Page 201 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

190 Chapter Eight

progress, the ascendant neoliberal metanarrative, and present-mindedness.
For Innis, electronic technologies and poststructuralist discourses, far from
65
“opening a path of critique and possibly new politics,” would have been un-
derstood as centralizing power by fetishizing the individual and universaliz-
ing the short-term as the predominant way of organizing and conceptualizing
time.

CULTURAL STUDIES AND/OR POLITICAL ECONOMY?

At this juncture we would seem to have reached an impasse: despite surface
similarities, there are fundamental antitheses between political economy (as
practiced, for example, by Innis), and poststructuralist cultural studies, at
least as represented by Poster, Grossberg, and Baudrillard. The inconsisten-
cies between political economy and poststructuralism are attributable, at one
level, to poststructuralism’s insistence on moving from action to language, to
its rejection of dialectical analyses, and to its persistent claim that the link be-
tween language and material reality is severed.
Fortunately, this book need not end on such a dour note. We would af-
firm that there are ample opportunities to integrate, or re-integrate, politi-
cal economy and cultural studies. Three of these have been treated explic-
itly in the preceding chapters of part II. Another fecund way, though, of
pursuing this reintegration would be to engage the question of technology
and knowledge in the works of theorists explicitly dismissed by Poster for
being “totalizing”—Habermas, Schiller, and Adorno, for example—and of
others seldom if ever referred to by Poster—Raymond Williams, Armand
Mattelart, Pierre Bourdieu and, of course, Harold Innis. I take up this ques-
tion again, at a new level, in the Conclusion.

NOTES

1. Revised from an article originally coauthored with Edward Comor.
2. Mark Poster, Cultural Theory and Poststructuralism: In Search of a Context
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 6.
3. Mark Poster, The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 7; emphasis added.
4. Poster, The Mode of Information, 6.
5. Poster, Cultural Theory and Poststructuralism, 82.
6. Poster, The Mode of Information, 6.
7. Poster, The Mode of Information, 6.
8. Poster, Cultural Theory and Poststructuralism, 126.