Page 206 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

Conclusion

The renowned split between political economy and cultural studies has been,
in a sense, a distraction, a diversion, a faux debate. Attracting so much atten-
tion on account of the bitterness exuding from the combatants, the hostilities
have diverted analysts from focusing on the more basic problematic—the bi-
furcation of critical cultural studies itself into cultural materialism and post-
1
structuralism. Pitting cultural studies (always in such instances represented
as a unity) against political economy not only depicts the “enemy” as being
outside the discourse (where it must remain, according to Grossberg), thereby
making the fundamental debate “us vs. them” rather than “us vs. us,” it also
renders cultural studies (again, depicted as a unity) hard to pin down and
hence to critique—because, for one thing, the ontologies of cultural material-
ism and poststructuralism are so antithetical. (Recall from chapter 3, for ex-
ample, how celebrated cultural studies scholars on the one hand insisted that
cultural studies is impossible to define as it varies according to who is doing
the research on any particular day, but on the other they were sure of one
thing: cultural studies is not political economy). 2
One could be very cynical. Why are the founders of cultural studies (Hog-
gart, Williams, Thompson) bent so out of shape by poststructuralists so as to
make it seem that (a) today’s poststructuralists are following rather faithfully
in the founders’ footsteps, when such is clearly not the case, and (b) the
founders of cultural studies created the field in order to put down the
“economism” and “false consciousness” proposed by critical political econo-
mists, when again nothing could be farther from the truth?
Another question. Why do “critical” poststructuralists go on and on about
oppression of gendered and racial minorities and speak of liberation through
the abandonment of “grand narratives” and the authentication of individual

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