Copyright © 2000 New Literary History, University of Virginia. This article first appeared in New Literary History, Volume 31, Issue 2, Spring, 2000, pages 241-245. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press

Dupré, John

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New Literary History, 2000, 31: 241–245Comments on Terry Eagleton’s“Base and Superstructure Revisited”John DupréLet me first confess that, remarkably, I am also one of thosepeople who is skeptical about alien abduction but do suspect thatthere is something important about the distinction between baseand superstructure. Based on Eagleton’s estimate, I calculate that theprobability of two such people speaking at the same session is compa-rable to the chance of winning the lottery and, paradoxically enough,somewhat less than the chance that there really are alien abductions.However, I do still have some doubts about how this distinction shouldbest be understood, some of which remain despite the many illuminat-ing ideas in Eagleton’s paper.Let me approach the issue in an obvious if possibly plodding way, bysaying a few words about the three obvious questions: What is the Base?What is the Superstructure? And how are they related?A society’s base, I take it, is the sum of its productive and reproductiveresources, and would include at least the means of production and therelations of production. As Eagleton notes, there can be no doubt thatthis is fundamental to society in the sense that there would be no societywithout production of, at the very least, the necessities of human life.But of course there is more than this banal truth involved in takingseriously a doctrine of base and superstructure.The superstructure is a more slippery concept. Sometimes it isunderstood as meaning simply culture. As Eagleton nicely remarks, theconcept of culture tends to vacillate between the broadly anthropologi-cal and the narrowly aesthetic, neither of which is of much use for thepresent purpose. Eagleton, at any rate, presents a more interestingconcept of superstructure as that part of culture the function of which isto contribute to the legitimation of the state. One important conse-quence of this definition is that it clearly does not constitute base andsuperstructure as exhaustive categories. Eagleton notes that a literarywork can be studied infrastructurally, as part of material production, orsuperstructurally, as collusive with dominant power. And there is also thepossibility of reading it neither way: it may be scrutinized for symptomsof subversion of the dominant power; or perhaps even treated as anew literary history242purely aesthetic object. There is also a problem that begins to surfacehere. If we think of the state as existing primarily to defend the relationsof production, and hence of the ideological function of the superstruc-ture as being to defend the relations of production, then the superstruc-ture will have been defined in relation to the base. This will threatensome claims about the relation between the two with triviality.So what of the relation between the two? Often, the Marxist doctrineis taken to be that base determines superstructure. But this is not easy tointerpret. Certainly we shouldn’t understand, for example, any straight-forward statement of efficient causation. A sufficient reason for this isthat the ideological function assigned to the superstructure could,presumably, be served by a wide variety of different ideological struc-tures. One more promising line might be the following. The function ofthe state is to preserve the means of production and social relations ofproduction. This function is carried out both by exercises of physicalforce and by ideological methods. The latter, more or less, constitutesthe superstructure. The base, then, determines the superstructure in thesense that what counts as superstructure depends on the nature of theeconomic base: the superstructure is whatever serves to give ideologicalsupport to whatever in fact constitutes the economic base.The problem with this interpretation is that it is merely analytic,whereas we presumably were looking for a substantive claim about howsocieties operate. Put another way, the claim about base determiningsuperstructure simply falls out of Eagleton’s perhaps rather idiosyncraticdefinition of superstructure. What this gives us is a suggestion as to whatshould make something count as an item of superstructure, but no ideawhether there are many or any such items. So perhaps the substantiveclaim is not so much about the relation between base and superstruc-ture—which proves to be merely analytic or conceptual—but rather inthe prevalence of the superstructural in culture. Here we can properlylocate Eagleton’s thesis that the superstructural dominates culture whenthe economic base provides no more than the necessities of subsistence,the situation characteristic of most of history and most of the world atpresent. But economic surplus creates the possibility of cultural produc-tion that can liberate itself from the role of ideological support of socialrelations. And this is also a part of the reason for the vital point thatEagleton stresses, that only a substantial economic surplus creates thepossibility of socialism. All this relates to Eagleton’s comments about theeconomic, or more specifically, money, as a necessary condition of justabout anything else that might be wanted in a human life. We shouldrecall not only the necessity of money for the acquisition of anything,but the necessity of acquiring certain things, the means of subsistence,before it makes any sense to acquire anything else. These simple points243comments on “base and superstructure”illustrate the general idea at a more basic level. Base determineseverything, including superstructure, until there is a certain amount ofit. (More strictly, until that point the only ideological production issuperstructural.) Beyond that point the possibilities for choice, indi-vidual self-expression, and so on begin to multiply.Related to all this is Eagleton’s claim that one should be a socialistbecause one doesn’t like work. Work is the realm of necessity and therealm in which base determines superstructure. As we become liberatedfrom work so the superstructure becomes liberated from the base, or theideological becomes liberated from the superstructural. But this presup-poses a very specific and perhaps inadequate conception of work, andmore should be said not only for William Morris, but even for Marx.There are several very different traditions for thinking about work.Certainly important is what Adam Smith—hardly a socialist—describedas toil and trouble, and what Marx