Base and Superstructure Revisited Author(s): Terry Eagleton Source: New Literary History, Vol. 31, No.

2, Economics and Culture: Production, Consumption, and Value (Spring, 2000), pp. 231-240 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20057599 . Accessed: 24/09/2013 15:18
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Base

and

Superstructure Terry Eagleton

Revisited*

Imagine

from Alpha Centauri who lacked the concept of sorts of goods. In Alpha Centaurian different society, combining some build Gothic some people in for scuba follies in go diving,
gardens, and others have various bizarre shapes cut, topiary-wise,

a visitor

their

in their voluminous together.

that he

Arriving
has to choose

thinks of doing all of these things hair, but nobody in our own culture, this visitor begins by imagining
between training as a trapeze artist, eating himself

to death,
silverware.

climbing
Soon,

in the Andes,
he would

and
come

collecting
to realize

eighteenth-century
that here on earth

however,

these versions
with marvelous

of the good
convenience

life need
a kind

not be incompatible.
of meta-good, a

For there exists

sort of magical

distillation perm?tate
of course

of all other these other

is money.

goods,

which

goods with

you the minimum of effort, would

which

allowed

to shunt

or between and its name

Not
grasp

long after
two other

realizing
facts about

this, the Centaurian

terrestrial money,

no doubt
together

quickly that it
that

constitute

something
engaged

of a paradox:
almost everybody's

first,

that it was
most

so utterly
of the time,

vital a good
and second,

energies

itwas held
looking

in hearty
that

contempt.
there was

The
a great

alien would
deal more

be instructed
to life than

by earnest
money, and

bankers

stockbrokers that the best things in life were by sentimental would free. Psychoanalysts tell him that money was a superior form of characters propping shit, while maudlin up the bar at his elbow would remind him that you cannot take itwith you and that the moon belongs informed
to everyone. He would soon find himself puzzling over the performative

contradiction
it, or, moral if you

between
prefer, over

what we said about money

a certain discrepancy between

and what we did with

material base and

superstructure.

with the exception *This the others, of Regenia essay and were at the University in their original form delivered Lablanc's, Culture and Economics (July 1998) co-sponsored by the Society the Research conveners gathering Committee of of the conference, the essays.

Gagnier's of Exeter

and Gregory on Conference

for Critical Exchange and the University of Exeter. The editors thank the principal Martha Woodmansee and Regenia for their help in Gagnier,

New Literary History, 2000, 31: 231-240

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This discrepancy?one much more marked in hypocritical Britain than in brashly upfront America for academic, (no English young is few of forms not, however, just hypocrisy. hired)?is Indeed, example, are as are rare charlatans hypocrisy just hypocrisy, just pretty complete
creatures. contradiction once everything The discrepancy about money's and nothing, signals, ontological impotent rather, genuine status?the fact omnipotent, a conundrum that it seems or at

and

meretricious

which some men and women will nonetheless go to almost to amass. Marx's and Economic any lengths precocious disturbingly MSS these and with ironies, explore aporias, Philosophical ambiguities the major theoretical treatise on the relish, though poetic positively bits of metal
matter One remains can, the however, collected make works rather of William too much Shakespeare. of this enigma, as

Shakespeare certainly can be both supremely

necessary selves, but condition. they give

does.

For there important

enough

is surely one phenomenon which and utterly banal, and that is a

may be poor things in them to momentous consequences,

Necessary birth often

conditions

and their status is thus hard to measure. It would be silly to say that a pen was a more than since without one the play Lear, important object King
would trying never to have say. Or, but got written, to the matter bring one a sees little what closer this home, perverse the claim intellectu is

is now sweeping the postmodern ally shoddy brand of culturalism which left forgets at its peril that whatever else human beings are, they are first status there of all natural, material that objective that without objects; could be no talk of relationship between relations of them, including we are and that fact natural material the that objectification; objects is a
necessary get up to. condition of anything more creative and less boring we might

The great eighteenth-century Irish philosopher Francis Hutcheson saw very shrewdly just why it was that the desire for wealth and power as the like Thomas Hobbes could so easily be construed by thinkers
primary motivations of human life. They are thus misconstrued, so

Hutcheson
the universal they because

argues
sine are in

in his Thoughts
qua non of themselves

on Laughter,
most other

because
human

they represent
aspirations, human appetites. not

the most

fundamental

People wealth most

have all kinds of desires beyond wealth and power; conditions essential the material and power provide of them.

