Dialectical Itineraries

This essay is a kind of sequel to an earlier one entitled “Marx's Aufhebung of Philosophy and the Foundations of a Historical‐Materialist Science.”[Note 1. History and Theory 30 (1991), 153–179. ...] Departing from the point reached in that essay, I take a Whitmanesque journey through Marx's writings and the logic of a materialist conception of history. I begin with Walt Whitman's very materialist, very dialectical, and very decentered apostrophe in his Song of the Open Road : “You objects that call forth from diffusion my meanings / And give them shape.” Taking this apostrophe as my cue, I proceed to elaborate the complexity and the dimensions of dialectical thinking within a historical‐materialist framework. The specific purpose of the essay is twofold: to portray the “decentered” dialectical methodology that is a consequence of Marx's historical‐materialist redefinition of the subject‐object relation; and to map the kinds of analytical tasks, the open‐ended “itineraries,” that a historical‐materialist science of Wissenschaft must pursue. This “dialectical cartography” is developed through a critical, though I hope productive, response to poststructuralist critiques of dialectics, particularly to those approaches that exaggerate Saussure's notion of the arbitrariness of signs. In this respect my intention is to indicate how the current confrontational relation between historical materialism and poststructuralism, especially over matters of the production of meaning and the analysis of culture, might be transformed into one of complementarity.