Such readings conflict with post-Saussurean methodology because they both
limit the arbitrary sign to a secondary role in meaning-production and
subvert the templum of the expressive object–for Barthes, the narrative text
(readerly or writerly). Of communication as a code, Barthes writes"[It]
should be understood in a restricted sense; it does not cover the whole of
signification which is in a text, and still less its 'significance'; it
simply designates every relationship in the text which is stated as an
address…or as an exchange….In short, communication should here be
understood in an economic sense (communication, circulation of goods)" (Young
156).In this context–the theorizing of intersubjective expression as limited
to the internal transportation of the materials of narrative–the following
passages from Marx are particularly apt:"If it be declared that the social
characters assumed by objects, or the material forms assumed by the social
qualities of labour under the regime of a definite mode of production, are
mere symbols, it is in the same breath also declared that these
characteristics are arbitrary fictions sanctioned by the so-called universal
consent of mankind." (Marx 103)"The religious reflex of the real world can,
in any case, only then finally vanish, when the practical relations of
everyday life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable
relations with regard to his fellowmen and to nature" (Marx 91).Furthermore,
Habermas writes, quoting Adorno, that "Adorno was convinced that the
principle of identity attained universal dominance in the measure that
bourgeois society was subjected to the organizing principle of exchange. 'In
exchange [bourgeois society] finds its social model; through it nonidentical
individual natures become commensurable, identical'" (jh 109).Irigaray
critiques this function of instrumentalized discourse in the specific context
of female sexuality:"…By submitting women's bodies to a general equivalent,
to a transcendent, super- natural value, men have drawn the social structure
into an ever-greater process of abstraction, to the point where they
themselves are produced in it as pure concepts…." (Irigaray 190).




What these hypothesized connections among the arbitrary sign, instrumental
and communicative discourse, modes of knowledge-production in bourgeois
society, and mythic practices illustrate most clearly is the need for a
skeptical discourse which can critique these categories. Both canon and
exegesis as concepts require a scrutiny undeterred by the paradigm shift that
would result in the transition to new modes of discourse which are more
congruent with the communicative hypothesis, that is, modes of discourse the
disruption of which has been argued here to be the source of expressive
authority for instrumental or taboo-based systems. Such a discourse would
make the same arguments as this paper does, but in a far simpler way, in far
simpler language, and in the context not of an analytical artifact but of
interactive discourse generated communicatively within social relationships
of all sorts.


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