Page 190 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

Keeping the Portals Open: Poster vs. Innis 179

course, as Poster recognizes, critical theory by this definition existed long be-
fore the arrival of poststructuralism: Marx’s writings, for example, countered
mainstream or hegemonic thought in the industrial age, as had Enlightenment
writings in the age of faith. For our era, though, Poster maintains, there needs
to be a new critical theory. This is because, he declares, with electronics dis-
course supercedes property as the primary site of domination, thereby obso-
lescing Marxism. Poststructuralism contributes to the new critical theory, he
claims, by “raising the question of language.” 29 In the postmodern era, the
task of critical theorists must be to reveal language-based patterns of domi-
nation, and then to subvert them. Hence, the mode of information must re-
place the mode of production as the fulcrum for contemporary critical thought
and strategy. He explains:
30
The focuses of protest in the 1970s were feminism, gay liberation, antipsychia-
try, prison reform—the groups addressed by Foucault’s writings—as well as
other challenges to capitalism which were equally at the margins of the theory
of the mode of production (racial, ethnic, and regional protest; antinuclear
movements; ecologists; and so forth). Thus poststructuralism argues for a plu-
rality of radical critiques, placing in question the centering of critical theory in
its proletarian site.” 31
It is now apparent how one could think of Poster as covering much the
same ground as Innis. Poster’s mode of information seems at first glance to
conform to Innis’ biases of communication. Innis, after all, investigated the
time/space biases of orality, various modes of writing, and electronics (pri-
marily radio), and speculated on their implications for structuring human re-
lations and individual consciousness. Similarly Poster distinguishes the same
three “eras” of media, and proposes that they have had profoundly different
consequences regarding the structuring of human relations and human con-
sciousness. Innis saw the various media as working their effects through the
types of messages they were predisposed to carry, and Poster views them as
working their effects through transformations in language. Like Innis, Poster
claims that the three types of media help establish different time and space
relations among communicators. Both Innis and Poster expressed concern re-
garding what Innis termed “monopolies of knowledge,” although for Poster
attention is focused not on control of media per se, but rather on the power
implications of the discourses, theories, or “grand narratives” mistakenly
taken to be universally true knowledge. Neither Poster nor Innis is Marxist,
either in his delineation of the stages of history or in his account of class
structure. Innis attributed power to those in control of the predominant
media of communication as opposed to distinguishing between capital and
labor, whereas Poster attributes power to those in charge of discourses and