Social Text 16
(Winter 1986/87)
from
“What Is Cultural Studies Anyway?”
Richard Johnson
Some students of culture remain “marxist” in name (despite the “crisis” and all that). It is more interesting, however, to to note where cultural studies has been Marx-influenced. Everyone will have their own checklist. My own, which is not intended to sketch an orthodoxy, includes three main premises. The first is that cultural processes are intimately connected with social relations, especially with class relations and class formations, with sexual divisions, with the racial structuring of social relations and with age oppressions as a form of dependency. The second is that culture involves power and helps to produce assymmetries in the abilities of individuals and social groups to define and realize their needs. And the third, which follows from the other two, is that culture is neither an autonomous nor an externally determined field, but a site of social differences and struggles. This by no means exhausts the elements of marxism that remain active and alive and resourceful in the existing circumstances, provided only they, too, are critiqued and developed in detailed studies.