Reference and Dissemination: Althusser after DerridaAuthor(s): Thomas E. LewisSource: Diacritics, Vol. 15, No. 4, Marx after Derrida (Winter, 1985), pp. 37-56Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/464933Accessed: 07/10/2008 20:55

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REFERENCE AND

DISSEMINATION:

ALTH USSER AFTER DERRIDA

THOMAS E. LEWIS

I strongly and repeatedly insist on the necessity of the phase of reversal, which people have perhaps too swiftly attempted to discredit .... To neglect this phase of reversal is to forget that the structure of the opposition is one of conflict and subordination and thus to pass too swiftly, without gaining any purchase against the former opposition, to a neutralization which in practice leaves things in their former state and deprives one of any way of intervening effectively.

-Jacques Derrida, Positions

Will State power be held or lost? That is the question with which the historical period of the dictatorship of the proletariat begins. But it is also a question which continually reappears, just as long as a reason for its appearance persists in the form of the existence of class relations in production and in the whole of society. As long as this basis exists, the dictatorship of the proletariat remains necessary in order to develop the revolutionary forces and to defeat the counterrevolutionary forces whose contradictory unity is not destroyed until long after the seizure of power.

- Etienne Balibar, On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

There are many senses in which one can construe the "after" that joins Marx and Derrida in the title of this collection, as well as the "after" that joins Althusser and Derrida in the title of this particular essay. The most obvious sense of "after" is the one that allows these titles to act as tropes for an excep- tional temporality: Marx did not live and write after Derrida, nor does Althusser. Indeed, attributing a temporally unusual sense to "after" seems altogether fitting here because these three writers share the view that the order of knowledge does not recapitulate the order of reality. When Marx distinguishes between abstract determinations and concrete determinations as part of his claim that historical sequences and conceptual sequences are incommensurable [Grundrisse 100-108], or when Althusser distinguishes between real objects and objects of knowledge as part of his claim that Marxism is not a historicism [Reading Capital 46-69, 119-44], each develops an argument concerning the possibilities and constraints of conceptual discourse that can accommodate Derrida's various deconstructions of such metaphysical notions as presence, identity, origin, and teleology. For this reason, attempts to press Derrida's texts into the service of antihistorical views always strike me as inconsequential: Althusser's writings already demonstrate that "antihistoricist" need not mean "antihistorical." While others may hold that deconstruction proclaims the futility of writing history, therefore, I shall consider in this essay one way in which deconstruction helps to clarify the necessity of writing history.

Obvious, too, are the senses here in which "after" might be used to mean "in search of" or "in pursuit of": "He's after him. What for?" Yet, if my uncon-

diacritics / winter 1985 37

scious agrees to cooperate, I plainly want to resist relying on these senses of "after" in any extended way. To allow the trope "in search of" to structure this essay would imply that a

teleological necessity informs the encounter between Marx and Derrida (and/or the one be- tween Althusser and Derrida), while I actually believe otherwise: there is no inner logic-or particular failure of logic-to either Marxism or deconstruction that necessitates that each one be supplemented by the other. It is virtually impossible at present, for example, to say that Marxism and deconstruction are either "complementary" or "contradictory," or "com- patible" or "incompatible," in any concrete way. Marxists and deconstructionists usually pitch their theoretical discourses at quite different "levels" of generality and, to all ap- pearances, concern themselves with quite different discursive "objects": in so doing, they merely signify past each other (this is one of the insights that is both facilitated and- poten- tially-undermined by the quotations that begin this essay). While finding no particular reason to weep over this state of affairs, therefore, I sometimes wonder whether Marxism and deconstruction actually have anything to demonstrate about the other that can be demonstrated to or for the other. Perhaps this is why Marx and Derrida, as well as Althusser and Derrida, have written so little about each other's work.

Indeed, it may be the case that there simply exist important differences between Marx- ism and deconstruction. Even such differences, however, are not always to be plotted most

usefully as a (campus) police story by means of deploying "after" as a trope for "in pursuit of." No doubt there are specific occasions upon which it is absolutely necessary for Marxists and deconstructionists to foreground the ideological differences that do separate Marxism and deconstruction in their present (multifarious) forms. Nevertheless, I consider that it would re- main useless here to stage a spectacle in which Marxism and deconstruction perform as

punch-drunk heavyweights in a boxing championship whose referee is none other than I. I believe this for one reason: "The question whether objective [gegenstandliche] truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory, but is a practical question. In prac- tice man [sic] must prove the truth, that is, the reality and power, the this-sidedness

[Diesseitigkeit] of his [sic] thinking. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question" [Karl Marx and Frederick

Engels, Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy 243]. To reproduce this quotation from Marx's Theses on Feuerbach is not to have recourse to anti-intellectualism: it is to

acknowledge the complexity of the social determinations that bear upon the institution of academic writing and reading in the United States today. Furthermore, this quotation an- nounces a theory of reference as a practice of dissemination.

That Marxism and deconstruction share some of the assumptions and concerns that

today are referred to as poststructuralist suggests another sense of "after" that I do consider as useful here, at least for the conjunction of Althusser and Derrida. This is the sense in which "after" may mean "in the manner of." At first glance, no two "manners" appear more foreign to each other than the respective styles, say, of Derrida's "Dissemination" and Althusser's

"Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." Yet the style of the "Derrida" that is par- ticularized by "Dissemination" has attained hardly any projection within contemporary critical practice. Either other deconstructionists find it too marginal a style to mime with suc- cess, or publishers and editors accord too little initial sympathy to those who essay it. Regret- tably, it is all too certain that many academicians consider this "Derrida," as well as his would-be mimes and satirists, in fact to be ill-mannered.

Nevertheless, if the "manners," say, of Derrida's Of Grammatology, Speech and Phenomena, and Margins of Philosophy are compared with those of Althusser's For Marx, Reading Capital, and Lenin and Philosophy, one immediately discerns remarkable affinities between their styles and argumentative modes. Each text carries out a rigorous argument that involves demonstrating some point about-or, better, the pointlessness of-traditional

epistemological discourse. Through the occasional (and sometimes frequent) adoption of outrageous tones, each text attempts to defy the protocol of the various institutions within which it is written and read. Each text also milks paradoxes for all they are worth, teases out the figurative bases of concepts, and vaunts in the verdict of guilty that it self-consciously pro- nounces on its own argument as a strategy for sustaining its own conclusions. Such features contribute to what I habitually refer to as the rhetorical "implacability" of all of Althusser's and Derrida's texts. While it eventually would prove unwise to forget that their styles and

38

argumentative modes also differ in crucial respects, this implacability can be constructed, under the names of reference and dissemination, as a political desire.

Finally, "after" cues a cluster of meanings that bluntly invites readers to reflect upon their own desires and expectations concerning this collection of essays (and my own contribution to it): Marx "as a result of" Derrida; Althusser "on account of" Derrida; Marx "next in rank to" Derrida; and Althusser "in honor of" Derrida. All of these senses of "after" bring into focus the

hegemony exercised by deconstruction over Marxism in contemporary North American literary theory. So it is that, for Marxists at least, there is a tactical decision to be made here. On the one hand, a collection of essays such as this one conceivably risks accomplishing an actual naming of Marx after Derrida in the same sense in which a child might be named after a particular saint during a baptismal ceremony. This unfortunate consequence would result all too swiftly from any attempt to construct formal relations of identity or supplementarity between the various goals, methods, concepts, ethics, politics, etc., of Marxism and deconstruction. On the other hand, an elaboration of some aspects of Marxism and deconstruction in relation to a specific problem or set of problems might accomplish a pro- ductive shift of the contexts in and for which certain discussions derive their meanings. Another result might be a partial break of the private ownership by deconstruction of some of the issues of present concern within the institution of literary study; Marxism now might be seen as having power of its own to implement in the analysis of topics that usually are

regarded by the profession at large as beyond its abilities or its interests. Of course, there are no guarantees that such an elaboration would produce these particular effects at all.

