Base and Superstructure Revisited

Terry Eagleton

New Literary History, Volume 31, Number 2, Spring 2000, pp. 231-240 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2000.0018

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Base and Superstructure Revisited*

Terry Eagleton
magine a visitor from Alpha Centauri who lacked the concept of combining different sorts of goods. In Alpha Centaurian society, some people go in for scuba diving, some build Gothic follies in their gardens, and others have various bizarre shapes cut, topiary-wise, in their voluminous hair, but nobody thinks of doing all of these things together. Arriving in our own culture, this visitor begins by imagining that he has to choose between training as a trapeze artist, eating himself to death, climbing in the Andes, and collecting eighteenth-century silverware. Soon, however, he would come to realize that here on earth these versions of the good life need not be incompatible. For there exists with marvelous convenience a kind of meta-good, a sort of magical distillation of all other goods, which allowed you to shunt between or permutate these other goods with the minimum of effort, and its name of course is money. Not long after realizing this, the Centaurian would no doubt quickly grasp two other facts about terrestrial money, which together constitute something of a paradox: rst, that it was so utterly vital a good that it engaged almost everybodys energies most of the time, and second, that it was held in hearty contempt. The alien would be instructed by earnestlooking bankers that there was a great deal more to life than money, and informed by sentimental stockbrokers that the best things in life were free. Psychoanalysts would tell him that money was a superior form of shit, while maudlin characters propping up the bar at his elbow would remind him that you cannot take it with you and that the moon belongs to everyone. He would soon nd himself puzzling over the performative contradiction between what we said about money and what we did with it, or, if you prefer, over a certain discrepancy between material base and moral superstructure.
*This essay and the others, with the exception of Regenia Gagniers and Gregory Lablancs, were in their original form delivered at the University of Exeter Conference on Culture and Economics (July 1998) co-sponsored by the Society for Critical Exchange and the Research Committee of the University of Exeter. The editors thank the principal conveners of the conference, Martha Woodmansee and Regenia Gagnier, for their help in gathering the essays.
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This discrepancyone much more marked in hypocritical Britain than in brashly upfront young America (no English academic, for example, is hired )is not, however, just hypocrisy. Indeed, few forms of hypocrisy are just hypocrisy, just as complete charlatans are pretty rare creatures. The discrepancy signals, rather, a genuine conundrum or contradiction about moneys ontological statusthe fact that it seems at once everything and nothing, impotent and omnipotent, meretricious bits of metal which some men and women will nonetheless go to almost any lengths to amass. Marxs disturbingly precocious Economic and Philosophical MSS explore these ironies, aporias, and ambiguities with positively poetic relish, though the major theoretical treatise on the matter remains the collected works of William Shakespeare. One can, however, make rather too much of this enigma, as Shakespeare certainly does. For there is surely one phenomenon which can be both supremely important and utterly banal, and that is a necessary condition. Necessary conditions may be poor things in themselves, but they give birth often enough to momentous consequences, and their status is thus hard to measure. It would be silly to say that a pen was a more important object than King Lear, since without one the play would never have got written, but one sees what this perverse claim is trying to say. Or, to bring the matter a little closer home, the intellectually shoddy brand of culturalism which is now sweeping the postmodern left forgets at its peril that whatever else human beings are, they are rst of all natural, material objects; that without that objective status there could be no talk of relationship between them, including relations of objectication; and that the fact that we are natural material objects is a necessary condition of anything more creative and less boring we might get up to. The great eighteenth-century Irish philosopher Francis Hutcheson saw very shrewdly just why it was that the desire for wealth and power could so easily be construed by thinkers like Thomas Hobbes as the primary motivations of human life. They are thus misconstrued, so Hutcheson argues in his Thoughts on Laughter, because they represent the universal sine qua non of most other human aspirations, not because they are in themselves the most fundamental human appetites. People have all kinds of desires beyond wealth and power; it is just that wealth and power provide the material conditions essential for fullling most of them. If money is the commodity of commodities, it is also the capacity of capacities, a kind of pure, vacuous accessibility which like the austere antechamber of a labyrinthine palace is nothing in itself but seems to lead off simultaneously in all directions, It is, if you like, the purely notional Omega point at which all capacities converge to be alchemically transmuted into one another. We are involved here among

