Page 46 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

Genealogy of Political Economy 35

centers of Innis’ staples writings (England, France, USA) occupy a role
equivalent to monopolies of knowledge in his media writings. Fourth, for
Heyer, studying the pulp and paper staple opened “a door to the newly emer-
gent field of communication studies; [Innis] simply followed pulp and paper
through its subsequent stages: newspapers and journalism, books and adver-
tising.” 144 Marshall McLuhan made a similar suggestion, writing:

Innis made the further transition from the history of staples to the history of the
media of communication quite naturally. Media are major resources like eco-
nomic staples. In fact, without railways, the staples of wheat and lumber can
scarcely be said to exist. Without the press and the magazine, wood pulp could
not exist as a staple either. 145

Finally, as proposed first by Robin Neill, the staples and media theses are
connected through Innis’continuing concern for value: “Through institutional
formation,” Neill wrote, “values [according to Innis] are embodied in the
structure of economic activity, and therefore an explanation of economic ad-
vance is impossible unless the determinants of values can be specified.” 146
Initially, Innis located these “determinants” in staples, albeit as interacting
with geography, modes of extraction, modes of transportation, and with for-
eign demand. In his media writings, however, Innis proposed a more central
role for transportation and communication: “The values that constitute soci-
ety,” Neill wrote, “are a set of judgments that, to a significant degree, are
structured by the dominant means of transportation and communication; that
is to say, the medium is the message.” 147

Medium Theory

In his introduction to Empire and Communications, first published in 1950,
Innis gave a brief summary of what is today known as medium theory. 148 In-
nis claimed the physical attributes of media (their heaviness and durability,
and elsewhere he mentioned also their capacity to store messages and their
ease or difficulty in being encoded), cause them to be biased either toward
supporting control through time (as exercised by religious leaders and others
invoking custom, tradition, local culture, continuity, myth, collective mem-
ory, and ultimate meaning), or control over space (as exercised by large cor-
porations, governments, and the military, all of which are intent on adminis-
tering ever-larger territories in the present). Paper, for example, being lighter
and more tractable than stone or parchment, and with the larger messaging ca-
pacity, is the more space-binding medium; in conjunction with the printing
press, paper becomes more space-binding still. An alternative formulation of
this space-time dialectic is being vs. becoming. 149