L'Esprit objectif as a Theory of Language

by Steve Martinot

Sartre's writing, which has continued to produce itself since his death (each new production being a totalization without a (or with a different) totalizer), can be historicized on three levels. First, there is its own internal development. For instance, some commentators argue that a philosophical break occurs between the early and later texts, while others see a continuity, or at least an ontological coherence.[1] In either case, an internal development is discernible, needing articulation. Still other critics, such as Thomas Busch, relate Sartre's development to his interaction with his times, to his response to real history with its surrounding philosophical debates and developments -- in a word, to the "force of circumstances" themselves. Sartre's text evinces an "external" history, a development articulated with its own "historical other."[2] And finally, there are Sartre's own times, the real circumstances that surrounded him, beset him -- and which he in turn lived as one of his epoch's "events." There is a totality laminating 1) Sartre's thinking the world in his writing; 2) Sartre's thinking in terms of the world and its writing; and 3) the writing and thinking in Sartre's world -- in short, a historicity in Sartre, a historicality to Sartre, and a history for Sartre.

Hazel Barnes invokes all three historicities when she argues that, in defining l'Esprit objectif, in L'Idiot de la Famille, Sartre combines and develops ideas from both What is Literature? and the Critique of Dialectical Reason.[3] In the latter, Sartre confronts the interrelation between freedom and one's determination by social praxis, the problem of how one makes history and is made by it. In the former, on the other hand, he theorizes writing as an autonomous activity of engagement in the world. And this thesis initiated a "secret" debate (an "external" interaction) with Roland Barthes on freedom and determination in language and writing.[4] In What is Literature?, Sartre posed the problem of writers grasping their historical moment as their own, to which Barthes had "responded" (in Writing Degree Zero) by asking how history grasped writers, and writing, as its own. Barthes discussed writing as manifesting itself within a determined and determining structure of language; and Sartre "responded," in his later writing, by re-posing the question of how practical structures determine through forms of exigency, or imperative. Though Sartre would never abandon his view of language as the instrumentalized rather than instrumentalizer, and though he was not only responding to Barthes in his later shifts on language, there is a domain (beyond Sartre's interaction with structuralism) in which Barthes stands as a singular interlocutor for Sartre's thinking. And it is this domain (the mere edges of which I will touch here) that marks Sartre's concept of l'Esprit objectif,[5] and claims it as a moment in a theory of language.

On Barthes

In Writing Degree Zero, Barthes presents l'ecriture[6] as an operation within a space produced by the givens of language and style. Language defines a space or realm of possibility, characterized not so much by its instrumentality as by its limits, its boundedness, as a "horizon of intelligibility." It is bequeathed by history and tradition as an inherited realm of familiarity. "Orthogonal" to this space of signification, style manifests the biographical as the writer's personal given. It is the upsurge of individual psycho-biological being and past experience, not as if from elsewhere, but as a "here." If language is a material structure of signifiers that is both (historically) determined and determining, style is an immaterial signifier whose signified is the unquotable immediacy of the personal (a signifier without a signified), similarly determined and determining. Within this space of givens, and constrained by them, Barthes argues, a writer chooses a mode of writing as a Form. Form is not itself an object to be intended or played with; it is precisely where intention, or object, may reside. And it is not without signification; it is itself a sign system that brings with it a certain socio-historical meaning. For instance, literary modes of writing signify Literature itself, among other things. This formal, second order signification provides an "alibi" for the author, an objectivity that bequeaths to the writer a certain justification, an elsewhere where meaning is made.

Because modes of writing, as form, present an aura of the objective, a history of writing and of literature becomes possible. For Barthes, this formal history both defines and constrains the possibility of being a writer; it is the place where the writer becomes a writer through the choice of how to become one. Form is where the writer is engaged. Barthes expresses this as "l'ecrivain s'engage," leaving ambiguous whether the writer engages him/herself, or is engaged, whether this is reflexive or passive. And this ambiguity of form resides at the core of each mode of writing.

Though Barthes' notion of l'engagement is not the same as that proposed by Sartre, it is closer than it looks. For Sartre, writing can succeed in its project only if the reader is free; therefore, in order for the writer to be a writer, s/he must engage themselves in their historical moment in such a way as to guarantee the reader's freedom. In this sense, every writer is inherently engaged at the moment of lifting the pen, and Sartre exhorts the writer to take to heart what this means (in both its import and importance). For Barthes, the problem lies elsewhere. The writer's engagement is a question of how the reader is also determined by both historical tradition (language) and literary history (l'ecriture); and it is from the determining meanings given by form that the reader must be freed. For instance, 19th Cent. naturalism, though affecting a mimesis of popular speech, was still a form of bourgeois writing; the passions it described remained imprisoned within its bourgeois (individualist and objectivist) character. The political writers of the left, Barthes argues, while attempting to articulate their rejection of the bourgeois, nevertheless made use precisely of bourgeois modes of writing, which in the end sustained the society they had sought to oppose through its formal significations. The discourses of contestation, by taking their language from the discourses contested, become complicit. As Barthes says, "the revolution must borrow from what it wants to destroy the very image of what it wants to possess." (DZ,87) And it is with such complicity that he charges Sartre. For Barthes, only a zero degree writing, a mode of writing whose connotations and second order significations (the meanings of form) have been eliminated, will escape complicity. Whether this is possible or not is a different question. But for Barthes, certain avant-garde movements, post-modernist experimentation with language, the New Novel movement, etc., were tending in that direction; in flattening language toward pure denotation, or pushing writing to the point of violating its own internal logic, a significationless (zero degree) form seemed to be in sight. Herein lies the hypothetical political or revolutionary content of the avant-garde -- its historical role, as it were.

