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The Two Marxes

Bridging the Political Economy/Technology and Culture Divide

Vincent Mosco

This chapter addresses how two approaches, political economy and the cultural study of technology, inform media analysis and history. The purpose is to explore the divide between these two distinct perspectives on media history, which is in essence a debate between two Marxes – Karl and Leo. Political economy grew primarily from the materialist conception of Karl Marx which concentrated on the dynamic but banal nature of technology. This gave rise to a materialist or political economic tradition in media studies that took up the role of communication technology in the processes of class domination, exploitation, contradiction, struggle, and resistance. On the other hand, Leo Marx established a tradition that centered on the sublime nature of technology, demonstrating how it drew people to visions of transcending the banalities of everyday life. What Karl would consider false consciousness (the sublime as socially constructed ideology), Leo would view as a genuine experience of meaningful transcendence. The former provided structural explanations that drew from a philosophical anthropology based in praxis, while the latter offered cultural explanations based on the use of a vocabulary rooted in aesthetics. The chapter focuses on specific tendencies and strengths within each and suggests how to draw together these distinctive but overlapping traditions in media scholarship.

The Marxian Tradition

Karl Marx built on several different strands in classical political economy. He accepted its focus on labor as the chief source of value, although he systematically recast it to account for differences between the use value and the exchange value of labor. This departure laid the groundwork for Marx's theory of exploitation in which he focused on the difference between the value and price of labor. He called this difference the surplus value that accrued to capital as a result of increasing the workday (absolute exploitation) or of intensifying the labor process during the workday (relative exploitation).

Marx's critique of political economy turned, in part, on a thorough attempt to historicize the perspective and, particularly, its conception of labor. For Marx, capitalism was a system of unprecedented dynamism, continuously revolutionizing its productive processes with new technologies and new forms of organizing the labor process. Capitalist development created a continuous maelstrom of conflict and struggle. No custom, ritual, or value could block the development of the market, the production of commodities, including labor, and the growth of surplus value. The capitalist tendency to continuous revolution, what Schumpeter (1942) dubbed “creative destruction,” could only be undone by forces that capitalism alone was able to release, primarily the working class, defined as those who are made to sell their labor power for a wage and thereby give up control over the means of production.

Classical political economy identified the forces propelling capitalism but tended to view them as natural. Marx sought to situate capitalism within the dialectical flow of history, but with a materialist vision that broke with established tendencies in historiography as epitomized in the work of Hegel, who valued the history of ideas, beliefs, and the rule of law. In addition to building on much of the Hegelian tradition, particularly Hegel's concept of the dialectic and his goal of a practical philosophy (meant to fuse theory and practice), Marx took up the challenge of revolutionizing it. He would do so by showing how people make history and themselves, albeit not under conditions of their own making. For Marx, history meant, above all, how people make themselves through labor.

The Marxian critique of political economy developed an equally radical social conception of capitalism. Capitalism is a material system, not because of what it appears to be, i.e., a system of things (of machinery, workplaces, products, etc.), but because it contains a historically unique set of social relations. The appearance of naturalism masked the reorganization of social life principally along social class lines. Marx (1867/1976) begins Capital, arguably his most mature work, with a chapter on “The Commodity.” But as the first sentence makes clear, although the commodity is ubiquitous, it is nevertheless a ubiquity of appearances: “The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an immense collection of commodities” (Marx, 1976, p. 125). Peel back the layers of appearance and we find a set of social relations, specifically “all commodities are merely definite quantities of congealed labor-time” (Marx, 1976, p. 130).

More generally, the social relations of capitalism embody a mass of producers who do not own the means of production but have to sell their labor power to a class of owners organized in separate firms that compete in various commodity, labor, raw material, and capital markets. Competition drives these different firms to maximize surplus value by exploiting labor in order to increase capital accumulation. The Marxian literature is filled with the debate over the precise definition and consequences of the capital–labor relationship. Nevertheless, the tendency in the traditional Marxian view is to argue that the system built on the capital–wage-labor relationship leads to the growing mechanization of labor, the concentration and centralization of capital, and periodic crises, of which the tendency to overproduction is probably the most pronounced (Mandel in Marx, 1976, p. 82). One can certainly find the seeds of this view in some classical political economy, particularly in the work of Ricardo and some of his followers. Nevertheless, until Marx, no one ventured an analysis of capitalism that so thoroughly sought to strip away the power of its apparent features that define a natural, taken-for-granted world, to reveal a set of socially dynamic, but fundamentally contradictory and, therefore unstable, social practices and social class relations.

Among the numerous critiques of the traditional Marxian view, one is particularly important to media studies: Marx did not carry the social analysis of capitalism far enough. This does not refer to the widespread, but generally mistaken, view that Marx missed the rise of today's managerial capitalism and service economy. For sympathetic critics like Baudrillard (1981), Smythe (1981), and Williams (1977), these are far less consequential than what results from an essentialist and narrow view of labor. The traditional Marxian analysis places a great deal of weight on the concept of labor. In his early work, as well as in the Grundrisse (which connects the early Marx to the Marx of Capital), Marx envisions labor as a broad category encompassing all social activity by which people constitute themselves and history. Nevertheless, even here, the emphasis is on the instrumental and productive nature of labor rather than on its expressive and constitutive qualities. Capital takes an even more productivist view of labor, largely, according to Marx's defenders, because it is a critique of capitalism, one of whose central features is the narrowing of labor into the instrumental–productivist wage relationship, turning human beings into objects or mere factors of production. However, one consequence of a formulation that identifies labor as the essential material activity, but squeezes its meaning into the wage system, is that other material practices of working people are diminished. This is especially true of those practices we identify with communication, including culture, language, social reproduction, reception, and consumption. These are rendered non-material, dependent on, and in extreme formulations superstructural reflections of a material base defined by labor. According to Haraway (1991, p. 132), although Marx recognized that labor encompassed the production of human beings themselves, he gave greatest weight to the production of the means of existence providing little more than a starting point for theories of, for example, the sex/gender division of labor. For Dallas Smythe (1981), communication scholars need to expand on Marx by developing a theory of audience labor, what scholars today call prosumption or acts of productive consumption such as contributing to advertiser-sponsored celebrity websites.

One of the primary tasks of a political economy of media that aims to build on a critical encounter with traditional Marxian analysis is to demonstrate how communication and culture are material practices, how labor and language are mutually constituted, and how communication and information are dialectical instances of the same social activity, the social construction of meaning. Situating these tasks within a larger framework of understanding power and resistance places communication directly into the flow of a Marxian tradition that remains alive and relevant today (Potts, 2005; Saad-Filho, 2002). The next section demonstrates how the political economy of communication has carried out this task.