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other things in a dispute about the various meanings of words like primary or fundamental, which can mean anything from logically prior to essentially pre-conditional of to of absolute value or unspeakably precious. What is logically prior may be worthless in itself. Nobody buys a house because they have fallen in love with its foundations, but nobody buys a house without them either. The economic is not, need one say, fundamental in the sense of being the most precious thing in life, not even for most merchant bankers. What is most precious in life for merchant bankers, as for us rather less fortunate creatures, is happiness. It may well be that some merchant bankers have come perversely to identify the material means of happiness with the spiritual end, just as some perverse people linger lovingly over the sensuous resonance of the shout of Fire! in a crowded train stationanother confusing spiritual end and material means, though in this case a mistake one is unlikely to survive very long. Butand this is where the performative contradiction comes ineven these morally shabby creatures tend to be coy of actually shouting from the housetops the fact that making money constitutes their true happiness, and feel the need instead to come up with a lot of nauseating nonsense about the joy of being with their families, the sunset being free of charge, and the human individual being beyond price. This sickly sort of talk is insincere, to be sure, but more importantly it is false. Love, sunsets, truly wonderful children, and the rest are by no means free of charge in the sense of being autonomous of money. It is hard to have human love without money, in the sense that it is hard to sustain a decent human relationship if you are dying of hunger. Neither, for much the same reasons, are you likely to relish the aesthetic appeal of the sunset. The notion that there are thing which money cant buy, while in one sense eminently true, is in another sense no more than a vulgar idealist platitude with which those who dont have enough of the stuff are allowed to console themselves by those who do. One thing which only money can buy is of course socialism, which, as the dismal experience of the Soviet bloc has taught us (but as Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky knew in any case), is only possible on the basis of reasonably advanced material conditions, a ourishing civic and liberal tradition, a skilled, educated working class, and a product large enough to be equitably distributed. One needs forces of production which are not so meager that only a draconian political state could take on the laborious task of developing them, thus destroying socialist democracy in the very act of trying to lay down its material basis. But since this material basis is what the bourgeoisie has been busy laying down over the centuries, Marxs vision of history is a kind of black joke, turning as it does on the trope of irony. To go socialist rather than Stalinist you have to be

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reasonably well-heeled; and if you are not, then some helpful ally must be instead. Socialism also involves recognizing that there is nothing in the least wrong with pressing ones self-interested material claims, as long as they are just ones, just as there is nothing whatsoever wrong with power and authority. On the contrary, power and authority are splendid things: it all depends on who is using them in what situations for what ends. Only liberals or postmodernists can afford to be suspicious of power. It is selessness here which is ideological. Only by economics, then, will culture be able to transcend the economic. I take it that this paradox is the governing thesis of cultural materialism, not some fashionable appeal to return culture to its material conditions. Many a conservative has done precisely this. Not all historicizers are left-wingersin fact some of the most distinguished of them, from Burke to Oakeshott, have been quite the reverse. Nowadays, hardly anyone apart from card-carrying formalists would bother to oppose the thesis that culture must in some sense be related to its historical conditions. The signicant conict is not over this bland platitude, but over the way you read the historical conditions in question. On the one side, so the case runs, there are those aesthetes and the formalists who rudely rip culture from its material contexts, while on the other side there are decent right-thinking people for whom culture and material context go together like Laurel and Hardy. This is just a piece of self-righteous piety with which the cultural left likes to cheer itself up. For Marxism, the culture of modernity is indeed in a sense autonomous of material conditions, and it is precisely material conditions which permit it to be so. What this means, roughly speaking, is that only on the back of a material surplus can culture become autonomous. By autonomous I mean of course not independent of any material context, which we can all agree is bourgeois-idealist, but something much more challenging and interesting, such as autonomous of those subservient political and ideological functions in church, court, and state which culture had traditionally fullled. This can happen only when a society has the material means to support a specialized caste of professional artists and intellectuals, and when the growth of the market is such that these people can now become independent of the state or the governing class and become dependent for their livelihood on market forces instead. Art becomes relatively autonomous of its material conditions precisely by being more rmly integrated into the economic, not by being cut adrift from it. To register both the delights and disasters of this historical momentthat is to say, to consider it dialectically, as both oppression and emancipationrequires a thinking-on-both-sides of which postmodern theory has so far proved itself lamentably incapable. Autonomy

