Why We Shouldn't Be Bored with the Political Economy versus Cultural Studies Debate

Abstract

Why We Shouldn't Be Bored with the Political Economy versus Cultural Studies Debate Janice Peck (bio) Any analysis that commences by isolating thought from the other components of social reality (the mental from the non-mental) and then attempts to deduce the latter from the former (the idealist approach), or the former from the latter (the vulgar materialist approach), will, by virtue of its underlying principle, inevitably box itself into a corner. —Maurice Godelier, The Mental and the Material It is then ironic to remember that the force of Marx's original criticism had been mainly directed against the separation of "areas" of thought and activity (as in the separation of consciousness from material production) and against the related evacuation of specific content—real human activities—by the imposition of abstract categories. The common abstraction of "the base"' and "the superstructure" is thus a radical persistence of the modes of thought which he attacked. —Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature In 1995, a head-to-head encounter between two heavyweights in the "cultural studies versus political economy" skirmish ended in stalemate when Lawrence Grossberg rebuffed Nicholas Garnham's entreaty for a reconciliation of these strands of critical media inquiry.1 Where Garnham argued that "the project of cultural studies can only be successfully pursued if the bridge with political economy is rebuilt,"2 Grossberg retorted that the two approaches had never been more than "distant cousins" and asserted his disinterest in rapprochement in the title of his essay: "Cultural Studies vs. Political Economy: Is Anybody Else Bored with This Debate?"3 Although media scholars such as Eileen Meehan continue to see cooperation between the two perspectives as "essential if we are [End Page 92] to fully appreciate the complex phenomena collapsed into the term media," political economy and cultural studies have neither reconciled nor officially divorced.4 Instead, they have arrived at an uneasy truce born of having divided up the world—and their respective objects of inquiry—into the putatively separate realms of "economy" and "culture." In Meehan's formulation of the distinction, "political economy provides the context for media products as cultural artifacts, while cultural studies examines how particular creators, particular artifacts, or particular consumers operate within that context."5 This division of terrains is evident in Garnham's query, "Where in the contemporary cultural studies . . . research program are examinations of the cultural producers and the organizational sites and practices they inhabit and through which they exercise their power,"6 and Grossberg's reply, "I'm tempted to answer that they are in political economy; that is, after all, what political economists do and why should they want cultural studies to do it? One could, after all, just as easily ask of political economy: Where are the studies of consumption and everyday life?"7 With Meehan, and contra Grossberg, I believe the political economy vs. cultural studies debate deserves intellectual engagement rather than boredom. However, I locate the problem not in their "focus on different objects of study"8 but in their mutual failure to resolve the problem that provoked division in the first place: how to think the relation between something labeled "the economic" and another thing designated as "the cultural." I propose that it is a shared belief in this separation—where "culture" and "economy" are conceived as empirically distinct "areas" or "levels" of human activity—that fuels the political economy–cultural studies debate and prevents its resolution. This separation of economy and culture rests on an enduring dualism within Western thought, which is variously construed as nature vs. culture, nature vs. society, material vs. mental, material vs. symbolic, conditions vs. consciousness, object vs. subject, things-in-themselves vs. the perceiving subject. In his history of communication studies, Dan Schiller treats the field's perennial failure to develop a theoretical framework capable of encompassing both communication and labor, or "mental" and "material" activity. This deficit, he argues, was reconfigured in the 1970s in communication and cultural studies in the form of a "resurgent dualism between 'political economy' and [End Page 93] its compensatory rival, 'signification'" that "was to remain predominant down to the present."9 Responding to the Garnham–Grossberg joust, Graham Murdock suggests that cultural...