8

Toward a Critique of the Political
Economy of the Sign

The critique of the political economy of the sign proposes to develop the analysis of the sign form, just as the critique of political economy once set out to analyze the commodity form.

Since the commodity comprises simultaneously exchange value and use value, its total analysis must encompass the two sides of the system. Similarly, the sign is at once signifier and signified; and so the analysis of the sign form must be established on two levels. Concurrently, of course, the logical and strategic analysis of the relation between the two terms is pressed upon us, thus:

1. Between the system of exchange value (EV) and that of use value (UV), or between the commodity form and the object form: this was the attempt in the preceding article.

2. Between the systems of the signifier and the signified (or between their respective codes, which define the articulation of sign value and the sign form).

In both cases, this (internal) relation is established as a hierarchical function between a dominant form and an alibi (or satellite) form, which is the logical crowning and ideological completion of the first.

1. THE MAGICAL THINKING OF IDEOLOGY

The effect of this homological structuration of values in what can conveniently be called the fields of economy and of signification is to displace the whole process of ideology and to theorize it in radically different terms. Ideology can no longer be understood as an infra-superstructural relation between a material production (system and relations of production) and a production of signs (culture, etc.,), which expresses and masks the contradictions at the “base.” Henceforth, all of this comprises, with the same degree of objectivity, a general political economy (its critique), which is traversed throughout by the same form and administered by the same logic.

It should be recalled that the traditional vision of ideology still proves incapable of grasping the “ideological” function of culture and of signs—except at the level of the signified. This follows inevitably from its separation of culture (and signs) in the artificial distinction between the economic and the ideological, not to mention the desperate contortions (“superstructure,” “dialectic,” “structure in dominance”) that this entails. Thus, ideology (of such-and-such a group, or the dominant class) always appears as the overblown discourse of some great theme, content, or value (patriotism, morality, humanism, happiness, consumption, the family) whose allegorical power somehow insinuates itself into consciousnesses (this has never been explained) in order to integrate them. These become, in turn, the contents of thought that come into play in real situations, In sum, ideology appears as a sort of cultural surf frothing on the beachhead of the economy.

So, it is dear that ideology is actually that very form that traverses both the production of signs and material production—or rather, it is the logical bifurcation of this form into two terms:

This is the functional, strategic split through which the form reproduces itself, It signifies that ideology lies already whole in the relation of EV to UV, that is, in the logic of the commodity, as is so in the relation of Sr to Sd, i.e., in the internal logic of the sign.

Marx demonstrated that the objectivity of material production did not reside in its materiality, but in its form. In fact, this is the point of departure for all critical theory. The same analytical reduction must be applied to ideology: its objectivity does not reside in its “ideality,” that is, in a realist metaphysic of thought contents, but in its form.

The “critique” (not excluding here the Marxist critique of ideology) feeds off a magical conception of its object. It does not unravel ideology as form, but as content, as given, transcendent value—a sort of mana that attaches itself to several global representations that magically impregnate those floating and mystified subjectivities called “consciousnesses.” Like the concept of need, which is presented as the link between the utility of an object and the demand of a subject, ideology appears as the relation between the projection of a consciousness and the ideality of—vaguely—an idea, or a value. Transposed from the analysis of material goods to collective representations and values, the same little magic footbridge is suspended between artificial, even metaphysical, concepts.1

In fact, ideology is the process of reducing and abstracting symbolic material into a form. But this reductive abstraction is given immediately as value (autonomous), as content (transcendent), and as a representation of consciousness (signified). It is the same process that lends the commodity an appearance of autonomous value and transcendent reality—a process that involves the misunderstanding of the form of the commodity and of the abstraction of social labor that it operates. In bourgeois (or, alas, Marxist) thought, culture is defined as a transcendence of contents correlated with consciousnesses by means of a “representation” that circulates among them like positive values, just as the fetishized commodity appears as a real and immediate value, correlated with individual subjects through “need” and use value, and circulating according to the rules of exchange value.