is the commodity of commodities, If money vacuous a like the kind of of pure, accessibility which capacity capacities, is in but austere antechamber itself of a labyrinthine palace nothing seems to lead off simultaneously It is, if you like, the in all directions, to be all capacities converge Omega point at which purely notional alchemically transmuted into one another. We are involved here among

it is just that for fulfilling it is also the

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a dispute of words about the various meanings like things in can or mean which from "fundamental," anything "logically "primary" to "of absolute to "essentially of value" or pre-conditional prior" is logically prior may be worthless in itself. "unspeakably precious." What a fallen in house its because have love with founda they buys Nobody other them either. tions, but nobody buys a house without is not, need one say, fundamental in the sense of being The economic even most merchant the most precious for bankers. thing in life, not in life for merchant ismost precious What bankers, as for us rather less
fortunate creatures, is happiness. It may well be that some merchant

to identify the material means of happi bankers have come perversely ness with the spiritual end, just as some perverse people linger lovingly
over the sensuous resonance confusing of the shout end of and "Fire!" material in a crowded means, though train in station?another spiritual

this case a mistake

where the performative

one

is unlikely
contradiction

to survive very long. But?and

comes in?even these

this is
morally

tend to be coy of actually shouting from the housetops shabby creatures the fact that making money constitutes their true happiness, and feel the nonsense need instead to come up with a lot of nauseating about the joy the sunset being free of charge, and the of being with their families, human This
is false. means

individual being beyond price. to be sure, but more sickly sort of talk is insincere,
Love, free of sunsets, charge truly in the wonderful sense of children, being and the autonomous

importantly
rest are by no It of money.

it
is

hard

to have human love without money, in the sense that it is hard to if you are dying of hunger. Neither, sustain a decent human relationship
the sunset. in one same The sense reasons, notion eminently are that you there true, the thing is in another likely are to relish which appeal can't money buy, no more a sense than the aesthetic

for much of while

vulgar idealist platitude with which those who don't have enough of the to console stuff are allowed themselves by those who do. One thing can buy is of course socialism, which, as the dismal which only money of the Soviet bloc has taught us (but as Marx, Lenin, and experience on the basis of reasonably in any case), is only possible knew Trotsky a flourishing advanced material civic and liberal tradition, a conditions, to be class, and a product skilled, educated working large enough are so distributed. One needs of forces not which equitably production a on state that draconian could take the laborious meager only political task of developing in the very socialist democracy them, thus destroying act of trying to lay down itsmaterial 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 To of socialist rather than Stalinist go trope you have to be irony.

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and if you are not, then some helpful ally must reasonably well-heeled; be instead. Socialism also involves recognizing in that there is nothing as the least wrong with pressing one's self-interested material claims, wrong with long as they are just ones, just as there is nothing whatsoever power and authority. On the contrary, power and authority are splendid on who is using them in what situations for what things: it all depends can afford to be suspicious ends. Only of liberals or postmodernists It here which is is selflessness power. ideological. the then, will culture be able to transcend Only by economics, economic.
materialism,

I take it that this paradox

not some fashionable

is the governing
appeal to return

thesis of cultural
culture to its

material

has done precisely this. Not conditions. Many a conservative some are most fact the of historicizers distinguished left-wingers?in
them, hardly from Burke to Oakeshott, apart from have card-carrying been anyone quite formalists the reverse. would Nowadays, bother

all of
to

to its be related the thesis that culture oppose not over The conflict is this bland historical conditions. significant in the way you read the historical but over conditions platitude,
question. and the On the one who side, so the rip case culture runs, there from are those aesthetes contexts, formalists rudely its material

must

in some

sense

while

side there are decent right-thinking people for whom context go together like Laurel and Hardy. This is culture and material the cultural left likes to piety with which just a piece of self-righteous in a is indeed the culture of modernity cheer itself up. For Marxism, on the other
sense autonomous of material conditions, and it is precisely material

it to be so. conditions which permit What this means, roughly speaking,

material mean can ing all and of surplus course is can not culture "independent become of but "autonomous any

is that only
autonomous. material

on
By

the back
"autonomous" which

of a
I we

context," much more

agree

interesting,

bourgeois-idealist, as such

something of those

challeng political

subservient

and

in church, court, and state which culture had functions ideological a society has the fulfilled." This can happen only when traditionally
means to support a specialized caste of professional artists and

material

and when intellectuals, people can now become and become dependent of its material conditions Art becomes precisely relatively autonomous not by being cut more the into economic, firmly integrated by being adrift from it. To register both the delights and disasters of this historical as both oppression it dialectically, is to say, to consider moment?that
and emancipation?requires a thinking-on-both-sides of which post

