Page 179 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

168 Chapter Seven

UNDULY EMPHASIZING MATTER AND MEDIUM

If form is associated with fluidity, interpretation, freedom, subjectivity, radi-
cal indeterminacy, and “articulation,” then matter is linked with physical laws
and hard determinisms. Presumably, were a critical political economist to
break the dialectic of information and treat media and communication solely
20
from a materialist perspective, the ensuing analysis would be filled with the
hard determinisms which Lawrence Grossberg and other poststructuralist
scholars routinely complain about. Philip Mirowski, indeed, has argued con-
vincingly that mainstream economics took classical physics as its exemplar, 21
and the mathematical, deterministic nature of the modern, mainstream disci-
pline was the result.
While grievous harm (loss of material bearings) follows from conceptually
de-materializing information, the opposite error—namely, regarding informa-
tion as matter alone—is equally harmful. B. F. Skinner, albeit writing outside
the realms of economics and political economy, is a case in point. He adopted
a totally materialist (“positivist”) view of information and communication.
The title of his perhaps most famous book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, in-
dicates concisely the price to be paid. In a world of total determinisms (oper-
ant conditioning), there is, of course, no freedom, but consequently as well no
dignity; for surely, dignity is contingent upon the proper and wise exercise of
freedom. In a world of complete determinisms, one must be fatalistic, as the
future has been caused already.
Jeremy Bentham, the nineteenth-century British philosopher and politi-
cal economist, was another advocate of a completely materialist view of
information. Although Bentham is usually regarded as a libertarian, that
designation is quite problematic, for Bentham (like Skinner) recognized no
human volition in the face of the two “sovereign masters,” pleasure and
pain:

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain
and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we might do, as well as to
determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong,
on the other the chain of causes and effects are fastened to their throne. 22

Both a poststructuralist cultural studies focused only on form (or on
Sausseurian signs), and a reductionist political economy focused only on mat-
ter, then, are partial and harmful. A means of reintegrating cultural studies and
political economy is to introduce into the analysis the dialectic of informa-
tion, thereby avoiding the harms and deficiencies attributable to both an un-
due idealism and an undue materialism.