Version 1.1 · evidence-layer upgrade to the revised SAARUTU full-quote density standard: load-bearing fragments re-pulled as complete block quotes; cross-page welds split (pp. 61/62, 212/214) and within-page clips re-pulled whole; multi-locus passages added (four logics, satellite/alibi, signifier-fetishism, medium/model, ideology-as-form, “return each to his place”); reconstruction, section order, apparatus, and anomaly notes preserved.
| Section | Printed pp. |
|---|---|
| Translator’s Introduction (Charles Levin) | 1–28 |
| 1. Sign-Function and Class Logic | 29–62 |
| 2. The Ideological Genesis of Needs | 63–87 |
| 3. Fetishism and Ideology: The Semiological Reduction | 88–101 |
| 4. Gesture and Signature: The Semiurgy of Contemporary Art | 102–111 |
| 5. The Art Auction: Sign Exchange and Sumptuary Value | 112–122 |
| 6. For a General Theory | 123–129 |
| 7. Beyond Use Value | 130–143 |
| 8. Towards a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign | 143–163 |
| 9. Requiem for the Media | 164–184 |
| 10. Design and Environment, or How Political Economy Escalates into Cyberblitz | 185–203 |
| 11. Concerning the Fulfillment of Desire in Exchange Value | 204–214 |
The book extends the critique of political economy to the sign. Where Marx analyzed the commodity as the cell-form of capitalist value, Baudrillard analyzes the sign as the cell-form of a parallel and inseparable system, sign exchange value, and argues that the two forms are governed by one logic. The wager is announced flatly in the opening essay:
“This empiricist hypothesis is false. Far from the primary status of the object being a pragmatic one which would subsequently come to overdetermine a social value of the sign, it is the sign exchange value (valeur d’échange signe) which is fundamental—use value is often no more than a practical guarantee (or even a rationalization pure and simple).”
Ch. 1, p. 29.
From that inversion the whole volume unfolds. The essays were written across the late 1960s and early 1970s and do not form a treatise; they circle the same nucleus from different entries (objects, needs, fetishism, art, the auction, the media, design). Levin warns the reader against reading them as a finished system:
“Notes For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign is literally a commotion of ideas, sometimes inconsistent, issuing from a period of intense critical activity in which nothing was resolved.”
Intro, p. 7.
The reconstruction below follows the source’s own order, because the order is the argument: Chapters 1–3 build the critique of consumption, needs, and fetishism on a sociological and ideological footing; Chapters 4–5 test it on art and the auction; Chapter 6 lays out the formal apparatus; Chapters 7–8 deliver the two theoretical cores (the critique of use value, the critique of the sign); Chapters 9–11 deploy the apparatus against the media, design, and the desire-in-value.
Three positions recur and hold the book together, and they are worth fixing before the chapter walk because every essay redeploys them.
Stated first in Chapter 2 and formalized in Chapter 6. Every object can be taken under one of four logics, each with its own principle. The Chapter 2 statement:
“A functional logic of use value; 2. An economic logic of exchange value; 3. A logic of symbolic exchange; 4. A logic of sign value. The first is a logic of practical operations, the second one of equivalence, the third, ambivalence, and the fourth, difference. Or again: a logic of utility, a logic of the market, a logic of the gift, and a logic of status. Organized in accordance with one of the above groupings, the object assumes respectively the status of an instrument, a commodity, a symbol, or a sign.”
Ch. 2, p. 66.
And the gloss that fixes which logic is in play: “Only the last of these defines the specific field of consumption” (Ch. 2, p. 66). The Chapter 6 restatement, with the principles attached to each logic:
“postulated four different logics of value: • the functional logic of use value • the economic logic of exchange value • the differential logic of sign value • the logic of symbolic exchange with, for their respective principles’ utility, equivalence, difference, ambivalence.”
Ch. 6, p. 123.
The book’s master move, carried in full at each locus in the chapter bodies below (Ch. 1 p. 29; Ch. 7 p. 137; Ch. 8 pp. 156, 158; Ch. 2 p. 70 / Ch. 8 p. 155). In each paired form the second term does not stand outside the first as its concrete or natural ground; it is produced by the first as its guarantee. Use value is the satellite and alibi of exchange value; the signified-referent is the satellite and alibi of the signifier; denotation is the alibi of connotation; need is the alibi of the system.
Symbolic exchange is not a fourth value alongside the others. It is what the entire field of value excludes. The decisive structural claim of Chapter 6 is that the bar separating the system of value from symbolic exchange is not a bar of implication but a line of radical exclusion:
“The bar that separates all these terms from symbolic exchange is not a bar of structural implication, it is a line of radical exclusion (which presupposes the radical alternative of transgression).”
Ch. 6, p. 128.
Because the symbolic is not itself a value, it can be named only negatively, from outside:
“It is the symbolic that continues to haunt the sign, for in its total exclusion it never ceases to dismantle the formal correlation of Sr and Sd. But the symbolic, whose virtuality of meaning is so subversive of the sign, cannot, for this very reason, be named except by allusion, by infraction (effraction). For signification, which names everything in terms of itself, can only speak the language of values and of the positivity of the sign.”
Ch. 8, p. 161.
Levin situates the book inside Western Marxism and reads it as the point where that tradition turns on itself. He places the eleven essays between Système des objets (1968) and La Société de consommation (1970) on one side and The Mirror of Production (1973) on the other, and resists any clean “break” narrative; even where Baudrillard discards Marxism he is still working through problematics common to Western Marxism. The operative phrase for what Baudrillard does to political economy:
“Indeed, what Baudrillard means, in practical terms, when he claims to “extend the critique of political economy to the sign” is that he wishes to include Marx and positivism (with structuralism as the latter’s archetypical modern representative), under the heading of political economy, in order to critique the whole lot in one go.”
Intro, p. 6.
