METHODS OF CULTURAL ANALYSIS - EXAMINED ESSAY

9.Critically examine the terms of the debate between

'political economy' and cultural studies' in Contemporary

Media Studies.

On the face of it 'political economy' and 'cultural

studies' in Contemporary Media Studies could not appear

more different. The first sets out to explain mass

communications as an economic process, prioritising the

material, whereas the second adopts a holistic conception

of culture and is interested in consumption as an

interpretative process. Where 'political economy'

stipulates the economic as determinant, cultural studies

authenticate the evidential value of human experience. A

caricature of the debate that has emerged between the two

camps in the nineties is the following: a political

economy perspective underestimates bottom-up pressure to

the media , is indifferent to the process by which

meaning is constructed in consumption of popular culture

and, ultimately, is only interested in cost, economic

surplus and exchange value. On the other hand, cultural

studies focus on deconstructing media audiences as

culture dupes, examine texts as polysemic, and have

little time for figures and tables showing conglomerate

control of culture industries.

In this essay I shall carefully examine the development

of both approaches, stressing that both approaches have

emerged out of a radical Marxist tradition (Curran

1996b:258), and were developed against American pluralist

effect model approach (Curran 1996b:258). I shall then

proceed to highlight their significant methodological

differences, and summarise the issues addressed in their

common debates. This return to the past will prove

essential to comprehend properly how the current

antithesis between what Curran names 'new revisionism' in

cultural studies and political economy has emerged

(Curran 1996b). The 'new revisionism' in cultural

studies is now the prevalent paradigm within which their

research is undertaken. It involves the abandonment of

William's 'baggy monster' of ideological domination, and

a focusing on the actual practices of audience

consumption, the real interpretative process of reading.

This 'new paradigm' adopts a substantial 888 sceptic

attitude towards the structuralist explanation of power

offered by political economy. This scepticism has

prevailed in media research to such an extent that as

Corner notes:

"in some 'new paradigm' work concerned with reception,

the question of an ideological level of media process, or

indeed of media power as a political issue at all, has

slipped almost entirely off the main research agenda if

not from framing commentary" (Corner 1991: 267)

This 'new revisionism' has caused an unnecessary

polarisation of the two approaches in question, thus,

blurring their common ground, However, since it at the

same time dominates the field, it has resulted in a

marginalisation of political economy. In the sequel, I

shall underline their common ground by indicating the

points at which their critique of revisionism agree. I

will conclude that their common ground is wrongly often

ignored in the process of juxtaposition

POLITICAL ECONOMY: CULTURE INDUSTRIES

A political economy1 investigates the social power

structure, the particular form of exchange relations that

emerge in late capitalism. It axiomatically stipulates

that the economic is determinant under capitalism

(Garnham 1990:21). It focuses on examining the

production of economic surplus. As Marxist it is distinct

from the neo-classical or pluralist perspective because

it privileges production over consumption, supply over

demand as the determining instance. It furthermore makes

a normative claim, namely that the distribution of the

economic surplus is not optimal as liberal economists

would maintain; rather it is historically contingent,

determined by the capitalist mode of production and would

hence differ under another mode of production. (Garnham

1990:8). Furthermore it is critical towards the value of

the liberal public space of debate by measuring it

against an ideally democratic public space. Hence it

sets out to illuminate the structural contradiction

between the doctrines of political liberalism and those

of its economic variety.

From the above it is evident that a political economy of

the mass media is concerned with analysing them

primarily as industries, as financial organisations.

