Base and Superstructure RevisitedAuthor(s): Terry EagletonSource: New Literary History, Vol. 31, No. 2, Economics and Culture: Production,Consumption, and Value (Spring, 2000), pp. 231-240Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20057599Accessed: 25/12/2009 13:50

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Base and Superstructure Revisited*

Terry Eagleton

Imagine 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

perm?tate 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: first, that it was so utterly vital a good that it

engaged almost everybody's energies most of the time, and second, that

it was held in hearty contempt. The alien would be instructed by earnest

looking 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 find 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 Gagnier's and Gregory Lablanc's, 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.

New Literary History, 2000, 31: 231-240

232 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

This discrepancy?one 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 money's ontological status?the 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. Marx's 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 them

selves, 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 intellectu

ally shoddy brand of culturalism which is now sweeping the postmodern left forgets at its peril that whatever else human beings are, they are first

of all natural, material objects; that without that objective status there

could be no talk of relationship between them, including relations of

objectification; 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 fulfilling 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

BASE AND SUPERSTRUCTURE REVISITED 233

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 founda

tions, 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 happi ness with the spiritual end, just as some perverse people linger lovingly over the sensuous resonance of the shout of "Fire!" in a crowded train

station?another confusing spiritual end and material means, though in

this case a mistake one is unlikely to survive very long. But?and this is

where the performative contradiction comes in?even 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 can't buy, while in one sense

eminently true, is in another sense no more than a

vulgar idealist platitude with which those who don't 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 flourishing 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, Marx's 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

234 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

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 one's 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 selflessness 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-wingers?in 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 significant conflict 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

challeng

ing and interesting, such as "autonomous of those subservient political

and ideological functions in church, court, and state which culture had

traditionally fulfilled." 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 firmly integrated into the economic, not by being cut

adrift from it. To register both the delights and disasters of this historical

moment?that is to say, to consider it dialectically, as both oppression and emancipation?requires

a thinking-on-both-sides

of which post

modern theory has so far proved itself lamentably incapable. Autonomy

BASE AND SUPERSTRUCTURE REVISITED 235

frees you from being the hired hack of the rulers, allows art to become

for the first 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 culture's 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 specific 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, fissured down the middle between use- and exchange

value, tries to resist the miseries of commodification at the level of the

economic by a defiant autotelism at the level of ideology?by the

courageous, vainglorious claim that it is its own end, ground, and raison

d'?tre. 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 other's 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 prefiguring 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

236 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

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 conse

quently 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 superfluity, when luxury is thus intro

duced 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

"superfluity" is especially intriguing. He means, no doubt, something like Marx's "surplus"; but one might claim more generally that culture is

itself superfluity, 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 five-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 superfluity 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 superfluous, or, if you prefer, constitutive in its very

superfluity. That continuous transgression or self-transcendence which

we call history, or culture, is of our nature?a 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 achieve

ments 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

cultural?one who, being prematurely born, has at the center of its

biological nature a void which culture must quickly move in to fill out.

Otherwise it will die.

The chief interest of Goldsmith's words for my purpose, though, lies

BASE AND SUPERSTRUCTURE REVISITED 237

in their curious prefiguring 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 first that I belong to that dwindling band who still believe that the base/superstructure model has some

thing 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 first dispel if I can one or two common false assumptions about this now universally reviled paradigm. The first 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 Burke's fine 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 super structure 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

first, 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

238 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

the story of sexual reproduction. That both have always been terrains of

conflict 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 find: that the great

majority of people at that time are enduring lives of pretty fruitless toil

for the profit 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 Prole

tariat, 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

exist?though this is more apparent from some locations within the

present than it is from others?is 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 foun

dational 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 definitive 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 consciousness?or, 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 produc tion. 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" desig nates a fixed zone of social functions and institutions. But this is surely not the case. Consider, to

begin with, why superstructures are necessary.

BASE AND SUPERSTRUCTURE REVISITED 239

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. Superstruc tures 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, fissured by certain antago nisms. 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 "superstrueturally" 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 flag, 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, reifies 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 conflict 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 Freud's "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 double

optic, reading it, in Benjamin's 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.

240 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

And this is especially salutary in a postmodern age which has inflated 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 difficult to sustain. The dialectical deftness of that statement is deeply admirable.

If the only opposite of culture is Nature?a term falsely thought synonymous with the insidiously "naturalized" by some postmodern theory?then 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 anthropo

logical sense of the word, the economic is cultural too; but then, in this

over-capacious 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 defined 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 first 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.