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frees you from being the hired hack of the rulers, allows art to become for the rst time critique, and permits the artwork itself to show forth in its very forms an autotelism which rebukes the brutal utilitarianism of its surroundings. There is also a considerably more downbeat side of the story, but one rather that is less in need of being rehearsed. The point, anyway, is that anyone who thinks that cultures historical autonomy of material functions is just a bad thing, like smoking or salt, is a moralist rather than a materialist; and that this partial, relative autonomy of material conditions is itself the effect of material conditions. It is this, not some shop-soiled doctrine about the need to relate culture to context, that is specic about the historical materialist contribution to the argument. To put the point rather more luridly: only when culture is thoroughly saturated by exchange-value does it wax politically utopian. For it is then that the artifact, ssured down the middle between use- and exchangevalue, tries to resist the miseries of commodication at the level of the economic by a deant autotelism at the level of ideologyby the courageous, vainglorious claim that it is its own end, ground, and raison dtre. This, to be sure, is to make a cultural virtue out of historical necessity: in a desperate last-ditch rationalization, the work must be its own end, since it scarcely seems to have any other very salient function any longer. But this autotelism can then become an image of how men and women themselves might be under altered material conditions. Marx himself, who is a full-blooded aesthete on such questions, holds that the point of socialism is to abolish the instrumental treatment of objects and human beings so that they may delight in the realization of their sensuous powers and capacities just for the sake of it (what he knows as use-value), rather than be forced to justify their delight in that autotelism at the tribunal of some higher Reason, World-Spirit, History, Duty, or Utility. His anthropology is thus in one sense quite properly foundational: it all comes down in the end to what we share in common by virtue of the structure of our bodies, to our species-being, as he terms it. It is a thoroughly essentialist doctrine, and none the worse for that. But in another sense, since our species-being has itself no function, or better since its function is just to realize its various functions for the sake of it; since, in other words, we quite properly cannot answer questions like: Why should we take delight in each others company? then the foundation in question is a peculiarly unfoundational one. The positive side of autonomous culture (we are all too familiar with the more negative facets) is that it can act as a frail preguring of this condition, notwithstanding its idealist illusions, elitist guilt, and pathetic ineffectuality. Where art is, there human beings shall be. Culture can serve to remind us of a time when men and women, exactly by dint of

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alternative economic arrangements, might come to live rather more by culture than by economics. If the economic is central to radical theory, then it can only be under the sign of its progressive sidelining, its increasingly marginal utility. When Oscar Wilde argues in The Soul of Man under Socialism that the whole point of socialism is to automate production so that we can get on with the business of cultivating our individual personalities, he is arguably much closer to Marx on this score that is the Marxist William Morris, who wishes on the whole to transform labor rather than abolish it. Let me quote you a passage which I am sure will sound familiar: The human being must go through the different stages of hunter, shepherd and husbandman, then, when property becomes valuable, and consequently gives cause for injustice; then when laws are appointed to repress injury, and secure possession, when men, by the sanction of these laws, become possessed of superuity, when luxury is thus introduced and demands its continual supply, then it is that the sciences become necessary and useful; the state cannot subsist without them.1 Not in fact the nineteenth-century German revolutionary Karl Marx, but the eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish Tory Oliver Goldsmith, whose word superuity is especially intriguing. He means, no doubt, something like Marxs surplus; but one might claim more generally that culture is itself superuity, that which is strictly surplus to biological need. Eating is natural, but Mars bars are cultural; dying is natural, but being buried standing upright with a ve-pound note for the Hades ferryman in your mouth is a question of culture. Cultural types sometimes feel restive with such formulations since they tend to make culture sound in classic bourgeois style like the icing on the cake, something not strictly necessary. But the whole point of our species-being, as both Marx and King Lear recognize, is that superuity is built into our very nature, that exceeding the measure belongs our normativity, that reasoning not the need is one of our most vital needs. The supplement is here constitutive rather than superuous, or, if you prefer, constitutive in its very superuity. That continuous transgression or self-transcendence which we call history, or culture, is of our naturea case which is quite different from the more crudely reductive culturalist claim that our nature just is culture. It is not the fact that our nature is culture, but the fact that culture is of our nature, which leads at once to our achievements and our self-undoings. A being whose nature is culture is not at all as interestingly non-self-identical as one like us whose nature is to be culturalone who, being prematurely born, has at the center of its biological nature a void which culture must quickly move in to ll out. Otherwise it will die. The chief interest of Goldsmiths words for my purpose, though, lies

