Book Review: Ethos Of Collaboration
Andrew Calabrese and Colin Sparks (Editors). Toward a
Political Economy of Culture: Capitalism and Communication
in the Twenty-First Century. Lanham: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2004.
Reviewed by Mark A. McCutcheon
(Visiting Professor, North American Studies Program,
Institute for English, American, and Celtic Studies,
University of Bonn, Germany).
If the 1990s witnessed a growing debate – across the
Humanities and social sciences (and more specifically in
communication studies) – between Cultural Studies and
political economy, the early “Aughts” of the new century
have yielded several attempts at rapprochement, according to
an emerging problematic of “cultural economy”.1 The present edited collection of essays in “critical political economy”
(read: Marxist political economy) extends this conciliatory
gesture, synthesizing political economic and Cultural
Studies approaches to the field of communications. The
result is a diverse, wide-ranging, and interconnected series
of essays on public sphere theory, popular culture and
broadcasting, and new media, bracketed by reflective
assessments of political economy in communication and
cultural studies, in disciplinary and methodological
contexts.
These themes structure the sequence of the text, which opens
with reflections on the aforementioned debate and “takes
stock” of the communication discipline in British and
American contexts. The second part, which includes some of
the strongest and weakest entries here, investigates
tensions and contradictions between capitalism and various
public spheres. Part three brings political economy to bear
on Hollywood and broadcasting, with the latter topic –
specifically its regulation in Europe – given far more
attention (almost ad nauseum). Part four features
particularly original and exciting work on new media (see
especially Vincent Mosco’s and Thomas Streeter’s quite
different essays connecting the popularization of the
Internet to neoliberalism and romanticism, respectively).
The book closes with a section that “representatively”
extends political economic concerns into matters of race and
gender, matters that had figured in the debate among
Nicholas Garnham, Lawrence Grossberg, and others as proper
to Cultural Studies.2
The last article in the book, Ellen Riordan’s suggestive
argument for feminist theory to “reconceptualize the
economic”,3
picks up the editors’ introductory review of the debate
between political economy and Cultural Studies, rounding out
the volume with an affirming encouragement to forge research
allies and alliances in the face of larger, urgent social
problems.
However, despite the book’s opening and closing moves towards
interdisciplinary rapprochement, some intradisciplinary
protectionism on behalf of political economy does persist,
in the way key references are or are not quoted and so
construct this book’s main audience as communication
scholars. The editors’ introduction denies that the
collection is a “Festschrift” honouring Garnham,4
but most of the articles do mention Garnham and his work,
and only a few do so critically. In telling contrast,
Grossberg, along with several canonical theorists identified
with Cultural Studies (Adorno, Bakhtin, Foucault), tend to
go unnoted even where their concepts are deployed (e.g.
culture industry, dialogism, discourse) – Stuart Hall is one
notable and welcome exception.5
The editors’ introductory essay addresses some of the
specific criticisms raised by Grossberg in 1995;
specifically, the conceptualization, first formulated by
Marx himself, of production and consumption as mutually
constitutive, not opposed. This conceptualization has
important implications for analyzing distribution, a topic
the book explores well (and on which, more later). Like
Streeter’s and Mosco’s entries on cyberspace, John Durham
Peters’ deconstruction of the “marketplace of ideas” cliché
similarly models the critical force that poststructuralist
analysis can bring to the political economy of
communication. But none of the aforementioned writers ground
their arguments in poststructuralism explicitly; could they
be channeling its sensibility, now arguably hegemonic in
academia? A latent message, reflected in the book’s title,
seems to be that while there is much here for Cultural
Studies scholars – and there is – the target audience
remains communication scholars. The collection may point
“toward a political economy of culture” but that keyword
gets nowhere near the quantity or quality of critical
theorization devoted throughout to its counterpart,
communication.
