Page 75 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

64 Chapter Two

or, setting theory aside, that media products are just plain fun. By contrast,
within critical cultural studies, asymmetries and injustices in the distribution
of communicatory power are front and center. Indeed, among the five char-
acteristics of (critical) cultural studies listed by Sardar and Van Loon, three
explicitly have to do with power:

[Critical] cultural studies aims to examine its subject matter in terms of cultural
practices and their relation to power. Its constant goal is to expose power relation-
ships and examine how these relationships influence and shape cultural practices.
[Critical] cultural studies’ . . . objective is to understand culture in all its com-
plex forms and to analyse the social and political context within which it mani-
fests itself.
[Critical] cultural studies is committed to moral evaluation of modern society
and to a radical line of political action. . . . Cultural studies aims to understand
and change the structures of dominance everywhere, but in capitalist societies in
particular. 15

At this point, however, a cautionary note must be sounded, to be amplified
throughout the book. Although the upper right-hand quadrant of figure 2.1 is
labeled critical-idealist, it is also the case that the more poststructuralist the
writings are, the greater is the tendency to abandon certain defining proper-
ties of critical analysis, including the presumption that there are enduring cri-
teria (or in Lazarsfeld’s terms, “human values,”) by which to judge events,
situations, conditions, structures, and practices. As well, due to its emphasis
on language, poststructuralism tends to emphasize interpretive freedom on
the part of message recipients, again melding this ostensibly critical stance
with “celebrative” cultural studies. In the course of this book, I will in fact
propose that poststructuralist positions are in practice faux-critical, that they
are quite status quo-affirming. But we are not ready to probe quite so deeply
16
just yet.
Today, exponents of poststructuralist cultural studies often write as if their
presumptions and their modes of analysis encompass the entire cultural stud-
ies field. Notwithstanding the fragmentation of cultural studies discussed ear-
lier, when poststructuralist cultural studies scholars denigrate political econ-
omy, they usually do so as if they were speaking for the entire field, which is
far from the case. I will argue in this book that in fact the differences between
poststructuralists and political economists today are no greater than they are
with cultural materialists, that indeed the differences are identical! So, when
poststructuralists like Lawrence Grossberg, Angela McRobbie, and others
point to irreconcilable differences between cultural studies and political econ-