Levin’s reconstruction of the core argument is the cleanest short statement of it in the volume, and worth holding as a gloss on Chapters 7–8. The binary-privilege insight:
“argument boils down to the insight that the articulation of binary terms must always privilege one side of the opposition, as the means of setting the system in motion. Thus, in the commodity system, it is exchange value that is privileged over use value precisely because exchange value is the system’s principle of circulation.”
Intro, p. 17.
And the alibi structure, as Levin states it for the sign:
“like use value, the nether side of the structural equation of the sign functions as the alibi for its privileged term, revealing what for Baudrillard is the basic form of the ideological process: a binary reduction establishing a complementary (i.e., asymmetrical) relation between arbitrarily isolated terms, which institutionalizes a linear, non-reciprocal exchange.”
Intro, p. 19.
Levin also marks the book’s vulnerability in his own terms, the “gaping lacuna” in Baudrillard’s discourse, quoting the passage carried whole at Ch. 8, p. 161:
“It is the symbolic which never ceases to dismantle the formal correlation of signifier and signified. But the symbolic, whose virtuality of meaning is so subversive of the sign, cannot, for this very reason, be named except by allusion, by infraction (effraction). For signification, which names everything in terms of itself, can only speak the language of values and of the positivity of the sign”
Baudrillard, quoted Intro, p. 161.
And the charge of over-reach, which he attributes to Mikel Dufrenne:
“There is clearly substance to this, especially given the way Baudrillard begins to resort to a version of the noble savage theme, Mikel Dufrenne, for one, has accused him of getting carried away with his argument in precisely this way.”
Intro, pp. 23–24.
He closes by marking the later trajectory toward simulation:
“It should be no surprise, then, that Baudrillard moves straight from his critique of the sign to a reality problematic in which he begins to take cybernetics, systems theory, communication theory and (as their archetype) McLuhanism (“the medium is the message”) at their face value.”
Intro, p. 27.
The longest essay, and the one that does the sociological groundwork. Its move is to demote use value and install sign exchange value as the fundamental category for a sociology of consumption, then to show that the distinctive function of objects is, at bottom, a discriminating (class) function.
Baudrillard opens on the Trobriand distinction between the Kula (symbolic exchange of bracelets and collars organizing status) and the Gimwali (commerce of primary goods), then claims the principle survives the institution:
“The Kula and the Potlatch have disappeared, but not their principle, which we will retain as the basis of a sociological theory of objects—and this is undoubtedly all the more true to the extent that objects multiply and differentiate themselves.”
Ch. 1, p. 30.
Veblen supplies the engine. The function of the subservient classes, women, servants, is to display the standing of the master through vicarious consumption:
“This notion of vicarious consumption is crucial: it leads us back to the fundamental theorem of consumption, which is that the latter has nothing to do with personal enjoyment (although the woman is pleased to be beautiful), but that rather it is a restrictive social institution that determines behavior before even being considered in the consciousness of the social actors.”
Ch. 1, p. 31.
The everyday object today carries a functional simulacrum (make-believe): the conflict between an aristocratic morality of otium and a puritan work ethic forces the object to disguise its prestige function behind a functional alibi.
“At the limit is the gadget: pure gratuitousness under a cover of functionality, pure waste under cover of an ethic of practicality. In any case, all objects, even futile ones, are objects of labor: housekeeping, organizing, tinkering, repairing—every-where homo faber is the double of homo-otiosus.”
Ch. 1, p. 32.
Chapin’s “living-room scale” (twenty-three items, status read off the furniture) is dismissed as “the most naive empiricism” (p. 34); indexing strata on a balance sheet of objects is a vicious circle:
“It is well known that objects tell a great deal about the social status of their owner, but there we have a vicious circle in the objects, one identifies a social category which has, in the final analysis, already been described on the basis of these objects (among other criteria). The recurring induction hides a circular deduction.”
Ch. 1, p. 35.
The corrective is to read objects in their syntax and rhetoric, as a class dialect:
“That is to say, they use it in their own way: they play with it, they break its rules, they speak it with their class dialect.”
Ch. 1, p. 37.
The lapses and contradictions of this discourse are the sociological object:
“On the contrary, this discourse always expresses in this very syntax a neurosis of mobility, of inertia or of social regression.”
Ch. 1, pp. 37–38.
Baudrillard focuses on the mobile middle classes, the “floating hinge of a stratified society,” because their objects carry an ambiguous status:
“That is what gives objects in this “milieu” a fundamentally ambiguous status: behind their triumph as signs of social promotion they secretly proclaim (or avow) social defeat.”
Ch. 1, p. 40.
Their proliferation is anchored, in Bourdieu’s phrase, in a “rhetoric of despair” (p. 41). Two organizing modes govern this petty-bourgeois rhetorical order:
“rhetorical order is governed by two essential modes: on the one hand, saturation and redundance; on the other, symmetry and hierarchy. Obviously there are numerous overlappings (thus symmetry is also redundancy, but it includes centrality). Nonetheless the two modes are quite distinct, the one (saturation-redundancy) expressing the inorganic, the other (symmetry-hierarchy) expressing the organic structure of this order.”
Ch. 1, p. 41.
The detail is dense and meant to be retrieved. The tactic of the pot and its saucer:
“The table is covered with a table cloth which itself is protected by a plastic table cloth. Drapes and double drapes are at the windows. We have carpets, slipcovers, coasters, wainscoting, lampshades. Each trinket sits on a doily, each flower in its pot, and each pot in its saucer. Everything is protected and surrounded. Even in the garden each cluster is encircled with wire-netting, each path is outlined by bricks, mosaics or flagstones. This could be analyzed as an anxious compulsion to sequestration, as an obsessional symbolism the obsession of the cottage owner and small capitalist is not merely to possess, but to underline what he possesses two or three times.”
Ch. 1, p. 42.
The class double-bind is stated exactly:
“It is a class which has gone far enough to interiorize the models of social success, but not far enough to avoid simultaneously interiorizing the defeat.”
Ch. 1, p. 43.