(Garnham 1990:30). It sets itself the task of

investigating how the economic structure, material

constrains and determines media production. It is

interested in the manner in which media industries

produce surplus value through commodity production and

consumption (Garnham 1990:30). It should be emphasised

that 'political economy' does not straightforwardly

maintain Marx's base/superstructure dichotomy. It does

not merely posit culture as epiphenomenal. Rather it

adopts the core argument put forward by the Frankfurt

school (Garnham 1990:21,30). According to it mechanical

reproduction collapses the superstructure into the base,

and industrialises it. The production of culture becomes

an industry, and in Adorno's words culture products " are

no longer also commodities, they are commodities through

and through " (Adorno 1989:129) Thus 'political economy'

contends that Marx was correct in predicting that under

advanced capitalism all aspects life will be reduced

(will be the equivalence of) to their exchange value.

Garnham helpfully summarises this as follows:

"What concerns us in fact is to stress, from the

analytical perspective, the continuing validity of the

base/superstructure model while at the same time

positioning to and analysing the ways in which the

development of monopoly capitalism has industrialised the

superstructure" (Garnham 1990:30)

Also, as stressed by Golding and Murdock, 'political

economy' offers a historically located analysis: an

analysis of media as commercial enterprises in late

capitalism, (Golding and Murdock 1991:17). It is

realist, in that it is interested in the ways material

constraints determine the lives of real actors, in real

life, in historically specific conditions. These material

constraints include public intervention (state funding

and regulation), increasing conglomerate control, the

expansion of the media and commodification (Golding and

Murdock 1991;19).In examining these four key historical

parameters, political economy aims at determining the

ways in which commodity production restricts commodity

consumption the economic conditions under which economic

products are produced inscribes upon their content, as

well as how social inequalities influence consumption.

Consequently political economy is not meaning-blind, it

is not indifferent to the content of cultural

commodities, rather "it is interested in seeing how the

making and taking of meaning is shaped at every level by

structured asymmetries in social relations."

Each of the four parameters mentioned above constitute a

central asymmetry of social relations examined by

political economy in late capitalism. Increasing

corporate ownership of media industries: how does

international conglomerate control of media industries

influence the public sphere ( Golding and Murdock 1991 ).

How do choices made at the level of production influence

what is and what is not included in public debate? State

intervention: how does the state directly or indirectly

control cultural production through providing or

restricting information to broadcasters, through funding

particular projects etc.? 2 Political economy is also

interested on how these four asymmetries influence and

circumscribe the work of the journalist.

So for political economy, communication industries are

not also industries, they are only industries; in the

words of Adorno: movies and radio no longer pretend to be

art. The truth that they are just business is made into

an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they

deliberately produce (Adorno 1979:121)]

Political economy has made a seminal contribution to

communication with works such as Murdock's discussion of

the relationship of ownership and control of media

industries (Murdock 1982).

CULTURAL STUDIES: two paradigms or one paradigm

Let us now turn to Cultural studies before juxtaposing

the two approaches:

Cultural Studies emerged from and developed in the

Birmingham Centre for Culture Studies. In no way can be

said to form a homogenous method/approach and has

evolved through the last 20 years significantly. In his

influential essay "Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms

Stuart Hall guides us through the two prevalent paradigms

of Cultural Studies providing a very clear picture of how

the fields developed in the late seventies and eighties

(Hall 1986:30). He concludes "between them these two

paradigms address what must be the core problem of

Cultural Studies". These are the culturalist paradigm,

(currently dominating Cultural Studies media research)

rooted in the work of William and Hogard and the

structuralist paradigm rooted in the work of Althusser,

Golding etc.

Cultural Studies conceive of culture as holistic, as

interlaced with the totality of social practices (Hall

1986). This conception of culture as collective, as the

totality of 'human practices', including their struggle,

is the key element of Cultural Studies. It signifies a

break from approaches that separate culture from the rest

of social practices or see culture as the result of

material activities. In Cultural Studies, culture is the

whole of social practice including its contradictions,

human struggle and praxis. This definition, like most

Marxist approaches, includes consciousness and being,

understanding and experience; however precisely because

it perceives of culture as holistic, it does not

hierachise being over consciousness. Hence this

definition of culture stands against Marx's

base/superstructure metaphor; a metaphor which Cultural

Studies constantly returns to but nevertheless rejects as

reductionist and deterministic. For cultural studies

culture can not be 'absorbed in the economic' (Hall

1986:32) Furthermore for cultural studies human

experience is where consciousness and being intersect. It

is the way people comprehend, perceive of and react to

their conditions of life. Hence human experience is

emphasised and is considered an "authenticating position"

in cultural analysis. In fact together with man as " a

historical and creative agent" it constitutes one of the

two defining elements of culturalism. ( Hall 1986: 26) .

