Page 119 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

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empiricism. The notion of ‘critical’ research (as opposed to administrative
research) becomes a point of legitimation in the development of mass
communication studies. It asserts the neutral, independent position of mass
communication research in the study of society and establishes mass
communication research not only as a field (and therefore, as an
administrative unit within universities), but also as a relevant and
important methodological specialization of a branch of sociology, in which
the priorities of the method become the determinants of social research and
the source of research agendas.
In this form, the accommodation of a ‘critical’ position within mass
communication research may have served as a convenient strategy for
defusing potentially controversial (since ideologically unacceptable) and
challenging threats to the authority of the sociological enterprise in mass
communication studies, including public opinion research. They arose from
two directions: traditional social criticism, latent in social scientific
scholarship since the turn of the century, and post-Second World War
marxism, vital as a theoretical force in the explanation of social changes
and the historical condition in Europe.
The suggestion of ‘critical’ research as a socially desirable goal, within
the limits of the dominant perspective of democratic practice, however,
was a pseudo-oppositional argument with an appeal to a commonsense
notion of criticism. It represented a successful attempt to create a false
dichotomy and a confrontation of research practices without challenging
their common theoretical and political premises. Subsequent endeavours of
mainstream mass communication research to embrace critical theory, or
appropriate certain aspects of a marxist perspective, have demonstrated a
willingness to coopt such approaches, rather than to rethink the position of
communication and media studies in terms of the weaknesses or failures of
their underlying theory of society.
Not unlike British cultural studies a few years later, the introduction of
critical theory as a European critique of contemporary society was a
political challenge and a direct confrontation between liberal pluralism and
marxism as competing theories of society; it also reflected the quality and
intensity of an intellectual commitment to a critique of ideological
domination and political power. Thus, the question of adapting cultural
studies to an analysis of social and political conditions of American society
is not only a commitment to the uses of history; it also requires an
emphasis upon the ideological in the review of those intentions, interests
and actions which intersect in the spheres of cultural, economic and
political power, thus rendering a fundamental critique of the dominant
model of society.
At a different level, the reception and assimilation of such distinct
theoretical propositions and research practices raise a number of questions
concerning the ways in which they are transformed into a problematic