The taste for the bygone is read the same way, as legitimacy-seeking:
“For all these reasons the taste for the bygone is characterized by the desire to transcend the dimension of economic success, to consecrate a social success or a privileged position in a redundant, culturalized, symbolic sign.”
Ch. 1, p. 43.
And the moral fanaticism of housekeeping, in which objects are disciplined like children:
“The objects here are entirely equivalent to children in whom one must first instill good manners, who must be “civilized” by submitting them to the formal imperatives of politeness.”
Ch. 1, p. 45.
The immense unpaid labor of housewives escapes the national accounts because it answers a symbolic, not an economic, calculus:
“If the immense work of housewives (children and objects) never appears in the national accounts, it is undoubtedly because these accounts are too abstract to take into consideration anything other than formal social revenue production. But it is also because, in its profound intention, this labor does not emerge from an economic calculus but from a symbolic and statutory calculus dictated by the relative social class configurations.”
Ch. 1, p. 46.
The privileged stage disavows polish and varnish for the values of “frankness” and the “natural,” whose function is in fact social discrimination:
“On the contrary, it is deduced from lower-class devotion to the artificial, to the baroque affectation of decorum, to the moral values of the veiled, the clothed, the cared for, the preened, to the moral values of effort. Here “preparation” is a cultural fault. Propriety (repressive conditioning) and manners in the matter of objects, which in another age were the cultural signs of the bourgeoisie, are stigmatized as the distinctive marks of the petty bourgeois classes who have outfitted themselves with them. The essential function of the values of “sincerity,” “authenticity,” “starkness,”—inner walls of bare concrete, unfinished timbers—is thus a function of discrimination (distinction), and their definition is first social.”
Ch. 1, p. 46.
Design’s claim that objects progress toward the harmonious synthesis of form and function masks the social function of formal innovation:
“One allows it to be understood that, according to a continuous progress, objects would obey an internal aesthetic logic which would ultimately lead them to appear in their “truth,” in the harmonious synthesis of their function and their form. This is the fundamental theory of design.26 Now the hypothesis of a progressive advancement from model to model toward an ideal state of the environment—a hypothesis which secretly rests upon the representation of technological progress—implies a whole ideology, for it masks the social function of formal innovation, which is a function of cultural discrimination.”
Ch. 1, p. 47.
On fashion and class, the formulation that recurs across the book (“speaks to all in order to return each to his place”; see Ch. 1 p. 60 and Ch. 9 p. 177) arrives here with the “luxury of heirs”:
“Now, this is quite obviously false, fashion, like mass culture, speaks to all in order to better return each one to his place. It is one of those institutions that best restores cultural inequality and social discrimination, establishing it under the pretense of abolishing it. It wishes to be beyond social logic, a kind of second nature in fact, it is entirely governed by the social strategy of class “Modern” transitoriness of objects (and other signs) is in fact the luxury of heirs.”
Ch. 1, p. 51.
The set-piece distinction between the object status and the objective status of the television. Before it transmits images the TV is first a thing bought and possessed:
“Now it is obvious that before being the vehicle of images, a transmitter addressing a receiver, the TV is first a “set” sold by a manufacturer to an individual. It is an object, bought and possessed. Undoubtedly its status is never just that, at any level of the social scale, but this primary status secretly induces a great number of ambiguous cultural behaviors in image reception.”
Ch. 1, p. 53.
Its possession is a certificate of citizenship, and its function becomes a proof function:
“As in John Stuart Mill, the possession of such and such an object is in itself a social service as a certificate of citizenship the TV is a token of recognition, of integration, of social legitimacy. At this level of almost unconscious response it is the object that is in question, not its objective function—and it no longer has an objective function, but a proof function.”
Ch. 1, p. 54.
Crucially, empirical study can only deliver a logic of stratification (continuous gradation), whereas theory reveals a logic of class:
“Empirical studies only make, and can only make, apparent a logic of stratification (distinction-inclusion-transition by plateaus—a continuous ascent); theoretical analysis makes a class logic emerge (distinction-exclusion). There are those for whom TV is an object, there are those for whom it is a cultural exercise: on this radical opposition a cultural class privilege is established that is registered in an essential social privilege.”
Ch. 1, p. 57.
The Reader’s Digest “civilization of A’s” survey is read as a binary that neutralizes class antagonism:
“Thus, the old bogey of the duel between antagonistic classes is conjured away in a statistical dichotomy: there are still two terms, but they are no longer in conflict—they change into the two poles of a social dynamic.”
Ch. 1, p. 59.
“This binary schema is a magic schema of integration: the arbitrary division of distinctive signs on the same scale allows the suggestion of an international model of distinction (the A’s), all the while preserving an international model of democracy, the idea of Europe—which is in fact quite simply that of the virtual homogenization of all social categories under the beneficent constellation of objects.”
Ch. 1, p. 60.
The essay closes on the strongest formulation of the political stake. First the discrimination thesis (p. 61):
“In this perspective, which is not legible at the level of the apparent mechanisms, consumption and the values of consumption are defined as the very criterion of a new discrimination: adherence to these values acts as a new morality for the use of slaves.”
Ch. 1, p. 61.
Then the master/slave morality, restated on the next page (p. 62):
“It must be asked whether certain classes are not consecrated to finding their salvation in objects, consecrated to a social destiny of consumption and thus assigned to a slave morality (enjoyment, immorality, irresponsibility) as opposed to a master morality (responsibility and power).”
Ch. 1, p. 62.
Hence the verdict on the “consumer society”:
“In this sense it is absurd to speak of a consumer society as if consumption were a system of universal values appropriate to all men because of being founded upon the satisfaction of individual needs, when really it is an institution and a morality, and in this way an element of the strategy of power in any society, past or future.”
Ch. 1, p. 62.
And on the discipline that studies it:
“Here sociology is most of the time both a dupe and an accomplice: it takes the ideology of consumption for consumption itself.”
Ch. 1, p. 62.