Political Economy

Two definitions of political economy help to capture the range of specific and general approaches to the discipline (Mosco, 2009). In the narrow sense, political economy is the study of the social relations, particularly the power relations, that mutually constitute the production, distribution, and consumption of resources, including communication resources. This formulation has a certain practical value because it calls attention to how the communication business operates; for example, how communications products move through a chain of producers, e.g., a Hollywood film company, to wholesalers, retailers, and, finally to consumers, whose purchases, rentals, downloads, and attention are fed back into new processes of production. However, there is sufficient ambiguity about what constitutes a producer, distributor, or consumer that one needs to be cautious about using it.

A more general and admittedly ambitious definition of political economy is the study of control and survival in social life. Control refers specifically to the internal organization of social group members and the process of adapting to change. Survival means how people produce what is needed for social reproduction and continuity. In this reading, control processes are broadly political, in that they constitute the social organization of relationships within a community and survival processes are mainly economic, because they concern production and reproduction. The strength of this definition is that it provides political economy with the breadth to encompass at least all human activity and, arguably, all living processes (Foster, 2002). The primary shortcoming is that it can lead one to overlook what distinguishes human political economy, principally our consciousness or awareness, from general processes of survival and control in nature.

Another way to think about political economy is to broaden its meaning beyond what is typically considered in definitions, by focusing on a set of central characteristics. To start, political economy has consistently placed in the foreground the goal of understanding social change and historical transformation. For classical political economists of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill, this meant comprehending the great capitalist revolution, the social upheaval that transformed societies based primarily on agricultural labor into commercial, manufacturing, and, eventually, industrial societies. For Karl Marx, it meant examining the dynamic forces within capitalism and the relationship between capitalism and other forms of political economic organization, in order to understand the processes of social change that would lead from capitalism to socialism. Orthodox economics, which began to coalesce against political economy in the late nineteenth century, tended to set aside this concern for the dynamics of history and social change, in order to transform political economy into the science of economics, which, like the science of physics, would provide general, if static, explanations. According to this view, economics would be able to explain precisely how buyers and sellers come together to set prices in the marketplace, but would not address those broad processes of social and economic change that create the conditions for setting prices. Contemporary political economists, occupying various heterodox positions distinct from what has become the economic mainstream, continue the tradition of classical political economy to take up social change and transformation, focusing now on such areas as the transition from an industrial to an information economy. The study of the mass media and communication technology plays an important role in this research because the industries encompassed by these fields of study are major forces in the creation of today's economy.

Political economy also concentrates on the social whole, or the totality of social relations that make up the economic, political, social, and cultural areas of life. From the time of Adam Smith whose interest in understanding social life was not constrained by the disciplinary boundaries that mark academic life today, through Karl Marx, and on to contemporary institutional, conservative, and neo-Marxian theorists, political economy has consistently aimed to build on the unity of the political and the economic by accounting for their mutual influence and for their relationship to wider social and symbolic spheres of activity. How are power and wealth related? How do these influence the mass media, information, and entertainment?

Political economy is also noted for its commitment to moral philosophy, understood as an interest in the values that help to create social behavior and in those moral principles that ought to guide efforts to change it. For Adam Smith (1976), as evidenced in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, a book he favored more than the popular Wealth of Nations (1937), this meant understanding values like self-interest, materialism, and individual freedom which were contributing to the rise of commercial capitalism. Whereas for Karl Marx (1973, 1976), moral philosophy meant the ongoing struggle between the drive to realize individual and social value in human labor and the push to reduce labor to a marketable commodity. Contemporary political economy tends to favor moral philosophical standpoints that promote democracy in all aspects of social life. This goes beyond the political realm, which guarantees rights to participate in government, to the economic, social, and cultural domains where supporters of democracy call for income equality, access to education, full public participation in cultural production, and a guaranteed right to communicate freely.

Finally, social praxis, or the unity of thinking and doing, also occupies a central place in political economy. Specifically, against traditional academic positions which separate the sphere of research from that of social intervention, political economists, in a tradition tracing its roots to ancient practices of providing advice and counsel to leaders, have consistently viewed intellectual life as a form of social action and social intervention as a form of knowledge. Although they differ fundamentally on what should characterize intervention – from Thomas Malthus, who supported open sewers as a form of population control, to Marx, who called on labor to realize itself in revolution – political economists agree that the division between research and action is artificial and should be overturned.

Several schools of thought in political economy guarantee a significant variety of viewpoints and vigorous internal debate. Arguably the most important divide emerged in responses to the classical political economy of Adam Smith and his followers. One set, which eventually established contemporary economics, focused on the individual as the primary unit of analysis, the market as the principal structure, and their interaction through the individual's decision to register wants or demands in the marketplace. This approach progressively eliminated classical political economy's concerns for history, the social totality, moral philosophy, and praxis. In doing so, it transformed political economy into the science of economics founded on empirical investigation of marketplace behavior conceptualized in the language of mathematics. Broadly understood as neoclassical economics or simply, in recognition of its dominant position as today's orthodoxy, economics, it is a perspective which reduces labor to just one among the factors of production. Along with raw material, land, and capital, labor is valued solely for its productivity, or the ability to enhance the market value of a final product (Marshall, 1961; Jevons, 1965).

A second group of responses to the classic political economy of Adam Smith found it more important to retain a concern for history, the social whole, moral philosophy, and praxis. This set constitutes the wide variety of approaches to political economy. A first wave was led by a number of groups including conservative thinkers who sought to replace marketplace individualism with the collective authority of tradition (Carlyle, 1984), by Utopian Socialists who accepted the classical faith in social intervention but urged putting community ahead of the market (Owen, 1851), and by Marxian thinkers who returned labor and the struggle between social classes to the center of political economy. Subsequent formulations built on these perspectives to create a wide range of contemporary formulations.

Although economics occupies the center and center-right of the academic political spectrum, a neoconservative political economy thrives in the work of George J. Stigler (1988), James M. Buchanan (1999), and Ronald Coase (1968; Coase & Barrett, 1991), all recipients of the Nobel Prize in economics, who apply the categories of neoclassical economics to all social behavior with the aim of expanding individual freedom. Institutional political economy occupies a slightly left of center view, arguing, for example, in the work of Galbraith (1985, 2004), who drew principally on Veblen (1934, 1932), that institutional and technological constraints shape markets to the advantage of those corporations and governments big and powerful enough to control them. Institutionalists created the framework for studies documenting how large media companies control the production and distribution of mass media products and restrict content diversity, particularly by limiting views that challenge business. Neo-Marxian approaches, including those of the French Regulation School (Lipietz, 1988; Robles, 1994), world systems theory (Wallerstein, 2004), and others engaged in the debate over globalization (Sassen, 1998; Veltmeyer, 2004), continue to place social class at the center of analysis, and are principally responsible for debates on the relationship between monopoly capitalism, the automation and deskilling of work, and the growth of an international division of labor. Finally, social movements have spawned their own schools of political economy, notably feminist political economy which addresses the persistence of patriarchy and the dearth of attention to household labor (Huws, 2003), environmental political economy which concentrates on the links between social behavior and the wider organic environment (Foster, 2002), and a political economy that brings together the analysis of social movements with the Italian autonomous Marxist theoretical tradition. Dyer-Witheford (1999) has made the most productive use of this tradition in communication studies.

