2.0

Certain models of reproduction tend to privilege dyads as the basic units of interaction.  The dyad in turn is locked onto one sensory modality.  This structure generates a closed system and guarantees the model's explanatory power.  It makes an elegant story with perfect pretensions to scienticity.  No extraneous details or third parties to complicate matters.

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For example, the relationship between State and citizen-worker, in Louis Althusser's examination of social reproduction, is sealed in a structure of specularity.  Not all cases offer themselves so transparently.  Mary O'Brien, for one, does not foreground sensory modalities when she links reproductive and temporal consciousness.  However, her materialist account of biological reproduction does rest ultimately upon an insufficiently critiqued idealist moment of fusion.  That moment is cast in the idiom of a single sensory modality, the idiom of touch.  Since both the idiom and the moment are imported from Hegel, one could speak of discursive contamination.  However her susceptibility is not so much a function of insufficient critique of her German pretext as related to her rhetorical adoption of Christian myth.

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First, O'Brien reads differences in reproductive consciousness off differences in anatomy.  This incipient determinism is circumvented by an appeal to history.  According to her, developments in contraceptive technology have supplied conditions under which women's reproductive consciousness no longer differs from that of men.  This movement registers in her discourse as the story of a fall (n1). 

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If O'Brien's is a Miltonic pattern, Althusser's is Dantesque.  Movements of ascension mark Althusser's discourse on social reproduction.  In his paradigm case, schooling is designed so that at each level a number of students enter the workplace to occupy places in the hierarchy of class.  However, it is not only the analogy with a static series of circles that renders the comparison with the divine comedy model salient.  There is also the disposition of the argument.  Althusser carefully culminates his exposition if not with a beatific vision then with the solemnisation of a formal structure for all ideology.  The particular dynamic of the sensory modalities played out in this general structure owes much to Althusser's choices in the exemplification of the general form of ideology, in particular his recourse to Christian trinitarian dogma.

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A stark ascetic streak permits Althusser to arrive at this point.  He neglects relations of consumption.  He favours analysis of the reproduction of the relations of production.  His concern is the making of workers.  Hence, in Althusser's discourse, ideology is set the task of dominating bodily drives.  This design stems not only from Christian residues in his thought but also from a selective importation of psychoanalytic elements.  The project of the care of a child is envisaged by Althusser in his essay "Freud and Lacan" as a story of progress through repression.  For him, it is bringing an animal being into the human condition:  "the extraordinary adventure which from birth to the liquidation of the Oedipal phase transforms a small animal conceived by a man and a woman into a small human child" (Lenin and Philosophy 189).  Social reproduction has the form of a conversion narrative, a being called.

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Name giving and recognition become central to the workings of ideology.  The fluid operation of these functions relies on a synchronization of the senses.  The essay "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" assumes a congruence between hearing and sight.  As interpellation discursively shifts to specularity, the ideological game becomes one of namer naming the (already) named.  Althusser is of course highlighting the role of ideology in constraining heterogeneity, limiting options and naturalizing existing conditions.  This leaves little conceptual space for a counter-hegemonic ideology.  One place to begin is to question his projection of a visual dyad onto the hearing situation and to examine how such a visual dyad is constructed through his privileging of a mirror metaphor.

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Althusser's essay "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" was first published June 1970 in La Pensée.  The piece consists of two sections.  The first and longer section is dated January-April 1969.  This section describes the two types of state apparatus, repressive and ideological (in that order) and explains the workings of interpellation and specularity (in that order).  The order contributes to the progressively deterministic tone of the presentation for if the activity of state repression is conceived as intermittent, ideology is not.  The ordering also facilitates movement from intersubjective to intrapsychic phenomena.  This sequence should not necessarily generate a greater degree of determinism.  However, as Althusser moves from examining groups, specifically classes in conflict and their interactions with state apparatus, to examining how an individual is constructed as a subject, his discourse skids on a static structure, a non- dialectical dyad.  Althusser's specular dyad derives from his particular understanding of the Lacanian mirror stage.  As such it partakes of the one-way vector found in the Oedipal narrative of psychoanalysis where it is axiomatic that a child seek to resemble a single parent.

