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| Ad Reinhardt, 1951 |
...only on the back of a material surplus can culture become autonomous. By "autonomous" I mean of course not "independent of any material context," which we can all agree is bourgeois-idealist, but something much more challenging and interesting, such as "autonomous of those subservient political and ideological functions in church, court, and state which culture had traditionally fulfilled." This can happen only when a society has the material means to support a specialized caste of professional artists and intellectuals, and when the growth of the market is such that these people can now become independent of the state or the governing class and become dependent for their livelihood on market forces instead.
Art becomes relatively autonomous of its material conditions precisely by being more firmly integrated into the economic, not by being cut adrift from it. To register both the delights and disasters of this historical moment-that is to say, to consider it dialectically, as both oppression and emancipation-requires a thinking-on-both-sides of which postmodern theory has so far proved itself lamentably incapable. Autonomy frees you [the cultural producer in particular] from being the [obviously] 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 surroundings. There is also a considerably more downbeat side of the story, but one rather that is less in need of being rehearsed. The point, anyway, is that anyone who thinks that culture's historical autonomy of material functions is just a bad thing, like smoking or salt, is a moralist rather than a materialist; and that this partial, relative autonomy of material conditions is itself the effect of material conditions. It is this, not some shop-soiled doctrine about the need to relate culture to context, that is specific about the historical materialist contribution to the argument. It is this, not some shop-soiled doctrine about the need to relate culture to context, that is specific about the historical materialist contribution to the argument.
To put the point rather more luridly: only when culture is thoroughly saturated by exchange-value does it wax politically utopian. For it is then that the artifact, fissured down the middle between use- and exchange value, tries to resist the miseries of commodification at the level of the economic by a defiant autotelism at the level of ideology-by the courageous, vainglorious claim that it is its own end, ground, and raison d'etre. This, to be sure, is to make a cultural virtue out of historical necessity: in a desperate last-ditch rationalization, the work must be its own end, since it scarcely seems to have any other very salient function any longer. But this autotelism can then become an image of how men and women themselves might be under altered material conditions. Marx himself, who is a full-blooded aesthete on such questions, holds that the point of socialism is to abolish the instrumental treatment of objects and human beings so that they may delight in the realization of their sensuous powers and capacities just for the sake of it (what he knows as "use-value"), rather than be forced to justify their delight in that autotelism at the tribunal of some higher Reason, World-Spirit, History, Duty, or Utility.
The chief interest of Goldsmith's words for my purpose, though, lies in their curious prefiguring of the Marxist base/superstructure model laws and sciences being, as Goldsmith recognizes, somehow functional with regard to property relations. And here I move at last to the main theme of my paper. I must confess first that I belong to that dwindling band who still believe that the base/superstructure model has something valuable to say, even if this is nowadays a proportion smaller than those who believe in the Virgin Birth or the Loch Ness monster, and positively miniscule in comparison with those who believe in alien abductions. Surely the Virgin Birth is about as plausible as this static, mechanistic, reductive, economistic, hierarchical, undialectical model 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 "hierarchical" nature. The model 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 being who, in Edmund Burke's fine phrase, "walks abroad without a keeper." It may be wrong as to what it considers more determinant than what; but you really cannot fault a doctrine for holding that some things are more true or important than others, since there is no doctrine which does not. Every doctrine, for example, implicitly holds that it is itself more true than its opposite, and this includes claims like "there is no truth," or "nothing is more important than anything else."
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Secondly, the base/superstructure model is not out to argue that law, culture, ideology, the state, and various other inhabitants of the superstructure are less real or material than property relations. It is not, in this sense at least, an ontological claim. We can all happily agree that prisons and museums are quite as real as banks. It is not a claim about degrees of ontological reality; nor is it simply a claim about priorities or preconditions. The assertion that we must eat before we can think ("Eats first, morals second" as Brecht observed) is only an instance of the base/ superstructure model if it carries with it the claim that what we eat somehow shapes or conditions what we think. The doctrine, in short, is about determinations.
- Terry Eagleton, 2000