In addition to using the words "naming" and "baptism" to raise (in perhaps too pointed a fashion) the question of what is to be desired or expected from positing relationships be- tween Marxism and deconstruction, I also have used them to introduce the problem of reference in a context of making tactical decisions that implement power in the absence of epistemological guarantees. Readers who are unfamiliar with recent Anglo-American philosophy will have failed to infer that these words have been used in a calculated way both to constitute a reference and to imply a criticism of the theory of reference that Saul Kripke develops in Naming and Necessity. This book, which has become tremendously important for Anglo-American analytic philosophers, presents Kripke's theory of rigid designation as a radical alternative to the theory of definite decriptions elaborated chiefly by Frege and Russell. In opposition to Frege's and Russell's view that reference occurs because language permits objects in the world to be picked out logically by virtue of identifying descriptions, Kripke's theory attempts to explain the process of reference as the result of an initial naming (or "baptism") of an object with a designating term that then is propagated among members of a linguistic community through shared and repeated usage. Once a referent has been "baptized" in this way, moreover, Kripke holds that a truth-functional link is secured be- tween this referent and its rigid designator by an a posteriori necessity, one which is said to provide causal grounds for epistemological certainty. For these reasons, Kripke's theory is known to analytic philosophers as the causal theory of reference, although, ironically, recent attempts have been made by some of its general proponents to rename it as the theory of direct reference. (I prefer its "born-again" name as the apter of its two designating terms.)

Much can be said in criticism of Kripke's views, as well as of Frege's and Russell's views, and I have raised objections to both theories elsewhere. Yet the relevant point here is that Kripke's theory seeks to account for both reference and reference failure, no longer in terms of inherent relations between alleged parts of the sign such as sense and meaning (Frege) or signifier and signified (Saussure), but rather, in terms of the social use of signs. This perspec- tive is welcome, of course, especially because recent work in semiotics has shown that con- ceptual attempts to account for instability or indeterminacy in signification by means of the binary opposition signifier/signified ("primacy of the signifier over the signified," etc.) cannot avoid employing a supplemental logic. In the high-and-dry tradition of analytic philosophy, however, Kripke concerns himself primarily with the reference of terms for such natural ob- jects as "H20," "tiger," and "heat." Thus, as happens with most analytic theories of reference, Kripke's theory of direct reference is rendered useless for explaining the process of reference to cultural phenomena because it incorporates an axiom of existence. Given what analytic philosophers mean when they talk about existence, this axiom forces reference to be con- ceived of as a relation that can obtain only between a representation and a spatio-temporal

diacritics I winter 1985 39

object [see Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism 110-38]. So it is that, because of his exclusive concern with reference to spatio-temporal objects, Kripke makes it difficult to perceive that the social use of signs also involves social conflict over the use of signs. In this respect, Kripke purchases his alleged grounds for epistemological certainty at the cost of obscuring the role of social power in the process of fixing and propagating references. For, if it once is allowed that conflict (and not simply "error") may occur in the social use of signs, it no longer can be claimed that the truth-values of signs are secured by means of an a

posteriori necessity. I have taken the time and trouble to sketch Kripke's view here, of course, because it

seems to me that any categorical denial of the possibility of reference- such as the one that many deconstructionists and various other critics believe to have been issued by Derrida- does not so much abandon as it merely inverts the theoretical problematic of direct reference. For, if it once is allowed that conflict (and, hence, domination) may occur in the social use of signs (it is clear that Derrida allows this), it no longer can be claimed that the values of signs are equally unsecured (it seems to me that sometimes Derrida claims this and sometimes not). In this respect, some deconstructionists purchase alleged grounds for epistemological uncertainty precisely at the cost of obscuring the role of social power in the process of fixing and disseminating references. The point here, of course, is that discussions of both reference and dissemination are doomed to repeat a vicious circle until and unless it is decided to break with epistemology altogether. Only in a different theoretical prob- lematic-one which is able to repudiate every form of concern with epistemological guarantees because it excludes all talk about epistemological certainty and/or uncertainty- can attempts be made to explore the consequences of positing the sociality and, hence, the variability of both the determinacies and the indeterminacies of signifying practices. As one protagonist of this essay has written in a manner that immediately recalls the other pro- tagonist and manner:

The whole history of the 'theory of knowledge' in Western philosophy from the famous 'Cartesian circle' to the circle of the Hegelian or Husserlian teleology of Reason shows us that this 'problem of knowledge' is a closed space.... Its high point of consciousness and honesty was reached precisely with the philosophy (Husserl) which was prepared to take theoretical responsibility for the necessary ex- istence of this circle, i.e., to think it as essential to its ideological undertaking; however, this did not make it leave the circle, did not deliver it from its ideological captivity- nor could the philosopher who has tried to think in an 'openness' (which seems to be only the ideological non-closure of the closure) the absolute condition of possibility of this 'closure,' i.e., of the closed history of the 'repetition' of this closure in Western metaphysics-Heidegger-leave this circle. It is impossible to leave a closed space simply by taking up a position merely outside it, either in its ex- terior or its profundity, they still belong to that circle, to that closed space, as its 'repetition' in its other-than-itself. Not the repetition but the non-repetition of this space is the way out of this circle: the sole theoretically sound flight- which is precisely not a flight, which is always committed to what it is fleeing from, but the radical foundation of a new space, a new problematic which allows the real prob- lem to be posed, the problem misrecognized in the recognition structure in which it is ideologically posed. [Althusser, Reading Capital 53]

For the remainder of this essay, therefore, I want to work with some of the conse- quences of positing a social basis for determinacy and indeterminacy in signification by try- ing to situate the discussion of reference and dissemination in a context that is devoid of epistemological concerns. In addition to allowing me to suggest a perhaps unexpected way of reading two of Derrida's so-called "antireferential" writings, exploring such consequences also will allow me to criticize, again from an odd perspective, the particular use given to the concept of "reproduction" by Althusser in his attempt to theorize the production of social relations. As will become clear, reproduction plays an important part not only in processes of reference but also in processes of dissemination: that is why so much depends on the use that eventually will be imparted to this concept here. Nevertheless, before proceeding fur-

40

ther, i should offer at least a crude abbreviation of what I think occurs in the process of reference [for more ample discussion, see my "Notes Toward a Theory of the Referent," and my Fiction and Reference, forthcoming 1986].

Within contemporary theory, it is Eco who establishes the possibility of discussing reference in a manner that forgoes epistemological concerns. He succeeds in this regard because his approach to reference assiduously avoids the "referential fallacy," which consists of the belief that an actual state of the world must underwrite the functioning of every semiotic entity. When seeking to determine the value of a reference, for example, Eco argues that it is quickly evident that "every attempt to establish what the referent of a sign is forces us to define the referent in terms of an abstract entity which moreover is only a cultural convention" [Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics 66]. From a semiotic point of view, therefore, the referent of a term can only be a cultural unit because any referent must be defined as an "interpretant," that is, as "another representation referred to the same 'object'" [Theory 68]. So it is that Eco claims that the Peircean notion of the interpretant "makes a theory of signification a rigorous science of cultural phenomena, while detaching it from a metaphysics of the referent" [Theory 70].

The theory of mentions also leads within Eco's semiotics to the same conclusion regard- ing the need to redefine the referent as an interpretant. Mentions, especially index-sensitive statements, constitute the most seemingly difficult group of semiotic phenomena to recon- cile to a notion of reference as a process that involves relations among cultural units (as op- posed to involving relations between representations and spatio-temporal objects). Indeed, the effective ability of mentions to indicate this particular reality apparently discredits any for- mulation of reference that is based on the potential for unlimited semiosis (as the theory of interpretants provides). If, however, the example of a person pointing toward a cat and say- ing "this is a cat" is considered, a semiotic analysis of this act demands that the perceptum connected to the speaker's forefinger be taken to represent the "token occurrence of a perceptual type so conceptually defined that the properties possessed by the perceptual model systematically correspond to the semantic properties of the sememe (cat ..." [Theory 164]. Hence,

the only solution seems to be: /this is a cat/ means "the semantic properties com- monly correlated by the linguistic code to the lexeme /cat/ coincide with the seman- tic properties that a zoological code correlates to that perceptum taken as an ex- pressive device." In other terms: both the word /cat/ and that token perceptum //cat// culturally stand for the same sememe. This solution undoubtedly looks rather Byzantine-but only if one is accustomed to thinking that a "true" perception represents an adequatio rei et intellectus or is a simplex apprehensio mirroring the thing, as the Schoolmen believed. But let us simply suppose that the expression /this is a cat/ is uttered in the presence of an iconic representation of a cat. All the above reasoning immediately becomes highly acceptable; we have a sign-vehicle (a) which is a linguistic expression to which a given content corresponds; and we have a sign- vehicle (b) which is an iconic expression to which a given content corresponds. In this case we are comparing two sets of semantic properties and /is/ can be read as /satisfactorily coincides/ (that is: the elements of the content plane of a code coin- cide with the elements of the content plane of another code; it is a simple process of transliteration). [Theory 164-65]