It is the cunning of form to veil itself continually in the evidence of content. It is the cunning of the code to veil itself and to produce itself in the obviousness of value. It is in the “materiality” of content that form consumes its abstraction and reproduces itself as form. That is its peculiar magic. It simultaneously produces the content and the consciousness to receive it (just as production produces the product and its corresponding need). Thus, it installs culture in a dual transcendence of values (of contents) and consciousness, and in a metaphysic of exchange between the two terms. And if the bourgeois vulgate enshrines it in this transcendence precisely in order to exalt it as culture, the Marxist vulgate embalms it in the very same transcendence in order to denounce it as ideology. But the two scriptures rejoin in the same magical thinking.2

Just about all contemporary thought in this area confounds itself on false problems and in endless controversies ensuing from artificial disjunctions:

1. The subject-object dichotomy, bridged by the magical concept of need. Things might run quite smoothly here if the general system of production-consumption were not disrupted by the insoluble problem of supply and demand. Can one still speak of autonomy of choice, or is it a question of manipulation? Perhaps the two perspectives can be synthesized?—mere pseudo-dialectic. It is all an eternal litany—and over a false problem anyway.

2. The infrastructure-superstructure dichotomy, which, as we have seen, covers over again the implacable disjunction between the materiality of contents and the ideality of consciousness, reuniting the two thereby separated poles with the magical conception of ideology. Even here, matters would run more smoothly if the problem of the “determinant instance” were not held eternally in suspense (since it is usually “in the last instance”—it never actually appears on the stage), with all the acrobatics of “interaction,” “dialectic,” “relative autonomy” and “overdetermination” that follow in its wake (and whose interminable careers have redounded to the glory of generations of intellectuals).

3. The exploitation-alienation distinction, which reiterates this false problem at the level of political analysis. The infinite debate over whether exploitation is the ground of alienation or vice versa; or whether the second succeeds the first as “the most advanced stage of capitalism”—all this is absurd. Not for the first time, the confusion arises from an artificial separation—this time of the sign and the commodity, which are not analyzed in their form, but posed instead as contents (the one of signification, the other of production). Whence emerges the distinction between an “exploitation” of labor power and an “alienation by signs.” As if the commodity and the system of material production “signified” nothing! As if signs and culture were not immediately abstract social production at the level of the code and models, in a generalized exchange system of values.

Ideology is thus properly situated on neither side of this split. Rather, it is the one and only form that traverses all the fields of social production. Ideology seizes all production, material or symbolic, in the same process of abstraction, reduction, general equivalence and exploitation.

1. It is because the logic of the commodity and of political economy is at the very heart of the sign, in the abstract equation of signifier and signified, in the differential combinatory of signs, that signs can function as exchange value (the discourse of communication) and as use value (rational decoding and distinctive social use).

2. It is because the structure of the sign is at the very heart of the commodity form that the commodity can take on, immediately, the effect of signification—not epiphenomenally, in excess of itself, as “message” or connotation—but because its very form establishes it as a total medium, as a system of communication administering all social exchange. Like the sign form, the commodity is a code managing the exchange of values. It makes little difference whether the contents of material production or the immaterial contents of signification are involved; it is the code that is determinant: the rules of the interplay of signifiers and exchange value. Generalized in the system of political economy, it is the code which, in both cases, reduces all symbolic ambivalence in order to ground the “rational” circulation of values and their play of exchange in the regulated equivalence of values.

It is here that the concept of alienation proves useless, by dint of its association with the metaphysic of the subject of consciousness. The code of political economy, which is the fundamental code of our society, does not operate by alienating consciousness from contents. A parallel confusion arises in the view of “primitive” myths as false stories or histories that consciousnesses recount to themselves. Here the pregnant effects of mythic contents are held to bind society together (through the “cohesion” of belief systems). But actually, these myths make up a code of signs that exchange among themselves, integrating the group through the very process of their circulation. Likewise, the fundamental code of our societies, the code of political economy (both commodity form and sign form) does not operate through the alienation of consciousness and contents. It rationalizes and regulates exchange, makes things communicate, but only under the law of the code and through the control of meaning.

The division of labor, the functional division of the terms of discourse, does not mystify people; it socializes them and informs their exchange according to a general, abstract model. The very concept of the individual is the product of this general system of exchange. And the idea of “totality” under which the subject (either that of consciousness or that of History) thinks itself in its ideal reference is nothing but the effect and the symptom of the system—the shadow that it wears. The concept of alienation involves a kind of wizardry in which consciousness thinks itself as its own ideal content (its rediscovered totality): it is an ideological concept. And ideology, in its version as a superstructure of contents of consciousness, is, in these terms, an alienated concept.

