No Escape: Culture and Economics in the Present

Abstract

This essay suggests that cultural studies, media studies and communications need to focus on the changes and challenges associated with this particular historical conjuncture, and re-assess the kinds of analysis that can most fruitfully contribute to this critical project. This requires rethinking some conventional assumptions about everyday life, media texts and communications technologies so that a more nuanced understanding of the imbrication between culture, labour and economy in the present moment may be developed.

Keywords:

• cultural studies
• media studies
• communications
• cultural economy
• political economy
• labour

Notes

[1] Michel Foucault, “Space, Knowledge, and Power,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1986), 244.

[2] James W. Carey, Communication as Culture (London: Routledge), 1989.

[3] Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 50.

[4] See the papers in the special issue on “Convergence Culture,” Cultural Studies 25 (4–5): 2011.

[5] Christian Fuchs, “Labor in Informational Capitalism and on the Internet,” The Information Society, 26 (2010): 191.

[6] Meaghan Morris, “Banality in Cultural Studies,” in Logics of Television, ed. Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 14–43.

[7] Fuchs, 192.

[8] Diane Elson, ed., Value: The Representation of Labour in Capitalism (London: CSE Books), 1979.

[9] See Colin McCabe, “Interview with Stuart Hall,” Critical Quarterly, 50 (1–2), 2007, 29; Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg et al. (New York: Routledge, 1992), 286.

[10] McKenzie Wark, “The Weird Global Media Event and the Tactical Intellectual [Version 3.0],” in New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, ed. Wendy Chun and Thomas Keenan (New York: Routledge, 2006), 266.

[11] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 143.

[12] See Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 2011.

[13] Meaghan Morris, Too Soon, Too Late: History in Popular Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 19.