Moreover, despite any initial impression here that Eco's "process of transliteration" makes a surreptitious appeal to Frege's and Russell's "identifying descriptions," this last statement does not propose a revival of Fregean semantics. In the first place, Frege conceives reference to be a property that belongs to a single representation as one of its parts, whereas Eco con- ceives reference to be an effect that belongs to two or more representations as a chain of in- terpretants. In the second place, reference for Frege always involves a relation between a representation and a spatio-temporal object, whereas reference for Eco always involves a relation among cultural units. Finally, for Frege, the property of having reference means that a representation can be assigned a truth-value, whereas, as I shall show for Eco, the effect of having produced reference means simply that semiosis has come to a provisional halt.

diacritics / winter 1985 41

Now, there is no place in Eco's work where he explicitly sets forth the "theory of reference" that I am attributing to him. I believe that the foundations of this theory, however, are contained both in Eco's Theory and in his essay, "Peirce and the Semiotic Foundations of Openness: Signs as Texts and Texts as Signs" [The Role of the Reader 175-99]. In this latter work, Eco sets himself the task of explaining Peirce's sometimes confusing use of the terms "sign," "representamen," "interpretant," "ground," "meaning," "Immediate Object," and "Dynamic Object." Since I shall not be concerned here with Eco's discussion of Peirce's discrimination between "representamen" and "sign," which is based on the type/token distinction and an alleged difference between a semiotics of signification and a semiotics of communication, I shall include both types and tokens under the term "representamen" and, for the sake of convenience, treat "sign" and "representamen" as roughly equivalent terms.

The immediate importance of "Peirce and the Semiotic Foundations of Openness," therefore, resides first in Eco's discovery that there is no profound difference among the terms "interpretant," "ground," "meaning," and "Immediate Object": "Ground, meaning, and interpretant are in fact the same, since it is impossible to define the ground if not as a mean- ing, and it is impossible to define any meaning if not as a series of interpretants" [Role 184]; "The Immediate Object is the way in which the Dyanmic Object is focused, this 'way' being nothing else but the ground or meaning" [Role 183]. In fact, these terms do not constitute dif- ferent semiotic "objects" as much as they constitute different semiotic "functions" that can be fulfilled on the occasion of any particular act of semiosis by a variable set of semiotic "ob- jects." Just as an interpretant of the representamen of one sign function alternately can become the representamen of another sign function in which the representamen of the first sign function alternately can become an interpretant ("blue". .. "sad"; "sad". . . "blue"), so also any particular semiotic "object" may be installed variably as an "interpretant," "ground," or "Immediate Object" across different sign functions. Hence, Eco opts to define these terms relationally in accordance with their role in the production of a sign function: "The notion of ground serves to distinguish the Dynamic Object . . . from the Immediate Object, whereas the interpretant serves to establish the relationship between representamen and Immediate Object" [Role 183]. All of these terms thus are seen by Eco to register multiple functions of segmenting, selecting, and focusing a content continuum: the Dynamic Object "motivates" the representamen; the Immediate Object "represents in some aspects" the Dynamic Object and, thereby, constitutes the ground; the ground "composes" the meaning, as does the inter- pretant, insofar as the interpretant provides the means by which both the Immediate Object and the representamen can be "interpreted" [Role 183].

Yet, concurrently, Eco has affirmed his conviction that "ground, meaning, and interpre- tant are in fact the same"; thus, once having distinguished among these three as discrete semiotic functions, he then subsumes all of them as semiotic "objects" under the category of "interpretant." Recalling from Peirce, moreover, that the interpretant is not only the meaning of a term but also the conclusion that is drawn from the premises of an argument, Eco pro- ceeds to endorse Peirce's view of the meaning of a term not only as the translation of a sign into another sign but also as a "second assertion" that follows from the term itself taken as a first assertion. Underlying this view, of course, is Peirce's insight that semiosis works on the basis of abductive inference and not on the basis (as in Saussure) of coded equivalence and identity [see Eco, "The Theory of Signs and the Role of the Reader," The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 14:1, 35-47, and Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language 14-45]. Therefore, in part because meaning is conceptualized here as the result of an inferential process, and in part because of the multiplicity of function and the variability of agency that has been located within the sign function, Eco eventually is led to posit an en- cyclopedic function for the content of a representamen: "So the meaning is in some way en- tailed by the premise, and, in more general terms, meaning is everything that is semantically implied by a sign. One could thus say that, according to Peirce, the meaning of a sign in- choatively contains all the texts within which that sign can be inserted. A sign is a textual matrix.... In other words, the theory of interpretants (and of meaning) concerns [both] arguments [and] single terms, and, in the light of such a theory, the content of a single term becomes something similar to an encyclopedia" [Role 184-85].

It is in the notion of viewing signs as rudimentary texts that, for my purposes, the further importance of Eco's essay resides. At this point, it is possible to pose the question that I

42

obviously have deferred for some time: namely, what is the "referent"? The answer to this question first requires clarification of the distinction between the Dynamic Object and the Immediate Object:

There is a difference between the object of which a sign is a sign and the object of a sign: the former is the Dynamic Object, a state of the outer world; the latter is a semiotic construction and should be recognized as a mere object of the inner world, except that, in order to "describe" this "inner" object, one should make recourse to interpretants, that is, to other signs taken as representamen, therefore experiencing other objects of the outer world.

The Dynamic Object is - semiotically speaking- at our disposal only as a set of interpretants organized according to a compositional spectrum operationally struc- tured. But while being, from a semiotic point of view, the possible object of a con- crete experience, it is, from an ontological point of view, the concrete object of a possible experience. [Role 193]

The distinction between the Dynamic Object and the Immediate Object realizes two aims of Eco's essay. First, it helps to establish Eco's semiotics as a materialist enterprise because it amounts to the materialist philosophical thesis that the world exists independently of human consciousness. Second, by building upon Eco's dissolution of the concept of "sign" and his shift of focus to the concept of "sign function" [Theory 48-50] in recognition of the transitory nature of the correlations provided for semiotic elements by codes which themselves are conceived of as transitory [Theory 125-26], it enables Eco to set forth the notion that all semiosis is transitory. The principle of unlimited semiosis, for example, might seem to sug- gest that semiosis is continuous and eternal and thus that it occurs in an uninterrupted space. Yet this principle suggests only that semiosis is potentially unlimited; it serves as a theoretical premise that enables semiotics to avoid an essentialist view of both communication and signification by allowing for instability, indeterminacy, contradiction, and historical change in the processes of sign production and sign interpretation. Indeed, far from continuous and eternal, semiotic space in Eco's conception in highly discontinuous and volatile precisely because it results from multiple series of interrupted acts of semiosis. To put it bluntly: semioticians once considered "signs" to be immortal, but they now consider "sign functions" to be profoundly mortal (despite the fact that sign functions also are famous for their scan- dalous proclivities to resurrection and/or reincarnation!).