If for culturalism experience is an authenticated source,

for structuralism it is an effect. Structuralism, the

second key paradigm, emphasises social structure and is

interested in ideology. Originating in the work of

Althusser3 it points out the dangers of overemphasising

the space for undetermined human praxis and resistance.

It stresses that under capitalism human agents are put in

social conditions which define them as agents.

Consequently, relations of structure are important. And

these relations are not only material they are also

ideological. Therefore, an examination of the particular

ways in which media institutions maintain a 'dominant'

ideology that sustains social relations is called for.

To sum up these two paradigms in the words of S.Hall

"whereas the 'culturalist' paradigm can be defined

without requiring a conceptual reference to the term

ideology, the 'structuralist interventions have been

largely articulated around the concept of ideology

(1986:27). Operating within these two paradigms Cultural

Studies have been interested in how meaning in media

texts is constructed as part of a complex

interpretative process which includes all social

relations. Meaning can not be abstracted from social

relations, rather it is the result of a elaborate

interpretative process. Cultural studies set out to

examine how "it is produced in and through particular

expressive forms and how it t is continually negotiated

and deconstructed through the practices of everyday life"

(Murdock 1989:436). As Hall argues for media studies this

signifies a break with the older traditional explanatory

models of the media (Hall 1980:117-118).This break has

taken four forms: a) A move away from behaviourist

approaches which perceived media influence as direct, as

an automatic stimulus response, toward the examination of

the media as a dominant ideological parameter. b)A

rejection of media texts as diaphanous, containing one

monolithic message. This was replaced with the idea that

texts are polysemic, i.e., rather then having one

inherent meaning they can only be read as intertwined

with the totality of social forces. c) the deconstruction

of the audience as a passive recipient of meaning, and

the transformation of consumption into an active

interpretative process in which audiences as active

agents 'decode' already 'encoded' meaning of media texts

In other words it is because of Cultural Studies that

audience research has gained its deserved position in

sociology and because of Cultural Studies that

consumption has ceased to be seen as a pre-determined

process and has been redefined as a complex of

contradictory process, as a flux of decoding and

encoding processes. Stuart's Hall's influential paper

"Encoding, Decoding ' provides us with such an

understanding of the consumption process (Hall 1973). In

it Hall introduces the concept of a 'structured polysemi'

: a media text is produced, with various 'encoded' with

various meanings, one of which is intended by the

producers. Therefore media texts were no longer

considered to be necessarily "closed ideological systems"

(von Zoonen 1991:45). Hall argued that audiences can

proceed to 'decode' such text in three ways: i) by

reading the text in the way intended by the producer,

thus assuming 'a dominant-hegemonic position', in which

encoding and decoding are symmetrical. ii) by recognising

the intended-dominant reading as valid, but nevertheless

interpreting this encoded meaning within a personal

ideological paradigm, hence assuming a negotiating

position iii) by rejecting the intended reading and

totally substituting his/her own for it, assuming a

oppositional relation in which decoding and encoding are

asymmetrical. Hall furthermore maintained that although

there is a 'preferred' reading, there are also

alternative readings.

Cultural Studies have transformed the way media audiences

are perceived,4 contributing to the field a plethora of

audience research work. The most famous of these are

D.Morley and Charlotte Bronsotns Nation-wide Audience

(Morley 1980) .Angs study of Dallas viewers

Cultural studies vs. political economy: the

early debate

The above brief description of political economy and

cultural studies in itself reveals that the two sides

approach the study of the media in dramatically different

ways. This has provoked some debate between them:

Authors belonging to the political economy approach

criticise Cultural Studies for its inability to examine

the particular way in which unequal distribution of

economic surplus posits people in different economic

positions and defines their consumption options.

