Global economic realities operate as an absent cause expressible only through figures

Evidence

At this point an essentially allegorical concept must be introduced — the “play of figuration” — in order to convey some sense that these new and enormous global realities are inaccessible to any individual subject or consciousness — not even to Hegel, let alone Cecil Rhodes or Queen Victoria — which is to say that those fundamental realities are somehow ultimately unrepresentable or, to use the Althusserian phrase, are something like an absent cause, one that can never emerge into the presence of perception. Yet this absent cause can find figures through which to express itself in distorted and symbolic ways: indeed, one of our basic tasks as critics of literature is to track down and make conceptually available the ultimate realities and experiences designated by those figures, which the reading mind inevitably tends to reify and to read as primary contents in their own right. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 880

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘play of figuration’ and the Althusserian ‘absent cause’ — central conceptual machinery for the whole book.
• DEEPTHINKING: The absent-cause-figures-but-reifies insight — critics mistake figures for primary contents — is a dense, reusable hermeneutic principle.
• XREF: Althusser’s absent cause connects to Lacanian real and to the reader’s goal of mapping own position in the world system.