When do sign functions die, and what happens upon the occasion of their death? Eco suggests that sign functions die whenever a "final interpretant" is reached:

By producing series of immediate responses (energetic interpretants), a sign establishes step by step a habit, a regularity of behavior in the interpreter or user of that sign. A habit being "a tendency ... to behave in a similar way under similar cir- cumstances in the future" ([Peirce] 5.487), the final interpretant is, as a result, this habit ([Peirce] 5.491). ... This means that, after having received a series of signs and having variously interpreted them, our way of acting in the world is either transitor- ily or permanently changed. This new attitude, this pragmatic issue, is the final inter- pretant. At this point the unlimited semiosis stops (and this stopping is not final in a chronological sense, since our daily life is interwoven with those habit mutations). The exchange of signs produces modifications of the experience. The missing link between semiosis and physical reality as practical action has been found. The theory of interpretants is not an idealistic one. [Role 192, 194]

The mortality of sign functions, therefore, derives from the fact that, while "it is true that signs cannot give us a direct acquaintance with objects," signs can "prescribe what to do in order to realize this acquaintance" [Role 193]. Without stating it explicitly, Eco herz invokes Peirce's notion of the sign as a rudimentary text in order to suggest that a function of cotex- tual insertion is performed upon the "death" of a particular act of semiosis that is akin to the function of cotextual insertion that is performed by the ground upon the "birth" of a par- ticular act of semiosis. It will be recalled that the ground constitutes the Immediate Object by

diacritics / winter 1985 43

selecting and making pertinent certain attributes of the Dynamic Object. The ground thus marks the place where reality-and here I do not wish to limit "reality" to spatio-temporal objects but wish rather to have it mean something as shamefully vague as (heterogeneous) "states of affairs"- is appropriated by and for semiosis in the only way possible, that is, from a particular perspective (which is why the Dynamic Object as such remains only a postulate of a materialist semiotics). Similarly, I am suggesting that Eco's view of the final interpretant re- quires that it be conceived of as performing a discrete function and, thereby, also as con- stituting a semiotic "object," by selecting and making pertinent certain attributes of the Dynamic Object; the final interpretant thus marks the place where semiosis volatilizes in the act of "legislating" a state of affairs (actions, habits, laws, attitudes, behaviors, etc.) in the only way possible, that is, from a particular perspective.

Now, I propose that what Eco calls the final interpretant also may be considered as the "referent." Indeed, paralleling Eco's notion that the ground serves to distinguish between the Immediate Object and the Dynamic Object (see discussion above), it can be hypothesized that the notion of referent serves to distinguish between the Dynamic Object and the inter- pretant. As a semiotic function, therefore, the referent is the way in which the Dynamic Ob- ject is focused as a particular act of semiosis ceases, this "way" being nothing else but the (final) interpretant or meaning. Paralleling Eco's contention that there is no profound dif- ference among ground, Immediate Object, interpretant, and meaning, moreover, the referent also can be subsumed as a semiotic "object" under the category of interpretant, specifying, in this instance, that it constitutes the interpretant by means of which semiosis is brought to a provisional halt. In this way, by conceiving of the referent as performing a discrete semiotic function, and yet by conceiving of this function as capable of being per- formed by various semiotic "objects" across different sign functions, it is possible to avoid confusing the referent with either the Immediate Object or the Dynamic Object. To confuse the referent with the Immediate Object, of course, would be to consider that the process of moving from world to sign function to world passes twice through the Immediate Object and, hence, to violate Peirce's maxim (which ultimately is based upon his correct denial of the possibility of immediate perception) that a sign is something by knowing which something more can be known [8.332], as well as to violate Eco's maxim (which ultimately constitutes a correct thesis of the nonidentity of expression and content, of communication and interpretation, and of production and consumption) that "by interpretation ... we mean the concept elaborated by Peirce, according to which every interpretant ..., besides translating the Immediate Object or the content of the sign, also increases our understanding of it" [Semiotics and Philosophy 43]. Needless to say, moreover, to confuse the referent with the Dynamic Object would be to abandon a materialist perspective altogether precisely by returning to a traditional epistemological problematic.

Before bringing this understanding of reference to bear upon Derrida's essay, "White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy" [acques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy 207-71], 1 should like to borrow one more page from Eco, a page that also is relevant for my discussion of Althusser. This page concerns Eco's dissolution of the concept of metaphor into the concept of metonymy. In keeping with his view of the encyclopedic format of the sign function, Eco considers metaphor in fact to be an effect of metonymy: "each metaphor can be traced back to a subjacent chain of metonymic connections which constitute the framework of the code and upon which is based the constitution of any semantic field" [Role 68]. Rather than resulting from a process of substitution, therefore, metaphor, when ana- lyzed semiotically, is said to result from a process of displacement. Between the terms that are installed in any "metaphorical" sign function, for example, other interpretants necessarily intervene; it is the discursive elision of an unaccustomed number of such interpretants that accounts for the appearance of metaphor as a process of substitution. Yet the ascription of

meaning(s) to a metaphor depends precisely on the conscious or unconscious ability to grasp - or to invent- an underlying chain of interpretants that is capable of correlating a con- tent or content nebula to the "metaphorical" expression. In Eco's view, the effect of metaphor thus is produced by manifestly "shortcircuiting," or "bypassing," a series of inter- pretants that either are available as contiguous elements within a code or that are available as operators of code switches: "a metaphor can be invented because language, in its process

44

of unlimited semiosis, constitutes a multidimensional network of metonymies, each of which is explained by a cultural convention rather than by an original resemblance" [Role 78].

On this view, metaphors can be seen to acquire characteristics that rarely are attributed to them. If it is remembered that there are no signs but that there are only sign functions that install transitory correlations between expression elements and content elements, then

metaphors emerge as discursive operations that enact a desire to arrest unlimited semiosis. In other words, because they attempt to provide not only the (functional) beginning point but also the (provisional) end point of a chain of interpretants, metaphors should be understood as seeking to operate as "final" interpretants. For this same reason, metaphors should also be understood as constituting an especially coercive variety of sign function. Un-

willing to abandon signification to the full degree of indeterminacy that might be tolerated in

particular contexts of semiosis with respect to the selection and activation of interpretantial chains, metaphors gamble on an ability to prescribe a precise semantic path for interpretan- tial inference, as well as a precise distance that sign interpreters are to travel along it. Metaphors, in this sense, are among the products of paranoia. Conjuring a well-known thesis of psychoanalysis, it can be said that it is because metaphors are paranoid both in structure and in process that they can be identified with concepts and knowledges. Indeed, just as concepts do, metaphors act as if more than the usual stakes were involved in getting sign in-

terpreters to a specific place and in getting them to do a specific thing once they are there. Now, although I do not expect many people to agree with me, I am convinced - provi-

sionally, of course-that it is this understanding of metaphor that Derrida is after in "White

Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy." It is not that the familiar paraphrases of this

essay are wrong; it is simply that they are impoverished in comparison with the audacity and complexity of Derrida's argument. Commentators of "White Mythology" usually would have it that the essay shows that, despite repeated attempts to do so, philosophical discourse can never escape the effects of metaphor: "In theory, metaphors are contingent features of

philosophical discourse; though they may play an important role in expressing and

elucidating concepts, they ought in principle to be separable from the concepts and their

adequacy or inadequacy, and indeed separating essential concepts from the rhetoric in which they are expressed is a fundamental philosophical task. But when one attempts to per- form this task, not only is it difficult to find concepts that are not metaphorical, but the very terms in which one defines this philosophical task are themselves metaphorical" [onathan Culler, On Deconstruction 147]. This is well enough, but it seems to me that potentially much more goes on in Derrida's essay than a reversal of hierarchy between the terms

metaphor and concept or between the terms rhetoric and philosophy. Because most deconstructionists and Marxists alike content themselves with having extracted this par- ticular kernel from its shell, however, they generally hold that, by demonstrating the metaphoricity of concepts, "White Mythology"- rightly or wrongly- also demonstrates the

impossibility of reference. What else can be said to happen in this essay that would suggest that its commentators

proceed overhastily in ascribing to it an outright dismissal of reference? I would propose that the most important effect of the essay is to dissolve the concept of metaphor itself. Derrida

argues that philosophers traditionally have maintained an ambivalent attitude toward metaphor: "The philosophical evaluation of metaphor always has been ambiguous: metaphor is dangerous and foreign as concerns intuition (vision or contact), concept (the grasping or proper presence of the signified), and consciousness (proximity or self-presence); but it is in complicity with what it endangers, is necessary to it in the extent to which the de- tour is a re-turn guided by the function of resemblance (mimesis or homoibsis), under the law of the same" [Margins 270]. In other words, philosophers apply to their evaluation of metaphors the same criterion of representation as resemblance that they apply to their evaluation of the adequacy or inadequacy of concepts. While regarding metaphors as in- stances of the provisional loss of meaning, therefore, philosophers continue to promote the traditional view of metaphor- namely, that metaphorical relations are constituted on the basis of resemblance- by considering metaphors as valuable starting points for the journey back to (full) meaning. So it is that Derrida makes certain to attack the notion of metaphor as resemblance at his earliest opportunity: "Metaphor has always been defined as the trope of

diacritics / winter 1985 45

resemblance; not simply as the resemblance between a signifier and a signified but as the resemblance between two signs, one of which designates the other. ... It goes without say- ing that far from belonging to this problematic and sharing its presuppositions, the question of metaphor, such as we are repeating it here, on the contrary should delimit them" [Margins 215].