The theoretical hinge of the first half: a deconstruction of object, need, and subject together, and the demonstration that needs are a productive force the system requires, not an anthropological given. Baudrillard opens with the dream analogy:
“it is rather the dream-work and the dream-processes that must be analyzed in order to recover the unconscious logic of a more profound discourse. And it is the workings and processes of an unconscious social logic that must be retrieved beneath the consecrated ideology of consumption.”
Ch. 2, p. 63.
The object has no meaning of its own:
“But the object is nothing. It is nothing but the different types of relations and significations that converge, contradict themselves, and twist around it, as such—the hidden logic that not only arranges this bundle of relations, but directs the manifest discourse that overlays and occludes it.”
Ch. 2, p. 63.
The pivotal passage on symbolic exchange and its degradation into sign (re-pulled whole; the intervening sentence on the reified relation is restored):
“Instead of abolishing itself in the relation that it establishes, and thus assuming symbolic value (as in the example of the gift), the object becomes autonomous, intransitive, opaque, and so begins to signify the abolition of the relationship. Having become a sign object, it is no longer the mobile signifier of a lack between two beings, it is “of” and “from” the reified relation (as is the commodity at another level, in relation to reified labor power). Whereas the symbol refers to lack (to absence) as a virtual relation of desire, the sign object only refers to the absence of relation itself, and to isolated individual subjects.”
Ch. 2, p. 65.
The worked examples are precise and meant to travel. The wedding ring:
“This is a unique object, symbol of the relationship of the couple. One would neither think of changing it (barring mishap) nor of wearing several. The symbolic object is made to last and to witness in its duration the permanence of the relationship. Fashion plays as negligible a role at the strictly symbolic level as at the level of pure instrumentality.”
Ch. 2, p. 66.
Against the ordinary ring:
“The ordinary ring is quite different: it does not symbolize a relationship. It is a non-singular object, a personal gratification, a sign in the eyes of others. I can wear several of them. I can substitute them. The ordinary ring takes part in the play of my accessories and the constellation of fashion. It is an object of consumption.”
Ch. 2, p. 66.
The definition is set negatively:
“An object is not an object of consumption unless it is released from its psychic determinations as symbol; from its functional determinations as instrument; from its commercial determinations as product; and is thus liberated as a sign to be recaptured by the formal logic of fashion, i.e., by the logic of differentiation.”
Ch. 2, p. 67.
And the triad of statuses, common name / proper name / brand name:
“The functional use of the object occurs in relation to its technical structure and its practical manipulation. It relates to the common name: e.g., refrigerator. The use of the symbol-object occurs in the context of its concrete presence and through the proper name proper to it. Possession and passion baptize the object (in the metaphorical name of the subject), affixing their seal to it. The “consumption of the object occurs in the context of its brand name, which is not a proper name, but a sort of generic Christian name.”
Ch. 2, pp. 68–69.
Need is the magical copula that joins a subject and object posited as separate, exactly as mana joins giver and receiver in naive anthropology:
“Mana, vital force, instincts, needs, choices, preferences, utilities, motivations’ it is always a question of the same magical copula, the equal sign in “A = A.” Metaphysics and economics jostle each other at the same impasses, over the same aporias, the same contradictions and dysfunctions, condemning each from the start to unlimited circular speculation by positing the autonomy of the subject and its specular reflection in the autonomy of the object.”
Ch. 2, p. 71.
Borges’ zoological classification is deployed to ridicule all empirical classifications of objects and needs:
“Animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor; (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, etc.”
Ch. 2, p. 69.
The economic concept of need is not innocent. It is required for ideological support:
“This is why economic science does not dispense with the concept of need. It could easily do so, for its calculations operate at the level of statistical demand. But the notion is urgently required for ideological support.”
Ch. 2, p. 71.
Because production rests on a petitio principii:
“The legitimacy of production rests on a petitio principii, i.e., that people discover a posteriori and almost miraculously that they need what is produced and offered at the marketplace (and thus, in order that they should experience this or any particular need, the need must already exist inside people as a virtual postulation).”
Ch. 2, p. 71.
Psycho-social economics exorcises the danger of a radical analysis whose object would be social logic itself:
“Psycho-social economics is a sort of near-sighted, cross-eyed hydra. But it surveys and defends something, for all that. It exorcises the danger of a radical analysis, whose object would be neither the group nor the individual subject at the conscious level, but social logic itself, for which it is necessary to create a principle of analysis.”
Ch. 2, p. 74.
The deep level is unconscious structures that organize the production of differences; the relation precedes the terms:
“Even before survival has been assured, every group or individual experiences a vital pressure to produce themselves meaningfully in a system of exchange and relationships. Concurrently with the production of goods, there is a push to elaborate significations, meaning—with the result that the one-for-the-other exists before the one and the other exist for themselves.”
Ch. 2, pp. 74–75.
Consumption is exchange:
“Consumption is exchange. A consumer is never isolated, any more than a speaker.”
Ch. 2, p. 75.
And so functionality follows on the social production of differences rather than grounding it:
“Similarly, consumption does not arise from an objective need of the consumer, a final intention of the subject toward the object; rather, there is social production, in a system of exchange, of a material of differences, a code of significations and invidious (statuaire) values. The functionality of goods and individual needs only follows on this, adjusting itself to, rationalizing, and in the same stroke repressing these fundamental structural mechanisms.”
Ch. 2, p. 75.
Veblen is credited with the discovery of a principle of total social analysis:
“We should refer at this point to Veblen, who, even if he posited the logic of differentiation more in terms of individuals than of classes, of prestige interaction rather than of exchange structure, nevertheless offers in a way far superior to those who have followed him and who have pretended to surpass him the discovery of a principle of total social analysis, the basis of a radical logic, in the mechanisms of differentiation. This is not a superadded, contextual variable, situationally given, but a relational variable of structure.”
Ch. 2, pp. 75–76.