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As well the deterministic tone and thrust of Althusser's formulations stem from the relationship his essay cultivates with the discourse of psychoanalysis:

If eternal means, not transcendent to all (temporal) history, but omnipresent, trans- historical and therefore immutable in form throughout the extent of history, I shall adopt Freud's expression word for word, and write ideology is eternal, exactly like the unconscious. (Lenin and Philosophy 152)

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A post scriptum dated April 1970 contributes an important modulation of the deterministic pronouncements of the earlier section.  Rereading himself a year later Althusser highlights the schematic nature of his set of theses.  He points out that they are obviously abstract.  Criteria for abstraction vary.  In some regards Althusser's theses are insufficiently abstract for they do not translate specularity out of its sensory encasement.  To do so would reveal the circularity of the specular model and such a formalization would expose its tautological status.  However, Althusser does not view abstraction as a move to greater mathematical or logical formalism.  His focus is upon abstraction as a move away from, in his case, an underlying reality, a final instance, a first cause:

The total process of the realization of the reproduction of the relations of production is therefore still abstract, insofar as it has not adopted the point of view of this class struggle.  To adopt the point of view of reproduction is therefore, in the last instance, to adopt the point of view of the class struggle. (Lenin and Philosophy 171)

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Accompanying the repeated mention of class struggle in the post scriptum is an emphasis on the plural nature of ideologies.  "It is only from the point of view of the classes, i.e. of the class struggle, that it is possible to explain the ideologies existing in a social formation "(Lenin and Philosophy 172).  Althusser also stresses that ideologies are not born in the Ideological State Apparatus (ISAs) but in social classes.  He concludes his post scriptum thus:

ideologies are not "born" in the ISAs but from the social classes at grips in the class struggle:  from their conditions of existence, their practices, their experience of the struggle, etc. (Lenin and Philosophy 173)

In his English version Ben Brewster maintains the prepositional shift of Althusser's French.  Ideologies are not born in (dans) ideological state apparatuses but from (de) classes in conflict.  The parameters of the reproductive problematic have been refashioned:  class struggle is the interaction in which class becomes a parent.

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The metaphor of birth that closes the post scriptum complicates the to and fro implications of abstraction that opens the post scriptum.  The assessment of truth and error recedes.  Furthermore, a functionalist and structuralist focus is displaced by a genealogical perspective.

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The prepositional relation is not symmetrical;  in is not the opposite of from.  This is not mere reversal.  In marking the difference between born in an apparatus and born from a social class, Althusser avoids simple negation of place of birth.  A simple assertion ­­ not here, there ­­ will not do for Althusser is justifying his own discursive paternity both as progenitor and progeny.

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In Althusser the question of correct analysis is never remote from considerations of the ownership of a brain child.  He often exploits the resonances of the French idiomatic expression "naître de père inconnu".  The fatherless child in Althusser's discourse figures an epistemic break, the coming into being of the radically revolutionary.  Not only do the nuances generated by the prepositional shift bear the trace of Althusser's preoccupation with epistemological ruptures and breaks evident in his insistence on the splits between the early and late Marx, the young and mature Freud, they also situate Althusser's own double-dated remarks within a similar narrative scheme with all its triumphist connotations.

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Never explicitly cast in the eschatological contours of a messianic scheme, the figure of the fatherless child nevertheless partakes of a conflation of epiphanic and redemptive moments.  Its deployment by Althusser brings an epistemological discovery into the ambit of an ethical stance.

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This gesture of epistemological-ethical fusion situates both the discoverer of the break and the break itself in the figure of the fatherless child.  Althusser is trying to occupy a place equivalent to that of Marx, a place combining both moral and epistemological power.  The figure of the fatherless child flits between the object of study (Marx) and the subject conducting that study (Althusser).  Its hovering movement is enhanced by its placement in apposition:

Dans le cas de la théorie marxiste, l'événement dénommable "coupure", tel que je l'ai défini plus haut, se trouve en effet produit, comme un "enfant sans père", par la confluence de ce que Lénine a appelé [...] (Éléments d'autocritique 99)

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Placed in such a medial position, the use of the fatherless child comparison troubles some readers.  For example, Grahame Lock's English version:

In the case of Marxist theory, the event which can be called a "break", as I defined it above, in fact seems to have been produced like a "fatherless child" by the meeting of what Lenin called [...] (Essays in Self-Criticism 149)

The apposition is lost.  The tense is shifted from the historical present to the past.  The break is found in English to have been produced whereas in the French the break finds itself to be produced or being produced.  Lock introduces a modal of doubt (seems) for Althusser's verb of discovery (finds).  Lock's resistive rendering foils identification between the subject of enunciation and the enunciating subject.  It smashes the textual mirror play.  The rendering also suppresses Althusser's idolatrous tendencies (n2). 