Instructively enough, once it has been launched, Derrida's attack on the notion of metaphor takes precisely the form of a sustained reduction of metaphor to metonymy. This strategy is evident throughout the essay in the persistence with which Derrida causes metaphor to be seen as an effect; the production of this effect is portrayed as a function of interpretantial chains, implicit narratives, disguised code switching, discursive displacements, and syntax in general:

Where has it ever been seen that there is the same relation between the sun and its rays as between sowing and seeds? If this analogy imposes itself-and it does - then it is that within language the analogy itself is due to a long and hardly visible chain whose first link is quite difficult to exhibit, and not only for Aristotle. Rather than a metaphor, do we not have here an "enigma," a secret narrative, com- posed of several metaphors, a powerful asyndeton or dissimulated conjunction, whose essential characteristic is "to describe a fact in an impossible combination of words.... "[Margins 243]

If I say that the evening is the old age of the day, or that old age is the evening of life, "the evening," although having the same sense, will no longer designate the same things. By virtue of its power of metaphoric displacement, signification will be in a kind of state of availability, between the nonmeaning preceding language (which has a meaning) and the truth of language which would say the thing such as it is, in act, properly. [Margins 241]

Now, it is because the metaphoric is plural from the outset that it does not escape syntax; and that it gives rise, in philosophy too, to a text which is not exhausted in the history of its meaning (signified concept or metaphoric tenor: thesis), in the visi- ble or invisible presence of its theme (meaning and truth of Being). But it is also because the metaphoric does not reduce syntax, and on the contrary organizes its divisions within syntax, that it gets carried away with itself, cannot be what it is ex- cept in erasing itself, indefinitely constructing its destruction. [Margins 268]

Furthermore, it is exactly through his reduction of metaphor to metonymy that Derrida is able to effect his identification of concepts and referents with metaphors. Having dismissed the notion of metaphor as resemblance, for example, he can dismiss the belief that philosophical discourse works so as to rectify metaphors by concepts, since, in the philosophical tradition he contests, the notion of conceptual adequacy depends on a notion of concept as resemblance that goes hand in hand with the notion of metaphor as resemblance. Similarly, having dismissed the notion of metaphor as resemblance, he can dismiss the belief that reference represents "original, unique, and irreplaceable" beings [Margins 243], since, in the same philosophical tradition, the notion of reference is the notion of concept as resemblance (to a natural object), which, again, remains part and parcel of the notion of metaphor as resemblance. Derrida thus ends by equating metaphor and concept as well as by equating metaphor and referent:

Are not all metaphors, strictly speaking, concepts and is there any sense in setting metaphor against concept? Does not a scientific critique's rectification rather pro- ceed from an inefficient tropic-concept that is poorly constructed, to an operative tropic-concept that is more refined and powerful in a given field and at a deter- minate phase of the scientific process? [Margins 264]

Above we said that the sun is the unique, irreplaceable, natural referent, around which everything must turn, toward which everything must turn. Now, following

46

the same route, however, we must reverse the proposition: the literally, properly named sun, the sensory sun, does not furnish poor knowledge solely because it fur- nishes poor metaphors, it is itself solely metaphorical .... Each time that there is a

metaphor, there is doubtless a sun somewhere; but each time there is sun, metaphor has begun .... T]he sun is metaphorical always, already .... [Margins 251]

To equate both concepts and referents with metaphors, however, should not be taken here to imply that Derrida dismisses the possibility of concepts and reference. In the signify- ing economy of "White Mythology," to identify concepts and referents with metaphors does not mean at all that concepts and referents must be seen as impossibilities; it means only that a certain traditional conception of concepts and reference must be seen as impossible. The

logic of this essay in fact makes concepts and references impossible only to the extent that

metaphor itself is made impossible, that is, to the extent that a certain traditional conception of metaphor- namely, metaphor as resemblance- is made impossible. Yet, in having un-

done this traditional conception of metaphor, Derrida has succeeded in demonstrating that

metaphor is possible as an effect of metonymy. It should follow, therefore, that concepts and reference are possible if they are conceived of as metonymic processes. This is a possibility to which I later shall return not only in discussing Althusser's notion of reference but also in

discussing Derrida's notion of dissemination. If it is overhasty to conclude from "White Mythology" that reference is impossible, there

nevertheless exist two features of this essay that may be said to encourage its commentators to view it as an antireferential text. The first of these features concerns the discursive treat- ment of the question of power in relation to metaphors and referents. On the one hand, the referent is always portrayed in this essay as the effect of a process that produces an (illusory) situation of univocal signification; thus, it is always clear that reference is a process that im-

plements power because - to borrow Peirce's term - it is seen as "legislating" a state of af- fairs. On the other hand, metaphor usually is portrayed as the effect of a process that pro- duces a (real) situation of multiple significations; thus, it sometimes appears that, rather than

implementing power, metaphor serves to negate power: "Marking the moment of the turn or

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i 1 1l

47 diacritics / winter 1985

of the detour ... during which meaning might seem to venture forth alone, unloosed from the very thing it aims at however, from the truth which attunes it to its referent, metaphor also opens a wandering of the semantic" [Margins 241]. So it is that there emerges in "White Mythology" a tendency to permit a logic of supplementarity to take hold in which metaphor plays a liberating role in response to the coercive role played by reference. Nevertheless, in having established an identification of referents with metaphors, Derrida's overall argument would seem to require precisely that the now generalized effect of metaphor be seen rather as a ubiquitous process of implementing power. This would be clear if commentators con- sistently recalled that the philosophical text, which, for Derrida in this essay, is the referential text par excellence, always is said to remain "within metaphor" [Margins 258]; indeed, in an act of consummate power, it is metaphor itself that establishes the conditions of possibility for philosophy. Related to this tendency to impose a logic of supplementarity on the opposi- tion between metaphor and referent, moreover, is Derrida's unfortunate deployment of the traditional philosophical definition of reference as a relation between a representation and a spatio-temporal object. Hence, the second feature of this essay that encourages its commen- tators to regard it as announcing the impossibility of reference is that, although he deconstructs it, Derrida imports into his argument, and uses it as the core of his definition of reference, the very axiom of existence upon which the analytic theory of reference depends. Were Derrida to have concerned himself less with "natural" referents (such as the sun) and more with "cultural" reference, therefore, he might have constructed less of a "straw" version of reference, and the relation between metaphor and power would have remained more constantly in view.

In this regard, it is Althusser's great strength that he refuses to accept the axiom of ex- istence when discussing issues related to reference. Althusser bases his anti-epistemological arguments in Reading Capital, for example, on Marx's defense in the 1857 Introduction of the methodological necessity for distinguishing between the real object ("which 'survives in its independence, after as before, outside the head"' [Reading Capital 41]) and the object of knowledge ("a product of the thought which produces it in itself as a thought-concrete" [Reading Capital 41]). He recalls that Marx justifies such a distinction on the grounds that it involves not only these two objects but also the specificity of their respective processes of production. Indeed, the mode of production of knowledge differs from the way in which the real at various levels may be said to produce itself in that the type of object upon which thought works, the methods it has at hand to effect value-producing transformations, and the entities so produced all remain irreducible to the status of the real object. Thus, Althusser's claim that the production of knowledge takes place entirely within knowledge does not signal some sort of idealist lapse; it indicates rather that thought produces its own object as an object of knowledge, which is a concept that in no way is to be identified with the real ob- ject. While affirming, therefore, that thought maintains determinate relations with the real, Althusser argues that knowledge remains a "peculiar structure, a determinate type of 'com- bination' (Verbindung) between its peculiar raw material . . . its peculiar means of produc- tion, and its relations with other structures of society" [Reading Capital 42].

