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
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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.