In sum, though both address the freedom of the reader, Sartre differs from Barthes in locating freedom in the dimensions of content rather than form, and with respect to language's referentiality rather than its self-referentiality.

In the Critique of Dialectical Reason (CDR), Sartre rethinks the issue of determination, and the givenness of the social past.[7] He asks how praxis becomes constrained, or unfree, when embedded in the contradictions of a social situation. But for the question of writing as praxis, the language of the CDR is insufficient. Writing resists translation into terms of the practico-inert; it does not, strictly speaking, work on matter nor produce worked matter. Though Sartre will speak of the written as a "thingified idea" (l'idee chosifiee) (IF,49), and of literature in general as "a work of material production," (IF,49) a contextualization that would give these a cultural rather than merely material meaning is still necessary. To transcend the CDR's language, Sartre develops (in IF) the notion of l'Esprit objectif, by which he means "culture as the practico-inert."

For Sartre, praxis constitutes itself through a dialectic between of one's activity in pursuit of a project, and the given world of/as worked matter to be transformed by that pursuit. Within this dialectic, one gains a grasp of the given (the practico-inert) through one's activity (an interiorization of exteriority), and one realizes one's project through that activity (an exteriorization of interiority). Furthermore, against the given as known through one's activity, one's activity becomes known in terms of its effect on the practico-inert. In these terms, instrumentality (both material and tools) constitutes a material aspect of epistemological access to the given acted on; and it gives access to the nature of the project thereby enacted (self-knowledge) as well. Thus, instrumentality in general functions as a way the world is apprehended that is irreducible either to itself or to that apprehension. It too is intelligible in terms of what it transcends through use, and the project whose realization it facilitates. (CDR,44) In this sense, it interposes itself between praxis and matter as a materialization of their very relation, an avatar for it. In so far as it discloses the object and the subject, the world and the person acting in the world, to each other without subsuming them, it functions (in Sartre's metaphor) as an "organ of perception."[8] And this only emphasizes that the encounter between praxis and matter as instrumentality is never arbitrary. Certain imperatives accompany it. Matter in general, through its qualities, demands to be worked in certain ways and not others; and instrumentality likewise demands of its employment: "use this way, and not that." The instrument itself, in representing the jobs it can perform and the socio-technical relations that have produced it, constitutes itself as a form of practical knowledge, "an implicit and non-verbal intuitive knowledge" within the realization of a project -- a knowledge whose direct and totalizing comprehension is an immediate condition of praxis. (IF,45)

Sartre underlines its immediacy. Such knowledge is coincident with the praxis that contains it; (IF,47) when one's activity changes to a different project, so does the attendent intuitive knowledge of what one is doing. It is thus to be distinguished from the articulated, and from institutionalized ideas and discourses ("ideologies, cosmogonies, ethico-esthetic and confessional systems" (IF,48)). Sartre also emphasizes that such knowledge includes awareness of both the work done and the social relationships surrounding and conditioning it. That is, more than mere know-how or technique, it situates praxis in its social world, as an intuition of one's lived (class, socio-economic, personal) relations to others.[9] For instance, a lathe in a factory making auto parts may be familiar to a farmer taking his produce to market past that factory, but it is not informed for him in its productive instrumentality by the immediate social relations of the factory as it is for a lathe operator. "The mode of use becomes an inert discourse, participating in the inertia of matter." (IF,48)[10] In other words, there is a certain dialogue between worker and matter that accompanies the practical dialectic between interiority and exteriority, between apprehension and activity. This implicit dialogue constitutes a kind of "subjectivity of work." (IF,46)

We can relate this sense of implicit knowledge to Sartre's earlier notion of non-reflective consciousness. In Being and Nothingness, he says:

[Non-reflective consciousness] is penetrated by a great light without being able to express what this light is illuminating. ... in full possession of it, [it] apprehends all. But ... this possession is deprived of the means which would ordinarily permit analysis and conceptualization. It grasps everything, all at once, without shading, without relief, without connections of grandeur.[11]

Sartre is speaking of an individual's grasp of his/her fundamental project, here, but the image is approrpiate. Furthermore, it suggests a certain constancy in Sartre's appeal to the unreflective. It is a kind of signified without a signifier, a meaning that both is and is not, and manifests itself in real activity as a form of second order signification, or connotation. For instance, Sartre suggests that the primordial forms of class rebellion emerge from just such non-reflective (social) consciousness.

When reflection addresses this intuitive knowledge, it necessarily does so through recourse to language. (IF,45) In Sartre's account, articulation avails itself of the terminologies and ideational forms already culturally extant (as mode of production, relations of production, institutions, laws, etc.); (IF,45) that is, it makes instrumentalities of them. But the process of articulation is never innocent. Sartre points out in BN that the language chosen for deliberation (or articulation) is always deceptive because its use is pursuant to a different project than what it articulates. (BN,551) And as instrumentality, it subjects practical knowledge to the discourses of social, human, and technological relations -- those discourses which already pretend to articulate and clarify social knowledge. Articulation also divides such knowledge, isolating parts, cutting them up into theoretic moments standing aside from praxis and its goals. Thus, it transforms what it approaches -- from the lived into the known. In general, implicit knowledge is falsified, i.e. constituted as a form of non-knowledge.

