Political Economy is tainted by the ‘epistemology of ignorance’ spread by the history of the Frankfurt School which silences and pushes different epistemologies for resistance to the margins – this is particularly true for black queer bodies who are reduced to objects of study by the white gaze

The intellectual history of the Frankfurt School, especially as it has been taken up by media and communication scholars, in other words, reveals not oversight but a motivated silence. It maps what Charles Mills has termed “an epistemology of ignorance” (2007, p. 16). Here we are talking precisely about ways of knowing that are premised on not knowing. We are talking about tactical silences, minimizations, and misrepresentations in textbooks, on curricula, and in how expertise is measured and valued. For Mills, these are epistemologies designed to safeguard white ignorance, protecting those who “for ‘racial’ reasons have needed not to know” (p. 35). Inscribed in the publication and citational politics of journal articles, conference programs and special issues, state-of-the-field forums and anthologies, encyclopedias, dictionaries, and keyworks collections, reproduced in syllabi, and concretized in hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions, the epistemologies of ignorance that characterize the legacies of the Frankfurt School are woven into the great debates and ferments, subsuming the claims as well as counter-claims that constitute the Communication canon. The intellectual footprints of these legacies of the Frankfurt School are tracked along two main strains, both part of the “critical” orientation in communication and media studies. The first of these, returning more fully to Marxist institutional and materialist analyses, was loosely organized under the banner of critical political economy.9 The other, riding Marxism’s wider “cultural turn,” brought communication and culture scholars together under the category of critical cultural studies, especially in the wake of the founding in 1964 of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Political economy, while positioned in sharp opposition to the U.S.-based “administrative” canon of communication studies, nevertheless took its cues from the Frankfurt School’s deliberate erasure of its formative investments in racism and racial difference. Selectively foregrounding critical theory’s investments in state and capitalist domination, scholars working on the political economy of media and communication emphasized institutional and industry analyses to highlight how mass media disenfranchised, commodified, and administered mass publics. Questions of race, if they emerged at all, took a backseat to issues of labor and class. Much of what is currently organized under the sub-field of media industries, for example, or what is now emerging as the digital media studies canon, reflects political economy’s deracialized emphasis on the economic base. Despite Cedric Robinson’s forceful claim that racialism, as a material force, permeates the social structures emergent from capitalism, and that “the development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society [have] pursued essentially racial directions” (2000, p. 2), critical political economy has yet to engage substantively with the theoretical formulations of racial capitalism and to reckon with the ways critical race approaches may enrich their insights. Critical cultural studies, for its part, took its cue from the Frankfurt School’s rejection of orthodox Marxism’s dichotomies between base and ideological superstructure, and the corresponding view that culture was merely epiphenomenal. Drawing attention to issues of cultural difference and marginality in ways that critical political economists rarely did, early works focused on white British objectifications of AfroCaribbean styles and Asian youth as victims of white skinhead aggression. Such an emphasis, as Huq explains, privileged the supposedly sub-culturally stylish and/or deviant deeds of white working-class males (2003, p. 30), and embedded familiar epistemological myopias that constrained critical cultural studies to questions of class division. Approaching the representational and cultural politics of racialized populations as distinct and particular, against which white cultural identities and experiences remained, as if by default, prototypical and generalizable, early critical cultural inquiry, in other words, had a race problem of its own. Reflecting conspicuous problems of ethnocentrism and nationalism and an essentially reactive approach to questions of ethnicity and racial identity, the emerging canon “mobilized [race and ethnicity] often by default rather than design,” inscribing the persistent and “unthinking assumption that cultures always flow into patterns congruent within the border of essentially homogeneous nation states” (Gilroy, 1993, p. 5). After Stuart Hall assumed the leadership of the Birmingham school in 1971, the culturalist shift within Marxist theory eased a wider range of projects concerned with race and post-coloniality but it took later generations of Birmingham scholars, likewise, to variously challenge the white working-class, male, and nation-bound focus of cultural studies (Clarke, 1985; Gilroy, 1993; McRobbie and Garber, 1976; McRobbie and Nava, 1984; Mercer, 1994). These efforts continue to make progress in opening out the field to the cultural practices of ethnic minorities, women, and middle-class youth, and attending to the reception practices of women of color and the performative subcultures of queer of color communities not as exotic and niche objects of study but as formative to the epistemologies and methodologies of critical cultural studies. In many ways, these contentious trajectories of the field have transformed communication and media studies. But, as we know too, our place in the canon remains uneasy. I read with dismay, for example, Toby Miller’s recent entry entitled “Cultural Studies and Communication” in the Oxford Research Encyclopedias, in which he identifies one notable “critical strand of communication studies,” namely, political economy (2018). Miller, a prominent cultural studies scholar,10 explains that while political economy “examines such social forces of domination as the state and capital,” cultural studies, in contrast, “is more akin to a tendency connected to concerns and identities on the margins of academia” (p. 1). Where political economy, seemingly in faithful service to the foundational burdens of the Frankfurt School, remains concerned with the “pessimistic” record of domination, cultural studies, in a presumably sunnier outlook, favors “a faith in the resistive qualities of the oppressed and silenced” (p. 6). Miller’s version of the cultural studies canon makes ethical claims to a commitment to social justice through historical and contemporary analyses of “slaves, crowds, pirates, bandits, minorities, audiences, fans, women, and the working class,” which, he explains, show us how “creative struggles undertaken by ordinary people (...) interpret dominant cultural forms in terms of their conditions of existence” (p. 7). Defining the oppressed and silenced wholly in terms of their alienation, powerlessness, and victimization, Miller’s account tediously retraces the blind spots of early critical cultural studies, positioning those othered by history and circumstance as outside, looking in, significant to the field as exotic objects of study. Reducing practices of “day-to-day non-compliance with authority” (p. 6) to struggles geared to “claim[ing] resources and seek[ing] inclusion” (p. 7), Miller approaches communication and media ecologies as if unmarked by institutional histories of raced and gendered difference, except when those on the outside, valiantly and creatively, peck at the margins. Espousing the “blithe universalism” that Said diagnosed in the work of the Frankfurt School, Miller, likewise, highlights how the crises of belonging and economic necessity confronting the oppressed are, no doubt, occasioned and impacted by the forces of global capitalism without much insight into how the historical expansion of capitalism has depended on the structural exploitation and subjugation of raced and gendered others. Miller’s summary is neither alone nor exceptional in the ways in locates critical race epistemologies and approaches outside the mainstay of critical cultural studies. Its logics of white ignorance shepherded by presumed experts and leaders in the field, it is, to be sure, another point of ethno-racial encounter, specifically, of raced erasure, of forgetting and not knowing. Tracking the institution that Sara Ahmed names “white men” as well as the racialized and racializing mechanisms for reproducing that institution, Miller’s essay offers us a glimpse, one among others, of how and why Communication remains so white.