Communication studies has drawn on the various schools of political economic analysis. North American research has been extensively influenced by the contributions of two founding figures, Dallas Smythe and Herbert Schiller. Smythe taught the first course in the political economy of communication at the University of Illinois and is the first of five generations of scholars linked together in this research tradition. Schiller, who followed Smythe at the University of Illinois, has a similar influence. Their approach to communication studies drew on both the institutional and Marxian traditions. A concern about the growing size and power of transnational communication businesses places their work squarely in the institutional school, but their interest in social class and in media imperialism gives their work a Marxian focus. Their research, and that of others in North America, is shaped by a sense of injustice that the communication industry has become an integral part of a wider corporate order which is both exploitative and undemocratic. Although Smythe, a Canadian, and Schiller, a US citizen, were concerned with media power within their respective national bases, they both developed a research program that charted the growth in power and influence of transnational media companies throughout the world (Smythe, 1981; Schiller, 1989, 1992, 1996, 2000; Maxwell, 2003).

North American research has produced a large literature on industry and class-specific manifestations of transnational corporate and state power, distinguished by its concern to participate in ongoing social movements and oppositional struggles to change the dominant media and to create alternatives (McChesney, 1999; Mosco, 2009; Schiller, 1999; Wasko, 2003). A major objective of this work is to advance public interest concerns before government regulatory and policy agencies. This includes support for those movements that have taken an active role before international organizations, in defense of transforming the prevailing international economic, information, and communication order (Costanza-Chock, 2003; Mosco & Schiller, 2001).

European research has taken two principal directions. The first, most prominent in the work of Garnham (1990, 2000) and in that of Golding and Murdock (Murdock, 2000; Murdock and Golding, 2000), has emphasized class power. Building on the Frankfurt School's critical theory tradition, as well as on the work of Raymond Williams (1975), it documents the integration of communication institutions, mainly business and state policy authorities, within the wider capitalist order, and the resistance of subaltern social classes and movements reflected mainly in opposition to neoconservative state practices promoting the liberalization, commercialization, and privatization of the communication industries.

Another research stream foregrounds class struggle and is most prominent in the writings of Armand Mattelart (1983, 1992, 2000). Mattelart has drawn from dependency theory, Western Marxism, and the worldwide experience of national liberation movements to understand communication as one among the principal sources of resistance to power. His work has demonstrated how poor nations, particularly in Latin America where Mattelart was an advisor to the government of Chile before it was overthrown in a 1973 military coup backed by the US government, used the mass media to oppose Western control and to create indigenous news and entertainment media.

While it is the case that scholars from developing societies are still concerned about issues of media imperialism, as evidenced by their involvement in the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), there is just as much evidence that scholarship in the former Third World has taken a strong interest in political economic theory (Chakravartty & Zhao, 2008; Liu, 2006; Qiu, 2009; Review of African Political Economy, 2004). The process of globalizing political economy research is proceeding rapidly. Some of this results from the sheer movement of scholars, a development that has increased over the last two decades. For example, the Canadian political economist Robin Mansell established a base for institutional political economy at the London School of Economics. Yuezhi Zhao, who has provided the foundation for a political economy of China's media and telecommunications system, left China for the United States and from there moved to Canada to establish important connections among scholars in all three countries. One of her students, A. J. M. Shafiul Alam Bhuiyan, came to Canada from Bangladesh and has produced important work on political economy from the perspective of a postcolonial subject (Bhuiyan 2008). The Korean political economist Dal Yong Jin moved to the University of Illinois, Urbana and worked with Dan Schiller to complete a dissertation on the political economy of telecommunications in South Korea. He has since joined Yuezhi Zhao and Robert Hackett to continue the historically strong presence of a political economy perspective at Simon Fraser University in Canada.

Universities with a strong political economy orientation have established an institutional base concentrating on international research. For example, the University of Westminster, where Nicholas Garnham helped to found the political economy perspective, has established, under the leadership of political economist Colin Sparks, a global research program with particular strength in the study of communication systems in the Middle East and in China. His colleague Daya Thussu, a scholar from India, has established a program to examine Indian media. Similarly, the political economist John Downing, who was once based in the United Kingdom, established the Global Media Research Center at Southern Illinois University.

At a more formal level, scholarly associations have been active in their support of global research. The International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) was founded in 1957 and, for many years, served as the only global academic society to support political economy research. The organization continues to advance political economic research with an international orientation. Under the leadership of its recent president Robin Mansell and through the hard work of political economy sections heads, including Janet Wasko, Graham Murdock, and Helena Sousa, the IAMCR provides a genuine home to political economists worldwide. The establishment of the Herbert Schiller and Dallas Smythe awards to recognize the work of young scholars offers recognition and incentive for continuing the political economy tradition.

The general growth of academic journals has advanced the process of globalizing political economy but specific examples have been especially helpful to the approach. Founded in 2002 by the political economist Yahya Kamalipour of Purdue University in the United States, Global Media Journal has featured critical, especially political economic, research. By 2011, the journal appeared in 18 different editions: African, American, Arabic, Australian, Brazilian, Canadian, Chinese, German, Indian, Malaysian, Mediterranean, Mexican, Pakistani, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, and Turkish. In addition to content from practically everywhere in the world, the linguistic range demonstrates a genuinely global character. Additionally, the Union for Democratic Communication, a US-based organization of critical scholars and media practitioners, has established Democratic Communique, a journal that strongly supports political economic research.

This process of global expansion has made a difference for what political economists have to say. Specifically, current research is deeply concerned with the integration of the global political economy and its media systems. Heretofore the focus was on how one (the United States) or just a handful (the United States plus the European Union) of nation-states and their own corporations dominated weaker states and their nascent economies. The result was deepening dependency and underdevelopment. Today the emphasis is on the integration of corporations, states, and classes across national, regional, and even developmental divides (Mosco & Schiller, 2001). In the view of Chakravartty & Zhao (2008), this involves the creation of a “transcultural political economy,” which they document in a book containing contributions from primarily non-Western scholars.

Corporations, including those in the communication industry, were once based in one country and moved through the world as an external force. Today they are embedded in the fabric of several societies to the point where it is often difficult to determine their national identity. Because corporations now operate as owners, partners, and in strategic alliances with companies based in the host country, political economists have shifted from focusing on the power of multinational corporations to addressing the rise of a worldwide transnational economy. Many of these companies originate in the West but the growth of other economies, notably those of China and India, render simplistic many of the standard models of Western domination. India, for example, which has traditionally been portrayed, quite accurately, as a casualty of British and then general Western imperialism, now contains its own transnational firms that have integrated into Western economies. The companies Tata, Infosys, WiPro, and ICICI have strong bases in North America, employing large numbers of workers, many of whom are eventually dismissed because, after training their own replacements, their jobs are outsourced back to India. These companies also train North American students as interns and operate their own outsourcing ventures throughout Latin America (Mosco & McKercher, 2008).