In this transformation, knowledge also becomes "thingified," passive -- what Sartre calls "mineralized." (IF,47) Sartre uses the term "mineralization" in CDR to describe how an assembly line worker, for instance, becomes an adjunct to a machine, living to the machine's rhythms, and thinking as it were the machine's thoughts. Similarly, though culturally given discourses do not determine what one must think or respond, they necessitate that one respond (i.e. think) within their given terms. That is, there is an imperative in these discourses that they be "read and understood this way, and not that." One's thought is becomes thus ruled by them. In this manner, the articulation of practical knowledge becomes a process of acculturation. And subjected to such instrumentality, the subjectivity of work is transformed into ideology. (IF,46)

For Sartre, the totality of institutional discourses, ideologies, truths, mystifications, cosmogonies, etc. present (i.e. mineralize) "the totality of imperatives imposed upon a person in a particular society." That is, a way of understanding l'Esprit objectif is as the totality of texts, (FI,48) including written texts, oral texts whose mode of existence is a particular inscription in memory, and the already experienced meanings given to worked matter that articulate its material imperatives.[12] "It is in writing that all these ideas [the totalized, mute, and practical ideas which are one with those of work] are preserved" -- and for which the literary, as actual books, is "the last avatar." (FI,49) In short, l'Esprit objectif is culture to the extent that culture is practico-inert. (FI,47)

If l'Esprit objectif is the synthetic milieu in which prior discourses instrumentalize themselves, then Barthes' sense of the historical determination of language may be included in it. The very notion of a "horizon of intelligibility" names a space (as instrumentality itself) of the play of articulation. Of course, there is a difference between spatial boundedness and discursive determinism. Within the space of that difference, there remains a value to considering language as instrumental; a freedom is preserved for the individual. But it is a relative freedom, because it is practical rather than ontological. Indeed, it is a constrained freedom because, unlike material exigency, to which one need not acceed (though perhaps at one's peril), the unobeyed discursive imperative remains an imposition of terms. Situated by given discourses within which to speak, and to have spoken, the spoken (as the impossibility of idea not becoming non-knowledge) contains (with its imperatives) what is chosen as speech. A refusal of terms only becomes another concretization (and accession to) the imperative of those same terms. Barthes' view of complicity is an aspect of this. And Sartre recognizes it (as counterfinality) when he says that the development of a working class consciousness must involve freeing class subjectivity from the given (ideological) discourses available for its articulation. This would constitute a purifying process analogous to that projected by Barthes for zero degree writing.

Thus, Sartre acceeds, in a sense, to the thrust of Barthes' historicization of writing; and he extends this accession into the realm of semiotics. For Sartre, the phenomenological approach to language recognizes that, in the absence of both a writer (or speaker) and a reader, there are no signs; signs serve only to guide a transcendence. (IF,50) But, if signification persists in the objectivity of texts, then writer and reader must be independent of each other; neither reader nor writer can require the existence of the other to those signs for an apprehension of their meaning -- and signs must be in some sense independent of both. That is, both reading and writing are essentially determined by the written. In other words, Sartre has embraced a sense of language's priority as determining that parallels Barthes', though recontextualized within Sartre's thinking. In a sense, Sartre gives an ontological foundation to what Barthes had asserted because Barthes gives a semiotic foundation to what Sartre responds.[13]

There is a third realm of imperative to be considered, that of social collectives. The statutory or "pledged" group, which is an already fused group[14] enacting its own group desire for permanence, (CDR,418) embodies in itself a social imperative for that permanence. Its permanence is concretized in a commitment (le serment, which Sheridan has translated as 'pledge') made to the group by each member, the violation of which would result in isolation, social ostracism, or injury. Desire thus objectifies the group, and renders it contradictory. Though composed of free praxes, the imperative renders the group a materiality that restricts its members' freedoms, "an inert synthesis within freedom itself." (CDR,417) Individuals retain "a free but given link" to it that is both "regulatory and totalized." (CDR,418) It becomes what Sartre calls a "totalitarian synthesis," a unity that brooks no alternative points of view. The group imperative is, thus, "untranscendable;" it takes the (organizational) form of an "opaque elsewhere" that remains unignorably "here". In effect, the group's common desire, with its nostalgia for originary collective praxis and elan, is replaced by an alterity in appearance. As an object reflected on, the group arrives at constituting a moment of freedom's own complicity in its unfreedom.

In sum, there are three levels of imperative: that of worked matter as instrumentality, that of group self-objectification, and that of l'Esprit objectif. These render a sense of the "determining" intelligible within the structure of praxis (1) as socially produced materiality, (2) as socially constructed intersubjectivity, and (3) as historical and ideological discourse. Each produces a different mode of practico-inert structure, that of technology, of group organizational identity, and of ideational and linguistic acculturation.