Today consumption—if this term as a meaning other than that given it by vulgar economics—defines precisely the stage where the commodity is immediately produced as a sign, as sign value, and where signs (culture) are produced as commodities. But this whole area of study is still occupied, “critically” or otherwise, by specialists of production (economy, infrastructure), or ideology specialists (signs, culture), or even by a kind of seamless dialectician of the totality. This partitioning of the object domain obscures even the simplest realities. If any progress is to be made at this point, “research”—especially Marxist research—must come to terms with the fact that nothing produced or exchanged today (objects, services, bodies, sex, culture, knowledge, etc.) can be decoded exclusively as a sign, nor solely measured as a commodity; that everything appears in the context of a general political economy in which the determining instance is neither the commodity nor culture (not even the updated commodity, revised and reinterpreted in its signifying function, with its message, its connotations, but always as if there still existed an objective substrate to it, the potential objectivity of the product as such; nor culture in its “critical” version, where signs, values, ideas are seen as everywhere commercialized or recuperated by the dominant system, but again, as if there subsisted through all this something whose transcendence could have been rationalized and simply compromised—a kind of sublime use value of culture distorted in exchange value). The object of this political economy, that is, its simplest component, its nuclear element—that which precisely the commodity was for Marx—is no longer today properly either commodity or sign, but indissolubly both, and both only in the sense that they are abolished as specific determinations, but not as form. Rather, this object is perhaps quite simply the object,3 the object form, on which use value, exchange value and sign value converge in a complex mode that describes the most general form of political economy.

2. THE METAPHYSICS OF THE SIGN

The meaning value of the sign asserts itself with the same apparent obviousness as the natural evidence of the value of the commodity to the predecessors of Marx. These, as they say, are “the simplest of matters,” and yet they are the most mysterious. Like political economy before it, semiology accomplishes little more than a description of their circulation and structural functioning.4

We have seen, in the preceding study, that the abstraction of the exchange value system is sustained by the effect of concrete reality and of objective purpose exhaled by use value and needs. This is the strategic logic of the commodity; its second term acts as the satellite and alibi for the first. The present hypothesis is that the same analysis holds true for the logic and strategy of the sign, thus exploding the “scientific postulates” of semio-linguistics—the arbitrary character of the sign in particular, as originally defined by Saussure and modified by Benveniste.

The arbitrariness of the sign does not reside in its non-motivation—in the commonplace that the signifier “table” has no “natural” vocation to signify the concept or the reality of the table (any more than Tisch in German, etc.); it is rooted in the very fact of positing an equivalence between such and such an Sr and such and such an Sd. In this sense, arbitrariness is total even in the case of the symbol,⁵ where the principle of equivalence between signifier and signified is fully retained in their analogy, Arbitrariness arises from the fundamental institution of an exact correlation between a given “discrete” Sr and an equally discrete Sd. In other words, arbitrariness lies in the “discretion” which alone grounds the possibility of the equational relation of the sign, so that. This equals this, and nothing else. This discretion is thus the very principle of the sign’s rationality; it functions as the agent of abstraction and universal reduction of all potentialities and qualities of meaning (sens) that do not depend on or derive from the respective framing, equivalence, and specular relation of a signifier and a signified. This is the directive and reductive rationalization transacted by the sign—not in relation to an exterior, immanent “concrete reality” that signs would supposedly recapture abstractly in order to express, but in relation to all that which overflows the schema of equivalence and signification; and which the sign reduces, represses and annihilates in the very operation that constitutes it (the sudden crystallization of an Sr and an Sd). The rationality of the sign is rooted in its exclusion and annihilation of all symbolic ambivalence on behalf of a fixed and equational structure. The sign is a discriminant: it structures itself through exclusion. Once crystallized on this exclusive structure, the sign aligns its fixed field, resigns the differential, and assigns Sr and Sd each its sphere of systemic control. Thus, the sign proffers itself as full value: positive, rational, exchangeable value. All virtualities of meaning are shorn in the cut of structure.

This one-to-one assignation of Sr to Sd can be complicated quite easily into an equivocal or multivocal relation without violating the logic of the sign. A signifier may refer to many signifieds, or vice versa: the principle of equivalence, ergo of exclusion and reduction, which roots the arbitrariness of the sign, remains untouched. While still opposing itself as radically as ever to ambivalence, equivalence has simply transmuted into polyvalence. Ambiguity itself is only the vacillation of a principle which, for all intents and purposes, rests intact. Nor does the “dissolve” effect (of signification) jeopardize the principle of the rationality of the sign—i.e., its reality principle. While retaining their discreteness, Sr and Sd are capable of multiple connections. But (through all these combinatory possibilities) the code of signification never ceases to monitor and systematically control meaning.

