Political Economy

Key Concepts

Political Economy: Centered in Marxism and traditionally focused on social change, “this research uncovers connections between ownership, corporate structure, finance capital, and market structures to show how economics affects technologies, politics, cultures, and information” (Meehan et al, p. 105) Specifically, political economy examines the production, distribution, and consumption of resources, including communication and information resources (p.107). In communication this often involves studying “telecommunications and media as industries” (Meehan et al, p. 108)

Neoliberalism: “Neoliberal economic policies and programs, begun in the late 1970s, have stressed the opening of markets, the financialization of currency regimes, the privatization of the public services sector, and the commodification and capitalization of biological life. Composed of such practices and logics, neoliberalism has most powerfully affected the imagined relation between the state and civil society, disorganizing the fantasy structure if not the actual operation of the so-called closed welfare economies hegemonic during the period of neoliberalism’s emergence” (Reddy, p. 103).

Spivak: “within the definition of an ideal civil society, if the state is a welfare state, it is directly the servant of the individual. When increasingly privatized, as in the New World Order [of neoliberalism], the priorities of the civil society are shifted from service to the citizen to capital maximization”(quoted in Reddy, p. 103).

Citizen-Subject: In Reddy’s analysis, a sort of depoliticized or decontextualized subject who is caught up in the regulative, universalist discourse of U.S. citizenship, which is also a vehicle for capitalist rationality: “We might say that the U.S. citizen-subject has become the twenty-first-century “conservative peasant” of which Marx spoke so scornfully in the Eighteenth Brumaire.Petty in its interests, heterogeneous to the formation of social classes on the global scale, and resistant to being politically and socially represented by the global proletariat on whose back society prospers…” (p. 106).

New Racism – Mukherjee call this the “erasures of racial oppressions” through “appeals to individualism and colorblindness” (p. 3). This “new racism” is used to replace an ideology of integration with a more conservative hegemony of “victim blaming” and “self-help.” (p.90).

Multicultural Conservatism – Minorities positioned in the middle class serve as representatives of individual responsibility, failing to acknowledge beneficial state programs that may have aided them and denying the need for these services to other members of minority groups. (Dillard, 2001, as cited in Mukherjee, p. 6)

State Racisms – Official “racisms managed and administered by the state” appearing through “census protocols, administrative forms, and audit bureaucracies” that serve to “categorize subjectify and control.” (Mukherjee p. 7)

Mythic Meritocracy – The imagined understanding of society as an egalitarian society based on merit. This understanding refuses to acknowledge historical and systemic oppression in favor of an imagined “colorblind” society. (Mukherjee)

Racial order – Established by the existing field of acceptable knowledges based on a mythic meritocracy and notion of equality that does not see or acknowledge its situatedness or dominance. These knowledges deny race but are “nevertheless imbued with the logics of race and gender (Mukherjee p. 34). She argues that Hollywood productions reproduce the dominant racial order “to celebrate hegemonic paradigms of racial progress” (p. 142).

Hegemony: “The term hegemony refers to a situation in which a provisional alliance of certain social groups can exert ‘total social authority over other subordinate groups, not simply by coercion or by the direct imposition of ruling ideas, but by ‘winning and shaping consent so that the power of the dominant classes appear both legitimate and natural’ (Hall, 1977 cited in Hebdige, 1987, p. 15-6).

Gramsci: Cultural hegemony is the cultural dominion of a group or a class that can impose its viewpoints until their internalization through everyday practices and shared believes, creating in this way the prerequisites for a complex system of control” (Gramsci 1948-51, Prison Notebooks*).

*L’egemonia culturale è un concetto che descrive il dominio culturale “di un gruppo o di una classe che sia in grado di imporre ad altri gruppi, attraverso pratiche quotidiane e credenze condivise, i propri punti di vista fino alla loro interiorizzazione, creando i presupposti per un complesso sistema di controllo”. (Gramsci, Quaderni dal carcere, 1948-51).

Genealogy – Both Mukherjee (p. 86) and Reddy (p. 108) are writing a genealogical account. Foucault’s genealogy, for example, “studies the accidents and contingencies that converge at crucial moments, giving rise to new epochs, concepts, and institutions…. In Nietzschean fashion, Foucault exposes history conceived as the origin and development of an identical subject, e.g., “modernity,” as a fiction modern discourses invent after the fact. Underlying the fiction of modernity is a sense of temporality that excludes the elements of chance and contingency in play at every moment. In short, linear, progressive history covers up the discontinuities and interruptions that mark points of succession in historical time. Foucault deploys genealogy to create what he calls a “counter-memory” or “a transformation of history into a totally different form of time” (Foucault 1977, 160). This entails dissolving identity for the subject in history by using the materials and techniques of modern historical research. --Stanford Encyclopedia of Postmodernism

Political Economy as Method

Topics of Study: “Economic structures, relations of production, and the political systems that support economic structures” (Meehan et al, p. 106). Investigate the sites of manufacture and dissemination (Meehan et al).

Methodological issues: Not well adapted to “analyzing cultural commodities as artifacts or audience commodities as cultural collectivities (Meehan et al, p. 106). Questions of determination among the relationship between social relations, commodities, institutions and hegemony (p. 107). How an analysis of race and gender figure in to political economy (p. 108).