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in their curious preguring of the Marxist base/superstructure model laws and sciences being, as Goldsmith recognizes, somehow functional with regard to property relations. And here I move at last to the main theme of my paper. I must confess rst that I belong to that dwindling band who still believe that the base/superstructure model has something valuable to say, even if this is nowadays a proportion smaller than those who believe in the Virgin Birth or the Loch Ness monster, and positively miniscule in comparison with those who believe in alien abductions. Surely the Virgin Birth is about as plausible as this static, mechanistic, reductive, economistic, hierarchical, undialectical model of how it is with culture and economics? Let me rst dispel if I can one or two common false assumptions about this now universally reviled paradigm. The rst concerns its hierarchical nature. The model is indeed hierarchical, but it is hard to see what is so sinister about that. It holds, in short, that some things are more important or crucially determinant than others, as does any human being who, in Edmund Burkes ne phrase, walks abroad without a keeper. It may be wrong as to what it considers more determinant than what; but you really cannot fault a doctrine for holding that some things are more true or important than others, since there is no doctrine which does not. Every doctrine, for example, implicitly holds that it is itself more true than its opposite, and this includes claims like there is no truth, or nothing is more important than anything else. Secondly, the base/superstructure model is not out to argue that law, culture, ideology, the state, and various other inhabitants of the superstructure are less real or material than property relations. It is not, in this sense at least, an ontological claim. We can all happily agree that prisons and museums are quite as real as banks. It is not a claim about degrees of ontological reality; nor is it simply a claim about priorities or preconditions. The assertion that we must eat before we can think (Eats rst, morals second as Brecht observed) is only an instance of the base/ superstructure model if it carries with it the claim that what we eat somehow shapes or conditions what we think. The doctrine, in short, is about determinations. Now in a broad sense it would surely seem quite plausible that the economic lies at the root of social life. Certainly Freud, no particular friend of Marxism, thought so himself: he says straight out that the basic motivation for society is an economic one, and implies that without this unpleasant form of coercion we would all just lie around the place all day in various interesting states of jouissance. There are two metanarratives which have absorbed most of the energies of most men and women in the world to date, and these are the story of material reproduction and

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the story of sexual reproduction. That both have always been terrains of conict is merely one thing they have in common. If we arrest history to date at any point whatsoever and take a cross-section down it, then we know already, even without looking, what we shall nd: that the great majority of people at that time are enduring lives of pretty fruitless toil for the prot of a minority, and that women form an oppressed stratum within this social order. And yet they talk of the death of metanarrative! There are those for whom all metanarratives must be Panglossian tales of a triumphantly unfolding Reason, Science, World-Spirit, or Proletariat, forgetful as they are that, for most men and women, the drearily self-consistent form which human history has displayed to date is one of scarcity, struggle, and violence. Would, indeed, that the postmodernists were right, and that no such metanarrative existed. But that it does existthough this is more apparent from some locations within the present than it is from othersis no doubt one reason why Marx refuses to dignify the human story so far with the word history at all. For him, it has all been so far mere pre-history, since the conditions for that genuine history which would be free, collective self-determination have not yet fully come into being. The economic, then, is certainly foundational in the sense that it is what most men and women, most of the time, have had to concern themselves with. But economic and sexual reproduction are also foundational in another sense of the word, in that they constitute the essential material preconditions of any other narratives we might get round to telling. Indeed without these particular narratives, we would not be here to tell any tale at all. Metanarratives, that is to say, are best considered not as transcendental tales from which all else can be rationally deduced, but as the material equivalent of transcendental conditions. None of this, however, is enough in itself to justify the base/ superstructure thesis. To do that, you would have somehow to show that this massive investment of energy in material production has given denitive shape to our cultural forms. And for this, it would be nothing like enough to show in some general materialist way that social being conditions consciousnessor, as Wittgenstein more pithily puts it, that it is what we do which lies at the bottom of our language games. For the doctrine is claiming a privilege not just for what we do, but for a particular sector of what we do, namely the activity of material production. And this is much less easy to demonstrate. At least it is if you assume, as most people (including no doubt Marx and Engels) seem to have done, that the term superstructure designates a xed zone of social functions and institutions. But this is surely not the case. Consider, to begin with, why superstructures are necessary.