For Althusser, the production of knowledge thus characteristically begins "from the abstract, from a generality, and not from a real concrete" [For Marx 190] and eventually transforms this kind of raw material into a "concrete-in-thought," which can be called knowledge ("the knowledge of an empirical existence and not that empirical existence itself" [For Marx 189]). He insists on an abstraction as the raw material for the production of knowledge because, if it were maintained that the starting point was the sensuous object itself, then there would result an empiricist/idealist definition of knowledge as an essence ex- tracted from an original and immediate confrontation with the real object. So it is that Althusser observes that the objects about which scientific investigations attempt to produce knowledges are represented to the process of investigation always in the form of cultural units, a toujours-deja-donnee formation of "matter already elaborated and transformed precisely by the imposition of the complex (sensuous-technical-ideological) structure which constitutes it as an object of knowledge . . ." [Reading Capital 43].

Subsequently, the transformations performed by a scientific methodology on an object of knowledge produce what Althusser calls a "knowledge effect." Insofar as it registers a repudiation of an empiricist notion of the process of scientific verification, the concept of the

48

knowledge effect enables Marxism to overcome "a metaphysics of the referent" because it entails the view that science is a discursive practice. With the object of knowledge methodologically separated from the real object, "Truth as resemblance" no longer serves as a criterion that governs the validity of scientific concepts and procedures. Hence, the verification question (in terms of an epistemology of resemblance) disappears, and the con- cern of science becomes focused upon its discursive systemization and effectivity. Such a concern can be said to promote an open-ended conception of scientific knowledge, one which views knowledge as culturally produced and as constantly amenable to revision, ex- pansion, and overturning.

(This view strikes many "materialists," of course, as almost heretical, for they consider that to uphold the notion that scientific concepts are historical elaborations rather than reflections of true Being forces one to abandon the notion of practice altogether. Actually, the only notion of practice that Althusser's formulations force one to abandon is the notion of a practice whose effects are guaranteed in advance by the theory that claims already to "know" them. Although the occasional nature of his writings [the Twentieth Party Congress, the Sino-Soviet split, etc.] often leads him to convey the impression of an unregenerated theoreticism because of the particular polemics in which he engages, Althusser, by stressing the incommensurability of objects of knowledge and real objects, fully implies a more im- portant role for practice as practice than even that which usually is championed by more "or- thodox" Marxists. Since, however, I do not have sufficient space here to defend Althusser on the question of the specificity [which is not the same as the autonomy] of science or theory, I only can state my conviction that any intelligent materialist account of knowledge must begin-as Althusser's does-by positing some such statement as, "Signs cannot give us a direct acquaintance with objects, since they can only prescribe what to do in order to realize this acquaintance" [Eco, Role 193]. Indeed, the importance and specificity of practice is upheld by this statement in so unequivocal a way that I often am tempted to consider it as a direct corollary of the materialist premise that the world exists independently of human con- sciousness.

Furthermore, to those deconstructionists who either recoil in horror or curl their lips in derision at the mere mention of"science," I can suggest only that it seems to me that Derrida himself is more interested in understanding science differently than in making some ineffec- tive humanist gesture of pooh-poohing science away. One does not refer to "inefficient" tropic-concepts, to "operative" tropic concepts, or to the exercise of power "in a given field and at a determined phase of the scientific process" if one simply repudiates science altogether [Margins 241]. Again, the question here, as it is posed by both Althusser and Der- rida, is one of denying validity to a certain essentialist conceptualization of science in favor of a more historical understanding of science as a discourse that maintains variable yet, in con- crete historical conjunctures, determinate relations to other discourses and to various social practices.)

In this light, it is useful to indicate the kind of relationship that Althusser discerns between concepts and metaphors in the process of producing knowledge. There can be no denying that a number of passages surface in Althusser's texts in which he participates in the traditional philosophical pastime of either abjuring metaphors or belaboring them for not having matured into concepts. Nevertheless, I believe that Althusser- in his heart of hearts, of course- generally considers not only that concepts are metaphors in and for theory but also that concepts are to be understood as operating metonymically so as to move the users of concepts along specific interpretantial chains in order that they may arrive at a specific place and perform a specific act:

We have seen Marx practising this concept [of the effectivity of a structure on its elements] in the use he makes of the 'Darstellung,' and trying to pinpoint it in the images of changes in the illumination or in the specific weight of objects by the ether in which they are immersed, and it is sometimes directly exposed in Marx's analyses, in passages where it is expressed in a novel but extremely precise language: a language of metaphors which are nevertheless already almost perfect concepts, and which are perhaps only incomplete insofar as they have not yet been grasped, i.e., retained and elaborated as concepts. [Reading Capital 192]

diacritics / winter 1985 49

For [Marx], this tacit identity (phenomenon-essence-truth of. . .) of the economic and the political disappears in favour of a new conception of the relation between determinant instances in the structure-superstructure complex which constitutes the essence of any social formation. Of course, these specific relations between struc- ture and superstructure still deserve theoretical elaboration and investigation. However, Marx has at least given us the 'two ends of the chain,'and has told us to find out what goes on between them.... [For Marx 111]

If it is remembered that Althusser separates the object of knowledge from the real object and that he views the validity of a theoretical discourse as a function of its discursive systemiza- tion and effectivity, then what these passages convey is precisely an understanding of con- cepts as "tropic-concepts," that is, as discursive operations that provisionally enable one to accomplish specific tasks by activating various series of metonymical chains in and for specific circumstances. Here Althusser can be said to acknowledge the metaphorical basis of concepts without at the same time abandoning the view that concepts actually can serve to put individuals in a position "to have something to do" with the world. Concepts, in other words, are seen by Althusser as operating as final interpretants.

That is why it is all the more surprising and disappointing that, when Althusser comes to focus his attention on the most famous metaphor within Marxism, he forgets both that con- cepts are metaphors and that metaphors are metonymies. The metaphor in question is the "base-superstructure" metaphor, and the relevant passages are these:

It is easy to see that this representation of the structure of every society as an edifice containing a base (infrastructure) on which are erected the two 'floors' of the superstructure, is a metaphor, to be quite precise, a spatial metaphor: the metaphor of a topography (topique). Like every metaphor, this metaphor suggests something, makes something visible. What? Precisely this: that the upper floors could not 'stay up' (in the air) alone, if they did not rest precisely on their base .... I believe that it is possible and necessary to think what characterizes the essential of the existence and nature of the superstructure on the basis of reproduction. Once one takes the point of view of reproduction, many of the questions whose existence was indicated by the spatial metaphor of the edifice, but to which it could not give a conceptual answer, are immediately illuminated.... [Lenin and Philosophy 134-35, 136]

It is obvious that a residual notion of metaphor as a valuable starting point for the journey toward (full) meaning damagingly informs these passages. It is also clear that Althusser does not consider the "concept" of reproduction itself to be metaphorical, since he sets it over and against the "metaphor" of base-superstructure. So it is that there emerges here another logic of supplementarity involving concept and metaphor. Furthermore, if the price that Derrida pays for sometimes constructing reference (concepts) and metaphor as a binary opposition is the underestimation of the relation between metaphor and power, it can be demonstrated that the price that Althusser pays for constructing the concept of "reproduction" and the metaphor of "base-superstructure" as a binary opposition is an overestimation of the relation between production and power.