This triad also stratifies the notion of intuitive practical knowledge, and on the plane of l'Esprit objectif, the question of articulation presents a critical problem. Implicit knowledge is coherent at the level of the for-itself, as a form of non-reflective consciousness. It is also intelligible dialectically as know-how accrued in and through activity at the level of praxis; work, for instance, is surrounded by meaning because it is material within a human world, and lived as such -- it is the human world that is thus revealed. But intuitive knowledge pertaining to the instrumental use of cultural and ideological discourses in the praxis of writing, or as acculturation, is already surrounded by language. This includes articulated processes of training, explanation, social relationship, and definition of social usage: discourses which are at once the conditions and the vestiges of the birth of discursive instrumentalities. One's social, political, or technological relations are always already constituted by language. What does it mean to have an implicit, unarticulated knowledge of them? [15] Sartre has argued that these relations are already inscribed within (material) instrumentality. In order to think (intuitively) one's praxis or its social relations, one would have to have already read those discourses into that praxis. As means of articulation of implicit practical knowledge, they would already have to have constituted what was to be articulated, and thus become means of self-rearticulation. If a use of different terms would amount to inventing new knowledge, then articulation only means reading back what had already been read in. That is, at the level of l'Esprit objectif, (implicit) meaning is already an intuition of articulated meaning; and the subject becomes a conduit through which given discourses pass and reorganize themselves. This begins to resemble Barthes' restriction of the writer to a choice of Form. And it dismantles the dialectic that, for Sartre, constitutes praxis.

What is further implied, for the praxis of writing, is that implicit knowledge is inseparable from the praxis of reading. Let us turn, then, to Sartre's account of the praxis of reading.

We have encountered a multiplicity of social textualities: (1) institutionalized ideas entextualized as ideologies, cosmogonies, cultural and class practices, etc.; (2) the instrumentalization of these texts as articulatory (mineralizing) language; and (3) an articulated non-knowledge extracted from intuitive knowledge within praxis. As textual materiality, they are what is read (or listened to, if such is the case); and as the instrumentality of reading praxis, they are the mode of reading. That is, the totality of social textuality is what one reads with, as well as what one reads. Sartre recognizes that intellection, the "synthetic surpassing of signifying materiality toward signification" which constitutes the intuitive knowledge contained in the praxis of reading, cannot totalize this social textuality. As the "practical knowledge" of reading, it "lasts no longer than does the material surpassed in the act that transcends it." (IF,49) Intellection has no greater longevity than the writing it transcends, unless written.[16] The social textualities that articulate intellection may limit and determine it by providing the terms for its practical act of reading, but their dictate is not unitary; their terms continue to engender multiple and overlapping forms of representation and falsification.

For Sartre, reading praxis also obeys a second logic of multiplicity. Each reader reads a text knowing (implicitly) that there are others, unknown, who are reading the same text, each of whom is reading it differently -- and each of whom is aware in some sense of this variance. "I know that other readers appropriate the idea at the same moment [as I do] ... who surpass the same material toward nearly the same, but sensibly different, meanings." (IF,50,52) Reading praxis is detotalized; each reader reads with a different intuitive knowledge, a different intellection, employing different re-articulatory instrumentality.

But how is a detotalized praxis of reading, as different appropriations of the text's "idea," possible without reflecting a semiotic polysemia? If readings differ because each reader's praxis is different, surpassing the same signs toward different meanings, then the possibility of submitting to these different praxes must be part of the sign. The text read must already contain the possibility of being a polysemic sign. In particular, the fact that each reading through a different instrumentality reflects a different practical contextualization of the sign (text) is one way this polysemia manifests itself. Context is not inherent in the sign; it is always, in some sense, metatextual. And the transcendence that is guided by the sign assists that guidance through its choice of contextualizing (instrumental) discourses. If reading is a (multiple) detotalized praxis, this is made possible by the play of signifiers among permissible meanings.

For Sartre, l'Esprit objectif is a totalization of this "detotalized (atomized) totalization of readers". But what totalizes for each reader is neither articulation nor intellection, which are already semiotically diffuse, but the future, a "presentiment" or apprehension, at the level of implicit knowledge, of the way the future will see the present as its past -- how "generations to come will make of today's lived present a totalized past." (IF,50) This previsioned future abolishes the present's experience of itself because the present is then expressed in the name of what future readers will experience of this present as their past. (IF,51) Though the multiplicity of individual readings of a text appears irreducible, cancellation of present experience "in the name of this future experience represents an imposed objectification" (objectivation totalitaire), which totalizes the present multiplicity.[17] At the same time, however, the present remains an irreducible multiplicity, not "objectively" in the sense that for each reader the present is (subjectively) totalized through the future; but subjectively in the sense that what I read (objectively) is "enriched in my eyes by a thousand interpretations that escape me." (IF,52)

The presentiment of the future through which totalization occurs is without content. First of all, one cannot see the future; and second, if it wasn't, the multiplicity of other readings would not be irreducible. The totalization is only form, the form of living an already fixed (objectified) present. Thus, the present understood as what a future will understand is always a deferred totalization, a mode of non-being. That is, the present gives itself as not yet given, while at the same time, it is already given as a past, as no longer the present. The praxis of reading is an alterity to its own (re)construction of the text through given discourses, a reading that is other than it's reading of the text. Thus, the praxis of reading is both a deferral (to a future) and an alterity (through it). In effect, l'Esprit objectif represents a "totalization without a totalizer," (IF,50) since the totalizer is always elsewhere, later. But this is also Sartre's characterization of "history" in CDR.

