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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/20057599.

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Base and Superstructure Revisited*Terry Eagleton

Imagine a visitor from Alpha Centauri who lacked the concept ofcombining 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 thingstogether. Arriving in our own culture, this visitor begins by imaginingthat he has to choose between training as a trapeze artist, eating himselfto death, climbing in the Andes, and collecting eighteenth-centurysilverware. Soon, however, he would come to realize that here on earththese versions of the good life need not be incompatible. For there exists

with marvelous convenience a kind of meta-good, a sort of magicaldistillation of all other goods, which allowed you to shunt between orperm?tate these other goods with the minimum of effort, and its nameof course is money.

Not long after realizing this, the Centaurian would no doubt quicklygrasp two other facts about terrestrial money, which together constitutesomething of a paradox: first, that it was so utterly vital a good that itengaged almost everybody's energies most of the time, and second, thatitwas held in hearty contempt. The alien would be instructed by earnestlooking bankers that there was a great deal more to life than money, andinformed by sentimental stockbrokers that the best things in life werefree. Psychoanalysts would tell him that money was a superior form ofshit, while maudlin characters propping up the bar

at his elbow wouldremind him that you cannot take itwith you and that the moon belongsto everyone. He would soon find himself puzzling over the performativecontradiction between what we said about money and what we did withit, 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 GregoryLablanc's, were in their original form delivered at the University of Exeter Conference onCulture and Economics (July 1998) co-sponsored by the Society for Critical Exchange andthe Research Committee of the University of Exeter. The editors thank the principalconveners of the conference, Martha Woodmansee and Regenia Gagnier, for their help in

gathering the essays.

New Literary History, 2000, 31: 231-240

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232 NEW LITERARY HISTORYThis discrepancy?one much more marked in hypocritical Britainthan in brashly upfront young America (no English academic, for

example, is hired)?is not, however, just hypocrisy. Indeed, few forms ofhypocrisy are just hypocrisy, just as complete charlatans are pretty rarecreatures. The discrepancy signals, rather, a genuine conundrum orcontradiction about money's ontological status?the fact that it seems atonce everything and nothing, impotent and omnipotent, meretriciousbits of metal which some men and women will nonetheless go to almostany lengths to amass. Marx's disturbingly precocious Economic andPhilosophical MSS explore these ironies, aporias, and ambiguities withpositively poetic relish, though the major theoretical treatise on thematter remains the collected works of William Shakespeare.

One can, however, make rather too much of this enigma, asShakespeare certainly does. For there is surely one phenomenon whichcan be both supremely important and utterly banal, and that is anecessary 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 penwas a more important object than King Lear, since without one the play

would never have got written, but one sees what this perverse claim istrying to say. Or, to bring the matter a little closer home, the intellectually shoddy brand of culturalism which is now sweeping the postmodernleft forgets at its peril that whatever else human beings are, they are firstof all natural, material objects; that without that objective status therecould be no talk of relationship between them, including relations ofobjectification; and that the fact that we are natural material objects is anecessary condition of anything more creative and less boring we mightget up to.The great eighteenth-century Irish philosopher Francis Hutchesonsaw very shrewdly just why it was that the desire for wealth and powercould so easily be construed by thinkers like Thomas Hobbes as theprimary motivations of human life. They are thus misconstrued, soHutcheson argues in his Thoughts on Laughter, because they representthe 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 thatwealth and power provide the material conditions essential for fulfillingmost of them. Ifmoney is the commodity of commodities, it is also thecapacity of capacities, a kind of pure, vacuous accessibility which like theaustere antechamber of a labyrinthine palace is nothing in itself butseems to lead off simultaneously in all directions, It is, if you like, thepurely notional Omega point at which all capacities converge to bealchemically transmuted into one another. We are involved here among

