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Marxism Literature (changes)

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Base and Superstructure

• People have thought that “determining base and the determined superstructure” is the key to Marxist “cultural analysis”
• It comes from 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
  • where he says relations of production “constitutes…the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political, and intellectual life process in general.”
  • Williams: this is actually more about legality than it is about culture. See how superstructure is defined as “legal and political”
    • not the same thing as “ideology” which he lists as “legal, political, religious, aesthetic, or philosophic”
    • and then we recognize this list as the “forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out” (that’s Marx again)
• Second most important use is in Brumaire, where “superstructure” refers to “feelings, illusions, habits of thought, and conceptions of life” which are produced by the class “out of the material foundation and out of the corresponding social conditions” and which the single person might “fancy” are the “true reasons for and premises of his conduct”
  • In this case means ideology, “the way it sees itself in the world” 76
• So we have three superstructures: legal/political expressing the base, a class’s form of consciousness and activities that let men consciously battle out economic conflict
  • All this really means is an emergent structure that must be understood with some regard to economics
• As for “base,” Marx uses a whole host of terms to refer to it, although the word superstructure has occurred multiple times
• So, “Marxism” projected and reified the terms; instead of original use as “relational” we now have tacked on to Marx a sense of being layered
  • Remember, Marx’s original critique “mainly directed against the separation of ‘areas’ of thought and activity (as in the separation of consciousness from material production) and against the related evacuation of specific content—real human activities—by the imposition of abstract categories.” 78
    • In other words, Marx ATTACKED this kind of abstraction; he was all for recognizing “complexity of real relations”
• 1857: Marx notes “As regards at, it is well known that some of its peaks by no means correspond to the general development of society; nor do they therefore to the material substructure, the skeleton as it were or its organization.”
• Engels: “the interconnection between conceptions and their material conditions of existence becomes more and more complicated, more and more obscured by immediate links. But the interconnection exists” 79
• Engels 1890: “according to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only dtermining one, he transforms the proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase.” 80
  • And then says that elements like legal systems, politics, religion, philosophy “also exercise their influence” on history “and in many cases preponderate in determining their form.” 80
  • Engels: accidents: “endless hosts of accidents (that is, of things and events whose inner interconnection is so remote or so impossible of proof that we can regard it as non-existent, as negligible)”
• Williams castigates Plekhanov’s “classic summary” of the sequence of five steps of base/superstructure as being silly b/c the “sequential” element is wrong b/c they are truly “indissoluble” b/c “these are not separate ‘areas’ or ‘elements’ but the whole, specific activities and products of real men”
  • He is committing the common habit of idealism in which “analytic categories…almost unnoticed, become substantive descriptions, which then take habitual priority over the whole social process to which, as analytic categories, they are attempting to speak.” 80-1
    • base and superstructure are NOT “separable concrete entities” b/c then you have “lost sight of the processes—not abstract relations but constitutive processes” that hist mat really cares about 81
    • so don’t bother about trying to assert the complexity or autonomy of superstructure
• Ultimately, Marx was trying to use a metaphor that would reflect relations and processes, and you are stupid to assume that the terms of the metaphor are supposed to be concrete entities (and then of course you complain of having the problem of having to “connect” the two separate parts)
• Marx also said you must think of material production “in its determined historical form and not as a general category”
  • You can discover and describe the details and features of a particular mode of production, but NEVER do so for mode of production in abstract b/c “never…either uniform nor static” 82
    • for example the “base” is “itself a dynamic and internally contradictory process” from a range of “association” to “antagonism”...so there’s no fixed base form which a superstructural entity would arise…!
• We don’t need to study base/superstructure, but “specific and indissoluble real processes”
• Unfortunately language “the physical fixity of the terms” prevents people from realizing this
• Also Marx saw “in actual development there are deep contradictions in the relationships of production and in the consequent social relationships” so these can have “dynamic variability”