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It is not, surely, an ontological necessity, as the claim that social being conditions consciousness is an ontological claim, true of all human animals by virtue of their collective body or species-being. Superstructures are necessary in a Marxist view not because of the kind of bodies we have, but because the productive activity to which these bodies give rise generates certain social contradictions. If we need a superstructure, then, it is because the base is self-divided, ssured by certain antagonisms. And the function of a superstructure, by and large, is to help manage these contradictions in the interests of a ruling class. To claim that this is the function of a superstructure, however, is very different from claiming that that is the function of a school, or a television station, or a law court, or a senate. As to that, it may or may not be, depending on which particular aspect of the institution, in which particular time or place, you have in mind. A TV station behaves superstructurally when it puts out a lot of lies to whitewash the state, but not superstructurally when it informs you that a deep depression is moving in from Iceland. A school forms part of the superstructure when it has its students salute the national ag, but not when it teaches them to tie their shoelaces. Law courts act superstructurally when they protect private property, but not when they protect senior citizens. The word superstructure, in other words, reies a range of political or ideological functions to an immovable ontological region. A practice or institution behaves superstructurally when, and only when, it acts in some way to support a dominant set of social relations. It follows that an institution may be superstructural at one time but not at another. It follows also that its various functions may be in conict on this score. Much of what we do is in fact neither superstructural nor infrastructural. You can study a literary work as part of material production, which is to treat it infrastructurally; or you can scrutinize it for symptoms of collusion with a dominant power, which is to read it superstructurally; or you can simply count up the number of commas, which is to do neither. Culture is the child of a one-parent family, having labor as its sole progenitor. Like many an oedipalized infant, it prefers to repress this lowly origin and dream up for itself, as in Freuds family romance syndrome, an altogether more glamorous, imposing sort of ancestry, for which the origin of culture is simply previous culture. The point of a materialist criticism, then, is to bring to the artifact a kind of doubleoptic, reading it, in Benjamins terms, as a document of civilization, while at the same time X-raying it for those traces of barbarism which were implicated in its birth, and which linger on within it. At least one reason for trying to make some sense of the much-derided base/ superstructure image is that, in a kind of Copernican iconoclasm, it at least succeeds in powerfully dislodging culture from its idealist supremacy.

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And this is especially salutary in a postmodern age which has inated the term culture out of all proportion. Culture is almost always either too broad or too narrow a concept, either vacuously anthropological or jealously aesthetic. Which is not to say that the term is entirely useless. Perhaps the most illuminating use of the word culture was made by Lenin, when he remarked of the Bolshevik revolution that it was the relative lack of culture in Tsarist Russia (culture here in the Gramscian sense of a dense tapestry of institutions of civil society) which helped make the revolution possible, but that it was the same lack of culture (in the sense of know-how, technology, education, literacy, and the like) which had made the revolution so difcult to sustain. The dialectical deftness of that statement is deeply admirable. If the only opposite of culture is Naturea term falsely thought synonymous with the insidiously naturalized by some postmodern theorythen it simply tries to cover too much. But if one of its antithetical terms is the economic, then the term begins once more to assume some semantic cutting-edge. Of course, in the broad anthropological sense of the word, the economic is cultural too; but then, in this overcapacious meaning, what is not? To insist that the economic is cultural has force only for those who believe that its laws are dictated by Providence; and while there may have been many such believers in a more classical period of capitalism, there are precious few now. The phrase cultural materialism has an oddly oxymoronic ring about it, since culture has been classically dened as that arena whose privilege is to transcend the material. But it has a hint of contradiction in another way too, since part of what a materialist theory has to tell us is that culture is not of rst importance. Or rather, for historical materialism it is not of primary importance yet. Men and women do not now live by culture alone; but the project of socialism is to try to lay down the kinds of material conditions in which, free of scarcity, toil, and coercion, they will be able to live by culture a great deal more than they do now. So culture, not economics, is indeed what it is all about in the long run. It is just that in order to get as far as the long run we need to reverse those priorities in our political practice, while never ceasing to hold them steadily in mind. Oxford University
NOTE 1 Oliver Goldsmith, The Citizen of the World, in Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Arthur Friedman, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1966), p. 338.