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BASE AND SUPERSTRUCTURE REVISITED 233other things in a dispute about the various meanings of words like"primary" or "fundamental," which can mean anything from "logicallyprior" 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 beingthe most precious thing in life, not even for most merchant bankers.What ismost precious in life for merchant bankers, as for us rather lessfortunate creatures, is happiness. It may well be that some merchantbankers have come perversely to identify the material means of happiness with the spiritual end, just as some perverse people linger lovinglyover the sensuous resonance of the shout of "Fire " in a crowded trainstation?another confusing spiritual end and material means, though inthis case a mistake one is unlikely to survive very long. But?and this is

where the performative contradiction comes in?even these morallyshabby creatures tend to be coy of actually shouting from the housetopsthe fact that making money constitutes their true happiness, and feel theneed instead to come up with a lot of nauseating nonsense about the joyof being with their families, the sunset being free of charge, and thehuman individual being beyond price.This sickly sort of talk is insincere, to be sure, but more importantly itis 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 ishard to have human love without money, in the sense that it is hard tosustain a decent human relationship if you are dying of hunger. Neither,for much the same reasons, are you likely to relish the aesthetic appealof 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 avulgar idealist platitude with which those who don't have enough of thestuff are allowed to console themselves by those who do. One thingwhich only money can buy is of course socialism, which, as the dismalexperience of the Soviet bloc has taught us (but as Marx, Lenin, andTrotsky knew in any case), is only possible on the basis of reasonablyadvanced material conditions, a flourishing civic and liberal tradition, askilled, educated working class, and a product large enough to beequitably distributed. One needs forces of production which are not so

meager that only a draconian political state could take on the laborioustask of developing them, thus destroying socialist democracy in the veryact of trying to lay down itsmaterial basis. But since this material basis iswhat 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 thetrope of irony. To go socialist rather than Stalinist you have to be

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234 NEW LITERARY HISTORYreasonably well-heeled; and if you are not, then some helpful ally mustbe instead. Socialism also involves recognizing that there is nothing inthe least wrong with pressing one's self-interested material claims, aslong as they are just ones, just as there is nothing whatsoever wrong with

power and authority. On the contrary, power and authority are splendidthings: it all depends on who is using them in what situations for whatends. 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 culturalmaterialism, not some fashionable appeal to return culture to itsmaterial conditions. Many a conservative has done precisely this. Not allhistoricizers 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 tooppose the thesis that culture must in some sense be related to itshistorical conditions. The significant conflict is not over this blandplatitude, but over the way you read the historical conditions inquestion. On the one side, so the case runs, there are those aesthetesand the formalists who rudely rip culture from its material contexts,while on the other side there are decent right-thinking people for whomculture and material context go together like Laurel and Hardy. This isjust a piece of self-righteous piety with which the cultural left likes tocheer itself up. For Marxism, the culture of modernity is indeed in asense autonomous of material conditions, and it is precisely materialconditions 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" Imean of course not "independent of any material context," which

wecan all agree is bourgeois-idealist, but something much more challenging and interesting, such as "autonomous of those subservient politicaland ideological functions in church, court, and state which culture hadtraditionally fulfilled." This can happen only when a society has the

material means to support a specialized caste of professional artists andintellectuals, and when the growth of the market is such that these

people can now become independent of the state or the governing classand become dependent for their livelihood on market forces instead.Art becomes relatively autonomous of its material conditions preciselyby being more firmly integrated into the economic, not by being cutadrift from it. To register both the delights and disasters of this historicalmoment?that is to say, to consider it dialectically, as both oppressionand emancipation?requires a thinking-on-both-sides of which postmodern theory has so far proved itself lamentably incapable. Autonomy

