. . . French post-structuralism . . . modelled itself on language as a self-constituting system in-forming human consciousness, but in some sense itself an alien entity at the heart of a (hence paradoxically divided) selfhood. Whereas Lukács had posited a non-reified society as the historical telos to which post-capitalist society would give birth, we have seen how Althusser, within a milieu greatly influenced by French structuralism, felt that social structures would always contain an unavoidable residuum of reification—just as human thought will always be limited by the enabling structures of language—or as power is an inescapable enabling condition for all possible societies for Foucault. And Adorno, with his own focus on the 'objectivity' of intersubjective cultural artefacts, similarly resisted what he saw as a Romantic dream of unmediated access to the natural in Lukács's vision of a fully postreified world.

In As You Like It, Shakespeare seems to situate himself among those sceptical of the possibility of a complete overcoming of reification, at least of those linguistic and cultural structures which in-form all possible human creations. Shakespeare's critique of the pastoral²² seems to be based in his keen sense of the profligacy of signifiers and their uneasy relation to a realm of signifieds. The Romantic-Lukácsian position—here implicitly identified as a logocentrism—seems to be articulated as part of our introduction to Arden by Duke Senior:

Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
Here feel we not the penalty of Adam,
The seasons' difference, as the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter's wind,
Which when it bites and blows upon my body
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say,
This is no flattery: these are counsellors
That feelingly persuade me what I am.'

(II. i. 2-11)

The Duke quite clearly situates utopia in a realm where signification is unproblematic, where the double voice of hypocrisy is impossible because all simply is, without pretence. But the idea seems to self-destruct almost as soon as it is articulated by the Duke,²³ who begins, as numerous commentators have noted, to encounter nature in rhetorical terms, as a persuader and, shortly, the source of a language which must itself be interpreted and 'moralized'. The Duke's apparently simple idea of nature as a realm of unproblematic truth is, of course, full of fruitful problems and has a long provenance and continued ramifications: Walter Benjamin, for example, pointed out that in the cabbala the language of Adam was held to be of just such an essentializing power, all known languages fallen from that happy state and unable fully to represent the world's being, a lack which both philosophy and poetry continually attempt to restore and in fruitful fruitlessness continually fail.²⁴

The Duke here loses himself in a similar reverie, his reference to the negation of 'the penalty of Adam' perhaps as much signifying his imagining of a prelapsarian language as in the loss of the eternal spring of Eden named in the following appositive.²⁵ The claim is paradoxical because the feel of the biting cold which he describes is anything but paradisaical; the sweetness, after all, is one of the

... uses of adversity,
Which like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.

(II. i. 12-14)

Thus the Duke has not reinvented the lost language of Adam, in which signs fully represent their signifieds, nor has he succeeded in fully separating himself out of the Symbolic order which had named and structured the world for him—a naming which he now sees as the occasion for flattery and falseness, but which he simply negates rather than replaces. In the cleared space of Arden, whose freedom he finds well worth its discomforts, he proves unable, despite his early claim, to re-create the Adamic language; like all of us, he must function within a profligacy of fallen signifieds. If a new world (or counter-society) is to be created, it will have to be formed out of the culture and language imported into the Utopian space, and the Duke seems deluded on this point at least at the very beginning. The parallel in this instance is perhaps less with Lear than it is with Gonzalo-Montaigne's vision of a golden age in The Tempest—a vision put into question as soon as it is articulated; there is even some parallel here with Richard II in his prison cell: the Duke—and all the refugees assembled in the Forest of Arden—immediately structure 'nature' into an idealized realm, not constructed from 'nothing', but built from the shards of an abandoned social realm refunctioned as signifiers of signifiers—as metaphors:

And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.

(II. i. 15-17)

In metaphor, that tension-filled 'equation' of dissimilars, is recapitulated and heightened the gap between signified and signifier which is characteristic of all languages and which makes this Utopian space not Eden but a space for the play of an interminable desire among signifieds now free of their fixed, ideological determinations but still haunted by lack and incompleteness. The green world becomes a space of imagination for Utopian construction, but one condemned also to cold, limit, and language itself. Perhaps the Duke, after his initial pure pastoralism, has discovered that melancholy dictum of modernity which Lacan says Freud defined most memorably: that the play of human desire constituting the libido, what he calls 'the whole microcosm' of mental complexity, 'has absolutely nothing to do with the macrocosm; only in fantasy does it engender [the] world'.²⁶ In any case it is clear that there is ample room and reason for melancholy in Arden, and it is famously supplied, first by the Duke himself, then by the redoubtable Jaques. The gaps among nature, culture, and utopia are represented, perhaps, in the lament on hunting deer introduced by the Duke but amplified and ramified by Jaques. Pregnant as are the Duke's definitions, there is a real sense in which they are, like Richard II's, a denial or displacement, a flight from the social 'real' which the Duke and his men are obsessively projecting on to nature's nameless—and unmoralized—spectacle. Certainly in Shakespeare's As You Like It, the Duke's idealism does not fare well as the play's complex dialectics unfold, and for that reason, the return to the world and to political power at the end of the play seems less a betrayal than it does a return to reality. One cannot live in utopia, seems to be one implication of the play, and it is one with which Bloch would have no argument. The usefulness of utopia is rather to serve as a reference point for critical reflection on the non-utopian real to which we are condemned.

The play establishes in the series of packed set speeches during our first trip into the space of Arden that the Forest is a realm of freedom, but one which will be structured by the finite resources and worn, ideological thought-tracks of the cultures which informed the consciousness and behaviour of these exiles. We can read the many references to the march of time in Arden as further indications of the non-Adamic, finite quality of this particular utopia. No wonder so many of the characters are so melancholy. They are trapped in the realm of the (merely) possible, condemned never to experience the Pastoral Absolute. The entire Western tradition of the pastoral, Lacan in effect tells us, is based on the myth of immediate satisfaction of the self in the fullness of nature. And, as Lacan famously argues (and a whole religious discourse ratifies), desire never achieves a terminal point, only the partial satisfactions of an endless series of objects which are essentially substitutes for an unachievable prelinguistic unity. If utopia appears at first as a fulfilment of desire, the very nature of desire guarantees that utopia will never be static, complete, or final. Nor could any play be constructed within a completely static domain of pastoral such as Lacan posits, as Shakespeare, that consummate practical dramatist, well knew. The unique dramatic structure of this play—one where, as a number of critics have observed, plot in the normal sense has given way to a choreography of dialogues on set themes in the forest²⁷—amounts to repeated deferments and a chain of desired objects very much in a Lacanian mode. In Arden, in short, you can't always get what you want—but you can get what you need.

Thus the Forest of Arden is no Garden of Eden, and even less a Dantesque Paradiso. Most viewers and readers, for instance, are taken with metasituational Jaques lamenting the re-creation of injustice—and with the Fool's pointed insistence on the continued deprivations of time and the lack of creature-comforts within his Utopian space. And, as we will see below, we are given an elaborate demonstration of the problems of eros set loose in a world where gender is an arbitrary, quasi-grammatical, and problematic category. Even with all these limitations, however, we are reminded by the embedded jump-cuts of Elizabethan staging created by the sudden shift of scene from Arden (II. i) back to the court (II. ii), Arden is a far cry from the dreary and dangerous suspicion, envy, and fear of reified court politics, a point reinforced in the congenially sentimental portrait of the aged faithful servant named Adam in silent, indeterminate commentary on his namesake's loss of paradise.