One result of these changes is a new international division of labor with the communication industry in the forefront. By creating global labor markets and by making extensive use of communication technologies to carry out the restructuring process, transnational business gains the flexibility to make the most profitable use of labor.

The global integration of corporate, government, and social class structures is fraught with risks, tensions, and contradictions. There is also considerable opposition, evidenced in the rise of social movements that have protested this development at meetings of the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and other international bodies like the World Summit on the Information Society. Political economists have not only examined these developments, they have also taken praxis seriously and participated at the political and policy levels. In doing so, they recognize the need to create transnational democracy and a genuine cosmopolitan citizenship.

Communication History in Political Economy

True to a central characteristic of the general theory of political economy, communication research making use of this perspective has always been sensitive to history. For example, beginning in the 1980s, historical research on the political economy of electronic media focused on the relationship between centers of political power and centers of media power. This included Herbert Schiller's (1981, 1992) research on the development of a global and heavily militarized electronic media system and Smythe's (1981) work on the history of Canadian media dependency across publishing, broadcasting, and telecommunications. Subsequent generations of scholars further developed and reworked several of these themes, emphasizing the relationship between government and corporate power. These include studies of US broadcasting (Kellner, 1990; Winston, 1986) and telecommunications (McChesney, 1993; Mosco, 1982; Schiller, 1982) as well as their counterparts in Canadian broadcasting (Raboy, 1990) and telecommunications (Babe, 1990; Martin, 1991) history. Dan Schiller's work is particularly important because it identified the growth of well-organized, large business users of telecommunications services and demonstrated how their emergence signaled a significant shift in the industry power structure. Raboy's book challenged the idea that public broadcasting necessarily contributes to political democracy by documenting how state control of the public system silenced the voices of community and civil society groups.

Research from the mid-1990s to the present has departed substantially from more traditional forms of historical analysis in communication studies which emphasized personalities, such as media moguls like Rupert Murdoch who, it is often maintained, drive the development of media. More sophisticated approaches to media history focused on the arc of technological development, equating communication history with the history of a specific medium like radio or television. However, this approach tends to reify technology, giving it a life of its own out of proportion to the ways social and political forces shape the development of technology. When traditional historical research turned to the social and political, it tended to carry out top-down studies of the policies and politics crafted by elites in government and business. Such a perspective is more useful than one that enshrines either a media mogul or a specific technology and, at its best, provides insights into the clashes between elites who share a general political inclination (Hills, 2007; Winseck & Pike, 2007). But it generally neglects to account for resistance outside of elite circles and specifically how communication history is a more widely contested terrain. Such a recognition characterizes today's historical analyses that adopt a political economy perspective. Specifically, they demonstrate that media systems are the result of a contested history, involving not just dueling capitalists and their allies in government, but also labor unions, citizens' groups, consumer cooperatives, religious enthusiasts, and social justice organizations of all stripes.

Robert McChesney (1993) firmly established the importance of this approach in his analysis of the battle for control over radio in the United States. Neither above politics, nor the privileged policy domain of a handful of elites, radio broadcasting was recognized early on as vital to democracy and numerous social movement organizations used what power they had to democratize radio. They did so by creating broadcasting stations that trade unions, local communities, and public interest organizations of all types could control for themselves. They fought for citizen access to the airwaves to counter the dominant corporate control of radio. They also worked to democratize the policy process by making the case for popular control over regulations that gave and took away licenses, that assigned spectrum to services, and that established rules for the fair use of the medium. In essence, the struggle for radio was the struggle for democracy. More than the instrument of a handful of pioneers, radio was embedded in the most significant political battles of the twentieth century, pitting supporters of the New Deal against the dominant conservative forces which held the upper hand in US politics.

Radio broadcasting was a central instrument of what Michael Denning (1996) has called “the cultural front,” a movement extending from the late 1920s to the early 1950s in the United States which provided the cultural energy for attempts to establish alternatives to America's traditional power structure led by big business. Communication scholars writing history today from a political–economic perspective are telling the detailed story of the media's role, including that of radio, in the cultural front. For example, Nathan Godfried (1997) has examined the history of a Chicago radio station created and operated by a labor federation representing unions in that city. Providing a voice for labor in a sea of commercial broadcasting was not easy, particularly since many of the unions, whose members were also fans of commercial stations, struggled to define a labor alternative. In the face of enormous commercial and business pressures, WCFL (for Chicago Federation of Labor) was able to retain its unique character through the 1940s, providing both news and entertainment from a labor standpoint. Returning to WCFL, Elizabeth Fones-Wolf (2006) takes up the role of radio in the drive to build a democratic Left in twentieth-century America. In telling the story of alternatives to commercial radio, Fones-Wolf describes the political battles that pitted labor and its allies against business in some of the central policy debates of the time. These included decisions about granting and renewing broadcast licenses, setting limits on station ownership, establishing rules about acceptable content, and defining the responsibility to air diverse perspectives (see also Fones-Wolf & Fones-Wolf, 2007).

Political economy has addressed the historical trajectories of resistance and opposition in other media, especially print journalism. For example, Tracy (2006) has written about the crucial role of the International Typographical Workers Union (ITU) in battles to control the labor process and the introduction of new technologies in the printing industry. The ITU's activism culminated in a 1964 strike that shut down the newspaper business in New York City for four months. Drawing on interviews with the leader of the labor action, Tracy documents labor's once powerful voice in the media industry. He also describes how hanging on to a narrow craft ideology ultimately contributed to muting that voice. Recent research extends this view by telling the story of the battles between craft and class among communication workers throughout the history of American media (Mosco & McKercher, 2008).

Political economy scholars have also addressed the history of resistance in the telecommunications and computer industries. Countering the traditional great inventor, technicist, and pro-corporate readings of AT&T's story, Venus Green (2001) examines the crucial interplay of race, gender, and class in the company's development. Dan Schiller (2007) recounts those struggles in the workplace and in policymaking circles that challenged business efforts to control the postal and telephone system. Pellow and Park (2002) take the analysis into Silicon Valley by telling the story of the struggles first of indigenous people, then of agricultural workers, and now those of immigrant women who do the dangerous hardware work and of more privileged, but often exploited, young software workers.

It is one of the truisms in countries with a national broadcaster like the BBC or the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) that such institutions provide a public defense against commercialism. But in her groundbreaking research on media history in Canada, Patricia Mazepa (2003, 2007) demonstrates that the story is significantly more complex and important enough to make a difference for how one thinks about public media. Drawing on archival sources, Mazepa shows that the CBC developed not only to defend against commercial broadcasting crossing the border from the United States, as most scholarship on the subject has concluded. It also fiercely protected itself from alternative definitions of “public” embodied in media produced by immigrant, socialist, and labor organizations. In Canada, public broadcasting came to be associated with white settler media, mainly English, and an elite French version based principally in the province of Quebec. Mazepa demonstrates how the Canadian state used its policy powers to undermine media emerging from outside the mainstream. Her work not only uncovers the largely ignored story of media production and resistance from below. It also calls on scholars, especially those involved in the process of making broadcasting policy, to question the meaning of “public” in public broadcasting.