Furthermore they maintain that Cultural Studies fail to

engage with ways in which the particular economic

structures and the working of industries circumscribe the

production of meaning.(Golding 1991:17) Cultural studies

fail to see how economic decision making, influences the

range of discourses available and thus prioritise the

production of one commodity over another.

On the other side authors working within Cultural Studies

paradigms argue that their political economy opponents

fail to acknowledge consumption as an interpretative

process, fail to account for the particular ways in which

the cultural products influence the lives of particular

individuals in particular circumstances. It continues to

provide a significant obstacle for contemporary

theorists who find in popular cultural forms the

expression of authentic pleasures and fulfilled desires

(Caughie 1991) (Born 1993) That authors form Cultural

Studies:" betray the same absences and the same blindness

the absence of actors and the blindness to the active

participation of consumer-citizens in the creation and

recreation, modification and transformation of culture,

They tend to presume that a cultural logic can be read

off form the analysis of industrial logic; to presume a

homogeneity of culture which is often an expression of

their own homogenising theories,; and they generally fail

acknowledge that culture is plural that cultures are the

products of individual and collective actions, more or

less distinctive, more or less authentic, more or less

removed from the tentacles of the cultural industry"

(Silverstone 1994:112 ). Furthermore, according to the

Cultural Studies authors political economy overemphasis

the analysis of structures at the expense of the specific

cultural forms through which these structures are

mediated. It does not account for the ambivalence in

meaning, the indeterminateness of media texts. In

addition that political economy in analysing the

particular institutions involved, does not focus on the

power structure. nor does it attempt to analyse or decode

the texts that circulate between institutions: for

example it could but does not decode regulation documents

, market research e.t.c. Moreover that political economy

has little to say about journalism and the interpretative

process a journalists undergoes as a consumer while

discovering information . As Schudson has mentioned,

political economy seems to tie everything back to

ownership contending that ' everything that is in the

black box need not be examined' (1989:266)

The above sketchy juxtaposition of political economy and

Cultural Studies can be found in most introductory

textbooks. However it seems to me that it only presents

half the story, since it overlooks two very important

characteristics shared by these two approaches: a)both

approaches developed as a response to pluralist liberal

American studies accounts of the media, prevalent at the

time, and b) they are both Marxist

The above debate has changed in the last decade. It seems

that cultural studies audience research has dominated

media studies, and that the structuralist radical

paradigm of Cultural studies has been marginalised. This

shift has polarised the difference between political

economy and cultural studies. At the same time the

dominance of audience study research in Cultural Studies

has broadened the methodological gap between the two

camps, resulting in the absence of direct debate between

the two approaches.

What exactly is the nature and cause of this shift? This

is in itself an issue of debate. Explanations vary; For

some, the structuralist paradigm of Cultural Studies

marginalised because it was taken over by Screen magazine

and authors such as Heath5 with a view to developing

psychoanalysis and the work of Freud and, later on, Lacan

in order to explore the question of desire and pleasure

in subject formation. Psychoanalytic structuralist

thought, as for example, crystallised in the early work

of L.Mulvey and her polemic essay "Visual Pleasure and

Narrative Cinema", developed an essentialist notion of

the subject, according to which the subject is inscribed

in the texts, and reading is primarily the act of

identification with prefixed Oedipal structures. However

out of and as a reaction to this form of structuralism

was born post-structuralism, which introduced as less

essentialist theory of subject formation: focused not so

much on the way the media constructs consumption and the

reading of texts to form the subject, but rather on how

the subject is constructed and constantly redefined by

the dynamic discourses such as capitalist institutions of

power, science culture and the media. The marginalisation

of this strand of thought has resulted in to the

exclusion up to now of a theory of subject formation in

political economy and Cultural Studies . This is an

important weakness shared by both political economy and

cultural studies have in common.

