The Cultural Industries
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| THE APPROACH TAKEN HERE In the respects discussed above, and others too, cultural studies has made an enormous though at times problematic contribution to our understanding of culture and power, and more recently to studies of cultural production. In the 1980s and 1990s, cultural studies was attacked not only by conservatives who questioned its emphasis on respect for cultural difference, but also by liberals and radicals. In fact, some of the strongest attacks on cultural stud- ies came from fellow leftists in political economy and radical media sociology who often accused it of a secret complicity with conservatism (see,for exam- ple, Gitlin, 1998; Miller and Philo, 2000, and others). Cultural studies gave as good as it got and, again, the main targets were often potential allies on the political left. The result was a series of polemics, which helped to create a 02-Hesmondhalgh-4453-Ch-01.indd 58 25/10/2012 5:50:44 PM 59 Theories of Culture, Theories of Cultural Production perception, at least in the research fields of media, communication and cultural studies, that critical analysis was evenly divided between two camps – politi- cal economy and cultural studies. This idea was reproduced not only in pub- lished books and articles but also in countless everyday references in seminar rooms, conference bars and so on, along the lines of ‘political economy does X, cultural studies does Y’. Even when some writers claimed that they want to move beyond the split, they then proceeded to attack, from a position strongly identified with one camp, a caricatured version of the other, thus maintaining the myth (such as Grossberg, 1995). In the two previous editions of this book, I took issue with this polarisa- tion, as a way of explaining my own synthesis of approaches to culture and power. My claim was that political economy versus cultural studies was Download 0.61 Mb. Share with your friends:
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