Many readers will have recognized that the relevant discussion appears in Althusser's essay, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation," from which the last quoted passages are taken [Lenin 127-86]. It is in this essay that Althusser sets forth his view that the role of ideology within any given mode of production is that of secur- ing the reproduction of the social relations of production. This view has been criticized in three separate works by Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst (Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production, 1975; Mode of Production and Social Formation, 1977; and by Hirst alone, On Law and Ideology, 1979), who present a critique of what has come to be known as functionalism and who take as their starting point the classical Marxist definition of the mode of production as an articulation of forces of production and relations of production. Within any established mode of production, of course, forces and relations of production traditionally are said to "correspond," and each is said to fulfill specific functions that enable the maintenance of the mode of production as a whole. According to Hindess and Hirst, however, if these functions

50

are taken as providing the fully adequate concepts of the forces and relations of production, and if such functions are conceived of as being essentially reproductive in nature, then a so- called functionalist view of the social formation necessarily arises. Marx maintains, for exam- ple, that the initial and indispensable function of production within any mode of production is the reproduction of the means (forces) of production. Althusser maintains, moreover, that the function of ideology within any mode of production is the reproduction of the relations of production. Now, if these functions are construed as completely determinant of their con- cepts, and if these concepts are articulated in a relation of correspondence to one another, then the concept of "mode of production" must be seen as designating an eternal structure. That is, once it is conceived that productive forces and relations "correspond" and that they functionally reproduce themselves in this relation of correspondence, it becomes impossible to theorize any conditions under which something on the order of a "transitional" phase of

"noncorrespondence" can occur. This means, of course, not only that no account can be rendered of past historical change, but also that no strategy can be calculated for promoting future historical change; it also explains why the issue of functionalism is so important for Marxist theory today.

I want to suggest that the question of the concept of mode of production stands here in the same position as the question of the concept of sign did earlier. Indeed, theory once had it that signs were immortal and found it necessary to construct the concept of their death in order to account for the history of both their determinacies and indeterminacies: so also now with modes of production. This analogy between signs and modes of production, moreover, provides a clue to the identity of the undertheorized concept that generally has impeded conceptualization of the death of modes of production: namely, the concept of representa- tion. Indeed, Hirst targets representation precisely as this spoiler in On Law and Ideology [68-73], but he does so the easy way (as does Derrida in "White Mythology") by making the

concept of representation mean representation as resemblance [Law 70-72]. The problem is a good deal more subtle, however, for, in Althusser's case, it involves, not just the notion of

representation as resemblance, but the notion of representation as production. This can be

glimpsed initially if one recalls what it is exactly that Althusser thinks that the concept of reproduction makes visible: "As Marx said, every child knows that a social formation which did not reproduce the conditions of production at the same time as it produced would not last a year" [Lenin 127]. Nevertheless, as I shall show, there is a grave problem with this sentence in that it is often taken as suggesting that a process of production is capable of

reproducing its own conditions of production. The sentence that follows this one in Althusser's text, furthermore, is even more misleading: "The ultimate condition of produc- tion is therefore the reproduction of the conditions of production" [Lenin 127]. This latter

sentence, of course, would not have been true for a process of production that did not repro- duce itself, nor would it be true for a process of production that did not seek to be repro- duced. (Allow me to note in passing that Marxism is deeply committed to the possible exis- tence of a mode of production that does not seek to reproduce itself: this possibility is figured in the concepts, or metaphors, if you will, of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and the

"withering away of the state.") Thus, Althusser's sentence logically should read: "The ultimate condition of reproduction is therefore the reproduction of the conditions of production."

What is happening, then, in Althusser's text? In deploying the tropic-concept of

reproduction as one that enables conceptualization of the relation between the conditions of

production and production itself, Althusser immediately poses the problem of production as a general problem of representation (re[-]presentation). The difficulty here is that the par- ticular form that Althusser gives to this general problem of representation is that of the

notoriously false semiotic problem of "doubles." Yet if one asks, as Althusser does, "how are the conditions of production to be represented in the process of production in a manner that secures the reproduction of the process of production?," the only possible answer- which is not the one Althusser provides- is that "the conditions of production cannot be represented in the process of production in a manner that secures the reproduction of the process of pro- duction." I insist on this view because, in the sense that it is given by Althusser, "reproduc- tion" means "duplication," and - I am tempted to say, "as every child knows"-"to duplicate is not to represent" [Eco, Theory 1801: "Given a wooden cube of a given size, matter, color, weight, surface structure and so on, and if I produce another cube possessing all the same

diacritics / winter 1985 51

properties (that is, if I shape the same continuum according to the same form) I have pro- duced not a sign of the first cube, but simply another cube. ... It is a matter of equal pro- duction conditions and procedures" [Theory 180]. It should be evident, therefore, that a specific process of production is capable of being "reproduced" in the sense of being "duplicated" only in those cases in which its conditions of production already have been represented to it and for it. So it is that the reproduction of the conditions of production can- not be thought of as the autochthonous effect of the representation of the conditions of pro- duction within a process of production, because every process of production - if indeed it is to be reproduced at all- requires the representation of its conditions of production in ad- vance and, as Eco's formulation implies, by some other process of production. This is a com- plicated way of indicating, of course, that the reproduction of a process of production can- not be conceived of independently from the processes of consumption that surround it.

Does the fact that "to duplicate is not to represent" mean that representation has nothing to do with reproduction? No, it means precisely that representation has everything to do with reproduction but nothing to do with production. Although Althusser suggests that production does represent itself by reproducing its conditions of production on its own, I am suggesting that, from the second time around to infinity, production is a process that may duplicate itself but which cannot represent itself. Rather, the representation of the conditions of production for the reproduction of the process of production can only be accomplished through the intervention of the process of consumption, that is, through the intervention of the various means by which the results of a given process of production are submitted to the effects of other processes of production. This is the definition of consumption, and it is also the theoretical conclusion that is called for by Marx's insight that reproduction cannot be thought of as taking place at the level of the firm [Althusser, Lenin 129]. Yet Althusser uses Marx's insight instead to eliminate considerations of consumption altogether. In so doing, he constructs the sphere of production as a homogeneous space and empties it of any potential sources of effective and successful contradiction; for, if it is the mere "fact" of production itself that provides for the reproduction (re[-]presentation) of the conditions of production of any specific process of production, then that process of production must be deemed to be eternal.

It is in this sense that Althusser overestimates the relation between production and power. By empowering production to guarantee the reproduction of its own conditions of production, he insures immortality for any mode of production once it has been established. Now, this view results directly from Althusser's habit of treating "representation" as a tropic- concept that is metonymically linked in theoretical discourse (and not just in the theoretical discourse of Marxism) with production rather than with reproduction. Here a particular no- tion of representation (as duplication and as based on resemblance or correspondence) serves as a metaphor (tropic-concept) for a particular notion of production (as autochthonous). What advantage would accrue, then, from breaking the metonymic chain that links such an inefficient tropic-concept of representation with another such inefficient tropic-concept of production and from replacing it with a metonymic chain that links a more operative tropic-concept of representation (as based on inference) with a more operative tropic-concept of reproduction (as involving consumption)? In the past, representation has served as a tropic-concept for production and, in so doing, has forced duplication to serve as a tropic-concept for reproduction. This has led to an impasse in which it has become im- possible to theorize the death of modes of production, even though, fortunately, modes of production have been dying like flies throughout history. If these terms are reshuffled so that reproduction is analyzed as a process of representation (based on inference) rather than as a process of duplication, however, reproduction becomes the operative tropic-concept of a historical process and relation between production and consumption and no longer stands as the inefficient tropic-concept of an alleged essential structure and self-identity belonging to production itself. One can agree with Althusser, for example, that the reproduction of a pro- cess of production depends on the reproduction of its conditions of production. Yet one must immediately emphasize with Marx that every process of production is simultaneously a process of consumption. One then must understand that Marx's insight that reproduction cannot be thought of as taking place at the level of the firm indicates that every specific pro- cess of production is a process of consumption, not for itself, but for another specific process

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(or processes) of production. That is why, in contrast to Althusser's view that a process of

production can provide for its own reproduction, it must be concluded that the reproduction of the conditions of production of a specific process of production depends on the produc- tion of its conditions of production by another specific process of production. In the margin of indeterminacy that is introduced by the multiplication and variability of agency stipulated by this last formulation, of course, there resides the theoretical possibility and the practical potential for historical change.