Relation to Cultural Studies: Post-modernist research is weakened if it looks for social control and the hegemony solely through artifacts and texts and fails to uncover the history and social totality (industry, economic relations) that allow for the production and dissemination of that text or artifact (Meehan) examine the restructuring of industry as a basis for understanding how sensibilities came about (Meehan)

Dimensions of Political Economy

  • History
  • The social totality
  • Moral philosophy
  • Praxis

Analytic Tools

  • Institutional analysis – “traces industrial structures and their effects (Meehan et al, p. 112)
  • Instrumental analysis – “traces the personal and business networks within institutions” (Meehan et al, p. 112)
  • Historical analysis (Mukherjee, Reddy)
  • Legal analysis (Mukherjee, Reddy)
  • Policy analysis (Mukherjee, Reddy)
  • Artifacts as sites for the (re)creation of signifier identities (Mukherjee)

Sources: “Government documents, corporate disclosures, trade journals, wholesale and retail sale lists, statements by employees and journalists, and promotional materials” (Meehan et al, p. 112); Laws and policy debate as sites for an investigation of the social totality (Reddy, Mukherjee).

  • Criteria for evaluating evidence: authenticity, credibility, representativenss, and meaning (Scott, 1990, as cited in Meehan et al, p. 113)
  • Direct access is best, but not always realistic. Cautions: political agendas, what information is not included or available, whose interests are the materials produced in, what are the situations in which the evidence is produced

The Law as an “archive”

As Reddy says, “the law seeks to produce an account of social differences that preserves the conditions for universality. Put otherwise, historical and social differences (of gender, race, sexuality, etc.) are subjugated by the law, as a precondition of their entrance into the national record, forced to preserve the liberal narrative of universality on which the legal sphere bases its notion of justice and the nation is said to be founded.” The law is idealized as disinterested and dispassionate, is actually “the active technique by which sexual, racial, gendered, and national differences, both historical and futural, are suppressed, frozen, and redirected as the occasion for a universal knowledge.” Thus we need to read the archive against the grain. (pp. 115-117).

Hollywood movies as models for policy. The repertoire of meanings and stereotypes circulated in the films are implicated in the anti-affirmative action rhetoric and policies of the 1990s, as well as in policies related to multiculturalism, immigration, the welfare state etc. (p. 143).

Hollywood mainstream movies in the nineties reinforce and reproduce the hegemony of the white male over women and black men in the workplace:

…mainstream Hollywood productions reproduce the dominant racial order of things to celebrate hegemonic paradigm of racial progress. […] Whether race is deployed as an effective stratagem of divisiveness in policy assaults or gender cinematic scripts work to cloud perverting national dilemmas about race, these generic combinations of silence and evocation perform key hegemonic work. Making and remaking ethical claims about merit and objectivity, they naturalize white male control over the post-civil rights workplace, and variously sort white women and black men into a range of collusions with the hegemonic mainstream. (Mukherjee,p. 142-43).

Discussion Questions:

1.What are some of the questions and concerns for political economy in the context of the analysis of race and difference?

2.How is Meehan et al’s conception of political economy useful for the study of race and difference? In what ways might it be limited?

3.How does a genealogical account mesh with a political-economic account of race and difference? In what ways might these approaches/methods be complementary and/or distinct?

4.What is the political economy method?

a.How do the readings differ in their methodological approaches?

b.How does political economy relate to history?

c.How does political economy relate to cultural studies?

d.How does political economy relate to studies of difference?

e.What articles from class have served as good examples of integrating political economy and why?

5.How can we apply political economy to our own work?

6.What are some specific problems and solutions that we may encounter conducting studies of political economy?

7.How might we apply this method in our weekly methods paper?

Videos:

Die Hard with a Vengeance: McClane “colorblindness”hegemonic racial ideology: white males moved beyond race, here Carver, the working-class man from Harlem is pegged as the “racist” (p. 85).

The Disclosure: M. Johnson from Femme fatale/men eater, to victim.

The Contender: President’s speech (gender-blindness ideology). The male President rescues the female sen. Hanson.

GI Jane: “ they [females] grow a metaphoric phallus to prove their mettle as one of the boys” (p.117). Methamorphosis of Jane seeking assimilation.

“Suck my dick” Clip: Jane got her figurative phallus, the metamorphosis is complete and she’s accepted by the cohort: the reification of masculinity restates the hegemony of the virility as the source of power. Jane in order to make it into the program needs to perform masculinity, which demonstrates her victory is not posing the SEAL program as genderless or gender-blind, but quite exactly as the opposite. “O’Neil ultimately reinforces the hegemonic, masculinist ideal of the American worker” (p.129).

THE MERITORIOUS IDEAL OF THE WORKPLACE IS PREMISED UPON A VAST FIELD OF ACCEPTED KNOWLEDGES THAT ARE GENDERED RATHER THAN GENDER-BLIND AND RACIAL RATHER THAN RACE-BLIND. (P.129)

Further Reading:

Garnham, N. (2001). The political economy of mass communication. In M. G. Durham, & D. Kellner (Eds.), Media and cultural studies: Keyworks (pp. 225-252). Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers.

Hesmondhalgh, D. (2002). The cultural industries. London; Thousand Oaks: SAGE.

Lury, C. (1996). Consumer culture. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. (For example, Chapter 6, Changing Races, Changing Places).

Mosco, V. (1996). The political economy of communication rethinking and renewal. London; Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications.

Murdock, Graham, Golding, Peter. (1991). Culture, communication and political economy. In J. Curran, & M. Gurevitch (Eds.), Mass media and society (4th ed., pp. 60-83). London; New York; New York: E. Arnold ; Distributed in the USA by Routledge, Chapman and Hall.

Smythe, D. W. (2001). On the audience commodity and its work. In M. G. Durham, & D. Kellner (Eds.), Media and cultural studies: Keyworks (pp. 253-279). Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers.