which production turns into consumption and distribution and then ceaselessly returns to its basic productive form (in the enlarged systemic category of production Marx wishes to substitute for the thematic or analytic one)! Indeed, it seems possible to complain that the current celebrants of the market -- the theoretical conservatives -- fail to show much enjoyment or jouissance (as we will see below, their market mainly serves as a policeman meant to keep Stalin from the gates, where in addition one suspects that Stalin in turn is merely a code word for Roosevelt).

As description, then, Becker's model seems to me impeccable and very faithful indeed to the facts of life as we know it; when it becomes prescriptive, of course, we face the most insidious forms of reaction (my two favourite practical consequences are, first, that oppressed minorities only make it worse for themselves by fighting back; and, second, that 'household production', in his special sense [see above], is seriously lowered in productivity when the wife has a job). But it is easy to see how this should be so. The Becker model is postmodern in its structure as a transcoding; two separate explanatory systems are combined here by way of the assertion of a fundamental identity (about which it is always protested that it is not metaphorical, the surest sign of an intent to metaphorize): human behaviour (pre-eminently the family or the oikos), on the one hand, the firm or enterprise, on the other. Much force and clarity are then generated by the rewriting of phenomena like spare time and personality traits in terms of potential raw materials. It does not follow, however, that the figural bracket can then be removed, as a veil is triumphantly snatched from a statue, allowing one then to reason about domestic matters in terms of money or the economic as such. But that is very precisely how Becker goes about 'deducing' his practical-political conclusions. Here too, then, he falls short of absolute postmodernity, where the transcoding process has as a consequence the suspension of everything that used to be 'literal'. Becker wants to marshal the equipment of metaphor and figural identification, only to return in a final moment to the literal level (which has in the meantime, in late capitalism, evaporated out from under him).

Why do I find none of this particularly scandalous, and what could possibly be its 'proper use'? As with Sartre, in Becker choice takes place within an already pre-given environment, which Sartre theorizes as such (he calls it the 'situation') but which Becker neglects. In both we have a welcome reduction of the old-fashioned subject (or individual, or ego), who is now little more than a point of consciousness directed on to the stockpile of materials available in the outside world, and making decisions on that information which are 'rational' in the new enlarged

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