A bit of an odd couple, you say? Granted. But I just kept thinking of Mr. Showmanship when I was reading through Williams’s essay. He sort of served as a talismanic paradigm for me to bounce ideas off of when I was reading, so I thought I would share one example of how my thinking was shaped by joining the Birmingham School theorist with the glittery pop music icon.In the course of discussing the B/SS model in Marxism, Williams cites Marx’s piano paradigm, wherein Marx asserts that the man who makes the piano is a productive worker, the man who distributes the piano may possibly be considered a productive worker, “Yet,” Williams explains, “when it comes to the man who plays the piano, whether to himself or to others, there is no question: he is not a productive worker at all” (35). In this example, as Williams explains, “[. . .] piano-maker is base, but pianist superstructure” (35). The usual conclusion made from this paradigm, as Williams explains, is that the piano maker is more “important” than the pianist. That’s strike one for our friend Liberace.
Williams, however, strongly questions the idea that base is more “important” than superstructure in this piano paradigm and for good reason. Williams tell us that this usual conclusion, in its emphasis on “capitalist commodity production” loses sight of Marx’s notion of productive forces (35). Williams suggests that it’s a question of whether we’re focusing on “primary production within the terms of capitalist economic relationships, or to the primary production of society itself, and of men themselves, the material production and reproduction of real life” (35). Basically he’s suggesting that we’re preoccupied with actual material production at the expense of fully recognizing the effect that social or cultural production has on the base.
Let’s consider Liberace here. Wikipedia told me that he had released almost seventy record albums (!) by 1954, the peak of his career, and in addition to his records, his television show in the 50s regularly drew thirty million viewers and gave him ten thousand fan letters each week. And check out this diverse list of television programs he appeared on: The Ed Sullivan Show, The Jack Benny Show, The Red Skelton Show, Here’s Lucy, Batman, The Monkees, The Tonight Show, Kojak, The Muppet Show, and Saturday Night Live. What am I getting at? This schmaltzy bastard produced culture like it was his job.
Acknowledging that relations of material production and consumption form the base, we need to ask ourselves who made the bigger impact on that base: guys at the Baldwin factory or the culture-producing machine that was Liberace? There’s no doubt that selling hundreds of thousands of records and attracting millions to their flickery television sets does much more to reproduce the base—the process of material/economic exchanges and relationships—than putting eighty-eight keys in a row does. Liberace’s just scored a very big point here.
Dismissing the idea that the piano maker is more “important” than the pianist is part of Williams’s larger effort to complicate our typical understanding of the base: he asserts that the base is not a static state but rather a process that is “active,” “complicated,” and even “contradictory.” Next, Williams wants to stress that productive forces for Marx entail much more than just the manufacture of goods or commodities, and he connects these two suggestions when he says that “If we have the broad sense of productive forces, we look at the whole question of the base differently, and we are less tempted to dismiss as superstructural, and in that sense as merely secondary, certain vital productive social forces, which are in the broad sense, from the beginning, basic” (35, emphasis addded). Liberace, I suggest, can be seen as a “vital productive social force.” As I hope my example has illustrated, Liberace, by virtue of his fame, contributed in a much larger and more conspicuous way to the reproduction of the base than a simple laborer could. We shouldn’t make the same mistake as the interpreters of Marx whom Williams censures, however, by declaring that Liberace was more “important” than the guys who assembled his Steinway. Williams doesn’t want to turn the typical understandings of B/SS on their head; he simply wants to complicate them. When it comes to the superstructure, he wants us to acknowledge that it isn’t just a secondary thing that’s determined by the base, but rather a “related range of cultural practices” that help to define and reproduce the base (34).
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