Page 17 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

6 Introduction to Part One

Lawrence Grossberg and James Carey, championing their understanding of
cultural studies, faced off against Nicholas Garnham and Graham Murdock,
who represented critical political economy. According to the journal’s associ-
ate editor, Oscar Gandy, Jr., the Colloquy was Grossberg’s idea, a way he
thought to transfer the debate from the extemporaneous platform of a live
conference to the less volatile and less evanescent medium of the printed
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page. Less evanescent, the published symposium certainly was; reduction in
volatility, however, is quite another matter. Gandy reports that Angela
McRobbie, invited as discussant on account of her feminist perspectives on
cultural studies, bowed out, “so outraged and insulted” had she been “by Gar-
nham’s initial draft.” Likewise, Carey fumed at what he termed Garnham’s
“condescending attitude toward cultural studies,” adding that “these are tones
of bitter divorce, not a search for a friendly reconciliation or a merger of in-
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tellectual labor.” In fact, even the published final edit is laced, from both
sides, with epithets, insults, and innuendo. Grossberg, for example, accused
Garnham of intentionally misrepresenting the founders of British cultural
studies, and then closed his contribution with the following caustic volley:
“So I must decline the invitation [proffered in the title of Garnham’s article]
to reconcile, and point out that we don’t need a divorce because we were
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never married.” The claim, “we were never married,” is a major object of
analysis and criticism in part I of this book.
Over a decade later, the fields remain riven. Janice Peck, for example,
wrote in 2006 that political economy and cultural studies “have arrived at an
uneasy truce born of having divided up the world—and their respective ob-
jects of inquiry—into the putatively separate realms of ‘economy’ and ‘cul-
ture.’” 12 Richard Lee, similarly, speaks not of two, but of three solitudes,
maintaining that inquiry into economic, political, and cultural matters “face
off [as] mutually exclusive superdisciplines.” 13 Making the impasse even
more ironic and unfortunate is the fact that, as Eileen Meehan observes, the
camps share, or at least claim to share, the same “critical valuation” of capi-
talism and its cultural processes. There should be, in other words, substantial
common ground. Nonetheless, Meehan asks rhetorically, “Is dialogue be-
tween cultural studies and political economy possible?” 14
What, then, has prevented or inhibited many political economy and cultural
studies scholars from entering, or re-entering, into sustained and fruitful dia-
logue? One explanation might be the propensity to specialize, even to such an
extent that academic specialties become noncommunicative. In chapter 1 I re-
view the emergence in the eighteenth century of political economy from
moral philosophy, and as well I recount the split between economics and po-
litical philosophy/political science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries—to the effect that today’s mainline economics (“neoclassicism”) is