Signifier Fetishism and Biopolitics: Production of Subjectivity in Reading Activity

Abstract

In Truth and Method, Gadamer attempts to articulate the process of understanding as a less subjective event, but presupposes a certain subjectivity with his construction of a textual ethics. Such program of de-subjectivation in the notion of reading also has its malaise in its (post-)structuralist variants, especially the idea of self-deriving texts, which I will term as signifier fetishism and describe in its three modalities. Baudrillard's critique of notions of use value and need exemplifies that signifier fetishism ignores the productivity in the realization of use value. By adapting Paolo Virno's arguments on immaterial labor, reading activity can be considered as consumption with its productivity mostly beyond dominant capitalist productive relations. Referring to the notion of biopolitical production from Hardt and Negri, a tentative characterization of reading as production will convert the issue of hermeneutic subject into the one of becoming-subjectivity.

Keywords

Reading / Signifier fetishism / Use value / Immaterial labor / Biopolitical production

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