I want to trace the contours of a specific question, namely, the status of the referent in contemporary cultural theory. Rather than wishing to secure a stable, univocal meaning for such a notoriously slippery category, I will attempt, through an immanent investigation of selected, though arguably seminal, theoretical projects, to elucidate what I take to be an intriguing recurrence, an 'insistence of the latter', of a category relegated to marginality by the currently ascendant paradigm of semiotics and structuralism. The relative value accorded these various projects, for my present purposes, is based on the extent to which they engage explicitly with the question of the referent or whether such a question must be dug out symptomatically. I begin with a survey of the symptomatic 'insistence' of the referent in the field of cultural theory and then turn to a series of moves which have been made in more constructive relation to such insistence, and to texts which may be privileged under such moves. To repeat: I am concerned to identify a certain set of motifs which, for polemical purposes, may be loosely grouped under the rubric of the referent, and not to posit a return, against history, to an unreconstructed, pre-semiotic notion of the referent.
Structuralism and semiotics effected a break with more traditional literary and cultural studies by drawing on the seminal work of Saussure in linguistics and Levi-Strauss in anthropology. Saussure argued the arbitrariness of the relation between sign systems and the world they 'refer' to, and Levi-Strauss that between mythological 'texts' and the societies out of which they are generated. Modes of linguistic and cultural signification could, indeed should, be examined as autonomous objects of study, predicated on their arbitrary and therefore asymmetrical and tenuous relation to their 'worlds of reference'. Nevertheless, structuralism and traditional semiotics tended, for reasons of theoretical tidiness under the sign of scientificity, to argue that while the referent - the speaking subject, the communica-tional exchange or dialogic context in Saussure, the role of myth in primitive societies in Levi-Strauss - may well have an ontological reality and an epistemological effect, it remained outside the domain of their fields of study. Thus, for instance, the 'transcendent subject'.
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the user of the language system, remained a sort of 'structuring absence' in structuralism. The structure of structuralist theory tended to be a mechanical or organic view of the internal operations of the structure, and a transcendental subject, a terra incognita or deus absconditus for the discipline itself, at times operating the structure.
Dissatisfactions with structuralism had a centrifugal effect on cultural theory. It led variously to post-structuralism, to Foucauldian accounts of discourse as institutional power, to attempts to renovate and revitalise the semiotic project, to programmatic political interventions in the field. Let me summarise these trends briefly as to their various implications for the status of the referent.
Post-structuralist, particularly deconstructionist theory, mounted an attack on the problems of structuralism I have adumbrated. Derrida, Kristeva, Barthes, among others, argued that the subject itself must be dismantled and placed within the process of signification, as an effect of it, no longer as an operator of it. The extra-textual base of signification was no longer tenable, all (text-context, sender-receiver, signified-signifier) relations were caught up in an infinite play or process of signification. Lacan's notion of the metonymic infinity of desire, of the constant slippage from desire to object to further desire, of the ultimately elusive nature of a fix, or correspondence, between signified and signifier, was an important base for this argument. The structure of the structuralist is thus activated and dynamised by the inclusion of the so-called operators of the structure. The structure is also dismantled, no longer having the internal symmetry and coherence which Derrida found to be simply another version of centering or presence. Reference is thus systematically negated as a possible ontological category.
Some of the problems arising from this negation may be focussed by considering what is arguably the classic post-structuralist 'manifesto', Barthes' S/Z (1975), and then a more comfortable, settled, programme of deconstructionist pedagogy, Deconstruction and Criticism (Barthes, Bloom, et al. 1979). Barthes nominates a cultural or referential code amongst the five codes that structure Balzac's Sarrasine. The literary text 'continually' refers to received complexes of knowledge which seemingly ground the text in scientific and moral authority (p.18). Barthes explicitly states that he will merely draw attention to these codes without attempting to analyse their operation (p.20). Indeed, there is a strong aversion to the cultural code: 'Life, then, in the classic text, becomes a nauseating mixture of common opinions, a smothering layer of received ideas...' (p.206). However, the referential code may be seen as the major way in which the text's discourse binds the reader into itself, addressing the reader as complicit in shared knowledge and assumptions. It is presumptive rather than informational (the semicccide), invitational (the hermeneutic), expository (the proairetic), or structural (the symbolic). The presumptive nature of the
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code gives the strongest evidence of the readerly quality of the text - of the more highly unified domain of literary discourse in the nineteenth century, such that a certain laxity or overconfidence of address may set in ('Have you ever encountered one of those women ...' (p.34).) Examining the referential code would open the text, not so much to deconstruction as to its proper historical and ideological valence. Indeed, whereas Barthes' notion of ideology as purely reflective (p.4) and his insistence that the cultural code is least essential and most resistant to rewriting in a writerly fashion (p.98) leads him to symptomatically revile this code (pp.98, 206), it is arguable that the central intrigue of the text for i ts time turned on the cultural code - that is, on the knowledge or ignorance of the fact that in the Italian states women may not act on stage or sing. The cultural code, in Sarrasine, may be seen as more basic than the other codes insofar as it determines whether the reader is positioned similarly to Sarrasine as unknowing, because this in turn determines the more localised effects of the other codes.
