ABSTRACT
The issue of the extent of cultural autonomy can now be approached as a topic in its own right, so to speak. For many of us, cultural activities do seem to be relatively free of social constraint. Much cultural analysis focuses on the creative or autonomous aspects of cultural production-the ideas that film directors had and their struggles to realise them in the studio system, say. However, there may well be hidden constraints too, and we need more than a simple voluntarism or idealism to tease them out, as most of the analysts I review in this book would argue. The debate arises when we discuss the best way to do this. In this chapter, I shall be reviewing some ‘materialist’ or sociological work again, with a particular interest in the politics of cultural autonomy, before turning to later writers in subsequent chapters.