conceived as alienated labor. Butsurely we should also recognize Marx’s idea of purposeful transforma-tion of nature as essential to the realization of humanity in theindividual, and the development of related ideas in Mill, Ruskin, orMorris. There may be a good case for restricting the anyhow technicalterm superstructure to specifically negative connotations, but doing sofor such a central and familiar term as work seems likely only toconfuse.1Turning to a rather different matter, I find myself a little troubled bythe concept of function. I have helped myself to this concept in thesecomments, and Eagleton does so in his paper. It is hard not to do so inthis area of thought. Eagleton writes, for instance, that “the function ofsuperstructure . . . is to help manage [contradictions in the economicbase] in the interests of the ruling class.” How is such a claim to beunderstood? Sometimes “function” is used to imply an intention, butpresumably this does not apply here. (I don’t want to deny thatsometimes, perhaps often, policy is determined by members of theruling class in proverbially smoke-filled rooms. But presumably con-spiracy theories will not provide a general explanation for socialfunctions.) Sometimes it refers to the role of something in a complexmechanism, as when it is said that the function of the carburetor is toregulate the proportions of fuel and air. But this only makes sense to theextent that we think of society as a whole as having an ultimate goal orpurpose. Possibly Marx did sometimes think this; but it is an idea ofwhich I would be very suspicious. The only other interpretation of whichI am aware is that which is now most popular in biological applicationsof the term, the idea that to say that the function of an X is to do F is tosay that the reason there are Xs is that they do F. This is the general ideaof which the existence of an intention is a special case, and for whichnew literary history244natural selection provides the necessary nonintentional gloss for biol-ogy. So, for instance, we have hearts because they circulate the bloodand that’s good for us, the connection between benefit and existencebeing provided by the story of natural selection. Hence the function ofthe heart is to pump blood. Perhaps there is a selective process by whichonly those cultural forms that do something useful for the ruling classare allowed to survive, and that justifies this kind of attribution offunction to elements of the superstructure. But I’m dubious about this,and so I think there is a philosophical problem here that remains to besufficiently resolved.Let me conclude with a matter on which perhaps—I’m not sure—Idisagree more substantially with Eagleton. This is the matter of essential-ism. Eagleton writes: “Marx’s anthropology comes down in the end towhat we share in virtue of the structure of our bodies, to our ‘species-being’ as he terms it—a thoroughly essentialist doctrine, naturally, andall the better for that.” Essentialism is a topic on which I’ve spilled agood deal of critical ink,2  and I naturally find this remark provocative.The problem is that we share very little in virtue of the structure of ourbodies. It is important, certainly, that we share some basic needs—food,water, shelter, and so on—and, as Eagleton rightly emphasizes, most ofhumankind has been mainly concerned with the satisfaction of its mostbasic needs. But if there were an essence of humanity in the senseEagleton requires, it would certainly go much beyond the most basicneeds, and in ways that Eagleton in fact notes. I take it that when, justafter the last quoted passage (interrupted only by some Aristotelianmetaphysics that struck me as obscure even by the standards of Aristote-lian metaphysics), he says that we cannot answer questions like, “Whyshould we take delight in each other’s company?”, the reason is that ourliking for one another’s company is part of what it is to be creatures ofthe kind we are. I think this is more or less true, but not usefully put interms of essences. Sociopaths are still human so that this species-typicalcharacteristic is not as basic as, say, the need for water. There is, I think,a continuous spectrum from what is absolutely physically necessary forhuman survival, through that without which almost no humans willthrive, to those things in which only humans with very specific tasteshave any interest. This is a way of putting things that has no problemstating facts about all or most humans, acknowledges the crucialdistinction between needs and desires often rejected by both post-modernists and neoclassical economists, but does this in a way that hasno truck with essentialism.In the end I’m fairly sure Eagleton can’t be an essentialist. He writesthat “that continuous transgression or self-transcendence which we callhistory, or culture, is part of our nature.” This seems to me importantly245comments on “base and superstructure”true. But surely self-transcendence is just what one cannot hope to do toan essential nature. While I am reluctant to accuse Terry Eagleton ofbeing insufficiently dialectical, in biology, at least, it does seem thatessentialism is naturally opposed to dialectics. To transcend one’s natureis to leave it behind and construct a new and different one; if that natureis one’s essence, to do this is not to transcend one’s self but to destroy it.This needs to be said in a way that does not deny obvious and importanttruths about our physical needs; but it needs to be said. One reason itneeds to be said is that essentialism, it seems to me, leads inexorably tobiologism, something one might be tempted, though surely wrongly, toassociate with Marx’s talk about species-being. Biologism, as in contem-porary sociobiology recently renamed evolutionary psychology, is abooming intellectual project, and it typifies the problems with essential-ism. Sociobiology presents human nature as fixed by forces in thedistant past and in a great variety of ways, most notably those to do withgender relations, as incapable of, or at least highly resistant to, self-transcendence. And it is this kind of example, I think, that has led somany radicals, perhaps even including Eagleton, to reject essentialism.There is a straight and narrow path, I hope and believe, between beingdashed on the unyielding Scylla of essentialism, and being sucked downinto the formless Charybdis of postmodernism.University of London andUniversity of ExeterNOTES1 For more details, see John Dupré and Regenia Gagnier, “A Brief History of Work,”Journal of Economic Issues, 30 (1996), 553–59.2 See my The Disorder of Things (Cambridge, Mass., 1993).

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