Page 90 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

Genealogy of Cultural Studies 79

foreseen. Moreover, a technical invention as such has comparatively little social
significance. It is only when it is selected for investment towards production,
and when it is consciously developed for particular social uses—that is, when it
moves from being a technical invention to what can properly be called an avail-
able technology—that the general significance begins. 120
Likewise, in Television: Technology and Cultural Form, after providing a
cursory review of the histories of electricity, telegraphy, photography, motion
pictures, radio, and television, Williams insisted: “It is especially a character-
istic of the [modern, technological] communications systems that all were
foreseen—not in utopian but in technical ways—before the crucial compo-
nents of the developed systems had been discovered and refined. In no way
is this a history of communications systems creating a new society or new so-
cial conditions.” 121
More generally, according to Williams, we must reject all doctrines of tech-
nological determinism as they obscure real social, political, and economic in-
tentions and decision-making. 122 “The reality of determination,” he wrote,
sounding positively Innisian, “is the setting of limits and the exertion of pres-
sures, within which variable social practices are profoundly affected but
never necessarily controlled.” 123
On the other hand, although rejecting technological determinism, certainly,
Williams also insisted that we not fall into the opposite error, namely deter-
mined technology—the belief that all consequences of technological innova-
tion are foreseen. For Williams, technological innovation usually gives rise to
“unforeseen uses and unforeseen effects;” 124 thereby he dismissed also the
contention that economic-political factors determine (in the hard sense) what
also might be seen as technologically induced outcomes.

Innis and Williams
It is time now to take stock of differences and similarities between Williams’
cultural studies and Innis’ political economy, and in particular to establish
whether and the extent to which these inaugural positions are broadly consis-
tent, mutually supportive, and/or complementary.
To begin, Williams’ tripartite demarcation of amplificatory, durative, and
alternative or symbolic media certainly differs from the dualist schemata set
forth by Innis, but the intent is the same. Williams wrote: “This typology,
while still abstract, bears centrally on questions of social relationships and so-
cial order within the communicative process.” 125 Innis’ aim, likewise, was to
relate changes in media to changes in social relationships and the social
order. Both writers, therefore, were media theorists. Furthermore, Williams’