Page 123 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

HANNO HARDT 111

concerning communication and the media from outside its own sphere. By
now it has become obvious that the study of communication and the media
is no longer the academic prerogative of one discipline, but the joint
concern of several intellectual traditions.
Notably the field of literary studies with its curiosity about the process
of social communication, including the role of the media, has moved freely
among leading intellectual currents and created an awareness of British and
Continental European thought and its contribution to the modernist
and postmodernist debates. In the meantime, mass communication research
proceeded with its narrowly defined task of investigating communication
and the media as autonomous social entities, demonstrating the definitive
and irreconcilable difference between the practitioners of pluralist
functionalism and the exponents of an ideological approach to the
processes of culture and communication.
Specifically, the British cultural studies tradition emerged from an
intellectual climate created and sustained by a political discourse (as
represented by the New Left Review), which operates on the assumption
that the social and economic problems of Britain cannot be solved by
current conservative or liberal socialist theories; instead, marxism as a
social theory is not only capable of explaining, but also of changing the
conditions of British society. These debates, informed by the contributions
of western European marxism, French structuralism, and the work of
Louis Althusser in particular, continue to serve as the intellectual resources
for alternative, political responses to the problems of British society,
including the distribution of economic and political power and the role of
the media.
British cultural studies belong to an intellectual tradition in which mass
communication research serves a useful purpose for a particular, if limited,
perspective on culture. Instead, the matrix of literature, literary criticism
and marxism produces a convenient context for the questioning of cultural
activities, including social communication. Such contextualization and the
location of the problematic in the cultural process, specifically among
cultural, political and economic phenomena, provided descriptive power
and theoretical complexity to the analysis of communication and media
practice. British cultural studies also appealed to the critics of mass
communication research with its provocative investigations of
contemporary social problems, demonstrating a sense of engagement
between political practice and theoretical consideration within the public
sphere. This is a qualitatively decisive difference from a system in which the
nature and extent of social research depend upon the relationship between
academic organizations, economic interests, and the political system.
Hence, mass communication research in the United States, with its primary
location within the organization of universities, encounters the practical
effects of politicizing research (for instance, through the policies of funding