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When Althusser is most wont to idolize, the figure of the fatherless child surfaces.  For example in the exuberant opening of "Freud and Lacan" an ample unfolding of the fatherless child figure serves to praise three unexpected children of the nineteenth- century, Marx, Freud and Nietzsche, in the quite unMarxist evocation of the maverick thinker as individual genius.  At the outset of this text Althusser dramatizes the analogy.  Possession of the "natural child" is contested:

"When a young science is born, the family circle is always ready for astonishment, jubilation and baptism.  For a long time, every child, even the foundling, has been reputed the son of a father, and when it is a prodigy, the fathers would fight at the gate if it were not for the mother and the respect due to her. (Lenin and Philosophy 181)

Having served the function of ensuring decorum, no further mention of the mother is made.  Althusser lapses into the monoparental mode.  He stresses the rupture, the unexpectedness of the radical thinker.  For him, Freud's destiny was "to be himself his own father" (182).  The entrepreneurial tenor of this celebration of the self-made man becomes explicit when Althusser states "[t]heoretically, Freud set up in business alone" (182).  Althusser's diction generates the uncanny return of bourgeois individualism.

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In a variation on the epistemological-ethical fusion, Althusser assumes the self to be co-terminous with its intellectual productions.  In the fantasized postnatal welcome, epistemological break, radical thinker, and new science all reflect each other.  Likewise when the narrative syntagm of the postnatal scene becomes the basis for the general form of ideology in the ISA essay, the subject of ideology and the self are made congruent.

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The syntagm of the fantasized scene is composed of two moments.  Expectation is followed by baptism or naming.  The first can be related to the anticipatory moment of hailing or interpellation.  The second, baptism or naming, is a key element of the specular structure of the subject.  Focused on the function of ideology, Althusser models reproduction as conversion.  This emerges most clearly when Althusser illustrates interpellation by the example of a one hundred and eighty degree "turn".  Be it Christian or secular, in conversion an authority claims a body just as fathers claim a child.  The general form of ideology as explicated in "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus" replicates a story focalized by Althusser's investment in heroic images of knowledge production and his stake in the Oedipal game of the name of the father.

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As one reads a narrative syntagm first out of the phantasmatic scene of birth/baptism and then across the detached "notes to an investigation" which together compose the ISA essay, one abstracts from the texts of the Althusserian corpus a peculiar pattern and one is able to trace the conversion of rhetorical resources into cognitive patterns.

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There are textual indicators justifying such a reading practice.  The narrative nuggets found in the notes are not self-contained.  Althusser composes by application of an algebraic technique.  In the ISA essay, following what he calls a "reshuffle", he carefully lists which terms disappear, survive and appear (Lenin and Philosophy 159).  Later in the same essay in his treatment of the three examples of interpellation, he is reshuffling but silently and without explicitly naming terms.

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Of the three examples, the first is the most complex.  Althusser will reduce the number of variables in the examples that follow.  In this first example Althusser asks readers to imagine friends fond of playing guessing games.  Someone knocks at the door.  A question is posed.  Who's there?  "Me," comes the answer.  The door is opened;  a friend has been recognized.  The door opening closes the sequence.  It confirms the recognition:

And we recognize that "it is him", or "her".  We open the door, and "it's true, it really was she who was there". (Lenin and Philosophy 161)

In this example, the interpellation (the knock), the moment of recognition and that of confirmation (opening the door) remain separate.  However, Althusser does not regard them as analytically distinct.  In his other examples these moments are fused.  For Althusser, interpellation combines the recognition by a hailing of a subject with the hailed individual's response, a recognition of being a subject.  Althusser does not consider these as different recognitions.  Schematically, an ideological apparatus functions successfully when the emission of a message is met by both the reception of a message and the emission of a new message confirming reception.  However, in arriving at his circular structure of the specular subject of ideology, Althusser elides any distinction between recognition, confirmation and interpellation.

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His circular structure is dyadic.  This structure is expressed as a relation between reflected and reflection that leaves untheorized or rather unanthropomorphized the role of the reflector.  A triadic approach also understands ideological interaction to be circular but not symmetrical.  Alongside the hailer and the hailed stands the witness.  Or, in terms of the transmission schema:  emitter, receiver and confirmer.  Of course, the confirmer may assume the interrogative of interpellation ­ a who's there in reply to a knock.