Determination

• The most difficult problem Marxists face: we are charged w/being reductive b/c supposedly we say that all cultural forms reduced to expression of economics: Caricature
• overdetermination: determination by multiple factors
• So, where does the myth start? Marx’s 1859 intro already quoted. The English translated says “determine” a lot, but it doesn’t exactly match up w/the German. To understand it, let’s look at how “determine” is complex in English
• Determine 1: “setting boundaries”
  • This is a good place to start
  • And he calls it “negative determination” (ie doesn’t actively block, just sets the terms)
• Determine 2: external determination (something outside determines it; w/out reference to will of the folks involved)
• Determine 3: inherent determination (the process itself determines an outcome; we can control it if we know the laws) (the “scientific” determination)
  • this initially seems like the Marxist determination: you enter into a society, and it has rules that are independent of your will
• The Wrong Interp
  • Comes from, for example, German Ideology: “The mass of productive forces accessible to men determines the conditions of society”
  • Where it leads you astray is when you forget that “accessible to” and the earlier example: “enter into”
• Right Interp (Point no. 1)
  • Engels: “We make history ourselves, but, in the first place, under very definite assumptions and conditions”
    • We Have Agency
    • We Are Back to Determination Being Defined As Setting Limits
• Point no. 2: “the key question is the degree to which ‘objective’ conditions are seen to be external”
  • if you think it’s external, you think that men can’t control it: that misconception is called “economism”
    • people have fallen under the error of abstract determinism “is the historical experience of large-scale capitalist economy” b/c it makes people think they can’t control anything but instead material conditions ruled by some kind of “law” that you can’t change
    • Williams points out that this has “bitter irony” b/c his doctrine meant to show that people make their own history. Bitter irony b/c he had a revolutionary doctrine, but it was taken as something that opined “passivity and reification”
    • the idea of abstract determinism is an interpretation caused by your experience in late capitalism
  • truly, it is historical objectivity: you INHERIT these conditions, that is why he says folks “enter into them….independent of their will” ... not b/c human agents don’t have power
• “New social relations, and the new kinds of activity that are possible through them, may be imagined but cannot be achieved unless the determining limits of a particular mode of production are surpassed in practice, by actual social change” 86
  • Historical example: Romantic concepts of liberty leading to real revolution
• Determine 4: “the exertion of pressure,” “an act of will and purpose” 87
  • this is “positive determination”
  • “social acts”
  • this kind of determination does occur in practice, as well as the limits definition
  • “society is never then only the ‘dead husk’ which limits social and individual fulfillment” but is “constitutive process with very powerful pressures”
• Ultimately, determination is…
  • complex process of “limits and pressures” that is “the whole social process itself and nowhere else: not in an abstracted ‘mode of production’ nor in an abstracted ‘psychology’.”
  • don’t think about “isolation of autonomous categories, which are seen as controlling or can be used as prediction” that is “mystification”
• More on overdetermination:
  • multiple forces not isolated ones
  • and they are structured
  • Freud: “multiple causation of a symptom”
  • but don’t let it get you off topic: “the practical process of development of men”
• “Any categorical objectification…offers to subsume…all lived, practical, and unevenly formed and formative experience” that’s why it’s silly 88-9

From Reflection to Mediation

• Silly base-superstructure thinking often conceived of as “reflection”
  • A) consciousness seen as only echo of ideology of material world
  • B) consciousness once you’ve trained it: “scientific truth”
    • what do these views do to art? well you have to make it reflect real reality, a conception Williams calls positivist (must know an objective reality and then reflect it ‘correctly’); leads to Marxist theories of realism and naturalism
• Yet says Williams truly understanding the “reflecting” the so-called base is knowing base as a process, and that doesn’t really seem like a boring ‘mirroring,’ does it?
• “mechanical materialim” = life is objects, not activity; “historical materialism” = “material life process as human activity”
  • lead to two diff types of art: mechanical materialism = naturalism; hisorical materialism = realism (this is him mouthing Lukacs)
  • if art “reflects” the hist mat process, it’s already more sophisticated than word ‘reflection’ would make it seem and already better than mechanical materialism (and indeed many of these theorists admit that in the ‘reflection’ process art must represent things in its own special way): this is the popular Marxist theory for awhile
    • but STILL Williams says it’s limited
      • why? b/c you assume you have a picture of reality already given and “otherwise known” (that is outside of art)
      • it is also bad b/c then it leads to attacks (your realism is false!)
• Overall, tho’ people have contested this idea on many grounds, for Williams it’s that this theory “is not materialist enough” 97
  • What you need: “the actual work on material—in a final sense, the material social process—which is the making of any art work.”
    • Jameson’s Political Unconscious agrees and extends this
    • to call this reflection is ALIENATING and PROJECTING
  • art work is both material and imaginative, not passive reflection
• A new theory arose to take up this idea: mediation
  • Mediation intended to show art as active process
    • a definition: idealist philosophy’s mediation is reconciliation of two opposites w/in totality
    • a more neutral definition: “interaction between separate forces” that is an indirect connection between two things
• Using this last definition, you see that w/art the material world becomes something diff via mediation
  • then some Marxist critics said you can reveal society that’s been “distorted” in art (v connex to psychoanalytic method): this is negative mediation
  • Positive sense of mediation comes from Frankfurt School: active relations between 2 kinds of being are always mediated, but not b/c something is external to it but through the “properties” of the things related
    • Adorno, “Mediation is in the object itself, not something between the object and that to which it was brought”
    • it’s not a disguise or interpretation then: “positive process in social reality”
• So what’s wrong w/this sense of positive mediation? It’s hard not to think of the social as somehow pre-existing, as the two things as somehow pre-existing
  • still has “Basic dualism” 99, so it’s truly just a more sophisticated reflection
    • you still take as separate “reality” and “speaking about reality”
• Truth is, “language and signification as indissoluble elements of the material process itself”
  • Tho’ mediation isn’t a perfect term (esp b/c it makes you think of an intermediary), mediation is much better than reflection after all, esp when you think of it as “inherent constitutive consciousness” b/c at least you’re not seeing it reflect back to an already constituted category of reality
• What’s really going on: relationship between society and culture is “positive and substantial, as a necessary process in the making of meanings and values, in the necessary form of the general social process of signification and communication” 100

