From: "Tobin Nellhaus" <nellhaus-AT-gwi.net>
To: <bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU>
Subject: Re: BHA: Base & Superstructure
Date: Sun, 8 Jun 1997 11:48:28 -0400


I asked:

> > >There remain difficulties with it (if ideology is a superstructure in
this
> > revised sense, where does language belong?)

Colin replied:

> > My answer would be that it is on all levels: base and superstructure, if
you
> > want to use that terminology.

Carrol observed:

> Assuming the validity of the base-superstructure perspective, then in one
> of his works Stalin had something of theoretical interest to say: Marxism
> and Linguistics. His point there was that language was simply not part
> of *either* base or superstructure but prior to and mostly independent
> of both.

and Michael wrote:

> As for language, well, a lot hangs on what the purview of that
> vexed term is taken to be in a given case.  Language is not just
> one thing, after all (not even the Chomskeans would concede)
> and so I'd be inclined to displace the whole problem onto
> a different category:  to wit, ideology.

Of these positions, I'm probably closest to Colin's, which I think is as
telling against the classical base/superstructure model as anything.  One of
the problems of Stalin's notion is that it disconnects language from
everything, and that way idealism lies; I think it's truer to say it's
connected to everything.  The position Michael sketches (if I understand him
correctly) seems to suggest that everything about language is governed by
political and economic interests; were this true, we should find major
linguistic shifts attending all (or at least most) political and economic
transformations, but I don't think we do.

My own position, actually, is that we have to refer language to another set
of material practices: communication.  I very much think of communication as
a *material* practice, involving bodily labor to produce sounds, written
marks, etc.  As I argued in my paper for the RM conference, I think
communication systems constitute a fundamental social structure on the same
order as the economic mode of production.  Linguistic structures are part of
communication structures.

Of course, my viewpoint gets back to an issue which I raised a few weeks ago
(in response I think to one of Ralph's posts), and which I don't think got a
satisfactory answer (actually, I don't think it got a reply): is there any
*critical realist* reason why there should be only *one* "base"? 
Particularly if we ride with the reinterpretation Howard offers, in which the
relation of base to superstructure is one of originating level to emergent
level, I think there isn't.

As for the Althusserian "structure in dominance," the general principle
always made sense to me.  But I've never quite gotten the idea that "the
lonely hour of the last instance never comes" ... maybe because it seems to
come rather often in my own life.  But my underlying concern is, I guess, a
critical realist one--economic forces are operating *all* the time, though
their effects may not always be manifest due to the interactions with/of
other social mechanisms.  In that sense, is the notion of a *last* instance
viable?  (Thanks Michael for the translation.  Now I can claim to having been
Donne in by the economy.  "Do not ask for whom the economy tolls--it tolls
for thee!").

Cheers and beers.

---
Tobin Nellhaus
nellhaus-AT-gwi.net
"Faith requires us to be materialists without flinching": C.S. Peirce


     --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---