Others, such as Curran, attribute this marginalising

shift to the prevalence Foucault prevailing in the field

(Curran 1996a). Foucault's voiced a scepticism toward any

theory that identified one single source of power,

stressing that power should be perceived as discourse,

contending that "power no longer operates through a

straight-forward 'top-down' mechanism where those in

authority exert various forms of coercive restraint upon

the mass" (Sarup 1988:74). Foucault's criticism of power

as concept caused disenchantment with structuralism, as a

consequence of which the structuralist paradigm of

cultural studies was shifted toward the periphery6.

Whatever its causes, in order to comprehend how the new

formulation of the debate between political economy and

cultural studies has been transformed it is necessary to

examine in some detail the nature of the shift that has

occurred within Cultural Studies at greater length;

Debate shifting: From the Two paradigm to the 'new

paradigm'

As Hall notes, Althusserian structuralism has been of

great importance in the development of cultural studies:

it provides a conception of ideology as a practice, it

accounts for the function 'ideology' has in sustaining

socio-economic relations. However, it is too

functionalist and reductionist and thus 'downplays the

notion of cultural contradiction and struggle' (Hall

1986:34). Cultural studies in the late eighties and

nineties have largely abandoned the notion of 'one

dominant ideology' and have supported an idea of the

media as a contested space (Curran 1996b:261). There has

been a shift away from the Althusserian moment, the

culturalist paradigm seems to have prevailed in the sense

that authors are less willing to accept a monolithic

perception of domination, a one-phasid ideology embedded

in media texts7.The hegemonic discourse of the 'dominant

ideology' thesis has been outdated. Hence the task for

cultural studies has become less that of 'de-coding'

textual power and cultural domination, and more that of

examining the specific extrapolations or even subversions

involved in audience consumption and text reading.

Methodologically this has meant that ethnography as a

research method in many cases has been preferred8. So as

Gurrevitz notes 'cultural studies stand in opposition to

both structuralism and political economy of the Mass

Media.' (Gurrevizt 1982) This has sharpened the

opposition between cultural studies and political

economy9. It has furthermore caused the emergence of a

new paradigm in Cultural Studies (Corner 1991, Curran

1996b, Willis Barker and Beezer) The 'new paradigm' seems

to include many heterogeneous elements. Thus, when

referring to the 'new revisionism ' ( as some of its

critiques have named it ( Curran 1996b, Corner 1991 ) I

am not assuming that this ' new revisionism' constitutes

one homogeneous new cultural studies approach to mass

communication.

In its American rather post-modernist version this

trend, despite being helpful in introducing 'cultural

studies to American students has led to extreme

celebrations of consumer soveirgnty (Morley 1996a:286).

Typical of this is the work of Fiske (Fiske 1987), who

emphasises the joys and pleasure of popular culture, and

is overenthusiastic about consumption as a subversive

practice, of consumer subcultures as forms of resistance

(Curran 1996b:260). As he himself mentions :"television

is the plurality of its reading practices, the democracy

of its pleasures, and it can only be understood in its

fragments. It promotes and provokes a network of

resistances to its own power whose attempt to homogenise

and hegemonise breaks down on the instability and

multiplicity of its meaning and pleasures" (Fiske

1987:324). One must must however agree with Curran that

this 'semiotic democracy' becomes difficult to

distinguish from liberal notions of pluralist media

(Curran 1996b:260) since it overemphasises undertermined

human praxis and consumer sovereignty, implying that it

is the consumers, via the market, who exercise top-down

influence. This is obviously antithetical to the cultural

studies tradition, I adopt Murdock and Golding's position

that "this 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"

(Murdock 1991:17)

This extreme strand of 'new revisionism', obviously not

stemming from a radical perspective, cannot be examined

further within the confines of this essay.