Only ambivalence (as a rupture of value, of another side or beyond of sign value, and as the emergence of the symbolic) sustains a challenge to the legibility, the false transparency of the sign; only ambivalence questions the evidence of the use value of the sign (rational decoding) and of its exchange value (the discourse of communication). It brings the political economy of the sign to a standstill; it dissolves the respective definitions of Sr and Sd—concepts emblazoned with the seal of signification; and since they assume their meaning through the process of signification in the classical sense, Sr and Sd would be doomed by the shattering of the semiologic. In the logic of ambivalence and of the symbolic, we are dealing with a process of the resolution of the sign, a resolution of the equation on which the sign is articulated, and which, in communicative discourse, is never resolved: integrated, opaque, never elucidated, the sign gives rise, in communicative discourse, to the same type of social mystery as that other medium, the commodity, which also depends on an abstract equation of all values.6

The critique of political economy, worked out by Marx at the level of exchange value, but whose total scope implies also that of use value, is quite precisely this resolution of the commodity and of its implicit equation—a resolution of the commodity as the form and code of general equivalence. It is this same critical resolution that must be extended to the field of signification, in a critique of the political economy of the sign.

3. THE MIRAGE OF THE REFERENT

Where the sign presents itself as a unity of discrete and functional meaning, the Sr refers to an Sd, and the ensemble to a referent. The sign as abstract structure refers to a fragment of objective reality. It is, moreover, between these two terms that Benveniste, modifying Saussure, relocates the arbitrariness of the sign—which is between the sign and that which it designates, and not between the Sr and the Sd, which are both of a psychic nature and necessarily associated in the mind of the subject by a veritable consubstantiality. Thus: “What is arbitrary is that a certain sign, and not another, is applied to a certain element of reality, and not to any other. In this sense, and only in this sense, it is permissible to speak of contingency, and even in so doing we would seek less to solve the problem than simply to pinpoint it in order to set it aside provisionally … The domain of arbitrariness is thus left outside the comprehension (logical intention) of the linguistic sign.”7

But banishing arbitrariness to the exterior of the sign does no more than displace the problem; and to believe in the possibility of deferring it is here only another way of providing a solution which, far from being merely provisional and methodological, risks reviving its eternal metaphysical formulation.

For Saussure the internal contingency of the sign was an obstacle that always threatened the reciprocal coherence of the Sr and the Sd. Through the expulsion of the arbitrary, Benveniste attempts to rescue the inner organization and logical necessity of the sign (not to mention that of semio-linguistics) But this adjustment is only possible on the basis of a separation between the sign and reality (the referent). As we have seen, Benveniste seems quite content to refer the solution to the problem that this creates back to philosophy; but in fact he responds to the question himself, and very metaphysically, like all linguists and semiologists—with the concepts of “motivation” and of “arbitrariness.”

In the end, the difficulty with Benveniste’s analysis (and the analyses of others) comes down to the fact that things are just not cut out according to his idealist scheme. The scission (coupure) does not occur between a sign and a “real” referent. It occurs between the Sr as form and, on the other side, the Sd and the Rft, which are registered together as content—the one of thought, the other of reality (or rather, of perception)—under the aegis of the Sr. The referent in question here is no moral external to the sign than is the Sd indeed it is governed by the sign. It is carved out and projected as its function; its only reality is of that which is ornamentally inscribed on the sign itself In a profound sense, the referent is the reflection of the sign, and this profound collusion, which depends on form, is “instinctively” translated at the level of contents by the speaking subject Benveniste declares: “For the speaking subject, there is complete adequation between language and reality, The sign recovers and commands reality; better still, it is that reality …”8 The poor speaker evidently knows nothing of the arbitrary character of the sign (but then, he probably isn’t a semiologist)! Yet there is a certain truth to his naive metaphysic, for Benveniste’s “arbitrary” link between the sign and reality has no more existence than the one postulated by Saussure between Sr and Sd.

So Benveniste’s argument ultimately turns back on itself. For if one admits, with him, and against Saussure, that the Sd is con-substantial with the Sr, then so must be the referent (reality), since the Sd and Rft are both cut from the same cloth (as assigned to them by the Sr). The process of carving out and separation, of abstract formalization, is continuous from one end to the other of the chain—from Sr to Rft inclusive. In fact, it makes little difference whether one claims either:

1. That motivation is general throughout the chain: But then it is no longer the substantial motivation of the psychologistic type (that of content) that emanates somehow from the Rft toward the Sr; it is a kind of formal motivation “from on high”—it is the law of the code and the signifier that informs and determines (to the point of) “reality,” The code becomes a veritable reality principle.