Leisure is redefined as the consumption of unproductive time, a form of potlatch:
“Leisure may be defined as any consumption of unproductive time. Now, this has nothing to do with passivity: it is an activity, an obligatory social phenomenon. Time is not in this instance “free,” it is sacrificed, wasted, it is the moment of a production of value, of an invidious production of status, and the social individual is not free to escape it. No one needs leisure, but everyone is called upon to provide evidence of his availability for unproductive labor. The consumption of empty time is a form of potlatch.”
Ch. 2, p. 76.
Like Bataille’s “accursed share,” free time assumes value in expenditure:
“Here, free time is a material of exchange and signification. Like Bataille’s “accursed share,”13 it assumes value in the exchange itself—or in destruction —and leisure is the locus of this symbolic operation.”
Ch. 2, pp. 76–77.
On the paradox of distinctive value, wealth and austerity obey one rule:
“This law of value can play on wealth or on destitution. Conspicuous luxury or conspicuous austerity answer to the same fundamental rule.”
Ch. 2, p. 77.
“There are innumerable examples of this paradox of value—of spartan wealth. People manipulate the subtle starkness of modern interiors. You pay through the nose to eat practically nothing. To deny oneself is a luxury! This is the sophistry of consumption, for which the refusal to validate a value is merely a hierarchical nuance in its formal verification.”
Ch. 2, p. 78.
Fashion is the model phenomenon. The mini-skirt is differential, not sexual:
“To take a recent example: neither the long skirt nor the mini-skirt has an absolute value in itself—only their differential relation acts as a criterion of meaning. The mini-skirt has nothing whatsoever to do with sexual liberation; it has no (fashion) value except in opposition to the long skirt.”
Ch. 2, p. 79.
And beauty in itself would end the fashion cycle:
“Truly beautiful, definitively beautiful clothing would put an end to fashion. The latter can do nothing but deny, repress and efface it—while conserving, with each new outing, the alibi of beauty.”
Ch. 2, p. 79.
The “vital anthropological minimum” is denied; the threshold is set from above, by the production of surplus:
“There have never been “societies of scarcity” or “societies of abundance,” since the expenditures of a society (whatever the objective volume of its resources) are articulated in terms of a structural surplus, and an equally structural deficit. An enormous surplus can coexist with the worst misery. In all cases, a certain surplus coexists with a certain poverty. But the crucial point is that it is always the production of this surplus that regulates the whole. The survival threshold is never determined from below, but from above.”
Ch. 2, p. 81.
The Siane of New Guinea, enriched, squandered everything in feasts and still lived below the “vital minimum” (p. 81). And “discretionary income” is exposed as an entrepreneurs’ rationalization:
“In fact, discretionary income is an idea rationalized at the discretion of entrepreneurs and market analysts. It justifies their manipulation of secondary needs, since, in their view, these don’t touch on the essential.”
Ch. 2, p. 82.
The central thesis is delivered in one line (re-pulled whole):
“Rather, they are better defined as a function induced (in the individual) by the internal logic of the system more precisely, not as a consummative force liberated by the affluent society, but as a productive force required by the functioning of the system itself, by its process of reproduction and survival. In other words, there are only needs because the system needs them.”
Ch. 2, p. 82.
Hence the coinage consummativity, and the figure of the consumer as the wage laborer’s double:
“Needs and labor are therefore two modalities of the same exploitation of productive forces. The saturated consumer appears as the spellbound avatar of the wage laborer.”
Ch. 2, p. 83.
The essay ends in a hard anti-humanism. Man is regenerated only as a surviving productive force:
“If he eats, drinks, lives somewhere, reproduces himself, it is because the system requires his self-production in order to reproduce itself: it needs men. If it could function with slaves, there would be no “free” workers. If it could function with asexual mechanical robots, there would be no sexual reproduction.30 If the system could function without feeding its workers, there would be no bread.”
Ch. 2, p. 86.
And the closing thesis that use value has nowhere to reappear:
“The truth is—and this has been recognized for a long time in the area of economic production—that use value no longer appears anywhere in the system. The determining logic of exchange value is, however, as ubiquitous as ever.”
Ch. 2, p. 87.
The conceptual breakthrough of the volume: fetishism is relocated from the signified to the signifier, from substance to code. Baudrillard first attacks the loose contemporary use of “fetishism” as “the conceptual fetish of vulgar social thought” (p. 88). The etymology does load-bearing work, recovering the original sense of fabrication:
“What quickly becomes apparent is the aspect of faking, of artificial registering—in short, of a cultural sign labor—and that this is at the origin of the status of fetish object, and thus also plays some part in the fascination it exercises.”
Ch. 3, p. 91.
The thesis itself, the relocation to the signifier:
“If fetishism exists it is thus not a fetishism of the signified, a fetishism of substances and values (called ideological), which the fetish object would incarnate for the alienated subject. Behind this reinterpretation (which is truly ideological) it is a fetishism of the signifier. That is to say that the subject is trapped in the factitious, differential, encoded, systematized aspect of the object. It is not the passion (whether of objects or subjects) for substances that speaks in fetishism, it is the passion for the code, which, by governing both objects and subjects, and by subordinating them to itself, delivers them up to abstract manipulation.”
Ch. 3, p. 92.
And what is fetishized is the system, not the object:
“In this sense, fetishism is not the sanctification of a certain object, or value (in which case one might hope to see it disappear in our age, when the liberalization of values and the abundance of objects would “normally” tend to desanctify them). It is the sanctification of the system as such, of the commodity as system: it is thus contemporaneous with the generalization of exchange value and is propagated with it.”
Ch. 3, p. 92.
Money fetishism is read the same way (a second locus of the same move):
“What is fascinating about money is neither its materiality, nor even that it might be the intercepted equivalent of a certain force (e.g., of labor) or of a certain potential power it is its systematic nature, the potential enclosed in the material for total commutability of all values, thanks to their definitive abstraction. It is the abstraction, the total artificiality of the sign that one “adores” in money. What is fetishized is the closed perfection of a system, not the “golden calf,” or the treasure.”
Ch. 3, p. 93.
