Page 195 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

184 Chapter Eight

As we bid farewell to the proletariat we must close the books on a whole
epoch of politics, the era of the dialectic and the class struggle. 45
Truth is not a transcendent unity. 46
As just noted, Poster’s very thesis regarding the electronic mode of infor-
mation requires that he, Poster, be a transcendental ego, and the foregoing
quotations exemplify that necessity.

Poststructuralism and Political Economy
Poster notes that Jürgen Habermas (often considered the leading contempo-
rary exponent of the Frankfurt School) regards poststructuralism as being an
essentially conservative or right wing philosophy due to its abandonment of
47
the Enlightenment. Poster himself remarked that “linearity and causality are
the spatial and temporal orderings of the now-bypassed modern era.” As a
48
result of abandoning the Enlightenment, poststructuralism is antithetical to
political economy and to the pursuit of social justice. After all, how can one
possibly do political economy if language is no longer representational,
merely self-referential, and if causality is anachronous?
Poster’s riposte, though, is interesting. He asserts, first, that since all dis-
courses, all knowledge systems, including scientific knowledge systems, are
49
implicated in power, to redress domination and repression, discourses them-
selves (including scientific discourses) must be de-authenticated. Thus, for
him, poststructuralism is the latest advance in critical theory. Poster concedes
that in the industrial age, Marxist theory, centering on ownership of the means
of production, was perhaps adequate to highlight patterns of domination. But
with electronics, discourse has now superceded property as the primary site
of domination, and so it now behooves contemporary critical theorists to re-
veal the language-based patterns of domination and subvert them. Language
must replace action.
However, this position, too, deserves critical scrutiny. Are ownership and con-
trol of media really dwarfed in importance when compared to the linguistic con-
sequences purported to be inherent in new media? Poster’s technological deter-
minism in this regard hinges on an affirmative answer, but the support he
presents is unconvincing. He makes much of television advertising’s imputation
of nonsensical properties to products, for example, as an instance in which lan-
guage loses representational properties in the electronic age. But actually, there
is nothing inherent in the technology of television that requires it to be used for
advertising at all, or if so used that its ads take on the characteristics outlined by
Poster. Surely those issues are better approached through analyses of ownership,
control, policy, and commodification—categories of political economy. Regard-