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BASE AND SUPERSTRUCTURE REVISITED 235frees you from being the hired hack of the rulers, allows art to becomefor the first time critique, and permits the artwork itself to show forth inits very forms an autotelism which rebukes the brutal utilitarianism of itssurroundings. There is also a considerably more downbeat side of thestory, but one rather that is less in need of being rehearsed. The point,anyway, is that anyone who thinks that culture's historical autonomy ofmaterial functions is just a bad thing, like smoking or salt, is a moralistrather than a materialist; and that this partial, relative autonomy ofmaterial conditions is itself the effect of material conditions. It is this,not some shop-soiled doctrine about the need to relate culture tocontext, that is specific about the historical materialist contribution tothe argument.To put the point rather more luridly: only when culture is thoroughlysaturated by exchange-value does itwax politically Utopian. For it is thenthat the artifact, fissured down the middle between use- and exchangevalue, tries to resist the miseries of commodification at the level of theeconomic by a defiant autotelism at the level of ideology?by thecourageous, vainglorious claim that it is its own end, ground, and raisond'?tre. This, to be sure, is to make a cultural virtue out of historicalnecessity: in a desperate last-ditch rationalization, the work must be itsown end, since it scarcely seems to have any other very salient functionany longer. But this autotelism can then become an image of how menand women themselves might be under altered material conditions.Marx himself, who is a full-blooded aesthete on such questions, holdsthat the point of socialism is to abolish the instrumental treatment ofobjects and human beings so that they may delight in the realization oftheir sensuous powers and capacities just for the sake of it (what heknows as "use-value"), rather than be forced to justify their delight inthat autotelism at the tribunal of some higher Reason, World-Spirit,History, Duty, or Utility. His anthropology is thus in one sense quiteproperly foundational: it all comes down in the end to what we share incommon 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 worsefor that. But in another sense, since our species-being has itself nofunction, or better since its function isjust to realize its various functionsfor the sake of it; since, in other words, we quite properly cannot answerquestions like: "Why should we take delight in each other's company?"?then the foundation in question is a peculiarly unfoundational one. Thepositive side of autonomous culture (we are all too familiar with themore negative facets) is that it can act as a frail prefiguring of thiscondition, notwithstanding its idealist illusions, elitist guilt, and patheticineffectuality. Where art is, there human beings shall be. Culture canserve to remind us of a time when men and women, exactly by dint of

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236 NEW LITERARY HISTORYalternative economic arrangements, might come to live rather more byculture than by economics. If the economic is central to radical theory,then it can only be under the sign of its progressive sidelining, itsincreasingly marginal utility. When Oscar Wilde argues in The Soul ofMan under Socialism that the whole point of socialism is to automate

production so that we can get on with the business of cultivating ourindividual personalities, he is arguably much closer to Marx on thisscore that is the Marxist William Morris, who wishes on the whole totransform labor rather than abolish it.

Let mequote you

apassage

which I am sure will sound familiar: "Thehuman being must go through the different stages of hunter, shepherdand husbandman, then, when property becomes valuable, and consequently gives cause for injustice; then when laws are appointed torepress injury, and secure possession, when men, by the sanction ofthese laws, become possessed of superfluity, 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."1Not in fact the nineteenth-century German revolutionary Karl Marx, butthe eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish Tory Oliver Goldsmith, whose word"superfluity" is especially intriguing. He means, no doubt, somethinglike Marx's "surplus"; but one might claim more generally that culture isitself superfluity, that which is strictly surplus to biological need. Eatingis natural, but Mars bars are cultural; dying is natural, but being buriedstanding upright with a five-pound note for the Hades ferryman in yourmouth is a question of culture. Cultural types sometimes feel restive withsuch formulations since they tend to make culture sound in classicbourgeois style like the icing on the cake, something not strictlynecessary. But the whole point of our species-being, as both Marx and

King Lear recognize, is that superfluity is built into our very nature, thatexceeding the measure belongs our normativity, that "reasoning not theneed" is one of our most vital needs. The supplement is here constitutiverather than superfluous, or, if you prefer, constitutive in its verysuperfluity. That continuous transgression or self-transcendence which

we call history, or culture, is of our nature?a case which is quitedifferent from the more crudely reductive culturalist claim that ournature just is culture. It is not the fact that our nature is culture, but thefact 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 allas interestingly non-self-identical as one like us whose nature is to becultural?one who, being prematurely born, has at the center of itsbiological nature a void which culture must quickly move in to fill out.Otherwise itwill die.

