Page 235 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

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maintains with Marxist concepts and problematics. In this section we must now
address these questions directly. Whichever variant of the Marxist problematic we
take, we are always led back to the central formulation, base/superstructure.
From the early 1844 manuscripts, through The German Ideology to the Critique
of Political Economy and the Grundrisse, whenever Marx wanted to refer to the
ways in which economic structure, social relations and the ‘ideological forms’
cohere to form a distinctive social formation he tended to employ some variation
on the idea of a ‘basis’ and ‘the superstructures’. The nature, degree and mode in
which one level determined the other was variously expressed in Marx’s own
writings and was the subject of key reformulations in Engels’s later
correspondence.
This argument is too complex to trace through in detail here. Marx always
insisted both that ‘the formation of ideas’ should be explained ‘from material
practice’ and that art was related to material production by an ‘uneven
development’. The ‘transformations’ which connected ‘the economic
foundation’ with ‘the whole immense superstructure’ were, clearly, not simple,
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transparent or unmediated. We know that by ‘economic foundations’ he meant
something as complex as ‘the material production of life itself…the form of
intercourse connected with this and created by the mode of production (i.e. civil
society in all its stages)’—‘the totality of these relations of production constitutes
the economic structure of society, the real foundation’. We know he thought it
crucial
to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic
conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of
natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic, or philosophic—
in short, ideological forms, in which men become conscious of the conflict
and fight it out.

But in the absence of the promised volumes on the state, politics and art, it
remains an unfinished project for Marxism to ‘think’ rigorously how the
‘correspondences’ between these levels are to be understood. That is the reason
why (a) in Marxism a proper ‘theory of the superstructure’ still awaits
elaboration; (b) it is difficult to base a Marxist theory of literature as a social
phenomenon squarely on the existing texts and concepts; and, paradoxically, (c)
the study of the literature/society problem, in a Marxist framework, is not a
marginal enterprise, but absolutely central to the development of historical
materialism as a science—because, within that problem, a critical absence in the
theory can be, progressively, clarified.
Despite the confused state of Marxism in this whole area, two things at least
are clear. First, the ‘vulgar Marxist’ way of conceptualizing the base/
superstructure relation is not likely to take us very far. It conceives this relation
in narrowly reflexive ways and tends always towards a reductively economistic
kind of analysis. Second, Marxism nevertheless does require the analyst