2. Or that it is arbitrariness, the conventionality of the sign, that reigns over the entire chain. Then the concrete ceases to exist, and the very perception of it hinges on the abstraction and the “discretion” of the Sr. The spectre of the Sr extends onto the world (in two senses: it “analyzes” it spectrally, and it haunts it).

The crucial thing is to see that the separation of the sign and the world is a fiction, and leads to a science fiction. The logic of equivalence, abstraction, discreteness and projection of the sign engulfs the Rft as surely as it does the Sd. This “world” that the sign “evokes” (the better to distance itself from it) is nothing but the effect of the sign, the shadow that it carries about, its “pantographic” extension. Even better; this world is quite simply the Sd-Rft. As we have seen, the Sd-Rft is a single and compact thing, an identity of content that acts as the moving shadow of the Sr. It is the reality effect in which the play of signifiers comes to fruition and deludes the world.

And now the homology between the logic of signification and the logic of political economy begins to emerge. For the latter exploits its reference to needs and the actualization of use value as an anthropological horizon while precluding their real intervention in its actual functioning and operative structure. Or so it appears. Similarly, the referent is maintained as exterior to the comprehension of the sign: the sign alludes to it, but its internal organization excludes it. In fact, it is now clear that the system of needs and of use value is thoroughly implicated in the form of political economy as its completion. And likewise for the referent, this “substance of reality,” in that it is entirely bound up in the logic of the sign. Thus, in each Field, the dominant form (system of exchange value and combinatory of the Sr respectively) provides itself with a referential rationale (raison), a content, an alibi, and, significantly, in each this articulation is made under the same metaphysical “sign,” i.e., need or motivation.

All of this venerable old psychology nourishes the semiological organism:

1. The referent, the “real” object, is the phenomenal object, the perceptual contents and lived experience of the subject—situated half way between phenomenology and Bergsonian substance opposed to form.

2. In a manner of speaking, this perceptual content emerges flush, it is shifted to the level of the sign by the signified, the content of thought. Between the two, one is supposed to glide in a kind of frictionless space from the perceptual to the conceptual, in accordance with the old recipes of philosophical idealism and the abstract associationism that was already stale in the nineteenth century.

And how is the articulation established between the sign and referent (or between the Sr and the Sd), subtly differentiated as they are (so subtly, in fact, as to preserve them in each other’s image!)? We have already broached the term: it is by motivation. Whether it is in order to deny motivation, according to the Saussurian theory of the sign (to relativize it, to proportion it in the definition of the symbol), or simply to affirm it, like Benveniste in his critique of the Saussurian theory (justified, to be sure, but only from the internal perspective of semio-linguistics)—the only relation thinkable, the only concept under which the articulation of the phenomenal (psychological) and the sign can be thought is that of motivation. It is a hollow and somewhat supernatural concept. But it can hardly be otherwise, once one has granted this metaphysical representation of the referent, this abstract separation between the sign and the world. Some form of wizardry is required to rejoin them: and—what a coincidence!—it is with this very term that political economy attempts to reunite the subject and the object it posits as separate: need. Need, motivation: one never escapes this circle. Each term conceals the same metaphysical wile. In the latter version, the term as a rather more logical resonance, in the other, a more psychological one; but let us not be mistaken here. The logical and the psychological are here indissolubly mixed: semiological motivation has all of psychology behind it. As to economic need, it is much more than a question of the “demand” of the subject: the entire logical articulation of economic science demands it as a functional postulate.

These concepts are not accidentally nebulous. Concepts are quite meaningless when they are busy bridging non-existent gaps. There is no distinction between the sign and the phenomenal referent, except from the metaphysical perspective that simultaneously idealizes and abstracts the sign and the Lebenswelt, the one as form, the other as content, in their formal opposition. Having provided itself with false distinctions, it cannot be expected to resolve them except with false concepts. But such distinctions are strategic and operational—that is the point. To resolve them (and to rupture the conceptual unreality, which would be the only means of resolving the false problem of the arbitrariness and motivation of the sign) would amount to shattering the possibility of all semiology.