Geoffrey Hartman's preface to Deconstruction and Criticism offers the fundamental insistence of deconstruction as its opposition to logocentric or incarnationist accounts: 'we all feel' the excess of figural language over assigned meaning, the strength of the signifier over the signified. Hartman is correct; this assumption underlies all contributions to the volume. However, who/what assigns meanings? Who/what tries to enclose figuration in proposition? Why is this such a recurring strategy, particularly outside the institution of literary criticism? Do some literary and para-literary texts themselves invite or demand (i.e. can they be read without disingenuity without) an assignation of meaning, a use-by-paraphrase, or repetition? Rather than there being an absolutist denial of the signified, may there not be more productively an account of the different ontological or historical statuses of texts, hierarchies amongst texts, based on the self-understanding, their actual use by readers, their 'conscious' relation to other practices, including but not absolutising inter textual practices? While Hartman professes a belief that teaching, criticising and presenting the great texts of our culture are essential tasks (p.vii), isn't deconstruction precisely committed to demonstrating the impossibility of a belief so stated? Isn't deconstruction essentially engaged in the other, and unreconciled, part of Hartman's belief (p.vii) that literary criticism need not merely 'serve' the text insofar as it attempts to displace the text with a reading which achieves a sublation of the text, its unsaid, and the reader's own moment? Outside this contradiction, Rene Girard (1965) has posited reasons for the reading of great texts, accounted for what texts are 'great', and suggested how we might read them, but only in the context of an ongoing polemic against deconstruction, particularly in terms of its absolutist refusal of an extra-discursive domain. Notwithstanding Hartman's defence of the classical tradition, there has been a distinct predilection in deconstruction for marginal,
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idiosyncratic texts. The lack of a general programme within which such choices might have plausibility may be compared, for instance, to feminist accounts of what renders certain women's voices marginal.
To take another tack, if our critical interest is to lie essentially with the excess of the signifier, then need this interest remain with its celebration and repetitious invocation, (however sophisticated)? In film theory, the excess of the signifier has been examined in terms of the pleasure this generates, with pleasure seen now as innocent, uniform, and ineffable. Does Hollywood generate pleasure predominantly for the male spectator? Is the excess of the signifier a sexed structure (or post-structure)? In what senses, and in what forms, may pleasure-in-excess be seen as politically progressive? When does the play (time) of the signifier end?
Foucault has effectively subsumed knowledge and power, modalities traditionally accorded an extra-discursive reality, into discourse. However, it would entirely miss the point to correlate the post-structuralist enterprise and that of Foucault. Discourse is accorded absolute epistemological priority, but discourse is by no means simply the exquisite, anarchistic play of the signifier, but is the site of all recoverable 'realities' of institutional power and control. Discourse is social institutionality, and thus is hierarchised, and has definite, measurable, even empirical effects which are to be understood as producing and reproducing social stratification and inequity (Foucault, 1972). This is a social theory of discourse which displaces semiotic theories of signification and gives considerable scope to notions of effectivity and use-value.