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

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BASE AND SUPERSTRUCTURE REVISITED 237in their curious prefiguring of the Marxist base/superstructure model?laws and sciences being, as Goldsmith recognizes, somehow functionalwith regard to property relations. And here Imove at last to the maintheme of my paper. Imust confess first that I belong to that dwindlingband who still believe that the base/superstructure model has something valuable to say, even if this is nowadays a proportion smaller thanthose who believe in the Virgin Birth or the Loch Ness monster, and

positively miniscule in comparison with those who believe in alienabductions. Surely the Virgin Birth is about as plausible as this static,mechanistic, reductive, economistic, hierarchical, undialectical modelof how it iswith culture and economics?

Let me first dispel if I can one or two common false assumptionsabout this now universally reviled paradigm. The first concerns its"hierarchical" nature. The model is indeed hierarchical, but it is hard tosee what is so sinister about that. It holds, in short, that some things aremore important or crucially determinant than others, as does anyhuman being who, in Edmund Burke's fine phrase, "walks abroadwithout a keeper." It may be wrong as to what it considers moredeterminant than what; but you really cannot fault a doctrine forholding that some things are more true or important than others, sincethere is no doctrine which does not. Every doctrine, for example,implicitly holds that it is itself more true than its opposite, and thisincludes claims like "there is no truth," or "nothing is more importantthan 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 thissense at least, an ontological claim. We can all happily agree that prisonsand museums are

quiteas real as banks. It is not a claim about degreesof ontological reality; nor is it simply a claim about priorities or

preconditions. The assertion that we must eat before we can think ("Eatsfirst, morals second" as Brecht observed) is only an instance of the base/superstructure model if it carries with it the claim that what we eatsomehow shapes or conditions what we think. The doctrine, in short, isabout determinations.

Now in a broad sense it would surely seem quite plausible that theeconomic lies at the root of social life. Certainly Freud, no particularfriend of Marxism, thought so himself: he says straight out that the basicmotivation for society is an economic one, and implies that without thisunpleasant form of coercion we would all just lie around the place allday in various interesting states of jouissance. There are two metanarrativeswhich have absorbed most of the energies of most men and women inthe world to date, and these are the story of material reproduction and

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238 NEW LITERARY HISTORYthe story of sexual reproduction. That both have always been terrains ofconflict ismerely one thing they have in common. Ifwe arrest history to

date at any point whatsoever and take a cross-section down it, then weknow already, even without looking, what we shall find: that the greatmajority of people at that time are enduring lives of pretty fruitless toilfor the profit of a minority, and that women form an oppressed stratumwithin this social order. And yet they talk of the death of metanarrativeThere are those for whom all metanarratives must be Panglossian talesof a triumphantly unfolding Reason, Science, World-Spirit, or Prole

tariat, forgetfulas

theyare

that, for mostmen and women, the drearilyself-consistent form which human history has displayed to date is one of

scarcity, struggle, and violence. Would, indeed, that the postmodernistswere right, and that no such metanarrative existed. But that it doesexist?though this is more apparent from some locations within thepresent than it is from others?is no doubt one reason why Marx refusesto 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 havenot 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 concernthemselves with. But economic and sexual reproduction are also foun

dational in another sense of the word, in that they constitute theessential material preconditions of any other narratives we might getround to telling. Indeed without these particular narratives, we wouldnot be here to tell any tale at all. Metanarratives, that is to say, are bestconsidered not as transcendental tales from which all else can berationally deduced, but as the material equivalent of transcendentalconditions.

None of this, however, is enough in itself to justify the base/superstructure thesis. To do that, you would have somehow to show thatthis massive investment of energy in material production has givendefinitive shape to our cultural forms. And for this, it would be nothinglike enough to show in some general materialist way that social beingconditions consciousness?or, asWittgenstein more pithily puts it, that"it iswhat we do which lies at the bottom of our language games." Forthe doctrine is claiming a privilege not just for what we do, but for aparticular 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 fixed zone of social functions and institutions. But this is surelynot the case. Consider, to begin with, why superstructures are necessary.