Writing about the history of journalism in Canada, McKercher (2002) charts the conflicts that erupted over control of the labor process, the use of technology, and the shape of the news. These were not simply established by those who owned the presses, nor imposed by the changing technologies in the workplace. They arose from strikes and other labor actions as well. Several of these opened spaces for workers and for those who wanted or needed a more diverse press. Many of them fell far short of success. But her historical work, like those of other political economists described in this section, offers a genuine alternative to the standard stories and, in doing so, gives back agency to social activists and workers.

The “Other” Marx

Another Marx helped to inspire an alternative to the political economy perspective. Leo Marx influenced scholars across several generations and a wide range of disciplines including history, literature, American studies, communication, and cultural studies. Marx has been a professor at MIT since 1976 where he contributed to the formation of a program in science, technology, and society. The author of numerous books on the relationship of technology and culture in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American society, Marx's most influential work was his first book, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, which was published in 1964 and reissued in 1999 with a new afterword by the author.

Leo Marx examined discourses, including the archival and literary record, to describe how technology was constituted from the sublime. Specifically, he reported on the manifold ways technology drew people to visions that transcended the banalities of everyday life. What Karl Marx concluded to be socially constructed ideology or false consciousness, Leo maintained was meaningful transcendence. Karl offered structural explanations that drew from a philosophical anthropology based in praxis. For him, analysis is rooted in political economy with the goal of transforming society. For Leo Marx, analysis is rooted in culture, and specifically aesthetics, with the goal of understanding the meanings that socially construct technology and living cultures. In The Machine in the Garden he described the struggle to create a US culture based on the dialectical relationship between conceptions of wilderness and of the built environment. Although both the unspoiled landscape and new technologies were invested with sublime characteristics, the American response settled, however uncomfortably, on a middle ground, the secure yet dynamic garden. For Leo Marx, the garden embodied the sublime experience in the United States until technology, beginning with the railroad, began to overtake it as the dominant cultural icon.

While it is useful to distinguish the political–economic and cultural orientations, it is also vital to resist simplistic dichotomies. Political economy has also addressed the cultural significance of new technologies. For one leading representative of the school, almost every wave of new technology, including information and communication media, contains a powerful rhetoric, “the ideology of redemption through networks” (Mattelart, 2000). Moreover, cultural scholars do not back off from political considerations. The Machine in the Garden begins with an assessment of the pastoral ideal, not simply as a romantic vision or myth but as a means of preserving a way of life that was under attack from powerful elites who sought to appropriate land for their own purposes. Whether the enemy is Roman aristocrats as featured in Virgil's Eclogues or the leaders of the British enclosure movement, there is no shortage of political forces and conflicts in Leo Marx's cultural analysis. One of his central concepts, the sublime, is drawn from aesthetics but embodies these power relations. As he describes it, “the rhetoric of the technological sublime” involves hymns to progress that rise “like froth on a tide of exuberant self-regard sweeping over all misgivings, problems, and contradictions” (Marx, 1964, p. 207).

Just as it would be impossible for one essay to do justice to the fullness of a political economy perspective, it is necessary to focus this description of a cultural view on a few key themes. For cultural theorists influenced by Leo Marx, technologies travel a road from the sublime to the banal, from the transcendent mythic spectacle that Edmund Burke wrote about 250 years ago, to what he called the “stale, unaffecting familiarity” of the banal (Burke, 1998, p. 79). For Leo Marx's student David Nye (1990, 1994), the sublime is a literal eruption of feeling that briefly overwhelms reason only to be recontained by it. Moreover, technologies enact their own mythologies and these are intimately connected to wider myths about time, space, and social relations. Finally, myths, understood not just as false statements, but as living, transcendent stories that help one to cope with life's contradictions, have significant social consequences.

Expansion of a Cultural Approach

Marx provided an opening to cultural history that others vigorously pursued. A key exemplar is one of Marx's protégés, Rosalind Williams, who built on Marx's work in Notes on the Underground, a book which was reissued in 2008 with a new afterword to the 1990 edition. Notes demonstrates that the foundation for producing social and cultural understandings of the world, including science and technology, is built on ideas and concepts drawn from aesthetics. Williams's extraordinary book starts with an enormous question: “What are the consequences when human beings dwell in an environment that is predominantly built rather than given?” (Williams, 2008, p. 1). Science, she describes, has provided some answers, but these are at best partial because each term in the question both reduces to and vehemently resists quantification and other tools of traditional science. After all, as Mircea Eliade, Leo Marx, and other cultural historians have described, the vast shift from a pastoral to an agricultural society, which constituted a new stage in built environments, certainly produced measurable increases in human material capabilities but also social, cultural, and spiritual upheavals that resist scientific tools of analysis. Understanding the shift to the technologically built environment requires not a reduction to science but an expansion of our imaginative capacity that includes ideas drawn from culture, the arts, and from aesthetics.

Starting from this premise, Williams takes us into the modern history of the mine, a story that embodies the concrete practice of science, digging to find resources, but also reflects the spirit of science, one that Francis Bacon captured in his then radical vision that “truth is to be sought in the deepest mines of nature” (Williams, 2008, p. 46). This leads Williams to examine first mines then railroads to understand the mutual constitution of their material and cultural dimensions. But a genuine understanding does not arrive until she deploys a foundation built on aesthetic notions of sublimity, fantasy, magic, and terror, which, along with other concepts, create an “underground aesthetics” to comprehend the construction and the descent into a new built environment. A cultural analysis is necessary because science and its attendant materialisms are limited: “The web of relationships between human beings and the earth that involve values, memories, symbolic representations, meanings, histories, anticipations, social organizations, and cultural connections – all these critical relationships cannot be framed within the normal procedures of science, and so they are often not framed at all” (Williams, 2008, p. 260).

James Carey (1992) followed this train of thinking with his research on the “electrical sublime,” a perspective that influenced my research on the “digital sublime” (Mosco, 2004) and that of other cultural scholars (Czitrom, 1982). Much of the discussion of the technological sublime draws on the classic work of Edmund Burke (1998), who remarked that the sublime so fills the mind with its object that it cannot entertain any other nor apply reason to it. Why? Because the sublime emerges from “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, [. . .] whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror” (p. 86). Unlike beauty and love, which, according to Burke, transcend the banal through pleasure and identification, the sublime achieves transcendence through astonishment, awe, terror, and psychic distance.

