Page 124 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

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

social scientific enquiries). In seeking alternative paths, American mass
communication research may find the organizational aspects of the British
cultural studies perspective in a climate of political engagement equally
appropriate and useful for producing its own answers to socially important
and politically relevant problems.
At the same time, the enthusiasm for an alternative explanation of
communication in society, if sustained, cannot rest upon the goodwill
towards British cultural studies and a calculated indifference towards the
dominant interpretation of the social structure. Instead, a commitment to
a critical approach, in the sense of a marxist critique of society, will lead to
a number of significant changes in the definition of society, social problems
and the media as well as in the organisation and execution of research
projects. They are changes rooted in radical ideas, uncompromising in their
demands for rethinking the theoretical basis of mass communication
studies and innovative in their creation of appropriate methodologies. Since
the traditional literature of communication theory and research restricts the
imagination by its denial of the historical process in the presentation of
mass communication phenomena, it must be replaced by a comprehensive
body of knowledge, which locates the enquiry about mass communication
in the realm of the ideological and explains the role of communication and
the place of the media through an examination of the cultural process. As a
result, disciplinary (and administrative) boundaries must be redrawn, with
theoretical (and political) implications for the definition of the field, which
leave no doubt that culture as a way of life directs the interpretation of
mass communication in society.
There is always a chance for the return of the ‘critical’ as an
accommodation of liberal dissent, while Marxist thought retreats again
into the shadow of the dominant ideology. In any case, British cultural
studies as a cultural phenomenon holds its own interpretation; its language
and practice are contained in the specific historical moment, which may
become accessible to American mass communication research, but it
cannot be appropriated, adapted or co-opted without losing its meaning.
The dilemma of American mass communication studies continues to lie in
the failure to comprehend and overcome the limitations of its own
intellectual history, not only by failing to address the problems of an
established (and politically powerful) academic discipline with its specific
theoretical and methodological requirements, but also by failing to
recognize the strength of eclecticism, including the potential of radical
thought.
For an extended discussion, see ‘On understanding hegemony: cultural
studies and the recovery of the critical’ in Critical Communication Studies:
Communication, History and Theory in America, London: Routledge, 173–
216.