Cultural Studies and Political Economy: Toward a New Integration

• Published in: Canadian Journal of Communication Vol. 36; no. 4; p. 679
• Main Author: Zeffiro, Andrea
• Format: Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Toronto University of Toronto Press 01.10.2011
• Subjects: Babe, Robert E; Bifurcations; Cultural studies; Culture; Dependence; Dialectics; Divergence; Ideology; Materialism; Nonfiction; Persuasion; Political economy; Politics; Post structuralist linguistics; Poststructuralism; Social integration; System theory; Systems theory
• ISSN: 0705-3657; 1499-6642

In Cultural Studies and Political Economy: Toward a New Integration, [Robert E Babe] focuses an interrogative lens on a scholarly rift between the fields of political economy and cultural studies.1 This academic breach not only stands in contrast to the material conditions of everyday life, in which the realms of culture, economy, and polity, continuously intertwine, but it also breaks with scholarly trajectory; during their respective developmental stages, political economy and cultural studies were, "fully integrated, consistent, and mutually supportive" (p. 4). Bonded by an investment in cultural materialism, the fields demonstrated, "mutual interaction and mutual dependency in the systems theory sense among culture, economy, and polity/policy" (p. 8). What then caused a scholarly divergence? In following Babe's excavation of the division, one is confronted with a persuasive argument: it was the poststructuralist turn within cultural studies that instigated the bifurcation An exploration of the rupture, including its causes, dimensions, consequences, and, possible resolutions (p. 4), is the focal point of the text, which Babe attends to with clarity and depth. The participants in the colloquy became focused on delineating disciplinary boundaries and disparities (i.e., cultural studies vs. political economy, or "us versus them"). Such a focal point was a distraction from the more problematic issue - the split within cultural studies, between cultural materialism and poststructuralism. "The renowned split," reflects Babe, "has been, in a sense, a distraction, a diversion, a faux debate" (p. 195). In allowing the real problem to remain unidentified, political and ideological differences, or what Babe also refers to as differences in the political economy of scholarship, continued to widen the gap between poststructuralists and cultural materialists, yet the gap was widely claimed as dissolution between political economy and cultural studies.