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Althusser implies that if an answer can take the form of a question then a response can be a call.  The premise conflates form and function.  It does invite considerations beyond the hailed/hailer dyad.  If the response to one is a call to another then social reproduction can be examined according to the workings of split address and multiple interpellation.  As a modelling system, an ISA creates an interaction that is designed to be overheard or observed.  Each hailer-hailed dyad calls out to another potential subject.  Bilateral questioning delays final confirmation of the specular dyad.  Indeed the movement towards dyad formation is highly sensitive to disruptive questions and so ideology as a language game is aimed at the control of questions.  Of course, some ideologies would construe the prolongation of bilateral questioning as worthy of imitation.  Again control of questions is the key.

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Interpellation, especially in this first example, hinges upon interrogation.  The play of sensory modalities is posed as a problem in verification.  The second modality confirms the findings of the first.  Visual recognition corroborates aural recognition.  The order from hearing to sight in this example recapitulates at the local level the sweep from aural to visual that marks the global structure of the essay.  Unlike the other examples, however, an exchange of questions is central to the door knocking narrative.  The knock indicates the desire to know if any one is there.  The counter question demands to know who is asking.

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The counter question as answer is a confirmation.  As question, it is also an interpellation.  It is a troubling element for Althusser.  Counter questions complicate the completion of the ritual of recognition.

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In Althusser's examples, questions provoke narrative delay.  They add peripetia to the game of anagnoresis.  Thus they complicate the phenomenon of recognition.  As exchanges between subjects, all questions occupy ideological space but some shape it, some crease it, so that recognition in a particular ideology cedes to recognition between ideologies.  The specular structure favoured by Althusser collapses ideology's interpellation of a subject into its interpellation of its subject.  As a consequence, Althusser conceives of interpellation less as a type of interrogation or a form of invitation than as recognition, less the projection of an expectation than its fulfilment.

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The link between closure and sight is evident in each of his examples.  The narrative of the knock achieves closure upon visual contact, more precisely face-to-face positioning once the door is opened.  The second example culminates in mutual recognition expressed by the hand shake greeting.  The third hinges on the accomplishment of the one hundred and eighty degree turn to face the source of a hailing- from-behind.  In these two as in the first example, the final response is organized around the hegemony of sight.

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The articulation between closure and sight stems from the influence of Lacanian psychoanalysis.  As Althusser mobilizes such concepts as the mirror stage and the Imaginary, he also imports a particular figuration of the parameters of familial ideology:

Everyone knows how much and in what way an unborn child is expected.  Which amounts to saying, very prosaically, if we agree to drop the "sentiments", i.e. the forms of family ideology (paternal/maternal/conjugal/fraternal) in which the unborn child is expected:  it is certain in advance that it will bear its Father's Name, and will therefore have an identity and be irreplaceable. (Lenin and Philosophy 164)

To set up a relation of reflection to a subject, ideology grasps a body.  Interpellation is a species of nomination aimed at recognition.  In short, ideology seizes and names.  It creates a relation of belonging (n3).   In this drama, to bestow a name is to lay a claim.  The paradigm case is the fatherly appropriation of children.

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If interpellations are repeated baptismal operations they may be connected to the uncertainty of paternity.  As second births into the circle of ideology, interpellations would figure a reproductive consciousness.  Althusser's point that interpellation constrains a specular subject would not be unconnected to what Donna Haraway describes as a

"regulatory fiction" basic to Western concepts of gender [which] insists that motherhood is natural and fatherhood is cultural:  mothers make babies naturally, biologically.  Motherhood is known on sight;  fatherhood is inferred. ( Haraway 135)

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The gendered distinction between nature and culture, itself an ideological product, if read back into Althusser's theorizing about ideology leads first to the psychologistic claim that specularity is a compensation mechanism for unseeable paternity.  Secondly, such reading back of the gendered distinction leads to a structural insight, namely, that continuity is aligned with reversibility.