Eco's project in A Theory of Semiotics (1976) is to produce a 'general semiotic theory' which unifies the semiotic field in a manner which takes account of the various disunified contributions hitherto (p.3). In general, though, it seems that the disharmonies within semiotics have not been sufficiently unified by Eco, if we assume for the moment that such a harmony is possible and desirable. One bifurcation is that between formalist and empirical traditions. A statement such as 'a general semiotic theory will be considered powerful according to its capacity for offering an appropriate formal definition for every sort of sign-function' (p.5) sits uneasily with 'semiosis is the process by which empirical subjects communicate, communication processes being made possible by the organization of signification systems' (p.316). Not that Eco can be accused of naive formalist or empiricist assumptions; indeed, the central thrust of the book is the displacement of such oppositional categorisations of semiosis. But his displacement is not exhaustive - at major points, he retreats into notions of disciplinarity and formalism which he has explicitly committed himself not to accept. An 'imperialistic' semiotics which defines everything as its proper object (p.6-7) then confesses agnosticism regarding questions of the 'concrete historical, biological, psychic subject' and of any thing
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'behind, before or after, outside or too much inside' this methodology of semiotics (p.314, 317). Eco implies that his discourse on semiotics is non-ideological, initially defining ideology as false consciousness and then stating that a non-ideological discourse is one which merely recognises its contradictions, as if such a meta-semiotic thus delivered itself out of contradiction (p.293). Moreover, whereas at the outset Eco argues that it would be idealist to posit the radical hypothesis that culture can be studied as a purely semiotic phenomenon, (p.22) at the end it is idealist not to subsume troublesome phenomena under semiotics (p.317).
Eco sees as a major advance over his previous work the introduction of four new elements: (1) a theory of referents, (2) the relation of pragmatics to semantics, (3) a critique of typologies of signs, and (4) a new account of iconism. These are interestingly related - all have to do with a general dissatisfaction with semiotics' formalist tendencies, its propensity for reifying and thus isolating the semiotic performance from its pragmatic and cultural context. Because of this non-dialectical and fetishistic scientism, semiotics has tended to incorporate questions of referentiality, pragmatics and the motivated or analogic sign (i.e. iconism) as a sort of repressed 'structuring absence'. Eco forthrightly addresses these problems. However, his work on the referent is both helpful and confused. His main section on the referent (p.58 ff) sets about the deconstruction of the notion, which certainly must be classified as a 'fuzzy concept' in Eco's terms (p.296). However, when faced with the 'concrete' subject, Eco slips back to using the term in what for him can only be considered an ideological fashion: 'the subject of an act of utterance ... must be considered one among the possible referents of the message or text...' (p.314). And, a statement even more imbued with dreaded ideology:' "culture"... may assume a degree of extra-referential independence that a theory' of codes must respect and analyse in all its autonomy' (p.297). What is 'extra-referential independence'? There are several helpful clarifications in the section on the referent, but more generally a repeated classificatory strategy which simply only admits referentiality insofar as it can be made over into the signified, the only category which 'computes' for semiotics, and the unexplained residue rendered irrelevant.
The relation of pragmatics to semantics becomes a subsumption of the former in a slightly renovated latter. Indeed, the whole bifurcated structure of the book - theory of codes, theory of sign production - can be seen as a perpetuation of the division between semantics and pragmatics. Wittgenstein's collapse of that distinction or Habermas' project for a 'universal pragmatics' would place us considerably further toward a critical (and therefore inescapably post-) semiotics. In one of the innumerable symptomatically marginal gestures toward semiotics' various 'others', Eco merely states 'Wittgenstein's Philo-sophische Untersuchungen basically represented the most rigorous
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(and suggestively fertile) attempt to eliminate every formalized discipline of meaning' (p.75).
Obviously this overview of representative projects in contemporary cultural theory has privileged a heterogeneous range of sites of torsion: the cultural code, the signified, pragmatics, discourse as institutional power, the use-value or effectivity of the text, the referent. These may be grouped less by their positive correlation one with another than by their negative correlation. These sites of torsion arise out of a general agnosticism or avowed hostility to such questions within certain dominant paradigms of cultural theory. It would require an investigation of the order of Wilden's System and Structure to establish the necessary positive correlations and discriminations; I have merely pointed to a series of symptomatic fissures which bear examination. I want to turn now to two major areas of debate in which such examination is taken up explicitly.
The first concerns questions of the political and philosophical traditions out of which much current cultural theory claims to be generated. The theoretical paradigm stitched together out of Althusserian Marxism, Lacanian psychoanalysis and semiotics and exemplified in the work of Screen in the mid to late seventies and its several offshoots and congruent projects has enjoyed a rapid ascendency. However, certain dissatisfactions with this paradigm demonstrate the necessity of founding a politics of cultural studies within a framework which sets limits on the domain of theoretical 'practice' and which thus guards against a theoreticist imperialism of other realms of social reality.
Terry Lovell (1980) and others (Clarke et al., 1980) have demonstrated that philosophical conventionalism, an epistemology which gives primacy to discourse and textuality at the expense of an ontological base regarded as an extra-discursive domain, is clearly implicit in Althusser and overtly programmatic in certain Althusserian developments such as Hindess and Hirst's work. Conventionalism denies the possibility of knowledge of a referential level for which discourses attempt to account.