Three things must be said about this. First, to the extent that the alterity and deferral of l'Esprit objectif holds true for any writer (a writer is also a reader who specifically totalizes him/herself as a self-projected future past), l'Esprit objectif becomes itself an historicization of writing. As such, we could find Barthes' notion of "mode of writing", i.e. the significations of form in particular readings, within it. In this context, one can read bourgeois writing as exemplary rather than demonstrative or mimetic; one's critique of the individualism of its representations, however, would have to be in a different "ecriture," and the difference would have a meaning of its own. An attempt at zero degree writing becomes one possible articulation among others extant within an historical moment. In this respect, it is noteworthy that the avant-guard on which Barthes focused some attention never succeeded in subsuming an entire social situation, thus always functioning within a multiplicity.

If Barthes' historicization of ecriture becomes one of the aspects embraced by Sartre's l'Esprit objectif, however, it is in an inverted sense. Where, for Barthes, the past determines the present, Sartre asks how that past is determined, or indeed constructed, and answers that it is the future, constituted (or written) by present praxis, that constructs the present which contains such a past for itself. The present writes its own past by envisioning itself through its future.

Second, if the praxis of reading contains the history in which the reader lives (the world totalized as a historical discourse), it also contains the history that s/he lives (a detotalized world of real readings), and the lived historicity of each reader (the deferral and alterity of the present as a totalization of detotalized givenness). L'Esprit objectif thus reflects the triad we encountered earlier -- of materiality (present), intersubjectivity (the present as the past of a future), and the structures of discourse (the present as the future of a past) -- i.e. the three levels of (Sartre's) historicity with which we began this essay. The form of language is implicated in this triadic historicity.

Third, as a totalization without a totalizer, l'Esprit objectif is not dialectical. If it manifests itself as alterity and deferral, it has constituted itself through two inseparable incommensurables both of which are positivities; there is neither opposition nor synthesis. Instead, l'Esprit objectif constitutes a sense of the present as history, the present as a sense of history, in terms of a different structure. And it is the form of that structure we must now examine.

But first let us simply note that Sartre's approach to the writer synthesizes an ontology of praxis with a Barthesian structure, though through certain inversions. Language and intentionality are inverted in terms of which grounds which; and past and future are in terms of the ground of an historicization of the present. Sartre has replaced his earlier notion of engagement in one's own time with a sense of one's own time as a past present produced in form through an envisioned future. Both Barthes' project in DZ and Sartre's in IF now project the liberatory through form rather than content. The difference has become what form language takes in its imposition of itself on the present.

In Sartre's account of the inner dynamic of l'Esprit objectif's readability,

What characterizes l'Esprit objectif at this level is that it is outside, not the product of thought in the present, but above all in books, i.e. in the writing of others. ... In whatever form, reading is an undertaking that transforms a thing into an idea: the eye must retrieve (reconstitute) the ideational act of the other through that act's vestiges, and the reading must restrain the dispersion of signs and discursively recompose, according to learned codes, what the object of [the writer's] possibly instantaneous intuitions were. (IF,51)

That is, l'Esprit objectif is always elsewhere, in things (books), though it produces itself by reversing the thingification of idea. The signs of the text, as material vestiges, are the traces of an other's ideation left in worked matter. This is not the Derridean trace, which is the semiotic investment of each sign by its differences from other signs, as the presence of absence (see note 13). Nevertheless, the act of reading is a search within otherness, a residence in an alterity that is already, at the moment of reading, an implicit knowledge: viz. that there is an other's ideation. Sartre's trace is the presence of a beckoning, enticing idea, no longer there, a presence of absence also -- but an absence that is ontological rather than semiotic. The Sartrean trace pertains to the generation of meaning, but as the praxis of making meaning where it had once already been made. At the semiotic point of present absence, Sartre refuses to erase the person who acts.

In the next sentence, however, Sartre's account takes on a distinctly Derridean flavor. If "the reader must restrain (as a praxis) the dispersion of signs," to "discursively recompose" the author's thought, there is already a recognition of a sign's prior dispersion. And we have already seen that this dispersion is a polysemia within the very structure of signs. The dispersion of "sensibly different" meanings (to be restrained) must already be structural if a totalization of a multiple (detotalized) reading is necessary. The "restraining" is done by each reader apprehending multiplicity not in others but as otherness in his/her own reading in order to read in the first place. The praxis of reading must already embrace, in some manner, a kind of Derridean dissemination.[18] It relinquishes dissemination only in the absolute otherness of totalization through the envisioned future that abolishes the present's experience of itself in the name of that future's experience. (FI,51)

