Page 99 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

88 Chapter Two

We see, too, in the abundant similarities between cultural studies as in-
troduced by the German-speaking Adorno and the inaugural cultural stud-
ies of the British theorists, evidence which belies James Carey’s claim that
“cultural studies must be ethnocentric.” 159 Carey’s reasoning was that “in-
tellectual work, including both cultural studies and political economy, is
always and everywhere decisively touched and shaped by the national for-
mation (along with class, race, gender, and so forth).” 160 However, al-
though Adorno certainly did not look into the formation of the British
working class as did Thompson, nor describe their daily routines as did
Hoggart, he assuredly did address the role of media in securing and per-
petuating elite dominance over the cultural practices of the broader public,
and that is precisely what the British theorists (and also, incidentally, the
Italian-speaking Gramsci) were most concerned to do. One might say that
a cultural studies bereft of political economy may incline toward ethno-
centrism, but when combined with political economy it will highlight cul-
tural commonalties of capitalist societies. Indeed, to emphasize ethnocen-
trism, one might argue, could be a device to deflect attention from
political-economic pressures on culture.
What is most striking about the documents inaugurating critical cultural
studies, whether authored by Adorno or by the British theorists (or by Gram-
sci, for that matter), is the seamless integration of cultural, political, and eco-
nomic matters. At the beginning of media studies, then, there was no bifurca-
tion between critical political economy and cultural studies. The inaugural
cultural studies writers believed they could not adequately understand the
everyday practice of culture without taking into full account the political-eco-
nomic context, including that of the production of cultural artifacts, and they
contended that political-economic context itself evolves in accordance with
shifts in culture. Likewise Innis, inaugurator of critical political economy of
media, conceived culture not just in terms of orality, literacy, and types of
knowledge, but also with regard to conceptions of such basic cultural cate-
gories as conceptions of time.

NOTES

1. John Hartley, A Short History of Cultural Studies (London: SAGE Publications,
2003), 1.
2. Wikipedia, “Cultural Studies,” (n.d.), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_studies
(accessed Dec. 15, 2007).
3. Valda Blundell, John Shepherd, and Ian Taylor, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Re-
locating Cultural Studies: Developments in Theory and Research (London: Rout-
ledge, 1993), 4.