These examples aside, perhaps an entrenched tendency to
identify Cultural Studies with all things postmodern (which
this book often uses as shorthand for irony, relativism,
and ahistoricism) – and thereby dismiss it – may explain why
a related constellation of critical keywords go largely
unproblematized. James Curran’s account of the Westminster
school of political economy mentions Garnham’s critique of
the “information society” concept, yet that concept persists
intact in several essays here where one might expect it to
lead instead to a more detailed critical definition of
information as such. In one great exception, Mosco
paraphrases Raymond Williams’ definition of technology – as
“a congealed social relationship”6
– in a way that reminds us of the dialectical concision of
Adorno’s definition of culture (sorely lacking here) as the
“perennial claim of the particular on the general”.7
Tatsuro Hanada’s reconstruction of a medieval Japanese
public sphere provides another, incidental exception with
reference to “communication,” locating that term in Western
capitalist epistemology as a binary opposite of property,
according to a metaphysical split between matter and mind
that nevertheless requires attention to communication as
property. In other respects, particularly its too-neat
homologies between Habermas’ model and medieval Japanese
history, Hanada’s essay replicates this recurring problem of
less-than-thoroughly theorized critical terms, which also
surfaces in several European entries by policy analysts that
consequently seem more like mainstream economics than
political economy.
Like specifically British work, European problems and
problematics are well represented in this volume,
particularly in policy analysis; Robert Horwitz on South
Africa’s truth commission joins Hanada on Japan to
substantiate the volume’s generalized attention to problems
of globalization in historical perspective. Those entries
speaking to North American issues and contexts may be fewer,
but they are more critically self-reflexive and seemingly
open to disciplinary rapprochement (a tactic occasioned,
perhaps, by what Robert McCesney’s essay in the first
section declares “the sad state of political economy in U.S.
media studies”). Janet Wasko’s skeptical demystification of
Hollywood economics self-consciously works against the
“audience and response” oriented tendencies in film studies
to map the deliberately labyrinthine financing and legal
practices of Hollywood film production; for this work the
essay deserves to be read by anyone studying film in its
social contexts.
Wasko’s essay typifies what Cultural Studies scholars may
find most useful in the present volume: its engaged and
enlightening explorations of the infrastructures,
institutions, and ideologies behind the intensifying
mediascapes, technospaces, and ideoscapes of global capital.8
Wasko’s contextualization of the role of distributors in the
film industry makes explicit a theme here that Steve Jones,
among others, have begun calling for: a greater research
focus on distribution, the mediating term largely overlooked
in Marxist and post-Marxist analyses of cultural production
(oversimplified as the province of political economy) and
reception and representation (oversimplified as that of
Cultural Studies). New media and information-communication
technologies have brought problems of distribution under
critical scrutiny, and into the public sphere, for instance
in the continuing controversy of file-sharing that occasions
Jones’ call. But the aggressive strategies of
sleight-of-hand, surveillance, dislocation, and exploitation
that have come to characterize (in one now-famous argument,
as psychopathic) the competitive transnational media
corporation demand a vigilant and principled attention to
the routes and traces of distribution, in the service of
scholarship as praxis.
The varied international perspectives arrayed here delineate
a critical and global field of debate and inquiry whose
balance of social critique and disciplinary self-examination
do much to advance the volume’s project of interdisciplinary
rapprochement between political economy and Cultural
Studies, and also suggest lines of force for reimagining
these disciplines’ boundaries and common grounds. In this,
editors Calabrese and Sparks offer the timely yet perennial
reminder that critical scholarship should retain a
macroscopic ethos of articulation and collaboration to mount
effective – and effectively interdisciplinary – social
critique.
Endnotes
1
See Paul Du Gay and Michael Pryke (Editors). Cultural
Economy: Cultural Analysis and Commercial Life. Thousand
Oaks: Sage, 2002.
2
Grossberg, Lawrence. “Cultural Studies vs. Political
Economy: Is Anybody Else Bored with this Debate?”
Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12.1 (1995):77.
3
Andrew Calabrese and Colin Sparks (Editors). Toward a
Political Economy of Culture: Capitalism and Communication
in the Twenty-First Century. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield,
2004:351.
4
Ibid.:xi.
5
Ibid.:305.
6
Ibid.:214.
7
Len Findlay. “‘Speaking Truth to Power?’: American Usage,
Canadian Literary Studies, and Policies for the Public Good
in Canada” English Studies in Canada. Volume 26,
Number 3:279-307.
8
Arjun Appadurai’s influential vocabulary for globalization
also seems a strange absence here, although perhaps alluded
to in Bernard Miège’s nod to extant analyses of
globalization (90); Miège argues that new media and
information technologies need to be situated in continuity
with extant structures and processes of capital, rather than
in revolutionary break from them (as much cyber-hype would
have it). See also: Appadurai, Arjun. "Disjuncture and
Difference in the Global Cultural Economy." Theory,
Culture and Society. Volume 7, Number 2-3 (1990):
295-310.
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