Page 77 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

66 Chapter Two

within the historical development of mainline American media/communica-
tion studies.
To see how cultural studies was conceived at its beginnings, I propose
again two major points of origin. One is Britain, where Richard Hoggart and
Raymond Williams, albeit in different ways, turned from literary analyses of
“great works” to critical appreciations or “readings” of everyday life, and
where historian E. P. Thompson recounted the cultural histories and contri-
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butions of ordinary, working class people. Stuart Hall, Lawrence Grossberg,
and many others have nominated these three writers as inaugurators, cer-
tainly, of British cultural studies. The second point of origin is, again, the
Frankfurt School, and Adorno in particular. Terry Eagleton, a former student
of Raymond Williams, wrote: “It was the Frankfurt School which first turned
serious attention to mass culture, and so lies at the origin of what is known
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today as Cultural Studies.” Kostas Gouliamos notes that Adorno was influ-
enced particularly by Siegfried Kracauer of the School, who built up theories
based on a series of small examples and was one of the first to treat cinema
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seriously. However, as Adorno is the more renowned and prolific of the two,
and given also his status as inaugurator of political economy approaches to
media studies, I focus on Adorno.
Other points of origin, too, can be identified. Particularly compelling are the
fascist prison cells where Antonio Gramsci was incarcerated from 1926 to
1937. Raymond Williams regarded Gramsci’s work on hegemony as “one of
the major turning points in Marxist cultural theory.” Today, Gramsci’s term,
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hegemony, is virtually a household word. His contributions to cultural theory
are undoubtedly seminal and highly significant. On the other hand, his work
was not disseminated, even in Italian, until after the War—subsequent to the pi-
oneering work of Adorno. As well, the English translation of The Modern
Prince appeared only in 1957, while Selections From The Prison Notebooks
and Letters From Prison were published in English in 1971 and 1973 respec-
tively. While Gramsci’s work is not considered further in the present book, it is
clear that fuller consideration would assuredly support, not refute, the main the-
sis: in its beginnings cultural studies was fully integrated with, and not anti-
thetical to, political economy. In particular, there is a great affinity between
Gramsci’s notion of hegemony and Innis’concept of monopolies of knowledge.
The thrust of Adorno’s position is less populist than that of the British cul-
tural theorists, but nonetheless Adorno shared many elements with them. By
juxtaposing in these opening chapters the sometimes linguistically diverse
and geographically disparate beginnings of cultural studies, we can derive the
essentials of a critical cultural studies for today which is consistent with and
supportive of critical political economy. The origin of cultural studies in the
United States is addressed in chapter 4.