The emptiness of the concepts in question evidently hides a strategy that can be analyzed simultaneously in the field of signification and of the economy. Motivation (need) only describes, behind the formal opposition between two terms, a kind of circuit, a sort of specular and tautological process between two modalities of the same form, via the detour of a self-proclaimed content; and the reproduction of a systematic abstraction (whether it be that of the exchange value or of the code of the signifier) via the detour of the real. We have seen that needs (UV system) do not constitute a qualitative, incommensurable concrete reality exterior to political economy, but rather a system that is itself induced by the EV system and which functions according to the same logic. If the two systems are in some way matched up in an identical form, then it is evident that the concept of need (like motivation) analyzes nothing at all. It only describes, through an illusory articulation, the general circulation of the same model and its internal operation. A typical rendition of this (necessarily) tautological definition of need might read: People appropriate a given object for themselves as use value “because they need it.”

Benveniste’s motivation partakes of the same circularity, the same psychological tautology.

1. The sign derives its necessity from a psychological consensus that inescapably binds a given Sr to a given Sd (some fraction of the “real” of thought).

2. But: the objectivity of this “denoted” fraction of the real is evidently the perceptive consensus of (speaking) subjects.

3. And this is supported no less evidently by the psychological consensus that links any given Sr to a given Sd.

The circle that legitimates the sign by the real and which founds the real by the sign is strictly vicious; but this circularity is the very secret of all metaphysical (ideological) operationality.

Needs are not the actuating (mouvante) and original expression of a subject, but the functional reduction of the subject by the system of use value in solidarity with that of exchange value. Similarly, the referent does not constitute an autonomous concrete reality at all; it is only the extrapolation of the excision (decoupage) established by the logic of the sign onto the world of things (onto the phenomenological universe of perception). It is the world such as it is seen and interpreted through the sign—that is, virtually excised and excisable at pleasure. The “real” table does not exist. If it can be registered in its identity (if it exists), this is because it has already been designated, abstracted and rationalized by the separation (decoupage) which establishes it in this equivalence to itself. Once again, given this line of reasoning, there is no fundamental difference between the referent and the signified, and the spontaneous confusion which so often arises here can only be symptomatic: the referent has no other value than that of the signified, of which it wants to be the substantial reference in vivo, and which it only succeeds in extending in abstracto.9 Thus the strategy repeats itself: the double aspect of the commodity (UV/EV) in fact conceals a formal homogeneity in which use value, regulated by the system of exchange value, confers on the latter its “naturalist” guarantee. And the double face of the sign (Sr/Sd, generalizable into Sr/Sd—Rft) obscures a formal homogeneity in which Sd and Rft (administered by the same logical form, which is none other than that of the Sr), serve together as the reference alibi—precisely the guarantee of “substance” for the Sr.

Saussure’s sheet of paper theory of language (the double face of the sign one “cuts up”) is thus perfectly idealist.10 By giving the Sr and the Sd “in equivalence” as constitutive agencies (instances) of the sign, it veils the strategic apparatus of the sign, which rests precisely on the disparity of the two terms and on the fundamental circularity of the dominant term:

1. To summarize what we have so far, there is a metaphysic of the Sd-Rft, homologous with that of needs and use value. The Sd-Rft is taken for an original reality, a substance of value and recurring finality through the supporting play of signifiers (cf. the analysis of Tel Quel, in particular Derrida). Similarly, use value is given as origin and purpose (finalité), and needs as the basic motor of the economic—the cycle of exchange value appearing here as a necessary detour, but incompatible with true finalities.

2. In reality, this moral and metaphysical privilege of contents (UV and Sd-Rft) only masks the decisive privilege of form (EV and Sr). These two terms are respectively the last “Reason,” the structural principle of the entire system, of which the former terms are only the detour. It is the rational abstraction of the system of exchange value and of the play of signifiers which commands the whole. But this fundamental strategy (of which it is impossible¹¹ here to demonstrate the operational repercussions at every level of contemporary society—from cybernetic programming to bureaucratic systems, and to the system of “consumption”) is carefully hidden by the spreading out of the signification process over the two (or three) agencies (Sr, Sd, Rft), and the play of their distinction and of their equivalence.

4. DENOTATION AND CONNOTATION

The entire conceptual battery of semio-linguistics must be subjected to the same radical analysis as Marx applied to the concepts of classical political economy. And so we shift to the level of the message, where, as we shall see, the by now familiar metaphysics reappears in the concepts of denotation and connotation.

Denotation maintains itself entirely on the basis of the myth of “objectivity” (whether the denotation is that of the linguistic sign, the photographic analagon, iconic, etc.) Objectivity in this case is the direct adequation of an Sr to a precise reality. Even the difficulty which arises in the case of the image (i.e., its nondiscreteness, the fact that its Sr and Sd form a continuum, etc.) poses no fundamental challenge to the rule of the equivalence of the sign, i.e., that assignation of two terms which makes possible the further assignation of a fictive real to the contoured image (decoupé) of the sign—and thus to the rationalization and general control of meaning.

