Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

The economic field 227
disabling features of the field of study’ (40). So what can political economy offer to
cultural studies? 57 Here is Peter Golding and Graham Murdock’s (1991) outline of its
protocols and procedures:
What distinguishes the critical political economy perspective . . . is precisely its
focus on the interplay between the symbolic and economic dimensions of public
communications [including popular culture]. It sets out to show how different
ways of financing and organising cultural production have traceable consequences
for the range of discourses and representations in the public domain and for audiences’
access to them (15; my italics).
The significant word here is ‘access’ (privileged over ‘use’ and ‘meaning’). This reveals
the limitations of the approach: good on the economic dimensions but weak on the
symbolic. Golding and Murdock suggest that the work of theorists such as Willis and
Fiske in its ‘romantic celebration of subversive consumption is clearly at odds with
cultural studies’ long-standing concern with the way the mass media operate ideologically,
to sustain and support prevailing relations of domination’ (17). What is
particularly revealing about this claim is not the critique of Willis and Fiske, but the
assumptions about the purposes of cultural studies. They seem to be suggesting that
unless the focus is firmly and exclusively on domination and manipulation, cultural
studies is failing in its task. There are only two positions: on the one hand, romantic
celebration, and on the other, the recognition of ideological power – and only the second
is a serious scholarly pursuit. Are all attempts to show people resisting ideological
manipulation forms of romantic celebration? Are left pessimism and moral leftism the
only guarantees of political and scholarly seriousness?
Political economy’s idea of cultural analysis seems to involve little more than
detailing access to, and availability of, texts and practices. Nowhere do they actually
advocate a consideration of what these texts and practices might mean (textually) or be
made to mean in use (consumption). As Golding and Murdock point out,
in contrast to recent work on audience activity within cultural studies, which concentrates
on the negotiation of textual interpretations and media use in immediate
social settings, critical political economy seeks to relate variations in people’s
responses to their overall location in the economic system (27).
This seems to suggest that the specific materiality of a text is unimportant, and that
audience negotiations are mere fictions, illusory moves in a game of economic power.
Whilst it is clearly important to locate the texts and practices of popular culture
within the field of their economic conditions of existence, it is clearly insufficient to do
this in the way advocated by political economy and to think then that you have also
analysed and answered important questions to do with both the specific materiality of
a text, and audience appropriation and use. It seems to me that post-Marxist hegemony
theory still holds the promise of keeping in active relationship production, text and
consumption, whereas political economy threatens, in spite of its admirable intentions,
to collapse everything back into the economic.