Page 248 - Cultural Theory and Popular Culture an Introduction
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                232   Chapter 10 The politics of the popular

                         It is important to distinguish between the power of the culture industries and the
                      power of their influence. Too often the two are conflated, but they are not necessarily
                      the  same.  The  trouble  with  the  political  economy  approach  is  that  too  often  it  is
                      assumed that they are the same. Warner Bros is undoubtedly part of a powerful multi-
                      national company, dealing in capitalist commodities. But once this is established, what
                      next? Does it follow, for example, that all Warner Bros’ products are the bearers of cap-
                      italist ideology? Despite what REM, for example, may say or think to the contrary, are
                      they really mere purveyors of capitalist ideology? Those who buy their records, pay to
                      see them live, are they really in effect buying capitalist ideology; being duped by a cap-
                      italist multinational; being reproduced as capitalist subjects, ready to spend more and
                      more money and consume more and more ideology? The problem with this approach
                      is that it fails to acknowledge fully that capitalism produces commodities on the basis
                      of their exchange value, whereas people tend to consume the commodities of capital-
                      ism  on  the  basis  of  their  use  value.  There  are  two  economies  running  in  parallel
                      courses: the economy of use, and the economy of exchange – we do not understand
                      one by interrogating only the other. We cannot understand consumption by collapsing
                      it into production, nor will we understand production by reading it off consumption.
                      Of course the difficulty is not in keeping them apart, but in bringing them into a rela-
                      tionship  that  can  be  meaningfully  analysed.  However,  if  when  studying  popular
                      culture  our  interest  is  the  repertoire  of  products  available  for  consumption,  then
                      production is our primary concern, whereas, if we are interested in discovering the par-
                      ticular pleasures of a specific text or practice, our primary focus should be on con-
                      sumption. In both instances, our approach would be determined by the questions we
                      seek to answer. Although it is certainly true that in an ideal research situation – given
                      adequate time and funding – cultural analysis would remain incomplete until produc-
                      tion and consumption had been dialectically linked, in the real world of study this is
                      not always going to be the case. In the light of this, political economy’s insistence that
                      it  offers  the  only  really  valid  approach  to  the  study  of  popular  culture  is  not  only
                      untrue, but, if widely believed, could result in either a reductive distortion, or a com-
                      plete stifling, of cultural studies research.






                         Post-Marxist cultural studies: hegemony revisited


                      The critique of cultural studies offered by political economy is important not for what
                      it says but because it draws attention to a question, which, needless to say, it does not
                      itself answer. The question is how to keep in analytical view the ‘conditions of exist-
                      ence’ of the texts and practices of everyday life. The problem with the mode of ana-
                      lysis  advocated  by  political  economy  is  that  it  only  addresses  the  beginning  of  the
                      process of making culture. What they describe is better understood, to borrow Stuart
                      Hall’s (1996c) phrase, as ‘determination by the economic in the first instance’ (45).
                      There are economic conditions, and fear of economic reductionism cannot just will
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