This is a travesty (though a sophisticated and in part useful one) of the Marxist heritage in that it excludes from consideration the crucial factor of the social relations of production and a historical materialism. It leads to a synchronic analysis of 'social formation', an attempt to give 'materialist' credentials to language (as the new 'universal', displacing historical developments of unequal economic and social relations), an obsessive attention to the text alone, and an overemphasis on theory as itself 'practice', equally valuable and equally effective as economic, political and ideological practice. What criticism of this position desires is that cultural studies regain an emphasis on the relatively autonomous, not relatively autonomous, area of theory and culture, retain the ontological domain of the exua-
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discursive which is knowable, and give strong emphasis to cultural practices which connect with the popular, the everyday.
Lovell makes the crucial distinction between a realist ontology and realist aesthetics, traditionally understood. A 'realist' ontology, which she argues to be a non-negotiable feature of the Marxist heritage, maintains the effectivity of the extra-discursive domain, but need not lead, in application, to a unilateral realist aesthetics. Brecht is exemplary here, in terms of his argument that realism is an attitude to aesthetic performance, which may then be mediated in a variety of forms. Realism thus can stand as an open category, notwithstanding the conventionalist formalism through which it has been defined by MacCabe and others.
A second area of controversy which crystallizes current questions of referentiality, use-value or effectivity and discourse as institutional power, and the type of text privileged by analysis, is the status of religious and, more generally, 'authoritative' discourse. Certain trajectories within and critiques of post-structuralism need to be examined in this regard. Eugen Bar has argued (1976) that the dominant paradigm of post-structuralism could be characterised as a radical negative theology insofar as the post-structuralists' discourse 'receives its power antithetically from the theological perspective which they belittle'. This theological perspective, however, is inscribed, albeit in an inverted fashion, in the project to ground signification in a pre-logical, pre-semiotic chora, in the 'materiality of the signifier'.It is also registered in the neo-scholastic reverence for such 'masters of instruction' as Marx, Freud, Lenin, Mao, Heidegger, Lacan. The symptomatically strong distaste for religious discourse characteristic of this dominant phase of post-structural ism has given way to a rhetorical dalliance with the forms of authoritative utterance but al so a quite sustained and even deferential attention to such discourse, principally the Bible, as a species of textuality that defies the canonical post-structuralist protocols.
The former trend may be understood as a kind of symptomatic response to the institutional marginality of post-structuralism. Eric Gans distinguishes between the academic 'Jew' and 'Pagan': the post-structuralist and the traditional academic disciplinarian respectively. There is arguably a relation of inverse proportion between the 'monotheistic' discourse of post-structuralism, with its excruciatingly excessive rhetoric of totality, universality and authoritativeness, and its institutional marginality:
For the... 'Jew'... pluralism is alienation, and as he finds it an ineluctable part of his experience he internalizes it as the 'fragmentation' of the subject, which, despite the bravado of terms like 'dissemination', pleasure of the text', etc., is primarily a self-mutilation... Insofaras the intellectual retains the desire, no doubt unavowed, to be himself the 'subject' of this universe within the ideal model he strives to create, he is obliged to 'disseminate' himself over an unbounded set of 'readings'... of whatever text he chooses. Thus he is sorely tempted to set himself above this plurality by the
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flashy but sterile meta-posture of the subject reflecting on its own non-existence as an object of reflection. (1979:44)
The grafting of the religious rhetorical gesture onto post-structural -ist discourse (such as one might find in Diacritics, Glyph, or Tel Quel) registers both this utopianism, through the invocation of discourses of a mythically unified culture, and this pathos, through the moral freight carried with a kind of desperate analogia by the religious gesture.
The less symptomatic and even deferential reconsideration of religious discourse is exemplified in recent work of central figures within French post-structuralism such as Sollers (1981) and Kristeva (1980). 'The interpretation and condensation of signification has been pushed as far as it can go': the Bible is taken up as that which resists positioning within the textualiser's universe, as that which provides the hermeneutic key 'to the code of occidental culture, as meaningful sediment' (Hayman, 1977). The Bible, for Sollers, reposes the canonical post-structuralist doctrines of the dissemination of the subject, of the Derridean priority of ecriture over parole, of the critique of logocentrism:
This structure of the Bible: and God spoke, speaking to say speak and speak to them and tell them what I tell you. That is what constitutes Scripture. And it is because once a subject, the subject called Christ, came to place himself in place of speech, that there is what is known as the New Testament, which is by no means a function of ecriture but a function of the incarnation of parole. An incarnation of speech which implies that a subject arose, saying if you are like me, or one with me, there! you will be in the same place as that which spoke-is speaking-speaks.
