On "The Forest and the Trees"

Johnson's introductory chapter covers the construction of the social.  As he says in chapter two of his book "we exist in a box."  However, how is that box made?  It is here that he fills us in.  (I should note that this chapter does come before the one of culture in his book, though for class we read chapter two first, in case non-classmates happen to read this and are confused).  At any rate, I think Johnson's work is a good introduction to the concept that of the social.  What I think is important in Johnson's work is that things are not simply relative (as a classmate said last week).  We reproduce the social through our actions, and it produces us.  Marx said, "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness."(1)  The universals that we experience are part of a experience larger than ourselves and to reduce this down, then, to "relativity" almost suggests that these are not real.  However, they are very real social forces that continue to shape us.  An individual does not simply opt out of this.

How, then, do people who come into conflict with the social struggle inside it.  There are two methods -- one is to abolish the social existence and create a new one.  The other is to seek representation within the social, to carve out a new social space.  It is in the latter where conceptions of "identity" are formed.(2)  I would suggest that the former can only be achieved through collective struggle.  As the graphic above suggests, one way we might do this is to create a counter-hegemony, to battle against the current culture with a new culture.

An important part of the equation is one that Johnson does not adequately touch, and something that we simply haven't talk about in class.  We have talked about the box we live in, but we haven't been able to explain what that box is.  I would suggest, following Marx and Gramsci (as well as others), that this box has two important elements: a base and a superstructure.(3)  I would call the box capitalism, because we live in a social system that is fundamentally different previous political-economic-social structures.  It was created through an prolonged process from the 1500's (roughly) up to this day.  And while there are important system of oppression (for example, patriarchy) that existed before this system, we experience it now fundamentally different than we would have in a society underpinned by, for example, feudal social relations.(4)

It is important, I think, to understand the present epoch we live in, because I do not agree with Max Weber that education is something that should be "value free."  The point of education is to find social antagonisms, understand social antagonisms, and abolish them.  My point here is not that Johnson is useless, far from it, but that I don't think his ideas go far enough in digging into what constitutes the social, what social relations are and how we enact them.

(1) Karl Marx, Preface to A Contriution to the Critique of Political Economy, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm.
(2) A Michel Foucault noted in his work The History of Sexuality, the notion of "homosexual" as an identity did not exist before the Victorian era.  Surely there were people who were had same-sex and what we might today call "queer" relations, but as an identity the concept of "homosexual" did not exist before this time.  A problem with modern Gender Studies has been taking modern identities and looking back in history to find examples that legitimize their place within the modern civil society.  These attempts, in my opinion, are ahistorical and wrongheaded.  See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, New York City, Vintage 1990.
(3) Karl Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm. "In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness."
(4) See Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, New York City, Autonomedia 2005 and Maria Della Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, Falling Wall Press, 1975.