Page 196 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

Keeping the Portals Open: Poster vs. Innis 185

ing the Johnson’s floor wax commercial, Poster argues that linking (“articulat-
ing” in Grossberg’s terms) floor wax and romance means that “the commodity
has been given a semiotic value that is distinct from, indeed out of phase with,
its use value and its exchange value.” He continues: “The social effect of the ad
(floor wax/romance) is not economic or psychological but linguistic: the TV
viewer participates in a communication, is part of a new language system. That
50
is all.” From a political economy perspective, however, that is not all! Poster’s
analysis is naïve in the extreme. Floor wax is linked to romance in the commer-
cial for the sole purpose of increasing the product’s exchange value. Moreover,
the purveyor of floor wax is able to accomplish the floor wax-romance “articu-
lation” on account of the financial resources it commands, as well as the legal-
technological-economic-financial milieu within which the television industry is
structured. Viewers “participate” in a language system that is rife with political-
economic causes and consequences.
More generally, the phenomena of self-referentiality, simulations, hyper-
realities, electronic surveillance and simulacra, all addressed by Poster, point
to the heightened relevance of political economy in the electronics age. Who
is enabled to construct media simulations, why, and how are they so enabled?
What is the nature of these simulations and whose interests do they promote?
What aspects of material reality are obscured through simulations? Of course,
Poster claims that we cannot fruitfully address material reality at all. But once
we, in effect (and ironically given Poster’s professed promotion of reflexiv-
ity and his ostensible concern for the marginalized), foreclose discussions on
real-world power structures and powerplays by agreeing that language is to-
tally self-referential, that hyperreality is “all there is” (to recall the old Peggy
Lee song), then advertisers, PR professionals, propagandists, and others with
communicatory power will certainly have won the day. Poster’s poststruc-
turalism negates the very possibility of critique; pseudoenvironments accord-
ing to Poster are as real as we can get:
In the [electronic] mode of information it becomes increasingly difficult, or even
pointless, for the subject to distinguish a ‘real’ existing ‘behind’ the flow of sig-
nifiers and as a consequence social life in part becomes a practice of position-
ing subjects to receive and interpret messages. 51
This self-referentiality of signs upsets the representational model of language,
the assurance of reason to contain meaning, and the confidence in the ability of
logical argument to determine the truth. . . . The electronic mediation of com-
munication in the postmodern lifeworld brings to the fore the rhetorical, figura-
tive, performative, and self-reflexive features of language. 52
Poster’s poststructuralism, despite a professed concern for the marginal-
ized, buttresses existing power and further marginalizes dissent. Who is best