We are at an interface between Sartre and Derrida, where their two approaches to language dovetail. And at that interface, the irreducibility of multiplicity signifies both a structural polyvalence, and a totalized alterity; each is the incommensurable product of the other, the other's outside that is ever rediscovered within. Structural polyvalence produces a totalized (material) alterity, though it encounters it elsewhere in the historicized trace (the present as the trace of itself in the future for which it is the past). Totalized alterity produces structural polyvalence, though it encounters it as still to be discovered in the present (material) trace. Material polyvocity is seen through the historicized trace, and the semiotic trace (as material, the text to be read) is seen through an historicized polyvocity (others reading it elsewhere). The difference between these two outsidenesses constitutes, for Derrida, the possibility of the sign's (or text's) meaning, and for Sartre, its being as, and in, l'Esprit objectif. In other words, in l'Esprit objectif, we encounter alterity (difference) as historicity and historicity as deferral; difference (alterity) as materiality and materiality as deferral. The trace of the sign's multiple differences overflows a totalized present; and the possibility of univocity, a totalization of the signifier, diffuses into deferral to a future. If we recognize the operation of (Derridean) differance in this,[19] we also find it exemplified in Sartre's statement that "the thought, in the instant I make it mine, remains definitively other, an other's thought that commands me to resuscitate it." (IF,51) It is always elsewhere, always later. Derrida's notion of dissemination, which embraces the incommensurability of appropriation and structural polyvocity, the deferral (as a perpetual need of resuscitation) to contingent contextualizations (as inescapable alterity), is structurally similar to this. In effect, Derridean differance, dissemination, and the Sartrean account of reading as praxis, are all homologous.

Finally, we can add that for both, not only is the sign polyvocal, but it is not unlimited in that respect. Both recognize that inherent in the act of reading is a choice of code (or context) delimiting meaning -- a code whose phenomenality is an implicit knowledge contained in socially given discourses (ideology, etc.), and whose objectifications belong to the deferred present.[20] This implies that, in theorizing the material interplay of thing and idea, Sartre has placed, upon a different practical plane, a semiotics that is not structurally dissimilar to Derrida's.[21]

Ironically, what remains different between them is their similar rejection of the transcendent. Where Sartre cancels appeal to God or human nature as transcendent being, Derrida cancels appeal to the future, to the abolition of the present's experience of itself in transcendent meaning (a transcendental signifier). Perhaps what remains so disturbing about Derrida's thinking is that in revealing the inner dynamic of language/textuality in the present, he has refused to allow this abolition to continue. As Sartre traps us in freedom, Derrida traps us in our present experience; we can no longer totalize without an awareness of profound self-violation.

What, now, is the meaning of the displacement of the dialectic by incommensurability, by this logic of alterity (as a "hybrid" of synchronic multiplicity and diachronic future pastness)?

What is important for the moment is the double character of l'Esprit objectif, which can only be an upsurge in us toward that idea if it is outside as worked matter. Its thingness is its guarantee of its permanence. It doesn't exist, it is. When, by reading, I transform the thing into idea, the metamorphosis is never complete. It is an idea-thing that penetrates me, since this hybrid being that can only return to life through me necessarily has its reality outside me as thought congealed in matter. (IF,51)

That is, there is no synthesis. If the transformation of thing into idea is never complete, then there is always a residue. Meaning never exhausts the sign.[22] That one is "penetrated" by this idea-thing only testifies to the artifactuality of knowledge; viz. that there is always more knowledge contained in signs than we can mean with them. This artifactuality is the fact that outside discourses always impinge on knowledge as the very condition for there to be knowledge in the first place (an outside inside the inside, as Derrida would say). It is the necessary condition for multiple readings, which, as "the enrichment of meaning through other readings that escape me," are the condition for anyone reading. This residue is the elsewhere that is in addition to my reading within detotalization, and which displaces mine through totalization. It is what Derrida refers to as the logic of the supplement, that which is beyond the limit only by being implicated inside what had established that limit for itself. In the logic of the supplement, the other, the differing, is implicit in the sign to which meaning is as-signed (as if signed) through that difference. Leonard Lawlor, in discussing Derrida's essay, "White Mythology," summarizes this appropriately (in a manner the mediates Derrida's and Sartre's languages). The logic of the supplement "implies the impossibility of determining completely any particular linguistic element, but also thought and being themselves."[23] That is, there is no transcendental point from which to apprehend the whole. That apprehension must come from within, through the leakage of what is within to an outside that is already central to what leaks, a present that leaks out to a future whose present it already is. On the one hand, there is no non-linguistic place from which to designate meaning. And on the other, there is no non-present place from which to designate meaning; one apprehends l'Esprit objectif always as unthinkably enriched by an unknowable other, always out of reach through a formal future.

In Derridean semiotics, what constitutes the sign's meaning is that it remains other, behind the trace, at the very moment of appropriation, a sustained deferral at the moment of difference. These are not negations of each other, nor mutually generating. They map out a negative space in which meaning is generated. In Sartrean semiotics, meaning emerges from an alterity (my thought of another's thought) and a deferral to future pastness (my assignment of another's assignment of my meaning) -- a state of irreducible otherness, and an act of presentiment. In both, meaning emerges from a confluence of inseparable incommensurables, for which, again, there is no synthesis. Sartre is operating within a logic of the supplement. In representing l'Esprit objectif as an historical operation, Sartre has revealed a certain materiality possible for that logic.

There are three distinct moments in Sartre's description of l'Esprit objectif, each of which, at the interface in question, can be associated structurally with an element of Derridean theorization of language within a logic of supplementarity. There is, first, the relation of reader to text, as the trace; second, the relation between readers as both serial and lived sociality, as the polyvocity of textuality, or dissemination; and third, the relation between one's reading and the totalized yet irreducible multiplicity of other readings, as differance.