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Althusser ties the principle of continuity to a reversible structure through grounding the reproduction of the specular subject upon the Oedipal scenario.  As does the psychoanalytic drama, the ideological interpellation of the individual as subject depends upon the passage between two domains.  Dyadic specularity is both the narrative outcome of this passage and the means for its accomplishment.  The act of interpellation is a return of recognition.  The hailing and hailed not only mirror each other, they cause each other to be.  Structure and effect interlock in a perpetuum mobile.

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This perpetual motion machine is fancifully rendered by the mechanical illustrations that accompany E.P. Thompson's disquisition on Althusser in "The Poverty of Theory".  Digressing further into the delights of explicating Thompson's ekphrasis of the "orrery of errors" will not unfortunately unravel the tangle of twos.

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When gendered distinctions are considered, the construction of a specular relation replicates in its form a previous dyadic structure.  The shift from maternal to paternal identification assumes the fundamental unit of human interaction remains (if it ever was) the dyad.  Recall the opening fable of "Freud and Lacan".  The expectation of a prodigy is marked by the central presence of many competing fathers but only a single mother.

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The assumptions present in this unique scenario are applied by the philosopher to more than exceptional cases.  Althusser reduces the tension of multiple interpellations in the story of the subject of ideology by appeal to a dyad.  The mother-child dyad belongs to the domain of nature, the domain of animal being.  The work of culture creates a second dyad in the name of the father, a dyad placed in the space of ideology.

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Haraway suggests that the "naturalness" of the mother-child dyad can be called into question.  The dyad in both domains, culture and nature, is an imaginary construct of ideology.

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An impervious mother-child dyad also inhabits the theorizing of Mary O'Brien.  Her investigations into the social relations of biological reproduction are as strongly marked by the regulatory fiction described by Haraway as are Althusser's into social reproduction.  She as he does stresses appropriation in the name of the father.  Like his, her work links continuity to reversibility.  However, instead of the evil eye of specularity, one finds the magic of connective touch.  Whatever sensory modality it may be grounded upon, superstition founds both their material analyses.  It is, as any superstition, sophisticated.  It is an ethnoscience of perception.  It is not unconnected to an ethnoscience of reproduction (n4). 

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O'Brien imports her sensory bias from a text she otherwise examines most critically ­­ a passage in Hegel's early theological writings.  Mention of Hegel's fragment on love appears in a bibliography of suggested readings concluding an essay published in 1976 "The Politics of Impotence".  The following year, under the auspices of the Group for Research On Women (GROW) of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, appears a study of Hegel wherein the fragment on love is discussed at length.  Just over a decade later, the GROW paper is reprinted with slight revisions in Reproducing the World, a collection of essays by O'Brien.

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Her treatment of this text is the basis from which she develops her exposition of the dialectics of reproduction.  Hegel is a pretext to her own model.  What she finds in Hegel is a description of a process.  What she discovers he lacks is a description of the gendered consciousness that is conditioned by that process.

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Description and its correction, her key rhetorical move, generates the scientificity of the account.  Evidence indicates that the corrective she offers is actually the filter through which the description attributed to Hegel is initially constructed.  The heuristic value of her model may remain undamaged;  the power of its persuasiveness, not.  The whole appeal to an authority now corrected and updated following the world-historical advent of universally available contraceptive technology becomes untenable.  It is through a particularly vulnerable periodization of the historical conditions of the relations of reproduction that she reads Hegel.  It will come as no surprise that O'Brien's periodization is conditioned by a dyad or more precisely is animated by dyadic designs.  Despite her appeal to dialectic, she reifies the couple, most notably in her reading of the German philosopher.  In a nutshell:

Hegel notes that reproduction is a process of "unity, separated opposites, reunion. " What he is referring to is the unity of the man and woman in copulation, which he discreetly calls "love," and the separation and reunion of the respective seed of the lovers, creating a new entity that is both part of but separate from its progenitors.  The new seed both is and is not the unity of the parents. ("Feminist Theory and Dialectical Logic" 105-106)

Many items in this description are not to be found in the Hegelian fragment from which they are said to derive.  The vocabulary of newness is not in Hegel.  His outlook is retrospective.  Indeed, in the translation used by O'Brien, one finds a note immediately after the statement concerning the nature of the process that O'Brien claims refers to reproduction.  The note indicates that Hegel had added then struck "The child is the parents themselves. " (Knox 308) The paradoxical statement can be explained by the sentence that follows where Hegel states "the lovers separate again, but in the child their union has become unseparated." (n5) 

