A dialectical materialist reading of the sign

In this article, I reread sections of Karl Marx’s Capital, substituting the term ‘sign’ wherever he used ‘commodity.’ I show that such a substitution yields statements that have close family relationship with the results of twentieth century scholarship in a variety of disciplines. The question about the origin of such family resemblance can be found in the notion of substitution that occurs in trade and translation. The results of this rereading suggest that a theory of sign can be grounded in the notion of substitution, translation, and use rather than in the notion of reference and meaning. This approach thereby fundamentally depsychologizes our understanding and theories of the sign.