and John Ralston Saul are largely
congruent with the mode of analysis inaugurated by Innis. Saul viewed lan-
guages as possible monopolies of knowledge and as culturally biased media.
Suzuki, too, described cultural biases of media, both old and new, and ex-
tended Innis’ analysis of oral culture to contemporary tribal cultures. The “tri-
angulation” presented here—Innis, Saul, Suzuki—affirms the possibility of
the Innisian medium dialectic of time-space being an important portal for di-
alogue between cultural studies and political economy.

NOTES

1. John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West
(Toronto: Penguin, 1992), 53.
2. John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization (Toronto: Anansi, 1995), 111.
3. Harold A. Innis, Empire and Communications (1950; reprint, with Foreword by
Marshall McLuhan, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), viii.
4. Saul, Unconscious Civilization, 5.