is such that these the growth of the market or state class of the the governing independent on market forces instead. for their livelihood

modern

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 first time critique, and permits the artwork itself to show forth in its very forms an autotelism which rebukes the brutal utilitarianism of its a more is There also side of the downbeat considerably surroundings. one in that is less need of but rather The rehearsed. story, being point, anyway, material
rather

is that anyone who thinks that culture's historical of autonomy is just a bad thing, like smoking or salt, is a moralist functions
than a materialist; and that this partial, relative autonomy of

material
not some

conditions
shop-soiled

is itself the effect

doctrine about

of material
the need

conditions.
to relate

It is this,
culture to

context,
the

that is specific

about

the historical

materialist

contribution

to

argument.

To put the point rather more luridly: only when culture saturated by exchange-value does itwax politically Utopian.
that the artifact, fissured down the middle between use-

is thoroughly For it is then

and exchange

at the level of the of commodification value, tries to resist the miseries at the level of ideology?by economic autotelism the by a defiant
courageous, d'?tre. This, vainglorious to be sure, claim is that it is its own a cultural end, virtue to make ground, out and of raison historical

necessity:
own any and end, longer. women

in a desperate
since But it

last-ditch
can be

rationalization,
to have then under any other an become altered

the work must be

very salient of function how men

its

seems scarcely this autotelism might

themselves

image material

conditions.

on such questions, Marx himself, who is a full-blooded aesthete holds that the point of socialism is to abolish the instrumental treatment of in the realization of objects and human beings so that they may delight their sensuous for the sake of it (what he powers and capacities just knows as "use-value"), rather than be forced to justify their delight in at the tribunal of some higher Reason, that autotelism World-Spirit, is thus in one sense quite History, Duty, or Utility. His anthropology it all comes down in the end to what we share in properly foundational:
common as he for terms that. But by virtue of the structure of our bodies, doctrine, our to our and it. It is a in thoroughly another sense, essentialist since "species-being," none the worse has itself no

species-being

function,
for the

or better
sake of

since

its function
in other words,

is just to realize
we

its various
cannot

functions
answer

quite properly " like: Why should we take delight in each other's company?"? questions then the foundation in question is a peculiarly unfoundational one. The are autonomous of too side culture all familiar with the (we positive more can as a act is it that frail of this facets) negative prefiguring its idealist elitist and condition, illusions, notwithstanding guilt, pathetic art is, there human beings can shall be. Culture ineffectuality. Where serve to remind us of a time when men and women, of dint exactly by

it; since,

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236
alternative economic arrangements, might come

NEW

LITERARY

HISTORY

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 its sidelining, in The Soul of Oscar Wilde argues increasingly marginal utility. When Man under Socialism that the whole point of socialism is to automate so that we can get on with the business our of cultivating production individual personalities, he is arguably much closer to Marx on this score that is the Marxist William to Morris, who wishes on the whole 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
repress these

gives
laws,

cause
and

for
secure possessed

injustice;

then when
when men, when

laws are
by luxury the

appointed
sanction is thus intro

to
of

injury, become

possession, of superfluity,

duced
become Not

and demands
necessary in fact the and

its continual
useful; the

supply,
state German

then

it is that
subsist Karl

the sciences
them."1 Marx, but

cannot

without

nineteenth-century

revolutionary

the eighteenth-century whose word Tory Oliver Goldsmith, Anglo-Irish no is He means, doubt, "superfluity" especially intriguing. 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 note for the Hades ferryman in your standing upright with a five-pound mouth is a question of culture. Cultural sometimes feel restive with types
such formulations since they tend to make culture sound in classic

bourgeois
necessary.

style
But the

like
whole

the

icing

on

the

cake,

something

not

strictly

as both of our Marx and point species-being, Lear is that is built into our that nature, very recognize, King superfluity our the measure not the that normativity, exceeding belongs "reasoning need" is one of our most vital needs. The is here constitutive supplement rather superfluity. we call than superfluous, That continuous or culture, or, if you prefer, or nature?a constitutive self-transcendence case which is in its very

history,

transgression our is of

which quite

different
nature fact

from

the more

crudely

reductive
fact which that our leads

culturalist
nature at once

claim
is culture, to our

that our
but achieve the

the is culture. It is not just is of our that culture nature,

ments and our self-undoings. A being whose nature is culture is not at all as interestingly as one like us whose nature is to be non-self-identical at center has of its cultural?one the who, being prematurely born, a move must to out. nature in fill which culture void biological quickly Otherwise The chief it will die. interest of Goldsmith's words for my purpose, though, lies