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In shifting emphasis from the term "union" to that of "unity" O'Brien has glossed the moment of the lovers' embrace as an exchange of genetic material or seeds.  However such a mixing of materials implies two notions that Hegel takes pains to remove from his account of the interaction of the lovers.  The separation of seeds as envisaged by O'Brien introduces a moment of loss.  This she will emphasize by referring to such a separation as an alienation.  Hegel in the fragment on love explicitly states that in giving there is no loss.  Giving between lovers results in enhancement, acquisition of the "wealth of life".  In O'Brien's reading the lovers remain distinct entities.  Hegel's lovers embrace in a union that sublates all differences into a whole without distinctions.  From the philosopher's formulation it is difficult to derive the necessary distance between the lovers to found a moment of exchange.

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In Hegel's description there are no seeds that mingle.  Generation is a result of the full union of the lovers.  A living child does, as Hegel indicates, "come into existence." However, O'Brien misses the intercession of a third party.  "God has acted and created.  What has been united is not divided again" [text transposed]" (Knox 307).  Divine agency is never discussed by O'Brien (n6). 

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Also, despite what O'Brien alleges, Hegel never generalizes such a union as the basis for all human reproduction.  The tripartite process is not that of reproduction.  In the paragraph referring to the process being one of union, separation, reunion, Hegel is describing the development of the seed:

Everything which gives the newly begotten child a manifold life and a specific existence, it must draw into itself, set over against itself, and unify with itself.  The seed breaks free from its original unity, turns ever more and more to opposition, and begins to develop. (Knox 297)

O'Brien takes this breaking free as birth, overlooking Hegel's assertion that "[e]ach stage of its development is a separation".  O'Brien privileges birth.  She brings the seed's development into the ambit of production.

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The alignment of the domains of reproduction and production allows O'Brien to articulate a relation between social and biological reproduction.  As well, this alignment allows her to enact her gesture of supplementation.  What she finds lacking in Hegel is an account of the labour, specifically female labour, in the process of bringing beings into the world.  For her the infant does not simply break free.  It is produced.

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This fundamentally recasts the telos of unification.  If Hegel's focus is upon the union of lovers, O'Brien's is upon the relation of parent to child.  The synchronic union is converted into a diachronic unity.  Throughout O'Brien's discourse unity is keyed to a temporal mode, or rather a dichotomy based in the different valorization of temporal modes, a difference itself rooted in a theoretical approach that regards the oppressor class as diseased.  She adopts a discourse of pathology stating men necessarily develop "ideological modes of continuity over time to heal the discontinuous sense of man the uncertain father." (The Politics of Reproduction 131)

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Continuity is her prime concern.  For O'Brien relation to a child constructs relation to species continuity.  Men produce no children of their own.  Men mediate their relation to species continuity through the creation of political institutions that enforce paternity rights ­­ physiological paternity being uncertain.

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Species continuity is the translation into biological terms of her concern with social continuity.

One crucial dimension of political activity is the creation of stability over time, of permanence beyond the individual life span.  Political institutions, at least from the perspective of those who uphold them, are able to do what their human content cannot.  They defy death by auto-regeneration.  ("The Politics of Impotence" 149)

While recognizing that the organic metaphors and the "[m]ale and sexual" imagery of political theory are "modes of expression" she insists they are "something more".  Indeed verbal expressions signal something more.  However in her move from organic metaphors to empirical constructs O'Brien elevates the generative function of political activity.  She unhinges drives towards destruction from political praxis (n7).  Operative in her formulations concerning reproductive consciousness is a birth/death dichotomy mapped onto woman/man.

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O'Brien does not crudely restate or invert an axiology derivable from such a dichotomy.  She uses periodization.  Two events cause changes in reproductive consciousness.  The first is the discovery of the principle of physiological paternity.  Second is the invention of contraceptive technology (n8).  O'Brien's periodization contains an implicit narrative.  One recognizes a union, separation, reunion, pattern.  The historical dialectic that O'Brien would discern in this transformation of reproductive consciousness and the relations of reproduction registers as the history of a dyad:  the establishment of asymmetry between two protagonists of opposite genders and the overcoming of that asymmetry.