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BASE AND SUPERSTRUCTURE REVISITED 239It is not, surely, an ontological necessity, as the claim that social beingconditions consciousness is an ontological claim, true of all humananimals by virtue of their collective body or species-being. Superstructures are necessary in a Marxist view not because of the kind of bodieswe have, but because the productive activity to which these bodies giverise generates certain social contradictions. If we need a superstructure,then, it is because the "base" is self-divided, fissured 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 claimthat this is the function of a superstructure, however, is very differentfrom 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, dependingon which particular aspect of the institution, in which particular time orplace, you have in mind. A TV station behaves "superstrueturally" whenit puts out a lot of lies to whitewash the state, but not superstructurallywhen it informs you that a deep depression ismoving in from Iceland. Aschool forms part of the superstructure when it has its students salutethe national flag, but not when it teaches them to tie their shoelaces.Law courts act superstructurally when they protect private property, butnot when they protect senior citizens.

The word "superstructure," in other words, reifies a range of politicalor ideological functions to an immovable ontological region. A practiceor institution behaves superstructurally when, and only when, it acts insome way to support a dominant set of social relations. It follows that aninstitution may be superstructural at one time but not at another. Itfollows 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 totreat it

infrastructurally;or you can scrutinize it for symptoms ofcollusion 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 soleprogenitor. Like many an oedipalized infant, it prefers to repress thislowly origin and dream up for itself, as in Freud's "family romance"syndrome, an altogether more glamorous, imposing sort of ancestry, forwhich the origin of culture is simply previous culture. The point of amaterialist criticism, then, is to bring to the artifact a kind of doubleoptic, reading it, in Benjamin's terms, as a document of civilization,while at the same time X-raying it for those traces of barbarism whichwere implicated in its birth, and which linger on within it.At least onereason for trying to make some sense of the much-derided base/superstructure image is that, in a kind of Copernican iconoclasm, it atleast succeeds in powerfully dislodging culture from its idealist supremacy.

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240 NEW LITERARY HISTORYAnd this is especially salutary in a postmodern age which has inflated theterm "culture" out of all proportion. Culture is almost always either toobroad or too narrow a concept, either vacuously anthropological orjealously aesthetic. Which is not to say that the term is entirely useless.Perhaps the most illuminating use of the word "culture" was made byLenin, when he remarked of the Bolshevik revolution that it was therelative lack of culture in Tsarist Russia ("culture" here in the Gramsciansense of a dense tapestry of institutions of civil society) which helpedmake the revolution possible, but that itwas the same lack of culture (inthe 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 thoughtsynonymous with the insidiously "naturalized" by some postmoderntheory?then it simply tries to cover too much. But if one of its

antithetical terms is the economic, then the term begins once more toassume some semantic cutting-edge. Of course, in the broad anthropological sense of the word, the economic is cultural too; but then, in this

over-capacious meaning, what is not? To insist that the economic iscultural has force only for those who believe that its laws are dictated byProvidence; and while there may have been many such believers in a

more classical period of capitalism, there are precious few now. Thephrase "cultural materialism" has an oddly oxymoronic ring about it,since "culture" has been classically defined as that arena whose privilegeis 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 thatculture is not of first importance. Or rather, for historical materialism itis not of primary importance yet. Men and women do not now live byculture alone; but the project of socialism is to try to lay down the kindsof material conditions in which, free of scarcity, toil, and coercion, theywill be able to live by culture a great deal more than they do now. Soculture, not economics, is indeed what it is all about in the long run. Itis 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 themsteadily inmind.

Oxford UniversityNOTE

1 Oliver Goldsmith, The Citizen of the World, in Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed.Arthur Friedman, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1966), p. 338.