It is, however, telling insofar as it hints at the

characteristics of the 'new paradigm': these are

obviously the key features mentioned above in reference

to the culturalist paradigm; in addition the re-

conceptualisation of the media audience as active, an

increased emphasis on audience autonomy. Cultural studies

audience research seems to constitute the largest amount

of research .Prevalent in this new audience research is

the feeling that the cases in which consumer abide

subordination to cultural power are plentier then these

in which they do not, of course this is a feeling never

substantiated (Corner 1991, Morley 95).

So, for example, the fact the trans-European satellite TV

did not succeed in gaining a mass audience in Europe was

explained by Colins as the result of consumer sovereignty

due to linguistic cultural differences (Collins 1989).

A further characteristic of this new revisionism is the

abandonment of the melancholy of the Frankfurt School

and the pessimism prevalent in it and in particular in

the work of Adorno10. Cultural Studies exponent's

celebration of the birth of the active audience implies

that an active reader who derives pleasure from

consumption was absent in all previous theory of mass

communication and was first acknowledged by cultural

studies . I wish to challenge this reading to suggest the

Adorno's pessimism as far deeper. It was not that his

work is consumer blind, rather that he saw no correlation

between pleasure and empowerment, the autonomous creation

of meaning in consumption and resistance to capitalist

power. As he writes, responding to Benjamin's romanticism

concerning the work of art in mechanical reproduction:

"the laughter of the audience in the cinema is nothing

but good and revolutionary, instead it is full of the

worst bourgeois sadism" (Adorno 1979:123).

Even if Adorno's consumer blindness is not imperative to

our question, one has to bare in mind his point and

challenge New Revisionist exponents to at least attempt

to problematise the relationship between pleasure and

empowerment, active looking and power. Is the

relationship between pleasure and empowerment causal?

Does enjoyment of consumption in a an unforseen way

necessarily cause a shift in power? Similarly does an

active reading cause empowerment; and in what sense? To

take a crude example: if I love soup operas whether

because I love the meaning inscribed in them or for my

own arbitrary meaning I will still consume soap operas.

What difference does it make for ideological and material

structures that I enjoys soup operas. Or what difference

does it make if attribute a feminist meaning to a

patriarchal soup opera. What it means for society depends

on many parameters. To say that by virtue of attributing

a different meaning I am empowered means one of the two

following thing: firstly that I what my pleasure means

for the rest o society is the wrong question to ask and

secondly that I am empowered because I choose the what

these thing mean to me I have the choose of consumption.

Both of these answers echoes liberal thought. Hence by

giving whether of them the New Revisionism has betrayed

Cultural studies premises. To phrase this objection in

more theoretical terms: Morley typifying the Culturalist

position states that " .. for this reason the work of the

media group at Birmingham university Centre for

Contemporary Cultural Studies ... turned to an engagement

with ethnomethodological perspectives: not in order to

abandon the macro in favour of the micro but rather, the

better to articulate the analysis of the one to that of

the other" (Morley1996:280). If the theoretically the

reason for which the micro, the specific consumption

process were to be examined was to better understand how

the macro is mediated thorough the micro, than to

complete the project of Cultural Studies there must be an

account of how this micro process reflects on to the

macro. Given that New Revisionist research have not

attempted to directly answer this question, one can

assume two answer are implied: firstly that this is the

wrong question to ask or secondly that individuals are

empowered because of an increase in choose (choice taken

as imperative to freedom). To imply either of these

answers means to subscribe to the liberal approach

according to which there is no macro structure that

constrains individual action, production does not

determine consumption. In other words what is implied is

that the macro is nothing but the collection of

individuals, that liberty is to be protected at all costs

and consumer choice is imperative for it extend this

fundamental human liberty. But such liberal predicaments

are contrary to the radical position. Exactly here lies

the new moment of opposition between Political Economy

and New Revisionism11. That the New Revisionism stress on

consumption as an interpretative process comes to close

to agreeing with the following: "in the processes of

mass communication we are swimming in a sea not of our

own creation. Almost all of us can indeed swim .Most of

us will swallow water. A few of us will drawn"

(Silverstone 1994:92)12

And this is a liberal functionalist position.