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in their curious prefiguring of the Marxist base/superstructure model? laws and sciences being, as Goldsmith somehow functional recognizes, with regard to property relations. And here I move at last to the main theme of my paper. Imust confess first that I belong to that dwindling band who still believe that the base/superstructure model has some to say, even if this is nowadays a smaller than thing valuable proportion those who believe in the Virgin Birth or the Loch Ness monster, and positively miniscule abductions. Surely
mechanistic, reductive,

in comparison the Virgin Birth

economistic,

with

is about

those who believe in alien as this static, as plausible

undialectical model

hierarchical,

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 nature. The model "hierarchical" 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
without

being
a

who,

in Edmund
It may be

Burke's
wrong as

fine
to

phrase,
what it

"walks abroad
considers more

keeper." some doctrine

determinant
holding there that is no

than what;

but

you
more does

really
true not. or

cannot
important

fault

a doctrine
others, for

for
since

are things which

than

Every

doctrine,

example,

implicitly
includes than

holds
claims

that
like else."

it is itself more
"there is no truth,"

true
or

than
"nothing is not

its opposite,
is more

and
important

this

anything the

Secondly, culture, structure sense and at

ideology, are less least, an

base/superstructure the and state, real or material ontological quite as claim. real

model various than We other property can all It

out

to

argue of the

that

law,

inhabitants relations.

super in this prisons degrees

It is not,

museums

are

as banks.

that agree happily a claim is not about

of

ontological

reality;
The second" model or

nor

is it simply
that we observed) carries what with we must

a claim
eat before an claim The is only it the think.

about
we instance that doctrine, can

priorities
think of what in the base/ we short,

or
("Eats

preconditions. first, morals superstructure somehow about

assertion as Brecht if it

eat is

shapes determinations.

conditions

in a broad sense it would that the surely seem quite plausible 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 this one, and implies that without form of coercion we would all just lie around the place all unpleasant Now economic
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 and reproduction

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238

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the story of sexual reproduction. That both have always been terrains of ismerely one thing they have in common. conflict If we arrest history to
date at any point whatsoever and take a cross-section down it, then we

already, even without looking, what we shall find: that the great are at of that time lives of pretty fruitless toil majority people enduring for the profit of a minority, and that women stratum form an oppressed within this social order. And yet they talk of the death of metanarrative! know
There are those for whom all metanarratives must be Panglossian tales

of a triumphantly
tariat, forgetful as

unfolding
they are

Reason,
that, for most

Science,
men

World-Spirit,
and women, the

or Prole
drearily

to date is one of form which human history has displayed and the violence. that Would, indeed, scarcity, struggle, postmodernists were right, and that no such metanarrative existed. But that it does this is more from some locations within the apparent exist?though self-consistent
present than it is from others?is no doubt one reason why Marx refuses

to dignify
it has all

the human
been so

story so far with

"pre-history,"

the word
since

"history" at all. For him,

the conditions for that

far mere

genuine history which would be free, collective not yet fully come into being. The economic, then, is certainly foundational
what most men with. in and But women, economic sense of most and the of of the time, themselves dational essential round not be to here sexual word, any

self-determination in the sense

have had are to

have that it is
concern foun the

another

reproduction in that other

also

material telling. to not

preconditions Indeed without tell as any tale at

they narratives narratives, that which

constitute we

these particular all. Metanarratives, tales from

get might we would say, else are can best be

is to all

considered

transcendental

rationally
conditions.

deduced, of this,

but however,
To

as

the material is enough

that, you would

equivalent in itself
have

of

transcendental the
to show

None
superstructure

to justify
somehow

base/
that

thesis.

do

this massive in material of energy has given investment production our to definitive forms. And for it would be cultural this, nothing shape to show in some general materialist like enough way that social being as Wittgenstein more pithily puts it, that conditions consciousness?or, our at "it is what we do which of lies the bottom language games." For a privilege not just for what we do, but for a is claiming the doctrine sector of what we do, namely the activity of material produc particular
tion. And this is much less easy to demonstrate.

