Page 102 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Economy 85

consumption of wealth through the management of scarce resources and
potentially unlimited needs. However, this political economy could also
be subjected to critique, most notably by Marx and Engels, as a system of
alienation that appropriated labor value as a surplus for satisfying the needs
of a privileged social class.
Both of these approaches to political economy—the descriptive and
the critical—differ from the modern science of economics, which bases
its calculations on the notion of abstract individuals who are motivated
by a desire for goods that are regulated by the pricing mechanisms of the
market (Gregory 1982). However, all of these modern understandings of the
economy, whether they focused on political order, contending social classes,
or atomized individuals in a free market, all participated in what Max Weber
identified as the modern differentiation of specialized social institutions. As a
result, the economy could be regarded as a separate domain, which certainly
affected any network of social relations but was in principle independent of
other spheres of human activity such as religion or aesthetics.
During the twentieth century, critical theorists of political economy
challenged any privileging of the economic as a separate sphere. In a variety
of critical interventions, accounts of economy that were developed embraced
basically aesthetic categories of display and reciprocity in a gift economy
(Mauss 1969), of excess, extravagance, and sacrificial loss in a general
economy (Bataille 1991), of desire in a libidinal economy (Lyotard 1993),
and of representation, circulation, and interpretation in a symbolic economy
(Goux 1990). In a dramatic and influential reevaluation of economy, Jean
Baudrillard’s political economy of the sign proposed that late capitalism was
essentially a signifying practice, circulating signs, rather than primarily a mode
for producing material goods (Baudrillard 1981; 1994). As sociologists Scott
Lash and John Urry argued, “What is increasingly being produced are not
material objects, but signs” (Lash and Urry 1994: 5). Economy, therefore,
was increasingly being recast as an economy of meaning.
In this expanding economy, which embraced aesthetics, desire, and
imagination as an economy of signification, the aesthetics of cultural
media, in all of its various forms, could also be rendered as an economy of
production, circulation, and consumption. On the production side, during
the 1930s the critical theorist Theodor Adorno called attention to the “culture
industry,” the machinery of mass cultural production in a capitalist economy
(Adorno 2001). As cultural production becomes an industry, the artwork is
transformed into a commodity that is created and exchanged for profit. In
the process, all cultural productions bear what Adorno called “the stigmata
of capitalism” (Bloch et al. 1977: 123). In this production-oriented model,
popular culture serves the interests of capital—profitability, uniformity, and
utility—by entangling people in a culture industry in which a character such