Page 76 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

Genealogy of Cultural Studies 65

omy, one should always be aware that really they are representing only their
particular (poststructuralist) mode of cultural studies, not the entire field.
One complaint lodged by contemporary (poststructuralist) cultural studies
scholars against political economy concerns economism, that is, an undue
17
economic determinism regarding culture; they have maintained that politi-
cal economy’s purported economism and class emphasis must be “supple-
mented” by other considerations, particularly ones relating to race, gender,
sexuality, and ethnicity. Some of these scholars also claim that since “moder-
nity has passed into postmodernity,” contemporary analyses must be “more
preoccupied with the fragmentation of cultures than they are with structures
of cultural production, dissemination and consumption.” In this view, criti-
18
cal political economy, as it is premised on the existence of structures of dom-
ination and oppression, is an anachronism in the postmodern age of ever-
shifting, ever-fragmenting, and ever-recombining structures.
Another contentious but related issue concerns the relative importance to
be accorded the production of cultural artifacts vs. their reception/interpreta-
tion. Johnson, for example, after acknowledging contributions to cultural
studies by political economists, by the early Frankfurt School, and by E. P.
Thompson’s classic book The Making of the English Working Class, dispar-
aged them all for taking “if not the viewpoint of cultural producers, at least
the theoretical standpoint of production.” Johnson thereupon defined pro-
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ductivism as inferring the character of cultural artifacts and their social uses
from their conditions of production, in other words contending that produc-
tion determines culture. 20
Economism and productivism, although frequently conflated, are separate
issues. In his essay “Sociology and Psychology,” for instance, Adorno pro-
posed that “the psychological reality of repression finds its basis in the real-
ity of economic exploitation and the domination of the exchange principle.” 21
By linking economic conditions to the psychological states of message recip-
ients, Adorno here might arguably be charged with economism, but certainly
not with productivism.
The main thesis of this chapter and the next is that a momentous change
occurred when poststructuralism displaced cultural materialism as the domi-
nant cultural studies paradigm, and that this change is the source of the split
between contemporary cultural studies and political economy. The present
chapter explores the origins and foundations of British cultural studies and es-
tablishes the initial unity with political economy, while chapter 3 (reviewing
the Colloquy) focuses on the departure of poststructuralist cultural studies
from its foundations and the concomitant split with critical political economy.
Chapter 4 looks at the birth of American cultural studies and places that