The sublime was originally associated with natural wonders including, as David Nye (1994) has examined, such US icons as the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, the Natural Bridge, or Yosemite. Indeed, it is this version of the sublime to which Burke directed his attention. As he remarked, “It comes upon us in the gloomy forest, and in the howling wilderness, in the form of the lion, the tiger, the panther, or rhinoceros” (Burke, 1998, p. 109). Later, when the natural gave way to the technological, the sublime came to be associated with the human-constructed world, including, but not limited to, modes of transportation like the railroad and airplane and aweinspiring projects like the Hoover and Glenn Canyon dams (Steinberg, 1993). In the novel Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf brilliantly captures the sublime image of mechanized flight and foreshadows the inevitable banality of the airplane as she describes one soaring in the skies over London shortly after World War I. The vision is seemingly magical until it is discovered to be advertising a popular candy.

One of the central contributions of Leo Marx and the cultural school of thought has been to demonstrate that history is filled with myth-making about technology and has much to say about how we invent myths whenever we invent technology. People want to believe that their era is unique in transforming the world as we have known it. The end is preferred to more of the same; the transcendent to the routine; the sublime to the banal. So we not only view our age as revolutionary. We forget that others looked at earlier technologies in the same way.

Scholars such as James Carey (1993), Susan Douglas (1986), Carolyn Marvin (1988), and Tom Standage (1999) have documented this tendency for the telegraph. In The Victorian Internet Standage writes that in the minds of many, time and space began their transformation when in December 1868 a room full of banquet guests enjoying the feast at Delmonico's restaurant in New York raised their glasses to Samuel F. B. Morse whose new invention, their toastmaster proclaimed, “annihilated both space and time in the transmission of intelligence” (Standage, 1999, p. 90). Or perhaps the transformation began even earlier in 1858, when the British Ambassador rose to toast another contributor to the success of the transatlantic telegraph, Edward Thornton, whose invention the diplomat enthusiastically called “the nerve of international life, transmitting knowledge of events, removing causes of misunderstanding, and promoting peace and harmony throughout the world” (Standage, 1999, pp. 90–91). One magazine exclaimed that “our whole human existence is being transformed” and another envisioned telegraphy creating its own “ghostland.” And according to another, “Wars are to cease; the kingdom of peace will be set up” (Douglas, 1986, p. 40). And, as Marvin (1988) describes, if not the kingdom of peace, then the kingdom of God. An early prophet of transoceanic telegraphic communication, Alonzo Jackman, offered a vision of the salvation of the world through instantaneous long-distance communication in a “new era” of evangelism and proclaimed: “Heathenism would be entombed, and the whole earth would be illuminated with the glorious light of Christianity” (Marvin, 1988, p. 192).

Leo Marx's student David Nye and communication scholar Carolyn Marvin document the importance of reflecting on how, shortly after the telegraph made its triumphant entrance, electricity burst into spectacle. Here is how one turn-of-the-century magazine described its magical power:

As historical research on the telegraph and electricity show, today's world of new media is not the first to be christened with magical powers to transcend the present and institute a new order. But they also demonstrate that transcendence is not easy to sustain. For Nye, the sublime eventually fades into the banality of everyday life. Just as the telegraph disappeared into the woodwork of routine commerce, electricity lost its compelling allure. Nye notes: “Electrical novelties faded quickly and became ‘natural.’ In 1880 one arc light in a store window drew a crowd; in 1885 a lighted mansion still impressed the multitude; in the 1890s came the first electric signs. Each in turn became normal and hardly worth a glance” (Nye, 1990, p. 57).

Michelle Martin (1991) picks up the pieces of this story with her analysis of the telephone. If the telegraph's lightning wires made up the Victorian Internet then the telephone's pairs of twisted copper made it the Internet of the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties. Martin shows how early promotion of the telephone described the characteristics of “a new social order” that the telephone would bring about. It would be both a “business savior” by permitting distant shopping and a liberator of “women slaves” since telephone shopping would lighten the load of homemakers. It would guard against “nervous strain,” provide “safety for your family,” reduce “household fatigue,” and make writing an anachronism. In short, it was the device that could “save the Nation” and so the decision to purchase a phone was considered more than a voluntary consumer choice but “a moral obligation for a considerate husband and a good citizen” (Martin, 1991, p. 37). Marvin echoes this view, noting that “perhaps more than any other communications invention, contemporaries considered the telephone the bellwether of a new age.” She cites the magazine Electrical World's enthusiasm for the telephone as “the voice crying in the wilderness” (Marvin, 1988, p. 209).

For Martin, Marvin, Claude Fischer, and others, the telephone became one of the central icons of modernity, the medium that marked the turn of the twentieth century. But once again they demonstrate how the sublime aura wears thin. Fischer (1992) documents this for the telephone in interviews with generations of early telephone users. The older interviewees, people who began to see telephones in use in the 1890s, “described the telephone in tones suggesting awe,” demonstrably moved by the act of hearing a distant voice and responding to it immediately. But this did not last for long, as those who took up the phone after the turn of the century attest. Statements like “Seems like we always had a telephone” and “Telephones were no big deal. It wasn't like you never saw a telephone” are common among those born just a few years later. For US citizens, the awe and the aura of the telephone disappeared after 1910 (Fischer, 1992, p. 243).

But once again, as Susan Douglas, Clayton R. Koppes, Thomas Lappin, and Eric Barnouw describe, the banality of one technology is matched by the emergence of a new sublime. The magic of messages transmitted through the air with no evidence of their passage was more than just the work of God, it was the medium of God's work. In 1922, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, a man ordinarily not prone to hyperbole, remarked on the wonder of “wireless fever” which had to be “one of the most astounding things that [has] come under my observation of American life” (Douglas, 1987, p. 303). Admittedly self-interested, the president of the Radio Corporation of America, General James G. Harbord, captured the history-making and history-ending power of radio with this analogy to the invention of printing that sounds more like a prayer than an observation:

Many of the same promises made about the telegraph, electricity, and the telephone were applied to this latest “miracle of the ages.” Like the others, it would serve as a potent force for social cohesion and world peace. One can understand that the president of the General Electric Company would see radio “as a means for general and perpetual peace on earth.” After all, GE owned RCA and had a huge stake in the development of broadcasting. One can also understand that Marconi, the widely described “father of wireless,” would see radio as “the only force to which we can look with any degree of hope for the ultimate establishment of permanent world peace.” But even those without a commercial stake in the technology weighed in with their utopian visions. The Episcopal bishop of Washington, DC gave his blessing to the new medium with the exclamation that “I believe the radio will be a potent factor in making the twentieth century the age of the brotherhood of man. More and more I have come to feel that this growing feeling of brotherhood may result from the intimacy and fellowship created through the medium of the air” (Koppes, 1969, p. 365).

More significantly, Koppes stresses, observers felt that radio would promote an epochal transformation in political life, the growth of direct democracy. In arguments that are strikingly like those we hear today about the Internet, radio would allow the listening audience direct contact with those in power. The New Republic magazine praised radio because “It has found a way to dispense with political middlemen. In a fashion, it has restored the demos upon which republican government is founded. No one will capture the radio vote unless he faces the microphones squarely and speaks his mind fully, candidly, and in extenso” (Koppes, 1969, p. 366).

