It is the event-nature of the scene of language that makes it possible to oppose production to consumption. We produce the edible victim for the sparagmos only after we have produced the sign, that is, converted our gesture of consumption into a supplementary act of representation. Whence our predilection for performing the latter while conceiving it as the former. It might be objected that this is not true of traditional, aristocratic society, nor of its prolongation into the nineteenth century, with its dandy and snob victims of romantic ennui. If the point of production is to generate peace, he subsists in a permanent state of war.
Aristocratic militarism reflects the sharp dichotomy between agricultural production and exchange.
The activities of tilling the soil and those of distributing its products are too divergent to sustain more than a trace of primitive egalitarianism. Yet the master's originary model is the big-man of old, who first learned to profit from his surplus production to control the ritual center. Contrary to appearances, the noble is in the first place a producer , not a consumer. Hegel's master-slave dialectic, with its relegation of production to the slave, is not originary. Recognition is not first given to him who inspires fear for one's life, but to him who provides divine abundance.