Left out? Marxism, The New Left and Cultural Studies‪.‬

While the spectre that haunted Europe in 1848 seems to have been exorcised, at least for the moment and at least from the eastern half of the continent, its theoretical counterpart--marxism as distinct from communism--still haunts the crossroads of international cultural studies, a ghostly Laius to the latter's Oedipus. (1) Thirty years ago it would have been merely truistic to call attention to the marxist origins of the new proto-discipline, but those origins have been progressively occluded in most subsequent histories, especially those centred on categories such as 'culturalism', 'structuralism' and 'post-structuralism', which powerfully inform the collective wisdom and pedagogical strategies of the (proto) discipline. To speak of cultural studies as a 'proto-discipline' or 'discipline', however, is to beg the question as to what exactly we mean by this concept. Let us begin at the end, then, with the third term in my title, with Oedipus rather than Laius; that is, with a preliminary account of the various self-definitions encoded in the recent history of cultural studies. Oedipus: Four Versions of Cultural Studies