However, the more systematic investigation of the status of religious discourse and its relations to contemporary questions of textuality has not arisen within the problematic of post-structuralism, although it circulates largely within it; this is the work of Girard (1977,78,79. See my fuller discussion of Girard, 1981,1982a, 1982b, 1983). Girard's early work on literature sought to establish a hierarchy of value whereby one might discriminate amongst texts in the literary tradition. This hierarchy was based on the extent to which the literary text was wholly caught up in the universe of 'mimetic desire', or lay in a symptomatically uneasy relation with mimetic desire, or, best, broke out of that relation altogether. 'Mimetic desire', or, as he calls it, in Deceit, Desire and the Novel, 'triangular desire', works on the principle of pure reciprocity, or 'eye for eye and tooth for tooth'. Society cannot survive operating on this principle of unchecked escalation of violence; human cultures achieve stability as the focus of reciprocal violence is shifted onto a designated victim in a process of scapegoating or 'victimage'. The motivated and institutionalised repetition of this process leads to the centrality of sacrifice in early cultures, from which elaborated forms of ritual and cultus and the texts of these forms, myths, develop. Later, more secularised textual forms, especially sophisticated literatures of advanced cultures, still retain this social function within however transformed cultural contexts. From the
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earliest literary criticism, then, Girard, has nevertheless propounded a social use-value for the literary text which accorded it the potential status of producing knowledge concerning cultural mechanisms. This contrasts markedly with both traditional literary criticism and post-structuralist accounts of textua lity, insofar as both mask what for Girard is ultimately a contempt for the next in terms of its potential production of cultural insight with versions of aestheticist organicity, on the one hand, or decentred play, on the other. Traditional literary criticism and post-structuralism offer variations of form, not of substance.
But this presupposition about the literary text - that it may generate knowledge of the extra-discursive domain of cultural mechanisms - must not remain the coy literary critical gesture to a generalized 'outside'of the discipline. Thus Girard develops his model of mimetic desire through anthropological, psychoanalytic, and Biblical evidence in order to posit the extent of the repression of the referent; that is, that originary acts of arbitrary violence or scapegoating are the foundation of human cultures and that these cultures are maintained through the perpetration of the sacrificial system. Girard rigorously defends the necessity of apprehending this level of extra-discursive reality behind, within, and beyond the text. 'The new problematic of mimesis exceeds the problematic of signification in all directions' (1979:203). He continually affirms that real violence, real social
disequilibrium, gave rise to the institutions of scapegoating and sacrifice, that most 'texts' both preserve and conceal this historical reality, and that certain privileged texts - of Dostoyevsky, Proust, Shakespeare, the Bible, pre-eminently the New Testament - disclose it and answer it definitively. Structuralist anthropology and, as a consequence, structuralism generally cannot distinguish real referentiality and mythic representations, and post-structuralist intertextuality catches the extra-textual up as simply another level of discourse.
'Contemporary thought is the supreme castration, because of the castration of the signified' (1978:464).
Stuart Cunningham teaches in the School of Humanities at Griffith University.
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Clarke, S. et al (1980) One dimensional Marxism, London: Allison and Busby.
Cunningham, S. (1981) The "force-field" of melodrama', Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 6.4.
(1982a) 'Reading the Bible', Interchange: papers on biblical and current questions No.30.
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(1982b) Review of Paisley Livingston, Ingmar Bergman and the rituals of art, MLN 92, No.5.
(1983) 'Good timing: Bad timing', Australian Journal of Screen Theory.
Eco, VJ1976)A Theory of Semiotics, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. University Press.
Foucault, M. (1972) The Archeology of Knowledge, London: Tavistock. Gans, E. (1979) 'Scandal to the Jew, folly to the pagans', Diacritics. Girard, R. (1965) Deceit, desire and the novel, Baltimore: John Hopkins.
(1977) Violence and the sacred, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins.
(1978a) Des choses cachees depuis la foundation du monde, Paris: Grasset.
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Hayman, D. (1977) 'An interview with Philippe Sollers', Tri-Quarterly, 38 (Winter).
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