Radio was also predicted to strengthen the quality of political oratory: “There is no doubt whatever that radio broadcasting will tend to improve the quality of speeches delivered at the average political meeting.” Why? Because “personality will count for nothing as far as the radio audience is concerned. Ill-built sentences expressing weak ideas cannot succeed without the aid of forensic gesticulation. The flowery nonsense and wild rhetorical excursions of the soap box spellbinder are probably a thing of the past if a microphone is being used” (Lappin, 1995, p. 218). Furthermore, as Lappin demonstrates, contemporary proponents of “virtual education” would find many of their arguments foreshadowed in radio's early years. The first radio courses in the early 1920s prompted Radio Broadcast magazine to forecast “the advent of the ‘University of the Air.’” One enthusiast declared: “The lid of the classroom has been blown off, and the walls have been set on the circumference of the globe.” Thanks to radio, “every home has the potentiality of becoming an extension of Carnegie Hall or Harvard University” (Lappin, 1995, pp. 366–367).

But once again, just as the garden paradise in Leo Marx's early United States turned into the banality of suburbia, it would not be long before the forces of banality would undermine the magic of radio. Douglas sees bad omens by the end of the second decade of the twentieth century as first military and then large corporate interests began to recognize the value of the new medium and lobbied to push off the air the young amateurs and educators who envisioned a utopian future for and with radio. The arrival of advertising and big business, with their interest in transforming the high-minded University of the Air into a medium to sell products with popular entertainment, led serious writers of the late 1920s to question whether radio would succeed. In 1927, as Lappin describes, The New Republic magazine, which had predicted that radio would create a new democratic age, now complained that “It turns to propaganda as easily as the aeroplane turns to bombing; it sows its seeds with a wider throw” (Lappin, 1995, p. 369). By 1930, the magazine could only conclude that “broadly speaking, the radio in America is going to waste” (Lappin, 1995, p. 374). Media historian Eric Barnouw describes how Lee de Forest, one of radio's founding inventors, concluded that radio had become “a stench in the nostrils of the gods of the ionosphere” (Barnouw, 1968, p. 234). Once very optimistic about the technology he helped to create, de Forest complained bitterly in a letter to the 1946 meeting of the National Association of Broadcasting. Attacking the proponents of commercial radio, he demands to know:

Nevertheless, as cultural analysts of television describe, his hopes rose again with the latest new medium.

As radio joined other communication technologies that promised but failed to transform time, space, and social relations, another powerful device, television, captured the popular imagination and attracted the sublimity that earlier technologies lost. As Kisselof (1995) and the Fishers (1996) demonstrate, television's first encounter with “end of everything” promises began with broadcast television, which spread widely beginning in the early 1950s. Its second arrived with cable television, which inspired dreams of a “wired nation” in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The first period of television's promise viewed the medium in terms familiar to anyone who heard about how radio would realize democracy, world peace, social harmony, and the transformation of mass education. As David Sarnoff, the founder of RCA, boasted at the 1939 New York World's Fair, television would provide “a torch of hope in a troubled world” (Kisselof, 1995, p. 51). It would do so by guaranteeing “a finer and broader understanding among all the people's [sic] of the world” (Fisher & Fisher, 1996, p. 350). Few people's expectations rose higher (or ultimately sank deeper) than those again of Lee de Forest, inventor of the vacuum tube. In 1928 he expounded on the medium he was helping to create by gushing over:

Television held out a promise not experienced since the arrival of the electric light and the automobile, and all three are mythologized in Dunlap's early work on television, which declared: “The advent of the television era can be compared in importance with the arrival of the electric light that dimmed the glory of candle and kerosene lamp; with the arrival of the automobile that relieved the horse, sped up travel and introduced good roads that linked the farm with the city” (Dunlap, 1932, p. 224). In short, television “is the wizardry of the age” (Dunlap, 1932, p. 258).

The enthusiasm grew with the promise of cable television. In fact, as Ralph Lee Smith (1972) documented, there was arguably a greater sense that cable would bring an epochal transformation in communication. Broadcast television held out great promise but it was hard to argue with those who saw it as largely a video extension of radio. But cable television was something completely different because it had the potential to link every home and workplace in an interconnected system. It is no wonder that one of the period's more popular books on the subject was called The Wired Nation – Cable TV: The Electronic Communications Highway. In fact, cable television was constructed with a similar sublimity as has been the case with the Internet. Indeed Smith put it in language now familiar to even the casual Internet observer: “In the 1960s, the nation provided large federal subsidies for a new interstate highway system to facilitate and modernize the flow of automotive traffic in the United States. In the 1970s it should make a similar national commitment for an electronic highway system, to facilitate the exchange of information and ideas” (Smith, 1972, p. 83). But anticipating the banality to come, he feared that “short-term commercial considerations [would] dictate the form of the network” (Smith, 1972, p. 83).

Computer communication is the latest version of Leo Marx's technological sublime, at once both the banal infrastructure for globalization and the sublime vision of a universal intelligence celebrated in the breezy optimism of Wired magazine as well as in the disturbing visions of the theologian Teilhard de Chardin (1959, 1964), who imagined the “noosphere,” a literal atmosphere of thought mounting in pressure upon a globe whose linked intelligence prepares the way for an evolutionary leap. Digital communication renews what was once promised by the telegraph, telephone, radio, and television by offering the literal connection, the missing link that will bring about transformation to time, space, and social relations. The remainder of this chapter situates my own research on computer communication in this stream of cultural analysis (Mosco, 2004).

The Culture of the Digital Sublime

Today's communication technology embodies the sublime and with it anoints the world with a near-apocalyptic quality – the end of history. The world experiences, in the work of Frances Fukuyama (1992), Nicholas Negroponte (1995), and Ray Kurzweil (1999), to name just some of the leading thinkers, a radical disjunction in time, opening the way to a new epoch no longer bound by the economic, technological, or even biological limitations that characterize every historical period. For Fukuyama (1992), new media and liberal democracy mark the end point in an evolutionary process that has taken people through stages of development (e.g., hunting and gathering, agriculture), modes of thinking (mythic, religious, philosophic), and forms of governance (tribal, feudal, communist, fascist). For the founding director of MIT's Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte (1995), the end of history comes with the end of an analog world and the arrival of a digital one to which we must accommodate. In matter-of-fact prose, he provides a modern-day prophet's call to say goodbye to the world of atoms, with its coarse, confining, materiality, and welcomes the digital world, with its infinitely malleable electrons able to transcend spatial, temporal, and material constraints. The world of atoms is ending, he says; we must learn to be digital. Ray Kurzweil (1999) brings the ballast of strong technological credentials to a bestselling book that casts the end of history in biological terms. The radical disjunction means the end of death as we know it because we are rapidly refining the ability to preserve our intelligence in software so that “life expectancy is no longer a viable term in relation to intelligent beings” (Kurzweil, 1999, p. 280). For Kurzweil, one of history's fundamental problems is that we have been dependent on the “longevity of our hardware,” that physical self which he laments through Yeats as “but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick” (Kurzweil, 1999, pp. 128–129). History as we know it ends as we “cross the divide” and “instantiate ourselves into our computational technology” (Kurzweil, 1999, pp. 128–129).

