Page 45 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

34 Chapter One

making aboriginal people continuously dependent on Europeans. Rifles
changed hunting practices drastically, diminishing to the point of virtual dis-
appearance the supply of beavers in territories opened to the hunt. They also
escalated the level of hostility among the various tribes which now competed
for control over the prime hunting territories. 138 Innis lamented,

The history of the fur trade is the history of contact between two civilizations,
the European and the North American. . . . Unfortunately the rapid destruction
of the food supply and the revolution in the methods of living accompanied by
the increasing attention to the fur trade by which these products were secured,
disturbed the balance which had grown up previous to the coming of the Euro-
pean. The new technology with its radical innovations brought about such a
rapid shift in the prevailing Indian culture as to lead to wholesale destruction of
the peoples concerned by warfare and disease. 139

Innis did not propose staples as working their effects unidirectionally, or in
isolation of other forces. His analysis, rather, concerned interactions among
staples, the technologies used to harvest and transport them, and the geo-
graphic characteristics of the regions. These three factors—staples, geogra-
phy, and technology—intersected to form distinct “amalgams.” 140 As Alexan-
der John Watson summarizes, Innis’ staples thesis is “more complex, more
universal, and less rigidly deterministic than commonly accepted; Innis never
uses the staple as anything more than a focusing point around which to ex-
amine the interplay of cultures and empires.” 141

From Staples to Media
Innis’ staples thesis prefigured his more renowned medium thesis in numer-
ous ways. First, as just noted, staples may be regarded as media for bringing
into contact previously isolated civilizations and biasing their relations in
terms of dominance and dependence, and mediating also to the dual dialectic
of continuity vs. change, and control over unbounded space vs. local control.
Just as a change to a different staple accompanied new patterns of political-
economic control, for Innis so too do new media usher in a new regime and
alter the time-space organization of society. Second, as noted by Paul Heyer,
ocean transport favored staples that were light and valuable (such as fur),
whereas primary inland waterways favored bulk commodities (such as lum-
ber and minerals), paralleling Innis’ analysis of the physical properties of
time-binding and space-binding communication media, 142 to be addressed
below. Likewise, as Watson interpreting Innis noted, since “each staples-
transportation system contains an unused capacity,” 143 the ensuing instability
foreshadowed the biases featured in Innis’ media studies. Third, the imperial