For Sartre, these three semiotic moments of l'Esprit objectif rematerialize themselves at the three levels of imperative: the trace as materiality (book), polyvocity as an intersubjectivity in praxis, and differance as the instrumental operation of given discourses. L'Esprit objectif overlays these moments upon each other, a lamination of different textual levels that structures both writing and the reader's acculturation. This triad converts the relation between the (immaterial) materiality of writing and the (material) immateriality of discourse as praxis homologically into the relation between the Derridean critique (and theorization) of language, and l'Esprit objectif. Where Derrida understands contextualization as contingent, and only metatextually (and always to an extent falsifyingly) given in the process of reading, rather than inherent in the text read, Sartre is positing reading as a contextualization, the articulation of meaning as the falsification of thought by contingent discourses understood metatextually as instrumentality. And it is the falsification of implicit knowledge (not its falsifiability) that opens praxis to creativity. The creative moment lies in the praxis of reading that surrounds writing, rather than in writing itself (most writers recognize that writing is really re-writing, meaning rereading what they have already written as a form of "intersubjectivity").

Because l'Esprit objectif is embedded within the logic of the supplement, it preserves the ontological relation of alterity between people and language. Language becomes the way in which the ontological is linked to the practical. In this sense, the practico-inert is an extension of l'Esprit objectif, rather than the latter extending the former to writing. The logic of the supplement renders language the envelop for the mutual relations of the ontological, the practico-inert, and the discursive.

In this regard, l'Esprit objectif is a theory of language. If it has embraced and incorporated the Barthesian critique, it has done so through an ontological projection into the deconstructive; and if it has formed an interface with this latter, it is through an ontological transformation of the former. This is l'Esprit objectif's interiorization of its history (as history's effect on Sartre). It is as if a Sartrean praxis had been lurking within the transformation engendered by deconstruction's critique of structuralism itself[24] -- as the external historicity of Sartre's thought, reflected in the real Esprit objectif of the last few decades. But in that sense, Sartre's text has responded to the change in l'Esprit objectif of his time, from one in which a Barthesian structuralism could flourish, to one which would spawn a post-structuralist critique and theorization of language.

Finally, we might add that the liberatory motif has not been forgotten. For Sartre, it has been shifted from individual ontological engagement to collective temporal totalization in which the future is the praxis of the present at the same time that the present is the praxis of the future. That is, the imperatives of language and social structure remain detotalized, non-determining, instrumental, the ground of an ever self-asserting and self dissolving avant-garde. However, as the deconstructive critique, the operation of l'Esprit objectif, and the ontology of reading have all revealed, the liberatory project must always do two things at once, only one of which can be ascertained at a time (like an Uncertainty Principle). If we live our freedom as agency in the present, it will be at the expense of history and the ability to totalize our being in it; and if we make our own history, it will be at the expense of deferring the present.

Endnotes

1. Some, like Mark Poster, or Thomas Flynn, argue that there is an ontological consistency from beginning to end, with only a change in emphasis from individual consciousness to social praxis. Others, like Wilfred Desan, argue that Sartre's radical freedom is self-contradictory. For Ronald Aronson, radical freedom obviates a practical account of human solidarity, and necessitates Sartre's later theorization of collectives and social constraints on a different basis. Cf. Mark Poster; Marxist Existentialism in Post-war France (Princeton Univ. Press, 1975). Thomas Flynn; Sartre and Marxist Existentialism (Chicago Univ. Press, 1984). Wilfred Desan; Tragic Finale (Harper, 1960). Ronald Aronson; Philosophy in the World (London: NLB, 1980).

2. Thomas Busch; The Power of Consciousness and the Force of Circumstances (Indiana Univ. Press, 1990).

3. Barnes, Hazel; Sartre and Flaubert (Chicago Univ. Press, 1981)

4. Jean-Paul Sartre; What is Literature?, trans Bernard Frechtman (Washington Sq. Press, 1966). Hereafter Lit. Roland Barthes; Writing Degree Zero, trans, Annete Lavers (Hill and Wang, 1968). Hereafter DZ.

5. Jean-Paul Sartre; L'Idiot de la Famille, Vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). Hereafter FI. The translations are my own. I will use the French term (l'Esprit objectif) to preserve its Sartrean specificity, and not dilute it with, or disseminate it among, the Hegelian or positivist connotations of "objective mind" -- a luxury attendant upon the positive act of non-translation.

6. Annette Lavers translates l'ecriture as "mode of writing." This objectifies the notion a little more that Barthes may have intended, but in some contexts it makes it easier to talk about. I will use both.

7. Jean-Paul Sartre; Critique of Dialectical Reason (London: Verso, 1982), trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith, p. 220 - 252. Hereafter CDR.

8. This is analogous to Sartre's account of totality itself. (CDR,45ff) The whole constitutes the parts as parts that constitute it as a whole, and is a transcendence irreducible to those parts. Its meaning emerges from the relations of its parts, and is the foundation for those relations. The whole, as meaning, relates to the parts and the relations it engenders among them as act of perceiving to perceived.