It may seem that this lengthy discussion of Althusser's work has had little to do with a

theory of reference, but, in fact, I have been discussing nothing but reference all along. In the first place, I have shown that Althusser's separation of the object of knowledge from the real object, as well as his view of theory as characterized by its discursive systemization and

effectivity, suggest an understanding of concepts as operating metonymically; this casts his

formulations in a light in which they can resonate constructively not only with Derrida's

understanding of metaphor but also with Eco's understanding of final interpretants. The no-

tion of reference that implicitly informs Althusser's work is indeed none other than that of a

process through which the users of concepts place themselves in a position "to have to do with the world" in specific ways and from specific perspectives by tracing the interpretantial chains that concepts-as tropic-concepts or metaphors-potentially provide through their

encyclopedic (metonymic) formats. In the second place, by criticizing the particular metonymic relations that Althusser establishes between the concepts of representation and

production and by arguing that such relations should be established between representation and reproduction, I have sought to lay the groundwork for a view of reference that forgoes the guarantees that Althusser accords to the meanings and effects of representation-as- production. Although I have had to work toward it in a more abstract fashion, my point is

ultimately the same one that Michel de Certeau makes in his general introduction to The Practice of Everyday Life:

To a rationalized, expansionist and at the same time centralized, clamorous, and

spectacular production corresponds another production, called "consumption." The

53 diacritics / winter 1985

latter is devious, it is dispersed, but it insinuates itself everywhere, silently and almost

invisibly, because it does not manifest itself through its own products, but rather

through its ways of using the products imposed by a dominant economic order. For instance, the ambiguity that subverted from within the Spanish colonizers'

"success" in imposing their own culture on the indigenous Indians is well known. Submissive, and even consenting to their subjection, the Indians nevertheless often made of the rituals, representations, and laws imposed on them something quite dif- ferent from what their conquerors had in mind; they subverted them not by reject- ing or altering them, but by using them with respect to ends and references foreign to the system they had no choice but to accept .... The strength of their difference lay in procedures of "consumption." To a lesser degree, a similar ambiguity creeps into our societies through the use made by the "common people" of the culture disseminated and imposed by the "elites" producing the language. [xii-xiii]

In addition to furnishing a certain closure, this last passage also furnishes a certain pretext. I should like to conclude my essay, therefore, with four short observations about the tropic-concept of dissemination as it appears both inside and outside Derrida's essay, "Dissemination" [in Dissemination 287-366]. My first observation is that the major difficulty with this essay surfaces in its tendency again to construct its argument around a binary op- position that imposes a logic of supplementarity in which the relationship between dissemination and power is occluded. In "Dissemination," for example, Derrida distinguishes between scission and dissemination. Scission is defined as a necessary violence (castration) performed upon a text in order to open discourse anew. Dissemination is what can happen after scission: it is defined as a material transfer of the products of scission to new discursive contexts in the interest of proliferating meanings and making reference problematic. Derrida does not claim, however, that dissemination is the only thing that can happen after scission, for scission itself is said to be capable of perpetuation in the form of mimesis. So it is that, on the one hand, scission seems to belong to dissemination because of its role as the necessary condition for dissemination and, on the other hand, scission seems not to belong to dissemination because of its role as the binary opposite of dissemination. In a textual economy in which scission is made to signify violence, and dissemination simultaneously is made to signify violence and the negation of violence, it is indeed difficult to avoid the con- clusion that scission establishes a power that dissemination seeks to relinquish.

Nevertheless, and this is my second observation, dissemination should be viewed precisely as a vigorous process of implementing power. Gregory Ulmer rightly has suggested with regard to "Dissemination" that "Derrida's desire to superimpose one text on the other (the program to which mimicry is addressed) is an attempt to devise a system of reference or representation which works in terms of differance" ["The Object of Post-Criticism," in The Anti-Aesthetic 93]. Importantly, as portrayed by Ulmer and as practiced by Derrida, this system of reference depends not a notion of representation as production but, rather, on a notion of representation as reproduction. What is at stake in the program of dissemination, then, is the exact possibility of consuming cultural products in an effectively different way. Indeed, the "superimposition" or mimicry that Derrida both enacts and promotes in "Dissemination" can be seen as an attempt to install "metaphorical" relations between one text and another precisely in the sense of opening "a wandering of the semantic" [Derrida, Margins 241]. Yet, as is demonstrated by Derrida in both "White Mythology" and "Dissemination," such a "metaphorical" process works on the basis of elaborating new metonymical relations between texts by shifting the contexts that enable such texts to acquire references. In miming a text in and for specific contexts of signification, therefore, dissemination constitutes an attempt to provide the (functional) beginning point and the (provisional) end point of a (new) chain of interpretants. Insofar as it may succeed in doing so, dissemination thus constitutes one of the potentially more coercive varieties of sign func- tion. This is what I meant at the beginning of my essay when I alluded to the "implacability" of Derrida's style.

Of course, there can be no question of attributing an intrinsic politics to such a style; its politics will arise from the uses to which it is put and the effectivity that it may claim in specific contexts of signification. Yet, my third observation is that it must be recognized that

54

Althusser's entire project within Marxism has been one of implacably seeking to shift the political contexts in and for which certain Marxist texts and certain Marxist concepts acquire their references. That Althusser attempts to achieve such a goal with respect to texts such as Capital, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, and Materialism and Empirio- Criticism, as well as with respect to concepts such as dialectic, ideology, and contradiction, is well known. What is less often recognized - or, rather, acknowledged - is that Althusser has attempted to do the same thing with the second most famous metaphor within Marxism: namely, the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Firmly embedded in the discourse of Stalinism, this concept was thrown out of Marxist political rhetoric in Western Europe at the time in which various national communist parties embraced the movement known as Eurocommunism. Indeed, in the debates that took place in France over this issue in the 1970s, Althusser defended the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat at the same time as the French communist party proved that you do not eradicate Stalinism simply by refusing to pronounce the words "dictatorship of the proletariat." It seemed to me then -and it still seems to me now - that, in attempting to keep the importance of the struggle for state power in view through his defense of the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, Althusser was emphasizing to Marxists that to neglect this phase of reversal is to forget that the struc- ture of the opposition is one of conflict and subordination and thus to pass too swiftly, without gaining any purchase against the former opposition, to a neutralization which in

practice leaves things in their former state and deprives one of any means of intervening ef-

fectively. Furthermore, it seems to me that Althusser attempted not only to disseminate a dif- ferent set of references for the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat but also to make it possible for Marxists to begin to view this concept precisely as the metaphor of an explicitly political practice of dissemination. At least that is why- no doubt in a purely idiosyncratic way-I now can read the following passage from Ernest Mandel's Revolutionary Marxism Today as endeavoring to make this very point:

It is irresponsible- even criminal- for revolutionaries to seek to oppose the concept of 'dictatorship of the proletariat' or 'people's power' to democratic freedoms. On the contrary, any tactic or initiative of revolutionaries that allows the masses to learn, through their own experience, that the extension of their own freedom conflicts with the repressive institutions of bourgeois democracy is not only extremely useful but even indispensable. The most symbolic and synthetic example is that of freedom of the press; it is here that the Portuguese revolution was blown off course and that there was great confusion which the bourgeoisie and Social Democracy were able to turn to their advantage.

What lessons should we draw from initiatives such as those of the Republica or Radio Renas(enca workers? Certainly not that we want to suppress the right of any political party to publish its own papers in a regime of soviet democracy. There can be absolutely no question of that. What is at issue is the broadening of the freedom of the press to include print-shop workers, radio-station workers, as well as workers' commissions and groups within every workplace. They too need the right to express themselves freely in the press - even if they do not have the means to express themselves with the same regularity as political parties. In other words, our aim is to break the monopoly of private ownership, and even of political party ownership, not in the sense of taking away anyone's present right of expression, but in the sense of extending that right to others. [16-17]

Now, lest all that seems a bit much, let me offer a fourth observation about dissemina- tion without comment. The Great Communicator is the Great Disseminator; no one understands the relationships among reference, dissemination, and power better than Ronald Reagan:

In Washington, President Reagan reiterated Friday that he is against sending troops to Central America, but urged conservatives to show the rightist rebels of Nicaragua "that the U.S. supports them with more than just pretty words and good wishes."

diacritics/ winter 1985 55

In a speech prepared for delivery at the 12th annual Conservative Political Action Conference dinner, Reagan continued the administration's push for renewed CIA backing of the rebels, which Congress had suspended last year. In a recent radio ad- dress, Reagan referred to the rebels, known as contras, for their opposition to Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government, as "our brothers." "They are our brothers, these freedom fighters, and we owe them our help," he said. "They are the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers, and the brave men and women of the French Resistance. We cannot turn away from them." [Des Moines Register, 2 March 1985]

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