At
and

least it is if you assume,

Engels) seem to have

as most
done, that

people
the

(including
term

no doubt Marx
desig

"superstructure"

nates
not

a fixed
the case.

zone of social
Consider, to

functions
with,

and
why

institutions.
superstructures

But

this is surely
are necessary.

begin

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239

as the claim that social being surely, an ontological necessity, is an ontological consciousness claim, true of all human or animals by virtue of their collective body Superstruc species-being. in a Marxist view not because of the kind of bodies tures are necessary we have, but because these bodies give the productive activity to which It is not, conditions
rise generates certain social contradictions. If we need a superstructure,

the "base" is self-divided, fissured by certain antago then, it is because of a superstructure, the function nisms. And by and large, is to help a ruling class. To claim in interests of the contradictions these manage of a superstructure, is very different that this is the function however, that that is the function of a school, or a television station, from claiming
or a law court, or a senate. As to that, it may or may not be, depending

in which particular time or particular aspect of the institution, A behaves in mind. TV station when have "superstrueturally" place, you it puts out a lot of lies to whitewash the state, but not superstructurally ismoving in from Iceland. A when it informs you that a deep depression when it has its students salute school forms part of the superstructure it teaches them to tie their shoelaces. the national flag, but not when on which
Law not courts when The word act they superstructurally senior protect when citizens. in other words, reifies a range of political they protect private property, but

"superstructure,"

or ideological or institution
some way to institution

functions behaves

to an immovable superstructurally
set of at

ontological region. A practice and it acts in when, only when,

social relations. time but It follows not at that an It another.

support be may

a dominant superstructural

one

follows also that its various functions may be in conflict on this score. nor infrastructural. Much of what we do is in fact neither superstructural You can study a literary work as part of material is to which production,
treat it infrastructurally; or you can scrutinize it for symptoms of

collusion
you can

with
simply

a dominant
count up

power, which
the number of

is to read it superstructurally;
commas, which is to do neither.

or

Culture progenitor.
lowly origin syndrome,

is the child Like many

and an dream altogether

of a one-parent an oedipalized
up more for itself, glamorous,

labor as its sole family, having to repress this it infant, prefers

as in Freud's imposing romance" "family sort of for ancestry,

is simply previous the origin of culture to bring to the is materialist criticism, then, in terms, as a it, Benjamin's optic, reading it for those while at the same time X-raying were implicated in its birth, and which linger reason some sense of for trying to make which superstructure least succeeds

artifact

culture. The a kind

point of a of double

of civilization, document traces of barbarism which on within it. At least one

the much-derided base/ it at iconoclasm, image is that, in a kind of Copernican in powerfully dislodging culture from its idealist supremacy.

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240
And this is especially salutary in a postmodern term "culture" out of all proportion. Culture
broad or too narrow a concept, either

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HISTORY

age which has inflated is almost always either

anthropological

the too
or

vacuously

jealously

Perhaps illuminating of Lenin, when he remarked relative lack of culture in Tsarist Russia ("culture" here in the Gramscian sense of a dense of civil society) which helped tapestry of institutions make the revolution possible, but that itwas the same lack of culture (in the sense of know-how, education, technology, literacy, and the like) so difficult which had made to sustain. The dialectical the revolution deftness of that statement is deeply admirable. If the only opposite of culture term falsely thought is Nature?a with "naturalized" the insidiously synonymous by some postmodern cover to too it tries much. if one of its But theory?then simply
antithetical assume some terms is the economic, cutting-edge. then Of the course, term in semantic once begins the broad more anthropo to

aesthetic. the most

Which

is not

to say that the term is entirely useless. use of the word "culture" was made by the Bolshevik revolution that it was the

logical cultural

sense of the word,

meaning,

the economic
what is not?

is cultural
To insist

too; but
that the

then,
economic

in this
is

over-capacious

has force only for those who believe that its laws are dictated by and while such believers in a there may have been many Providence;
more phrase classical "cultural of period materialism" capitalism, has there an oddly a hint are precious few ring now. about The it, oxymoronic

since
is to way culture

"culture" has been

transcend too, since is not of the material. part first of

classically
But what

defined
it has

as that arena whose

of contradiction to tell has theory for historical

privilege
in another us is that it

a materialist Or rather,

importance.

materialism

is not of primary do not now live by yet. Men and women importance 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 is indeed what it is all about in the long run. It culture, not economics,
is just that in order to get as far as the long run we need to reverse those

in our political priorities steadily in mind.

practice,

while

never

ceasing

to hold

them

Oxford NOTE
1 Oliver Goldsmith, vol. The Citizen in Collected Works of the World, p. 338.

University

of Oliver

Goldsmith,

ed.

Arthur

Friedman,

2 (Oxford,

1966),

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