Page 120 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

108 BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES AND THE RETURN OF THE ‘CRITICAL’

which can be accommodated by a rather distinct, if limiting, system of
academic disciplines in the United States. Although this is an issue which
has been underlying the study of communication and media practice in
American universities for many years, the arrival of British cultural studies
on the American academic scene has dramatized the question of
disciplinary boundaries and academic compartmentalization of knowlege,
including the construction and administration of appropriate social
research agendas.
The arrival of British cultural studies in the research literature of
American mass communication studies promised a series of immediate
rewards, since the encounter of mass communication research with critical
theory had remained a most difficult undertaking. There was a continuing
problem with the accessibility of these ideas for the development of
research, which had remained conceptually rooted in the traditional,
sociological model of mass communication research. This problem was
exacerbated by the atheoretical nature of mass communication studies, its
relative isolation from other disciplines engaged in an exchange with critical
theory, and, possibly, by an identification with a marxist critique of society,
and thus with a devastating critique of the culture industry, that excluded
the potential for a theoretical compromise of sorts.
The work of the Frankfurt School had offered a comprehensive
modernist view of the cultural and political crisis of Western society, which
found a modest and eclectic response among communication and media
scholars. British cultural studies, on the other hand, has attracted
considerable interest and a substantial following. The initial response may
have been partly due to a sense of familiarity, albeit misleading, with the
ideas of culture and media research as significant concepts in the history of
American mass communication research.
In fact, mass communication studies in the United States have had a
strong cultural tradition, and a cultural approach to the problems of
communication and media has remained a consistent and recognized theme
in the literature of the field. Also, the idea of culture and society in the
context of mass communication research in the United States has European
origins. It is defined through its assimilation of nineteenth century
European social thought into American practice; that is to say, by the
effects of American pragmatism on the development of academic
disciplines and their particular social concerns.
Consequently, mass communication studies have been embedded in the
social science apparatus and surfaced with the social reform movement
earlier this century. They rose to academic prominence and political
importance with the recognition of commercial and political propaganda
as essential aspects of mass persuasion vis-à-vis an increasing need for the
mediation of knowledge in a complex urban society. The field also shared
the basic tenets of the social sciences of the time, namely the belief in a world