As previously stressed such polarisation of the two

approaches overemphasises their differences. This is

achieved with the inflation of the similarities between a

liberal pluralist approach such as typified by

Silverstone13, a post modernist approach such as the one

of Fiske and the British cultural studies that emerged

from a radical traditions. These approaches are hardly

sinonimous. Through such inflation Cultural Studies are

portrayed as power-blind, and Political Economy as

audience-blind. Of course as have stressed throughout

this essay this means to conflate their similarities. To

further my argument and conclude: from the Political

Economy position Curran after giving a detailed account

of the history of mass media research argues that the

somewhat over celebrated 'birth' of the reader is a

rediscovery of an old 'wheel', and Political Economy has

not been that audience-blind (Curran 1996a). As for the

power-blindness of Cultural Studies I wish to conclude

with the a quote that indicates that my claim is correct,

and that despite this New Revisionism in Cultural

studies, the Cultural Studies commitment to the radical

tradition has not been marginalised:

"the power of the viewer to reinterpret meanings is

hardly equivalent to the discursive power of centralised

media institutions to construct the texts which the

viewer interprets, and to imagine otherwise is simply

foolish". Unlike what one would believe this has not been

said by a Political Economy supporter rather by a founder

of audience research D.Morley. This sums up my point

( Morley 1996:291).

This revisionism has had its impact on political

economy as well, authors are now more hesitant to claim

some linear process of subordination occurring in their

claims of conglomerate control, As Curran notes"

revisionist stress on audience autonomy has encouraged a

more cautious assessment of media influence" (Curran

1996b)

1The use of the article "a" does not imply that a

political economy is one homogenous approach to media

studies . Many strands exist, for example the

instrumentalist approach see (Herman &Chosmky 1988),the

critical political economy Murdock and Golding approach

see (Murdock&Golding 1991). The plethora of these canot

be examined within the constraints of this essay

2For details of how state control over the media see

(Golding 1986, Gandy 1982)

3 Althusser defines ideology as "a representation of the

imaginary relationship of individuals to their real

conditions of existence"(Althusser 1971:5).

4Curran argues that audience research is just the

revitalisation of an 'old wheel' in communication theory

but this argument can not be examined within the

constraints of this essay.

5For a criticism of Screen magazine, the thought of

Heath and his use Althusser see (McDonnell & Robins 1980)

6The further perplexities surrounding this shift, if

there was a shift, because even this has been challenged,

can not be examined within the constraints of this essay.

7A more extensive reference to the causes of this shift

can not be examined within the constraints of this essay.

Curran attributes disenchantment with structuralism to

Foucault's influence of Cultural Studies and explores

possible causes for this shift extensively see (Curran

1996:259)

8On debates concerning methodology in Cultural Studies

see (Morley 1992:21)

9Curran notes that this shift has caused an impact in

Political Economy making authors formpoliticla economy

more cautious in their treatment of issue of power.

10For an analisis of Adorno's and his work as a

melancholic author see Rose 19

11Their new moment of thier opposition is crystallised in

J.Curran debate with D.Morley in a series of articles

appearing in Cultural Studies and Communication see

Curran 1996b, Curran 1996c, Curran 1996c, Moerly 1996a,

Morely1996b

12To be fair to New Revisionist I have included here a

rather ambivalent and moderate liberal quote, after New

Revisionist writers are not that optimistic

13This inflation is built upon a common emphasis of New

Revisionism and Liberal Functionalism on consumtion as a

ritualisng process . For example of such liberal

funcitonalist approaches see Katz, 1994 or Silverstone,

1994