Page 255 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

ANGELA MCROBBIE 243

What these examples also show is how a discussion which begins
by defining itself within the framework of economics and production finds
itself very quickly dealing with questions of culture. As Stuart Hall notes,

Culture has ceased (if ever it was—which I doubt) to be a decorative
addendum to the ‘hard world’ of production and things, the icing on
the cake of the material world…. Modern culture is relentlessly
material in its practices and modes of production. And the material
world of commodities and technologies is profoundly cultural.
(Hall, 1988:128)
Hall then suggests that the new technologies make demands on their users
or consumers which in turn require the mastery of new cultural capacities.
While the sheer unpredictability of the new technologies does away with
‘deterministic rationality’, there is still a tendency in this mode of analysis
to slip into a model which, though far from the old language of the marxist
base-superstructure metaphor, evokes a sense that cultural and social
changes emerge, however unevenly, out of the changes in the economy. It is
the economy which takes the lead. This makes absolute sense as a
counterpoint to the Thatcherist ‘sovereignty of the market’ model, and to
the neo-right’s free-floating notion of demand, both of which imply that it
is the people who take the lead. It also re-introduces to cultural studies the
importance of the place occupied by economic processes, something which
Meaghan Morris has recently suggested is acknowledged in cultural studies
as being important but as somehow already dealt with by the political
economists of the media. Morris argues for greater consideration to be
given to the re-integration of the economics of culture than a reworked
version of the old base-superstructure model allows,

in an era of de-industrialisation and increasing integration of markets
and circuits alike, the problem of theorising relations between
production and consumption (or thinking ‘production’ at all) is
considerably more complex than is allowed by a reduction of effort to
so to anachronistic terms.
(quoted in Goodwin, 1993:21)

What Morris is suggesting here is that the whole idea of production and
consumption being stable and somehow fixed processes needs to be
revised. Nixon has also expressed concern that as long as phrases like these
are used in cultural analysis there will be a tendency to think of production
as economic and therefore ‘bottom line’ and consumption as cultural. This
produces a further tendency which he also detects in the New Times work
to continue in the mould of seeing this kind of economics of production
(albeit in post-Fordist terms) as the ‘motor of change’ and at the same time