Page 210 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

Conclusion 199

material experience. The “structuralist mode,” on the other hand, is indebted to
French linguistics, literary criticism, and semiotic theory, and conceives cultural
forms as being “(semi)autonomous inaugurating ‘discourses’ susceptible to rhetorical
and semiological analyses of cognitive constitutions and ideological effects.” Vincent
B. Leitch, “Birmingham Cultural Studies: Popular Arts, Poststructuralism, Radical
Critique,” Journal of the Midwest Modern Languages Association 24, no. 1 (spring
1991): 74. See also note 5, chapter 3.
2. In his contribution to the Colloquy, James Carey asserted: “I have never be-
lieved that the conflict between political economy and cultural studies, as I under-
stand it, was an intellectual conflict. There are no intellectual differences beyond rec-
onciliation, but there are political ones.” Carey, “Abolishing the Old Spiritual World,”
Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12, no. 1 (1995): 87. Carey notwithstanding,
in the present book it has been emphasized that while the ostensible political objec-
tives of critical cultural studies and critical political economy are similar if not indeed
identical, their different ontologies make their positions intellectually irreconcilable.
Interestingly, in an article written at about the same time, and fundamentally contra-
dicting his position referenced here, Carey insisted that economics is and must always
be irreconcilable with communication studies: communication studies’ methodologi-
cal collectivism, he opined, is and must remain a counterpoint to economics’ method-
ological individualism. See Carey, “Communications and Economics,” in Information
and Communication in Economics, ed. Robert E. Babe (Boston: Kluwer, 1994),
321–36.
3. Stuart Hall, “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart
Hall,” ed. Lawrence Grossberg (1986), in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural
Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1996), 137,
134.
4. Kevin O’Donnell, Postmodernism (Oxford: Lion Publishing, 2003), 6.
5. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitch-
man (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 6.
6. See Paul Cobley, “Introduction,” The Communication Theory Reader, ed. Paul
Cobley (London: Routledge, 1996), 26–32. Cobley suggested that “the increased at-
tention given to Peirce’s work . . . often looks as though it might upset the whole ap-
plecart of post-structuralism. . . . [It] appears to offer a new perspective on how com-
munication might be thought to refer to the real world.”
7. Barrington Nevitt, The Communication Ecology: Re-presentation versus
Replica (Toronto: Butterworths, 1982), 109–10.
8. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780–1950 (1958; reprint, Har-
mondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 323.