Page 32 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

Genealogy of Political Economy 21

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much indebted. Indeed, among Innis’ earliest publications is a tribute to Ve-
49
blen. Begrudgingly, Innis also acknowledged certain affinities with Marx:
“Much of this will smack of Marxian interpretation,” he wrote, “but I have
tried to use the Marxian interpretation to interpret Marx; there has been no
systematic pushing of the Marxian conclusion to its ultimate limit, and in
pushing it to its limit, showing its limitations.” 50
Like Adorno, however, Innis, too, is seldom singled out as a founder of criti-
cal political economy of media. Here again, I can propose possible explanations.
First, Innis was Canadian. He worked at the margin of the U.S. center. Elsewhere
I have speculated whether John Kenneth Galbraith, like Innis an economist of
Scottish ancestry and born in close proximity to Innis in rural southwestern On-
tario, would have attained international acclaim had he chosen to spend his ca-
reer at the University of Toronto instead of Harvard, or to advise Canadian prime
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ministers instead of U.S. presidents. Second, Innis turned to media studies only
late in his abbreviated life, focusing for most of his career on Canadian economic
history. Third, while certainly paying attention to contemporary media, particu-
larly advertising and news systems, Innis’ canvass was far grander than is usual
among political economists; he wrote about media practices and media control
in ancient Greece, Rome, China, Babylon, Sumer, and Egypt, as well as in me-
dieval Europe and (then-contemporary) America. Hence, many think of him as
a historian of media, rather than as a political economist.
Nonetheless, Innis’ credentials as an inaugurator of political economy ap-
proaches to media studies, like those of Adorno, are impeccable. Innis was
likely the first to proclaim that, to persist, political-economic power needs to
control the media of communication. He emphasized the struggle to control
media, which for him was part and parcel of the struggle for political-
economic dominance. He related shifts in media technologies to changes in
the distribution of political and economic power, both domestically and in-
ternationally. He invented the term “monopolies of knowledge” to represent
not only concentration of media ownership and control, but also of the knowl-
edges circulating in society as they affect people’s perceptions and under-
standings. He coined the term “information industries” to highlight the eco-
nomic/industrial dimensions of cultural production. He related industrial
processes generally, such as the quest for economies of scale and mass mar-
keting, to the production and distribution of culture through such constructs
as “the mechanization of knowledge.” Moreover, Innis’ analyses of the
political-economic dimensions of media and changes in media technologies
and patterns of media control were fully integrated to such cultural categories
as conceptions of time, conceptions of space, education, literacy, the news
and mass entertainment, and the mass production of culture. All this he ac-
complished between 1946 and 1952.