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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: 25/12/2009 13:50
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Base
and
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
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
distillation perm?tate
of course
goods,
which
goods with
allowed
to shunt
Not
grasp
long after
two other
realizing
facts about
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
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
for Critical Exchange and the University of Exeter. The editors thank the principal Martha Woodmansee and Regenia for their help in Gagnier,
232
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HISTORY
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
does.
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
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
BASE
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REVISITED
233
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
one
is unlikely
contradiction
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
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.
234
NEW
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HISTORY
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,
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
is that only
autonomous. material
on
By
the back
"autonomous" which
of a
I we
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
itself lamentably
incapable.
Autonomy
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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 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
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-
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
its
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,
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
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
BASE
AND
SUPERSTRUCTURE
REVISITED
237
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,
with
is about
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
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
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
base/superstructure the and state, real or material ontological quite as claim. real
out
to
argue of the
that
law,
inhabitants relations.
It is not,
museums
are
as banks.
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
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
238
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HISTORY
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
the word
since
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
have that it is
concern foun the
another
also
constitute we
is to all
considered
transcendental
rationally
conditions.
deduced, of this,
but however,
To
as
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
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
BASE
AND
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REVISITED
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
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,
of a one-parent an oedipalized
up more for itself, glamorous,
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
point of a of double
the much-derided base/ it at iconoclasm, image is that, in a kind of Copernican in powerfully dislodging culture from its idealist supremacy.
240
And this is especially salutary in a postmodern term "culture" out of all proportion. Culture
broad or too narrow a concept, either
NEW
LITERARY
HISTORY
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
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
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
classically
But what
defined
it has
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
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),