9. Two things should be noted here. First, for Sartre, this implicit knowledge contains a certain social critique in its intuition of the inhumanity of an exploitative structure, of the subhumanity of the exploited, and thus constitutes the "first germ of a political attitude of refusal." (IF,45) Second, social superstructures are not the locus of disclosure of this implicit knowledge, but only the higher levels of its elaboration. That is, the relation of implicit practical knowledge to social structure, literature, law, or ruling political ideology, already constitutes a transformation (from the "practico-theoretic" to the "theoretico-practical") through a complex process of explicitation. (FI,45)

10. In discussing this, Sartre transforms the Hegelian master-slave relation slightly, in an interesting manner. The master becomes a transmitter of the imperatives of matter to the worker. Though he becomes a transmitter by dint of ownership, and through participation in certain economic relations such as markets, he himself, nevertheless, becomes the avatar of the exigencies he faces, and which he needs production to fulfill. His own orders to the worker take on the nature of the materialities he is dealing with. As Sartre says, the boss "plays an inorganic role with respect to the worker, and his orders emerge from a mouth of stone." (IF,48)

11. Sartre; Being and Nothingness, trans Hazel Barnes (Wash. Sq. Press, 1966), p. 699. Hereafter BN.

12. In this last instance, for example, a hacksaw makes a certain demand for its use as instrumentality, even when lying on a parlor coffee table, though the act of having placed it on that coffee table may have its own "novelistic" or inscriptive meaning quite apart from its instrumentality.

13. This relationship is most pronounced in Sartre's particular definition of ideology. "By ideology, one does not mean here a philosophical system, a rigorous construct (even on false premises), or even a vague, loose set of ideas held in common by the members of a class. In truth, it is a question of a group of relations between terms that are only defined by their reciprocal oppositions, or by a "differential" that determines each by others such that the essence of each resides in its difference with such and such others terms, and ultimately, with the whole." (IF,222) We recognize this as the structuralist view of language itself, which is precisely how Sartre sees ideology, or institutional discourses, operating in the articulation of intuitive knowledge.

14. The group in fusion, for Sartre, is the formation of a common praxis through a fusing of praxes (for some immediate goal, or in defense against some immediate threat) through a common recognition that each other's praxis is also one's own. His account of the group allows him to begin to speak of a collective subject, as an historical entity. Cf. CDR, Book II, Ch. 1.

15. Sartre's own critique of an unconscious is apropos here. In his critique of the Freudian unconscious, Sartre asks how the censor can repress certain material without being conscious of discerning it, and of the need to repress what is discerned (i.e. of what it would have to be conscious). One would have to "conceive of a knowledge that is ignorant of itself." (BN,63) And for l'Esprit objectif, we would have to conceive of articulated knowledge that could no longer articulate itself, and have to be articulated anew, in different terms, though its initial form as articulated had only been that of certain terms.

16. Most poets suffer this to be unfortunately the case; if the suddenly encountered poetic line is not immediately written down, either on paper or in some special memory, it is lost with the first change of the physical, somatic, or environmental circumstances in which it was born.

17. This is a central point for Sartre, whose major question is how writers acculturate themselves (and, in particular, how that happened in 1850). His apprehension of an objective unity of a mode of writing inverts Barthes' notion of ecriture. It resides in a determination by a future, upon a past, rather than a past grasping the present as its future. And he points out that, for Flaubert, in particular, this future-present-past was not an immortality, but a mode of not-being.

18. Derrida's notion of dissemination is his articulation of the dispersion of the sign, the multiplication of its meanings among discourses, contexts, inflections, and levels of narrativity. Cf. Derrida; Dissemination, trans Barbara Johnson (Chicago Univ. Press, 1981.

19. Cf. Jacques Derrida; "Differance," in Speech and Phenomena, trans. David Allison (Northwestern Univ. Press, 1973). Differance is Derrida's way of naming the inseparability of two incommensurable dimensions of the production of signification: the sign's system of differences with other signs, and the deferral of presence, meaning, the signified.

20. Derrida has often warned that the act of reading a text which attempted to escape a metaphysics, with its assertion of apriori hierarchies, and universalization of its own origin, would necessarily have to reestablish some metaphysics, simply in the attempt to render the text intelligible for itself. Sartre's attempt to subvert the particular priority of idea over signifier, in recognizing that the sign "can only be a surpassing toward the idea if it is outside as worked matter," is already a reincorporation of the sign in the idea of it, in the process of writing.

21. A word about why it is permissible to speak of a Sartrean semiotics at all might be in order, since Sartre generally deals ontologically with consciousness. What I am tracing here is one of the moments in Sartre's development as an internal historicity of his theories of language and textuality. This historicity includes Lit, St. Genet, Sartre's debates with structuralism, and IF, as its majof moments. His theorizing subsumes and dovetails with other semiotics. On both counts, it can be considered a semiotics as such.

22. See, for instance, Derrida's discussion of the unsaturation of the sign in Grammatology, and in Limited Inc.

23. Leonard Lawler; "A Little Daylight; A reading of Derrida's 'White Mythology'"; in Man and World, 24:285-300, 1991. Lawlor's article is interesting for the present discussion. He discusses "White Mythology" in terms of Derrida's "law of supplementarity." He critiques Husserl's account of the subject in a way that parallels Sartre's critique of Husserl, and which leads Sartre to posit non-reflective consciousness (conscience(de)soi) to escape the mise en abyme of that critique. That is, for Sartre, there is no non-subjective place from which to designate the subject. Though Sartre never generalized this move beyond its structural particularity in his early argument (BN), it is no surprise that it resurges in his account of the detotalized praxis of reading.

24. Jacques Derrida; "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences," in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago Univ. Press, 1978).