This is the fifth and final column in the Topia series exploring intersections between political economy and cultural studies. The column in Topia 15 (Babe 2006: 91-101) documents the tendency on the part of mainstream American communication/media scholars—from John Dewey in the first decades of the 20th century to postmodernist writers of today—to obscure to the vanishing point concerns and methods of political economy. The earlier column suggests that “readers should scrutinize carefully the writings of contemporary poststructuralist/postmodernist authoritative figures to determine just where they stand on issues of political economy” (98). That is precisely what we do here: we focus on the American poststructuralist Mark Poster and compare his writings to the media analysis of Canadian political economist Harold Innis