In addition to crossing the divide in time, cyberspace helps to cross the spatial divide, putting an end to geography as we know it. For Frances Cairncross (1997), this means the “death of distance,” as cyberspace, unlike material space, permits us to experience what it means to be anywhere at any time we choose. Accepting this view, Kenichi Ohmae (1990) celebrates a “borderless world” where any attempt to create boundaries is doomed to failure or what William Mitchell (1995, 1999) calls an “e-topia” of near boundless choices for where and how we live and work. For him, computer communication does not just extend geometry: “The Net negates geometry [. . .] it is fundamentally and profoundly antispatial. The Net is ambient-nowhere in particular and everywhere at once” (Mitchell, 1995, p. 8). Even those like Margeret Wertheim (1999) who take a less triumphalist view still see cyberspace as spatially disjunctive, exploding the singularity of the Enlightenment's vision of one empirical space and introducing an experience dimly reminiscent of the medieval era where existential space is inherently dual – composed then of secular and spiritual space, today of material and cyberspace.

Finally, cyberspace promises to end politics as we know it by undermining bureaucratic constraints on building networked democracies and by sweeping away age-old strategic thinking (Mosco & Foster, 2001). In the work of the Tofflers (1995), George Gilder (1989, 1994, 2000), and others, the end of politics means more than just using computer communication to create electronic democracy. It also redefines politics by grounding power in networks rather than in institutions. New economic power rests in looser structures, systems with nodal points whose power derives not from their geographical supremacy but from networked interdependence and flexibility. Real-time and 24-hour networks of information flows transcend the physical city and the nation-state too, creating new laws with which politics must comply or be threatened with extinction. Proponents go as far as to envision a quantum politics whose indeterminacy mirrors that of the subatomic world. The end of politics also means the end of fear, particularly the age-old fear of military attack because computer communications enables a defense against it. The need for offensive weapons and strategies of mutually assured destruction disappears as ballistic missile defense systems lift a protective umbrella that shields the world. From the time that Ronald Reagan first called for such a defense, telling Gorbachev that he saw the “hand of providence” in it, to George W. Bush's reinvention of these systems and their stubborn persistence today, we hear the language of a new dawn in global security, of world peace, driven by a kind of machina ex deo that will transform politics as we have known it throughout history.

Cultural studies scholars help one to understand how stories about communication technology envision a radical transformation in temporal, spatial, and social relations. They maintain that while computer communication may not bring about the end of history, of geography, and of politics, there is a lot to be gained from research that addresses why it is not and why people believe that it is. Specifically, one of the reasons why variations on “the end of” stories are so popular is because people collectively forget that technology is constructed with and through the sublime. New media gurus encourage thinking about the end of history, the end of geography, and the end of politics. Everything has changed. So one can apply the mute button to whatever has come before. After all, history has nothing to say to us because it knows nothing of new media. But quite to the contrary, cultural analysts insist that history is filled with stories about technological sublime and research needs to engage this point directly.

Then why do people so willingly acquiesce, indeed actively affirm, stories about the end? It is not just the mechanisms of political economy, including the power of gurus, the mass media looking for a good story, politicians wanting to be identified with the next new thing, and advertisers eager to market the latest promise to transform life as we know it. These are undoubtedly important forces in compelling belief and action. But there is more to it than this. Cultural theorists and historians remind us that active affirmation does not just come from external pressure. There is something powerfully attractive about the culture communication networks, not just the Internet that formed the basis of my book The Digital Sublime but the ensemble of new social media that Eran Fisher (2010) examines in Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age: The Spirit of Networks. Nevertheless, as these and other cultural analyses that build upon the work of Leo Marx describe, this magnetic power extends back in time to earlier examples of the electrical sublime and further back to the technological and the natural sublime. Consequently, we need to understand political–economic pressures within the cultural context of meaningful narratives that lift us out of the day-to-day and designate us as a special, perhaps even a chosen, people. Put simply, people want to believe that their era is unique in transforming the world. The end is preferred to more of the same; the transcendent to the routine, the sublime to the banal. So people not only view their age as revolutionary. They forget that others looked at earlier technologies in much the same way. It is only when we see today's media as mutually constituted out of a culture that creates sublime meanings and a political economy that empowers it that we can fully understand why it is that over and over again, people have encountered and believed in a genuinely living end.

For the followers of Leo Marx, history, geography, and politics ended in the 1850s when the telegraph was introduced. They ended again a few decades later when electrification lit up cities, but the stories were largely forgotten when electricity literally withdrew into the woodwork. The end came once more when the telephone brought about a renewal of these narratives. In the 1920s the arrival of radio brought along its own cast of storytellers who saw it marking a radical change in time, space, and social relations. In the 1950s television changed the world and then changed it again in the 1960s with the multi-channel world of cable television and again with today's new media. As one cultural theorist has concluded in what amounts to an understatement: “The structure of the history of technology itself is such as to encourage particular philosophical attitudes. Most commonly the particular philosophy involved is an optimistic, not to say triumphalist view of both the history of technology and the nature of man” (Mitcham, 1973, p. 169).

Bridging the Divide

The cultural history advanced by Leo Marx and his followers is part of a broad-based intellectual movement that focuses on the constitution of meaning in texts, including all forms of social communication. The approach contains numerous currents and fissures that provide for considerable ferment from within. Nevertheless, it can contribute to the understanding of political economy in several ways. Cultural studies has been open to a broad-based critique of positivism (the view that sensory observation is the only source of knowledge). Moreover, it has defended a more open philosophical approach that concentrates on subjectivity or how people interpret their world, as well as on the social creation of knowledge. Cultural studies has also expanded the meaning of cultural analysis by starting from the premise that culture is ordinary, produced by all social actors rather than primarily by a privileged elite, and that the social is organized around gender and nationality divisions and identities as much as by social class.

Although the political economy approach derived from Karl Marx can learn from these departures, it can also contribute equally to enrich the cultural approach. Even as it takes on a philosophical approach that is open to subjectivity and is more broadly inclusive, political economy insists on a realist epistemology that maintains the value of material historical research, of thinking in terms of concrete social totalities, with a well-grounded moral philosophy, and a commitment to overcome the distinction between social research and social practice.

Whatever the divisions between the two Marxes, the process of research should bring together, not separate, intellectuals and cultural producers. It ought to build a common understanding and common political purpose that can advance the democratization of social life. In making this call, critics, including political economists, must remind themselves of their own wider purpose, which includes forging intellectual and political links across disciplinary boundaries. There is much to be gained by continuing the conversation between the legacies of the two Marxes.

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