And the collection, a third locus, where the systematic cycle negates castration:
“Elsewhere we have seen how, in the collection, it is neither the nature of objects nor even their symbolic value that is important; but precisely the sense in which they negate all this, and deny the reality of castration for the subject through the systematic nature of the collective cycle, whose continual shifting from one term to another helps the subject to weave around himself a closed and invulnerable world that dissolves all obstacles to the realization of desire (perverse, of course).”
Ch. 3, p. 93.
The body-and-beauty cult is the clearest illustration. Fetish-beauty is an anti-nature incarnate:
“What we are talking about is a kind of anti-nature incarnate, bound up in a general stereotype of models of beauty, in a perfectionist vertigo and controlled narcissism.”
Ch. 3, p. 94.
What fascinates is the mark, the artifact, not the body:
“It is the sign in this beauty, the mark (makeup, symmetry, or calculated asymmetry, etc.), which fascinates; it is the artifact that is the object of desire.”
Ch. 3, p. 94.
The structural homology is made explicit: the marked body substitutes sign-difference for castration:
“This is to substitute the line of demarcation between elements-signs for the great dividing line of castration. It substitutes the significant difference, the formal division between signs, for the irreducible ambivalence, for the symbolic split (écart).”
Ch. 3, p. 95.
And the general formula of fascination:
“What fascinates us is always that which radically excludes us in the name of its internal logic or perfection: a mathematical formula, a paranoic system, a concrete jungle, a useless object, or, again, a smooth body, without orifices, doubled and redoubled by a mirror, devoted to perverse autosatisfaction.”
Ch. 3, p. 96.
The chapter’s engine concept. Ideology is the operation by which the symbolic is reduced to the semiological. Three worked cases. The sun:
“The vacation sun no longer retains anything of the collective symbolic function it had among the Aztecs, the Egyptians, etc.13 It no longer has that ambivalence of a natural force—life and death, beneficent and murderous—which it had in primitive cults or still has in peasant labor. The vacation sun is a completely positive sign, the absolute source of happiness and euphoria, and as such it is significantly opposed to non-sun (rain, cold, bad weather).”
Ch. 3, p. 98.
Masculine-feminine:
“No being is assigned by nature to a sex. Sexual ambivalence (activity-passivity) is at the heart of each subject, sexual differentiation is registered as a difference in the body of each subject and not as an absolute term linked to a particular sexual organ.”
Ch. 3, p. 99.
“Once again, the ideological labor consists in semiologically reducing, in dispersing this irreducible reality into a great distinctive structure, masculine-feminine—into sexes that are full, distinct and opposed to one another.”
Ch. 3, p. 99.
The unconscious:
“Here, then, the possessive pronoun is itself semiologically reductive and ideologically effective insofar as it reduces this unconscious to a simple oppositional term vis-à-vis consciousness.”
Ch. 3, p. 99.
“The myth of the unconscious becomes the ideological solution to the problems of the unconscious.”
Ch. 3, p. 100.
The definition is stated outright:
“In fact, it is the semiological organization itself, the entrenchment in a system of signs, that has the goal of reducing the symbolic function. This semiological reduction of the symbolic properly constitutes the ideological process.”
Ch. 3, p. 98.
The closing summary fixes the machinery. Ideological labor reduces real labor by substituting distinctive oppositions, and those oppositions rank hierarchically:
“The process of ideological labor always aims toward reducing the process of real labor (the process of unconscious symbolic labor in the division of the subject, the process of labor of productive forces in the explosion of relations of production). This process is always a process of abstraction by signs, of substituting a system of distinctive oppositions for the process of real labor (the first moment: process of signification). But these oppositions are not neutral; they rank themselves hierarchically, privileging one of the terms (second moment: process of discrimination) Signification does not always carry discrimination with it (phonemic differences at the level of language), but discrimination always presupposes signification—the sign-function that reduces ambivalence and the symbolic.”
Ch. 3, pp. 100–101.
And the function this abstract totalization serves:
“This abstract totalization permits signs to function ideologically, that is, to establish and perpetuate real discriminations and the order of power.”
Ch. 3, p. 101.
The first application essay. Its object is the signature and the seriality of modern art, read as the passage from a world of representation to a world of the series. The historical turn:
“A certain fact may be of interest here until the nineteenth century, the copy of an original work had its own value, it was a legitimate practice. In our time the copy is illegitimate, inauthentic: it is no longer “art.””
Ch. 4, p. 103.
What changed is the conditions of signification:
“Something else has changed: the conditions of signification of the oeuvre itself.”
Ch. 4, p. 103.
Once transcendence is abolished, the work becomes the original and value migrates to the gesture:
“Today the conjuncture of values is entirely different: transcendence is abolished, the oeuvre becomes the original. Its meaning passes from the restitution of appearances to the act of inventing them. Value is transferred from an eminent, objective beauty to the singularity of the artist in his gesture.”
Ch. 4, p. 104.
The shift from order to series, from space to time:
“We are no longer in space but in time, in the realm of difference and no longer of resemblance, in the series and no longer in the order.”
Ch. 4, p. 104.
The signature becomes the caption and guarantee of vintage:
“Hence the mythical value taken on by that guarantee of vintage (appellation contrölée): the signature. It becomes the veritable caption of our oeuvres.”
Ch. 4, p. 105.
A false term in the series threatens the whole series:
“A false Soulages may well be worth another Soulages but it throws suspicion on all Soulages. The code of recognition becomes suspect, and hence the integrity of meaning of the oeuvre itself.”
Ch. 4, p. 105.
So the essential task is to preserve the sign:
“The work is no longer rooted in God (in the objective order of the world) but in the series itself. The essential task then is to preserve the authenticity of the sign.”
Ch. 4, p. 105.
Rauschenberg’s Factum I / Factum II is the limiting case (the ellipsis is in the source-quoted Otto Hahn passage):
“In Factum I and Factum II, Rauschenberg has done the same canvas twice, almost to the last daub, literally … What seems a brush stroke thrown on as hurriedly as possible and followed by droplets in an entirely accidental fashion is in fact a very studied gesture which Rauschenberg is capable of executing repeatedly at will”
Otto Hahn, quoted Ch. 4, p. 106.
