Beyond Signification: The Co-Evolution of Subject and Semiosis 57Consider the possibility that to describe the world in a certain way is to identify oneself,
so that a person who asserts x can be thought also to believe y. For example, because it is not
uncommon for a person who supports the death penalty to be simultaneously opposed to
abortion, one might come to expect that an individual who articulates the one opinion on life
and death would also be found to hold the other. In this way one proposition can become
linked to another. This of course is not a matter of logic and it is fallible. Just as Pavlov‘s dog
may salivate at the sound of a bell and yet the food does not appear, so might someone who
believes in the death penalty also be found to be pro-choice in the matter of abortion, contrary
to one‘s expectations.
One identifies with certain propositions and opposes others. These patterns of
identification and counter-identification vary from one individual (and group) to another,
depending on their experiences and interests. Indexical relationships amongst propositions
mean that certain propositions, through their collocations in discourse, evoke other
propositions. These ideational collocations, as I explained earlier, are often themselves
represented by abstract nouns. Thus someone interpreting a text will ̳detect‘ that the author
of it has interests either identical or opposed to his or her own; e.g. the person who articulates
an opposition to abortion is assumed to be a ̳right-winger‘, even in the absence of evidence
that he or she is also conservative with respect to other propositions.
The cunning subject is one who interprets discourse and identifies persons, things and
situations in terms of the differential interests and identities involved, although not
necessarily with the full consciousness of doing so (or of being a subject of this kind). There
are numerous portrayals of this subjectivity in art, especially in literature, and indeed it is not
an unreasonable proposition to say that this preoccupation is constitutive of modern literature
as such. One begins to notice in early modern literature such Shakespearean figures as
Hamlet,^19 who is plunged into a situation of moral uncertainty, or Iago in Othello, who is
cunning personified and an expert manipulator of the indices of his society.
In the nineteenth century novel, one has works such as Maupassant‘s Bel Ami and Zola‘s
Nana, both of whose leading characters are expert social manipulators. But what makes both
of the latter highly typical and illustrative is the way in which ̳natural‘ sexual fetishism is
blended with indices of a more socially constructed nature, thereby showing all the more
strikingly the cunning subject as a true inhabitant of the spiritual-animal kingdom. In the light
of competing interests, the law in this kingdom is seen to lose its universal character, since it
appears to be nothing more than the product of a contest between individual wills, each of
which may experience the formal definition of the law as being contradicted by particular
experiences, and therefore as a legitimate object of manipulation rather than reverence. The
way in which the chief protagonist in Bel Ami uses the agency of the law to entrap his
adulterous wife as part of a broader ambitious scheme serves as a model of such cynical
manipulation (given his own hyper-adulterous nature).
In this antinomian world the cunning subject who typically inhabits it is one that has
internalised the originary relationship between lord and bondsman. According to Gillian Rose
(1996, p. 73), this is the essential nature of modern subjectivity. Putting it simply, one may
say that each subject is a potential slave to be made the object of exploitation by another, and
(^19) Benzon‘s (1993) analysis of Hamlet, as well as other literary characters, is part of an important and relevant work
on literary character in the evolution of culture.