The problem is always one of method, and this is where the second idea, of the structures of the genesis of consciousness, must be taken seriously. We are weakest, in social studies, in just this area: in what is called the sociology of knowledge but is always much more than that, for it is not only knowledge we are concerned with but all the active processes of learning, imagination, creation, performance. And there is very rich material, within a discipline we already have, for the detailed description of just these processes, in so many individual works. To find ways of extending this, not simply to a background of social history or of the history of ideas, but to other active processes through which social groups form and define themselves, will be very difficult but is now centrally necessary. For relating literary process to the social product, or the social process to the literary product—which is what now we mostly do—in the end breaks down, and people retire, with that by now professional expression of resigned intelligence and virtue, to the teaching of the day before yesterday. But if in every case we try, by varying forms of analysis, to go beyond the particular and isolated product—‘the text’—to its real process —its most active and specific formation—I believe we can find points of connection that answer, as our separated studies so often do not, to our closest sense of our own living process.
On each of these points—the idea of the collective subject, and the idea of the structures of the genesis of consciousness—Lucien Goldmann’s contribution, though unfinished, was significant. Locked as he was in much immediate controversy, he seems often to have been limited to restating his most general positions; yet even here, in ways that in summary I have not been able to indicate, he produced refinements and further definitions, in so complex a field, from which we can all learn. We can dissent, as I often do, from particular formulations and applications, and still recognize the emphasis, the exceptionally valuable emphasis, which he gave, theoretically and practically, to the development of literary and social studies.
And this is more than a professional concern. Beyond the arguments, as listening to him last spring in Cambridge it was not difficult to see, there is a social crisis, a human crisis, in which, in just these ways, we are ourselves involved. For the achievement of clarity and significance, in these most human studies, is directly connected with the struggle for human means and ends in a world that will permit no reserved areas, no safe subjects, no neutral activities. Now and here, in respecting his memory, I take the sense he gave: of a continuing inquiry, a continuing argument, a continuing concern; of a man who made, in our time, a significant response, and with whom we can find, as I think he would have said, a significant community, a way of seeing and being and acting in the world.
Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory
Any modern approach to a Marxist theory of culture must begin by considering the proposition of a determining base and a determined superstructure. From a strictly theoretical point of view this is not, in fact, where we might choose to begin. It would be in many ways preferable if we could begin from a proposition which originally was equally central, equally authentic: namely the proposition that social being determines consciousness. It is not that the two propositions necessarily deny each other or are in contradiction. But the proposition of base and superstructure, with its figurative element, with its suggestion of a fixed and definite spatial relationship, constitutes, at least in certain hands, a very specialized and at times unacceptable version of the other proposition. Yet in the transition from Marx to Marxism, and in the development of mainstream Marxism itself, the proposition of the determining base and the determined superstructure has been commonly held to be the key to Marxist cultural analysis.
It is important, as we try to analyse this proposition, to be aware that the term of relationship which is involved, that is to say ‘determines’, is of great linguistic and theoretical complexity. The language of determination and even more of determinism was inherited from idealist and especially theological accounts of the world and man. It is significant that it is in one of his familiar inversions, his contradictions of received propositions, that Marx uses the word which becomes, in English translation, ‘determines’ (the usual but not invariable German word is bestimmen). He is opposing an ideology that had been insistent on the power of certain forces outside man, or, in its secular version, on an abstract determining consciousness. Marx’s own proposition explicitly denies this, and puts the origin of determination in men’s own activities. Nevertheless, the particular history and continuity of the term serves to remind us that there are, within ordinary use—and this is true of most of the major European languages—quite different possible meanings and implications of the word ‘determine’. There is, on the one hand, from its theological inheritance, the notion of an external cause which totally predicts or prefigures, indeed totally controls a subsequent activity. But there is also, from the experience of social practice, a notion of determination as setting limits, exerting pressures.*
Now there is clearly a difference between a process of setting limits and exerting pressures, whether by some external force or by the internal laws of a particular development, and that other process in which a subsequent content is essentially prefigured, predicted and controlled by a pre-existing external force. Yet it is fair to say, looking at many applications of Marxist cultural analysis, that it is the second sense, the notion of prefiguration, prediction or control, which has often explicitly or implicitly been used.
Superstructure: Qualifications and Amendments
The term of relationship is then the first thing that we have to examine in this proposition, but we have to do this by going on to look at the related terms themselves. ‘Superstructure’ (Überbau) has had most attention. In common usage, after Marx, it acquired a main sense of a unitary ‘area’ within which all cultural and ideological activities could be placed. But already in Marx himself, in the later correspondence of Engels, and at many points in the subsequent Marxist tradition, qualifications were made about the determined character of certain superstructural activities. The first kind of qualification had to do with delays in time, with complications, and with certain indirect or relatively distant relationships. The simplest notion of a superstructure, which is still by no means entirely abandoned, had been the reflection, the imitation or the reproduction of the reality of the base in the superstructure in a more or less direct way. Positivist notions of reflection and reproduction of course directly supported this. But since in many real cultural activities this relationship cannot be found, or cannot be found without effort or even violence to the material or practice being studied, the notion was introduced of delays in time, the famous lags; of various technical complications; and of indirectness, in which certain kinds of activity in the cultural sphere—philosophy, for example—were situated at a greater distance from the primary economic activities. That was the first stage of qualification of the notion of superstructure: in effect, an operational qualification. The second stage was related but more fundamental, in that the process of the relationship itself was more substantially looked at. This was the kind of reconsideration which gave rise to the modern notion of ‘mediation’, in which something more than simple reflection or reproduction—indeed something radically different from either reflection or reproduction—actively occurs. In the later twentieth century there is the notion of ‘homologous structures’, where there may be no direct or easily apparent similarity, and certainly nothing like reflection or reproduction, between the superstructural process and the reality of the base, but in which there is an essential homology or correspondence of structures, which can be discovered by analysis. This is not the same notion as ‘mediation’, but it is the same kind of amendment in that the relationship between the base and the superstructure is not supposed to be direct, nor simply operationally subject to lags and complications and indirectnesses, but that of its nature it is not direct reproduction.
These qualifications and amendments are important. But it seems to me that what has not been looked at with equal care is the received notion of the ‘base’ (Basis, Grundlage). And indeed I