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The dance of the dyad is staged within an economy.  A commodity logic rules the operations of O'Brien's dyads.  Producer meets appropriator.  The assumption here is that women make babies.  Such an assumption rooted in an ethnoscience of reproduction is not universally held.  Feminist anthropologist, Marilyn Strathern notes that

maternal work presents itself to Western industrial and market minds in terms of its natural status as the prime source from which all else comes and as a resource to be valued. (Gender of the Gift 316)

She stresses the difference with Melanasia where

Women do not replicate raw material, babies in the form of unfashioned natural resources, but produce entities which stand in a social relation to themselves (316)

and "Children are the outcome of multiple others. " (n9) 

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If an ethnoscience of reproduction is sensitive to the number of players, so too is an ethnoscience of perception.  The shift need not be in the number of sensory modalities at play.  Significant consequences stem from varying the unit of interaction.  Descriptions based on non-dyadic units stage dances not only nuptial in nature.

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The operation of O'Brien's conjugal dyad is cemented by tactility.  It is not possible to argue uncontrovertibly that O'Brien locks the dyad onto this one and only this one sensory modality.  She never cites in full the passage in Hegel's fragment on love concering the fusion of the lovers, the passage upon which so much rests.  It reads:

What in the first instance is most the individual's own is united into the whole in the lovers' touch and contact;  consciousness of a separate self disappears, and all distinction between the lovers is annulled. (Knox, 307)

In O'Brien's other access to the German, the touch and contact is rendered by phrasing that suggests more than a simple physical encouter.  Harris gives "in mutual contact and shared feeling" (Hegel's Development 309).  The lovers are in a state;  they are in der Berührung, in der Befühlung, in the touching and in the contacting.  The weight of the preposition is lost on O'Brien.  Her focus is the between.

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Whether O'Brien is following Knox or Harris or some mixture of both, it is possible to argue that a commodity logic is at work when O'Brien reads this tactile and affective meeting as an exchange.  As Strathern points out:

What commodity logic promotes is a perceived diversity and complexity not in relationships but in the attributes of persons as selves and agents. (Gender of the Gift 312)

This is the perfect basis for conceiving contacts as exchanges.  Relationships become a matter of swapping attributes, assembling a unity, rather than formulating interactions, being united.

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O'Brien conflates the two different products of the process.  She equates two entities:  the unity resulting from the union and the union itself.  Or rather she proceeds by excision.  She disregards Hegel's fundamental focus upon union in itself and she neglects the type of economy in which it is embedded.

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Two economies are discernable in Hegel's text.  The first is an economy of the gift in which the act of giving does not diminish the person giving.  The second is an exchange economy where each party stands to lose.  This second economy does appear in the final paragraph of the Hegelian fragment "which is devoted to proving that two individuals cannot really have common property" (Harris 310).  From this conclusion O'Brien's model of the alienated seeds takes its cue.  And the moment of touch is conceived in terms of exchange.

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Hegel's haptic thematics need not be soldered to the conjugal mode.  Two is not the ultimate number of love.  What happens when there is an orgy (n10) or in any case including prolonged masturbation where being touched and touching meld?  The limit experience, Hegel's Bewußtlosigkeit, contact to the point of loss of consciousness, is reproducible without engendering any child.

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Rethinking the inevitable naturalness of the obligation to reproduce whether biological or ideological invites heraclictic formulations:  reproduction without unification, continuities without reversibility.  In a contrary fashion, as if children of Parmenides, O'Brien and Althusser offer closed cycles as they struggle, their theoretical descriptions emmeshed in base-superstructure relations, with chicken and egg problems.

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Rethinking levels of description, rethinking premises, rethinking the articulation of interlocking patterns, in short asking metadiscursive questions, needs to be more often factored into theory making.

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What is it to ask how a question is asked?  It is to practice maieutics.  To discover in Althusser's text hints that an ideological apparatus controls a game of questions.  To grasp from O'Brien the temporal character of value conversion.  To understand how differently valued temporal modes discursively feedback into the creation of value: reproductive consciousness reproduces itself.  O'Brien herself claims in The Politics of Reproduction to be "labouring to give birth to a new philosophy of birth." (13)

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To practice maieutics in a culture of the question is to find replication and reproduction to be variants of emulation.  As conservation and shuffling of genetic material, replication and reproduction are carry over operations ­­ future directed.  Emulation is conformance to a pattern be it of the past, the present or a projected future ideal.  Emulation operates not with substance or things but with patterns and relations.  It is not the basis of social reproduction.  It emulates social reproduction and through metadiscursive movements does so nondyadically, does so dialectically.

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