Two by two: a few thoughts on parallels in the writings of Sassure and Marx

While reading the selections from Marx for today's discussion, particularly Capital (1867), I was continually reminded of the Course in General Linguistics (1916).  As with Sassure's notion of an implied order behind language, a mutually comprehensible system, order, pattern-- whatever it's called, it governs actual, observable activities of human society.

When Marx says that value, specifically labor-value, "converts every product into a social hieroglyphic.. we try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of our own social products; for to stamp an object of utility as a value, is just as much a social product as language" (669), it is easy to apply the concept of commodity as a sign to an understanding of Marx's argument.  This association reinforced my interest in the commodity's binary nature.  Like the linguistic sign is composed of signifier/signified, the commodity or product is composed of use-value/labor-value: the former, concrete, the latter, abstract.  The "shape," as Marx says, of the commodity is merely indicative of its labor-value, in the same way that the signifier provides access to what Marx would call an "aggregate" meaning-- that is to say, insofar as both the signified and the labor-value is a construct of complex and varied interrelations of composite experiences and information.  Like a linguistic sign, a commodity is a symbol exchanged between two parties who mutually agree upon a system of values and meaning to facilitate social interaction.

The use of binary systems of relation and difference has been an issue of interest to me since reading selections from writing by Helene Cioux, a French feminist deconstructionist theorist, in a Twentieth-century Women's literature course I took last year.  Cioux is concerned with the impact of established systems of thought and socio-linguistic order, particularly the binary system of oppositions--male/female, master/slave, strong/weak, winner/loser etc--upon the treatment of women and, more importantly, all people operating under this system of conflict. Cioux emphatically denies the notion that dominant thought structures--perpetuated, as Marx would agree, by the ruling classes--are "the way things are" or indicative of some kind of unalterable human nature.  Her writing itself is an endeavor to operate outside and beyond the binary-breakdown of social components.  To my dismay, I found myself frustrated by what seemed to me to be Cioux's abstract or nebulous writing style.  I felt inextricably entrenched in the dominant thought-pattern structure of binary oppositions, yet I remain confident that Cioux is correct in asserting that this way of thinking is only one possible mode of organizing the world and relational concepts.  It's prevalence and dominance is not necessarily indicative of its truth or inate-ness.

In this vein, I also found it interesting that in the brief introduction to Capital, the editor points out that Marx "attempted to provide a scientific explanation of his contention that a capitalist economic system requires the appropriation from workers of more value than they are paid for."  As I understand it, Freud, too, famously emphasized the scientific validity of his work, often in the face of open skepticism.  And Sassure, the linguist: his career implies access to objective, scientific reasoning.  These men subscribe to the myth of objectivity when a claim to scientific observation and analysis is used to validate their theories.  This claim to science can be thought of as a sign, used in the rhetoric of an argument about human behavior to convey legitimacy and value.