The Sd of connotation12 is quite certainly amenable to the same analysis, since it also re-emerges as a “denotation effect” of the new process of “staggered” signification. Barthes’ analysis of the advertisement for Panzani pasta, with its connotation of “Italianity” is an example.¹³ “Italianity” is only apparently of the Sd, conceptual content, etc. In fact, it constitutes a code unto itself—a myth, if you wish. But myths are not comprised of content. They are a process of exchange and circulation of a code whose form is determinant. And so it is for the role of connotation here. And if it is the locus of ideology, this is not a question of its having grafted annex and parasitical significations onto an “objective” denotative process, nor that it has smuggled in parallel contents, foreign to the infrastructure of the sign that would otherwise constitute the process of denotation:14 what is involved here is precisely a free play of concatenation and exchange of Srs—a process of indefinite reproduction of the code (cf. “Fetishism and Ideology”: ideology is bound to form, not content: it is the passion of the code).

Having said this, we can return to the process of denotation in order to show that it differs in no way from connotation: the denoted Sd, this objective “reality,” is itself nothing more than a coded form (code of perception, “psychological” code, code of “realistic” values, etc.). In other words, ideology is as rife with the denotative as with the connotative process and, in sum, denotation is never really anything more than the most attractive and subtle of connotations.

As Barthes says in S/Z: “Denotation is not the first among meanings, but pretends to be so; under this illusion, it is ultimately no more than the last of the connotations (the one that seems both to establish and to close the reading), the superior myth by which the text pretends to return to the nature of language, to language as nature doesn’t a sentence, whatever meaning it releases, subsequent to its utterance, it would seem, appear to be telling us something simple, literal, primitive: something true, in relation to which all the rest is literature?”¹⁵

So it all parallels use value as the “denotative” function of objects. Indeed, doesn’t the object have that air, in its “being serviceable,” of having said something objective? This manifest discourse is the subtlest of its mythologies. A false ingenuity, and a perversion of objectivity is involved. Utility, like the literality of which Barthes speaks, is not a nature; it is a code of natural evidence which has the privilege over many other possible codes (the moral, the aesthetic, etc.) of appearing rational, while the others seem like mere rationalizations of more or less “ideological” purposes. Denotation or use value; objectivity or utility: it is always the complicity of the real with the code under the sign of evidence which generates these categories. And just as use value, the “literal” and ideal finality of the object, resurges continually from the system of exchange value, the effect of concreteness, reality and denotation results from the complex play of interference of networks and codes—just as white light results from the interference of the colors of the spectrum. So the white light of denotation is only the play of the spectrum—the chromatic ghost—of connotations.

Thus the denotation-connotation distinction appears unreal and itself ideological. It could, however, be restored in a paradoxical sense, exactly opposed to the current accepted use. For denotation distinguishes itself from other significations (connoted) by its singular function of effacing the traces of the ideological process by restoring its universality and “objective” innocence. Far from being the objective term to which connotation is opposed as an ideological term, denotation is thus (since it naturalizes the very process of ideology) the most ideological term—ideological to the second degree. It is the “superior myth” of which Barthes speaks. This is exactly the same ideological function we have discerned of use value in its relation to exchange value. Hence, the two Fields reciprocally illuminate each other in the totality of the ideological process.16

5. BEYOND THE SIGN: THE SYMBOLIC

A critique of the political economy of the sign implies certain perspectives of transcendence—a “beyond” of the signification process through which sign exchange value organizes itself; and thus also a “beyond” of semiology which, in its quite “objective innocence,” simply details the functioning of sign exchange value.

In general, the critical perspectives of transcendence of the sign (of its abstract rationality, its “arbitrariness”) are generated in the spirit of one of the two terms that comprise it: that is, either in the name of the Sd (of the Rft: same thing), which it is then necessary to liberate from the stranglehold of the code (of the Sr)—or in the name of the Sr, which must be liberated from that of the Sd.

