Marxism and Infrastructure

On reading Levine’s article, I was reminded of a move typically associated with a classical Marxist aesthetics: namely, the metaphoric logic that separates but simultaneously connects the different domains that order lived experience. For classical marxist aesthetics this is often the metaphor of base and superstructure, which tends to designate “the economic” as the base (or, depending on the context of the work, what is sometimes called “the infrastructure”) against the superstructure (which loosely correlates with “ideology”). I found myself wondering: is Levine’s article a way of reformulating this distinction? And, if so, why would Levine want to reinscribe this logic: does she perceive a deficiency with the base/superstructure metaphor?  Is such a reformulation a way of “saving” a logic (i.e., of the base-superstructure metaphor) that has become overburdened by associations that undermine its potential to transform the organization of lived experiences?

I don’t mean to suggest that Levine’s infrastructure-structure model is simply a rearticulation of the marxist metaphor (i.e., I’m not saying that Levine simply gives the base-superstructure model another name while retaining what this metaphor was meant to describe), but rather I’m asking why Levine chooses to use this infra/structure model when there was already a critical apparatus in place (and one fairly well entrenched in literary criticism, although not without its problems). To put my historicist hat on for a moment, I’m wondering whether Levine’s article can tell us something about how we approach a mode of contemporary realism and our capacity to formalize a way to understand it.

To be sure, the base-superstructure model has largely been used by marxist aesthetics to theorize realism, and such theories will often describe realist fiction as interiorizing the base-superstructure distinction by mapping it on to a form / content dichotomy. Henri Arvon can explain this rhetorical move better than I can:

The relations between content and form correspond to the more general relations between the economic base and the ideological superstructure; content is always the governing factor and though form in the final analysis is always necessarily subservient to it, it is not thereby shorn of all autonomy whatsoever.” (Marxist Aesthetics, p. 41).

In this way, people writing through the framework of a classic marxist aesthetics would understand a work of realist fiction as interiorizing the base-superstructure relation in everyday experience by “capturing” it in the relation between literary form and content. As Arvon’s language of “governance” and “subservience” might suggest, this is also a way of formulating a relation between what we would now call technological determinism and cultural constructivism. In other words, does realist fiction produce or construct a “reality” or does it merely describe or reflect a “reality” already external to it? Does content “govern” form, or the other way around?

The work of poststructuralism and the various theoretical paradigms to follow in literary and media studies for the most part put these dichotomies to bed (although not entirely): content was shown to be part of a literary work’s form, and form was also subject to the demands of a text’s content (or even to become content: the medium as message); likewise, many argued that technologies were not entirely responsible for producing cultural formations, and cultural formations were not entirely responsible for shaping cultural forms (this is what Rettberg called last week “co-construction,” as Maggie’s post pointed out). Levine is also careful to do this by “defamiliarizing” the language of structure and infrastructure, emphasizing that each are flexible, pervasive, and codetermined.

And yet, it seems we can’t stray too far from “form” here (perhaps unsurprising, given Levine’s prior work on form). The processes of defamiliarizing the habituated infrastructures taken up in Americanah are linked in Levine’s article to the bildung form (or structure?) of an outsider. Similarly, Lupton’s article traces how novels like Remainder and The Accidental defamiliarize the habituated infrastructure of the material book form. Maybe such frameworks encourage us to think about how the form-content (which, as with Levine’s infra/structures, we might think of as codetermined and, in a way, inseparable) of novels practices a digital logic without necessarily becoming digital.

Take this extract from one of Ifemelu’s blog posts in Americanah:

So light skin is valued in the community of American blacks. But everyone pretends this is no longer so. They say the days of the paper-bag test (look this up) are gone and let’s move forward. But today most of the American blacks who are successful as entertainers and as public figures are light. (265)

Note how Ifemelu writes “look this up”. I think it’s safe to say that someone writing an actual blog would just link to the information referenced. But of course the material conditions of the book don’t permit this in the same way. And yet, this imperative allows another sort of connection to occur: this statement is simultaneously a demand for the reader of the material book to “look this up.” Although operating by way of different material mediums, both a blog using hyperlinks and the representation of a blog in a novel are techniques of “linking” to information beyond their own forms. This action supposes an infrastructure that connects a book like Americanah or blog posts to sites (not only websites) where people can access additional data. The book and the blog are part of a wider information network.

Maybe this is why Levine turns to the model of infra/structure: these terms (once demystified by Levine, of course) lend themselves to uncovering underlying logics for the production and reproduction of texts (as well as structures like racism) that don’t always, or don’t only, turn to economics as the determining factor for explaining how people act and the forms things take. The infrastructure and structure model seems (to me) a formulation that could be applied to basically any situation, which makes it very promising but also makes me a little suspicious of it.