“In any case, Rauschenberg knows that although his two paintings are identical, they are nonetheless different because they testify to two distinct moments and so retain their own individual value on the market. So, this duplication retains nothing of a copy. Subjectivity triumphs in the mechanical repetition of itself.”
Ch. 4, p. 106.
The thesis on what modern art testifies to (re-pulled whole):
“And here we have the truth of our modern art: if it bears witness to our time, it does so neither by direct allusion nor even in its pure gesture denying a systematized world—it is in testifying to the systematic of this full world by means of the inverse and homologous systematic of its empty gesture, a pure gesture marking an absence.”
Ch. 4, p. 108.
Warhol is the witness who turns the structure into fashion:
“This by continually proving itself in a gesture that is repeated according to a play of inessential and combinatory variations in turn permits art to be something other than absolute repetition. “I would like to be a machine,” Andy Warhol says.”
Ch. 4, p. 109.
His naive realism is refused, because the everyday is difference in repetition:
“Let us applaud this democratic conception, but recognize that it is either very naive or in very bad faith.”
Ch. 4, p. 109.
“Everydayness is difference in repetition. In isolating the chair on the canvas, I remove all its everydayness from it and at the same time remove from the canvas all the characteristics of an everyday object (which in the theorists’ illusion ought to make it absolutely resemble the chair).”
Ch. 4, p. 109.
The verdict: modern art is an art of collusion:
“Modern art, midway between critical terrorism (ideological) and de facto structural integration, is quite exactly an art of collusion vis-à-vis this contemporary world. It plays with it, and is included in the game. It can parody this world, illustrate it, simulate it, alter it; it never disturbs the order, which is also its own.”
Ch. 4, p. 110.
And modern works have become everyday objects that pose no problem to the order:
“In this sense, modern works have indeed become everyday object: although laden with cultural connotations, they pose no problems to the environment.”
Ch. 4, p. 110.
The experimental heart of the book’s economic argument. The auction is the matrix where the three values transfuse:
“The auction, this crucible of the interchange of values, where economic value, sign value and symbolic value transfuse according to the rules of the game, can be considered as an ideological matrix—one of the shrines of the political economy of the sign.”
Ch. 5, p. 112.
It is the experimental terrain because money is exchanged there for a pure sign:
“By contrast, the auction of the work of art has this notable characteristic: that economic exchange value, in the pure form of its general equivalent, money, is exchanged there for a pure sign, the painting. So, it is an experimental terrain, simultaneously collective and institutional, for separating out the operation of this sign value.”
Ch. 5, p. 112.
The general hypothesis transferred to all consumption: consumption is expenditure, the destruction of wealth:
“The act of consumption is never simply a purchase (reconversion of exchange value into use value); it is also an expenditure (an aspect as radically neglected by political economy as by Marx); that is to say, it is wealth manifested, and a manifest destruction of wealth.”
Ch. 5, p. 112.
“Every act of purchase is thus simultaneously an economic act and a trans-economic act of the production of differential sign value.”
Ch. 5, p. 113.
Which forces the reframe of the whole field (re-pulled whole):
“At this point, the field of political economy, articulated only through exchange value and use value, explodes and must be entirely reanalyzed as generalized political economy, which implies the production of sign exchange value in the same way and in the same movement as the production of material goods and of economic exchange value.”
Ch. 5, pp. 113–114.
Against the vulgate that culture is simply appropriated by the dominant class:
“We are still within the political vulgate: culture annexed and manipulated by the dominant class.”
Ch. 5, p. 114.
Sign values are produced by a specific labor that yields domination, not profit:
“Between the two, another type of labor intervenes which transforms economic value and surplus value into sign value: it is a sumptuary operation, devouring (consummation) and surpassing economic value according to a radically different type of exchange. Yet in a certain way it also produces a surplus value: domination, which is not to be confused with economic privilege and profit.”
Ch. 5, p. 115.
In the order of signs it is mastery of expenditure, based on a monopoly of the code:
“In the order of signs (of culture), it is mastery of expenditure that is decisive, that is, a mastery of the trans-substantiation of economic exchange value into sign exchange value based on a monopoly of the code.”
Ch. 5, p. 115.
In the auction, exchange value is no longer offered but wagered:
“Once the latter has been put out of play, exchange value is no longer offered (in exchange for); it is wagered (mise en jeu). At once, it ceases to be exchange value and the whole situation is transferred out of the realm of the economic.”
Ch. 5, p. 116.
Money is trans-substantiated into a sumptuary value, instituting aristocratic parity:
“In the crucial moment of the auction, money is nullified as a divisible exchange value and is trans-substantiated by its expenditure into an indivisible sumptuary value. Thus, it becomes the homolog of the painting as a sign, a unique and indivisible object.”
Ch. 5, p. 117.
The auction’s true function is the institution of a privileged community:
“Whoever the vanquisher in the challenge, the essential function of the auction is the institution of a community of the privileged who define themselves as such by agonistic speculation upon a restricted corpus of signs.”
Ch. 5, p. 117.
The thesis on ideology stated here, which the volume keeps returning to:
“Ideology is not a mysterious duping (trucage) of consciousness, it is a social logic that is substituted for another (and which resolves the latter’s contradictions), thus changing the very definition of value.”
Ch. 5, p. 118.
Object fetishism is inverted against the psychological account:
“Thus, it is not the psychological relation of the individual to the object that gives birth to fetishism and that sustains the principle of exchange. “Object Fetishism” never supports exchange in its principle, but the social principle of exchange supports the fetishized value of the object.”
Ch. 5, p. 118.