The first perspective—the party of the Sd—is to be analyzed in the framework of Derrida’s (and Tel Quel’s) critique of the primacy of the signified in the occidental process of meaning, which moralizes the sign in its content (of thought or of reality) at the expense of form, and confers an ethical and metaphysical status to meaning itself. This “natural philosophy” of signification implies an “idealism of the referent.” It is a critique of the abstraction and arbitrariness of the sign in the name of “concrete” reality. Its phantasm is that of a total resurrection of the “real” in an immediate and transparent intuition, which establishes the economy of the sign (of the Sr) and of the code in order to release the Signifieds (subjects, history, nature, contradictions) in their actuating, dialectical, authentic truth. Today, this vision is developed largely in the critique of the abstraction of systems and codes in the name of authentic values (which are largely derived from the bourgeois system of individualist values). It amounts to a long sermon denouncing the alienation of the system, which becomes, with the expansion of this very system, a kind of universal discourse.

The temptation to criticize the Sr in the name of the Sd (Rft), to make of the “real” the ideal alternative to the formal play of signs, is congruent with what we have analyzed as the idealism of use value.17 The salvation of UV from the system of EV, without realizing that UV is a satellite system in solidarity with that of EV: this is precisely the idealism and transcendental humanism of contents which we discover again in the attempt to rescue the Sd (Rft) from the terrorism of the Sr. The velleity of emancipating and liberating the “real” leaves intact the entire ideology of signification—just as the ideology of political economy is preserved in toto in the ideal autonomization of use value.

Because it confirms the separation which establishes the logic of the sign, every attempt to surpass the political economy of the sign which takes its support from one of its constituent elements is condemned to reproduce its arbitrary character (ergo, ideology) in the alternated mode of Sd or Sr.¹⁸ Any basis for a crucial interrogation of the sign must be situated from the perspective of what it expels and annihilates in its very institution, in the respective emergence and structural assignation of the Sr and the Sd. The process of signification is, at bottom, nothing but a gigantic simulation model of meaning. Clearly, neither the real, the referent, nor some substance of value banished to the exterior shadow of the sign can abolish this process. It is the symbolic that continues to haunt the sign, for in its total exclusion it never ceases to dismantle the formal correlation of Sr and Sd. But the symbolic, whose virtuality of meaning is so subversive of the sign, cannot, for this very reason, be named except by allusion, by infraction (effraction). For signification, which names everything in terms of itself, can only speak the language of values and of the positivity of the sign.

Indeed, in the final analysis, the whole problem revolves around the question of the positivity of the sign, its “assumption of value” (prise de valeur). Of what is outside the sign, of what is other than the sign, we can say nothing, really, except that it is ambivalent, that is, it is impossible to distinguish respective separated terms and to positivize them as such. And we can say that in this ambivalence is rooted a type of exchange that is radically different from the exchange of values (exchange values or sign values). But this (symbolic) exchange is foreclosed and abolished by the sign in its simultaneous institution of: (1) a separation, a distinctive structure; and (2) a positive relation, a sort of structural copulation between the two terms, which clearly only eternalizes their separation. This copulation is objectified in the bar of structural inclusion between Sr and Sd (Sr/Sd).19 It is then even further objectified and positivized in the “R” of Hjemslev’s formula ERC.20 It is this positive relation that makes a value of the sign. Whether it is understood to be arbitrary or motivated makes little difference. These terms divert the problem by inscribing it in an already established logic of the sign. Its true arbitrariness, or true motivation, is its positivization, which creates its rationality. And this is nothing other than the radical reduction of all ambivalence, through its dual abstraction. The motivation of the sign is thus purely and simply its strategy, structural crystallization and the liquidation of ambivalence by the “solidification” of value. And this motivation evidently functions by means of the arbitrariness of its form foreclosure and reduction. The concepts of arbitrariness and motivation are thus hardly contradictory from a strategic (political) perspective.

Still, the arbitrariness of the sign is at bottom untenable. The sign value cannot admit to its own deductive abstraction any more than exchange value can. Whatever it denies and represses, it will attempt to exorcise and integrate into its own operation such is the status of the “real,” of the referent, which are only the simulacrum of the symbolic, its form reduced and intercepted by the sign. Through this mirage of the referent, which is nothing but the phantasm of what the sign itself represses during its operation,21 the sign attempts to mislead: it permits itself to appear as totality, to efface the traces of its abstract transcendence, and parades about as the reality principle of meaning.²²

As the functional and terrorist organization of the control of meaning under the sign of the positivity of value, signification is in some ways kin to the notion of reification. It is the locus of an elemental objectification that reverberates through the amplified systems of signs up to the level of the social and political terrorism of the bracketing (encadrement) of meaning. All the repressive and reductive strategies of power systems are already present in the internal logic of the sign, as well as those of exchange value and political economy. Only total revolution, theoretical and practical, can restore the symbolic in the demise of the sign and of value. Even signs must burn.