Page 197 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

186 Chapter Eight

able to perform, to concoct pseudoenvironments, to use figurative and per-
formative ploys to persuade? Professional communicators, of course. Who is
better able to hire the services of media professionals than the wealthy? Mar-
ginalized groups such as environmentalists, lacking the big budgets required
to concoct pseudoenvironments, need to draw on reason, logic, data, evi-
dence, and a quest for truth—all of which Poster relegates to the dung heap
of anachronous curiosities. Wide acceptance of poststructuralism as a para-
digm would be a great boon to all professional persuaders and propagandists.
In this light, poststructuralism can be seen as merely the latest instance of
American scholarship skirting issues of social justice, and servicing estab-
lished power.

HAROLD INNIS

Poster and Innis are both dedicated to the goal of developing reflexive ca-
pacities. For both, in the words of Poster, “the problem of communication
theory begins with a recognition of necessary self-reflexivity, on the depen-
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dence of knowledge on its context.” For both, a method is needed to criti-
cally assess both “the authorial position of the theorist and the categories he
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or she develops.” For Poster, modernist social science, including political
economy, is anathema to this project. This is because in science and social
science the author’s quest for objectivity invariably results in a position of
omniscience—a totalitarian (“totalizing”) posture, in his view. Hence, Poster
flees the Enlightenment through deconstruction, or what he terms the self-
referentiality of language in the electronic era. Innis, in contrast, although
cognizant and wary of Enlightenment harms (mechanization of knowledge;
loss of continuity, of meaning, and of an ethical base; decline in oral dialec-
tic), never gave up on the Enlightenment and, ironically perhaps, came to
view classicism as a major reference for developing a self-reflexive mind-
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set. In this context, Innis’ media studies constituted an attempt to forge an
inherently reflexive social science by developing a political-economic ap-
proach in which the concept of bias was prominent.

Bias
Guided by his classicist contemporaries at the University of Toronto, Innis
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sought to investigate history by placing those interpreting history, and their
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biases, at the center of his analysis. His concept of bias first appeared in a
pre-communications studies paper of 1935, entitled “The Role of Intelli-
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gence.” It was a response to an article by E. J. Urwick, who had argued that