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LITERATURE/SOCIETY: MAPPING THE FIELD 225

rigorously to confront the question of determinations—more especially, the
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‘determination of the economic level in the last instance’. We may usefully
break this question down into several, related questions:
(a) how to ‘think’ a social totality or social formation—the ‘ensemble of social
relations’—in a different way;
(b) how to ‘think’ what is specific about each of the levels, activities or
‘practices’ which compose or ‘produce’ this complex totality;
(c) how to ‘think’ the different modes in which social activity in history (what
Marx, in The German Ideology, defined as praxis and Williams translates as
‘human energy’) appears—for example, in economic life and production;
social relations; institutional life and the state; consciousness, ideas,
ideologies and beliefs; artistic and symbolic productions, including
language;
(d) how to ‘think’ the relationships of determination and ‘relative autonomy’
between the different levels in this totality.

We may identify two variants or problematics in this area within Marxism. The
first follows from Marx’s notion that ‘definite forms of social consciousness’
correspond to the ‘totality of relations of production’. It attempts to elaborate and
clarify just what that notion of correspondence entails. The theorists who belong
to this variant all reject some simple notion that the superstructures directly
reflect the base. They therefore explore the mediations, the transformation, the
refractions, which establish or reveal the dialectical links between ‘ideas’ and
‘society’. These writers address the base/superstructure problem head-on and
deal with literature as a ‘superstructural’ phenomenon. Lukács and Goldmann
(but also, from another position, Adorno and Marcuse) belong within this
problematic.
There is, however, a second line of theorizing. This stems rather from Marx’s
equally important injunction that ‘consciousness must be explained from the…
conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of
production’. The base/superstructure problem is seen not so much as a two-tiered
model but in terms of a complex, differentiated totality. Thus literature is
regarded less as a refraction of the base through the superstructures and more as
a specific kind of activity (praxis), as a certain kind of practice, even as a form of
production. To this alternative tradition belongs Brecht, with his stress on the
‘mounting’ of the work of art, his concern with ‘effect’; Benjamin, with his
attention to the new ‘productive forces’ in artistic work; perhaps, in an
intermediary position, Sartre, who is concerned with praxis and project, but for
whom the work of art is the production not of a text (object) but of certain kinds
of signified meanings— artistic production as a form of signification; and the
structuralist and semiotic schools, for whom the primary mode of artistic
production is the production of signs through language and sign systems. We
should also include here the ‘Althusserians’, who, though they have not produced