Dominant, Residual, Emergent

• To retain sense of history as movement, when you do “epochal” thinking (grasping a social process as a unique totality, synchronic), you have to see the forces both “within and beyond a specific and effective dominance” 121
  • and how the “relate to the whole cultural process” of change rather than just the abstraction formation (feudal, bourgeois, etc)
  • not to see things as “marginal” or “secondary” tendencies either!
  • for in a culture there’s not just “stages” or “variations” But also real movement: “internal dynamic relations”
  • so there’s residual and emergent, not just dominant, and they say things about the dominant too 122
• Residual
  • doesn’t mean ‘archaic’ (he uses ‘archaic’ to refer to practices that are consciously seen as in the past, might be revived specially)
    • all cultures have parts of the past in them, but “archaic” is stuff not truly lived now but experience specifically as past (revived), while “residual” is still lived (and can have any number of relations to dominant)
  • residual was formed in the past but is still active in present; allowing “experiences, meanings, and values” to be experience even tho’ can’t be “Expressed or substantially verified” in terms of dominant
  • can have “alternative or oppositional” character
    • which is distinguished from the parts of the past that HAVE been wholly incorporated into the dominant (or even the parts of this residual, some can be oppositional and others a dupe for the man)
      • for example: organized religion, mostly residual, but has a few oppositional qualities (brotherhood, unpaid work), yet still has some qualities that support dominant culture (morality, afterlife being where you get rewarded for your work down here)
      • for example, rural community, mostly residual, but does often work as an “idealization or escape…leisure function of the dominant order itself”
  • residual at a distance from, but still a part of it or “some version of it” will usually be incorporated into dominant culture 123: “reinterpretation, dilution, project, and discriminating inclusion and exclusion”
    • think of history of lit canon
  • 124 “human experience, aspiration, and achievement which the dominant culture neglects, undervalues, opposes, represses, or cannot even recognize”
• Emergent **
  • “new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationships are continually being created”
    • not the novel, which is new creation w/in dominant culture, but truly “substantial and oppositional” (admittedly sometimes diff to distinguish)
  • “the formation of a new class, the coming to consciousness of a new class, and within this, in actual process, the (often uneven) emergence of elements of a new cultural formation”
    • will be “uneven” and “incomplete” while the dominant class still in power
    • “to the degree that it emerges” esp in oppositional mood, attempts for incorporation begin, which “conditions and limits the emergence” and tends to neutralize oppositional character b/c it looks “accepted”
      • ex: creation of radical popular press, which used received literary forms…
      • ex: working class lifestyle becomes popular and commercialized
  • so where is genuine emergence? “a constantly repeated, an always renewable, move beyond a phase of practical incorporation” (difficult)
  • Other kinds of emergence than cultural emergence!
• “no mode of production and therefore no dominant social order ever in reality includes or exhausts all human practice, human energy, and human intention” 125
  • things happen outside the dominant, and the dominant only “selects” parts of human experience
• He notes: what is theorized as excluded by dominant is usually characterized as private, personal, metaphysical, or natural BECAUSE dominant mode has secured the rights of DEFINING THE SOCIAL, thus appearing to leave whatever’s the opposite of “social” to carry the burden of the “different”
  • “It is this seizure that has especially to be resisted.” Why? B/ the dominant form will also neglect possible SOCIAL forms and experiences! it doesn’t exhaust life, and it doesn’t exhaust the social either
  • a dominant will allow some part of life to be deemed “natural” or “aesthetic” and thus “willing to ignore” it
• Some dominant forms are more or less vampiric in this respect: some want to invade more and more parts of life, while others leave other parts alone
  • Advanced capitalism (b/c of its “social character of labor…communications…decision-making”) “reaches much further than ever before…into hitherto ‘reserved’ or ‘resigned’” 126 areas of human experience and meaning
    • So now we’ve less area for emergent, but we can still find cultural meanings or practices that the dominant is “unable in any real terms to recognize”
    • Significant emergence still hard b/c so quickly incorporated
• “This complex process can still in part be described in class terms. But there is always other social being and consciousness which is neglected and excluded: alternative perceptions of others, in immediate relationships; new perceptions and practices of the material world…different in quality from the developing and articulated interests of a rising class”
  • So two kinds of emergent: a new rising class and whatever dominant is excluding (these two sources can often join powers tho’ truly they are distinct)
• Emergent: “never only a matter of immediate practice; indeed it depends crucially on finding new forms or adaptations of form”
  • and indeed some kinds of emergence better described as “pre-emergence” b/c it is “pressing but not yet fully articulated”