The painting’s true value is genealogical, producing legitimacy not profit:
“Just as the cycle of successive gifts in primitive societies charges the object with more and more value, so the painting circulates from inheritor to inheritor as a title of nobility, being charged with prestige throughout its history. Here, by the very circulation of signs a sort of surplus value is produced which must be radically distinguished from economic surplus value. It does not create profit, but legitimacy and it is with this that the art lover identifies himself by his economic sacrifice in the auction.”
Ch. 5, p. 121.
The museum is the bank of this system:
“just as a gold bank, the public backing of the Bank of France, is necessary in order that the circulation of capital and private speculation be organized, so the fixed reserve of the museum is necessary for the functioning of the sign exchange of paintings. Museums play the role of banks in the political economy of paintings”
Ch. 5, pp. 121–122.
And the wide claim, that economic class domination may be a detour in a longer genealogy:
“But perhaps economic exploitation and “class” domination are at bottom only a “historic” variant and a detour in the immense genealogy of the forms of social domination.”
Ch. 5, p. 120.
The closing NB extends the same transmutation to knowledge, via Goblot:
“One could also analyze the academic congress (of scholars, of intellectuals, of sociologists) as places of transmission, of hereditary reproduction of the intelligentsia and of a privileged community on the basis of an agonistic debauch of signs.”
Ch. 5, p. 122.
The shortest and most schematic essay. It restates the four logics (carried whole in the orientation above, Ch. 2 p. 66 and here p. 123), lays out a conversion table of transits between values, and declines to claim more than a combinatory:
“combinatory exploration, with its merely formal symmetries. There is no organizing theory behind it.”
Ch. 6, p. 126.
The first homology attempted treats the symbolic as a homogeneous fourth value:
“sign value is to symbolic exchange what exchange value (economic) is to use value.”
Ch. 6, p. 126.
This proves incoherent, because the symbolic cannot be a value at all:
“the symbolic is not a value (i.e., not positive, autonomisable, measurable or codifiable) It is the ambivalence (positive and negative) of personal exchange—and as such it is radically opposed to all values.”
Ch. 6, p. 127.
The corrected, coherent homology decomposes the sign into its terms:
“exchange value is to use value what the signifier is to the signified.”
Ch. 6, p. 127.
The structural consequence is the book’s central diagram. The bar between the terms within the system is one of implication:
“that which separates the signified from the signifier is a line of formal logical implication. It does not radically separate these respective terms; rather, it establishes a structural relation between them (and similarly between exchange value and signifier, between use value and signified).”
Ch. 6, p. 128.
But the bar separating the whole field of value from symbolic exchange is one of radical exclusion (carried whole in the orientation above, p. 128). Hence there is no articulation across it:
“There is no articulation between these three forms (which describe general political economy) and symbolic exchange.”
Ch. 6, p. 125.
The programmatic tasks that govern Chapters 7–8. First, the critique of use value:
“The extension of the critique of political economy to a radical critique of use value, in order to reduce the idealist anthropology which it still subtends, even in Marx (whether at the level of “needs” of individuals or at the level of the “use value of labor”).”
Ch. 6, pp. 128–129.
The standing assessment of Marx fixed here:
“In fact, strictly speaking, Marx offers only a critical theory of exchange value. The critical theory of use value, signifier, and signified remains to be developed.”
Ch. 6, p. 129.
And the identity of the general theory of value with a theory of symbolic exchange:
“general political economy (or a critical theory of value) and a theory of symbolic exchange are one and the same thing. It is the basis of a revolutionary anthropology.”
Ch. 6, p. 128.
The first theoretical core. The target is the ambiguity of use value in Marx. Baudrillard’s counter-thesis is that use value is itself an abstraction and a fetishized social relation:
“For use value—indeed, utility itself—is a fetishized social relation, just like the abstract equivalence of commodities. Use value is an abstraction.”
Ch. 7, p. 131.
The governing analogy: needs are to use value what abstract social labor is to exchange value:
“In effect, our hypothesis is that needs (i.e., the system of needs) are the equivalent of abstract social labor: on them is erected the system of use value, just as abstract social labor is the basis for the system of exchange value.”
Ch. 7, p. 131.
As the producer is an abstraction (labor power), the consumer is an abstraction (need power):
“the consumer never appears as desire and enjoyment, but as abstract social need power (one could say Bedürfniskraft, Bedurfnisvermögen, by analogy with Arbeitskraft, Arbeitsvermögen).”
Ch. 7, p. 132.
Use value carries a metaphysic, the moral law of utility:
“Use value is the expression of a whole metaphysic: that of utility. It registers itself as a kind of moral law at the heart of the object—and it is inscribed there as the finality of the “need” of the subject.”
Ch. 7, p. 133.
Hence the object form is the completed form of the commodity form, the same fetishism on both sides:
“And if we call this abstract equivalence of utilities the object form, we can say that the object form is only the completed form of the commodity form. In other words, the same logic (and the same fetishism) plays on the two sides of the commodity specified by Marx: use value and exchange value.”
Ch. 7, p. 134.
The satellite/alibi structure, stated across both pairs at once (a key locus of the recurring move):
“Let us say that they have a tactical value—whereas exchange value and signifier have strategic value. The system is organized along the lines of a functional but hierarchized bipolarity. Absolute preeminence redounds to exchange value and the signifier. Use value and needs are only an effect of exchange value. Signified (and referent) are only an effect of the signifier (we will return to this point later).6 Neither is an autonomous reality that either exchange value or the signifier would express or translate in their code. At bottom, they are only simulation models, produced by the play of exchange value and of signifiers. They provide the latter with the guarantee of the real, the lived, the concrete, they are the guarantee of an objective reality for which, however, in the same moment, these systems qua systems substitute their own total logic. (Even the term “substitute” is misleading, in this context. It implies the existence somewhere of a fundamental reality that the system appropriates or distorts. In fact, there is no reality or principle of reality other than that directly produced by the system as its ideal reference.) Use value and the signified do not constitute an elsewhere with respect to the systems of the other two; they are only their alibis.”
Ch. 7, p. 137.
Use value is doubly damning because it naturalizes the system as the tribunal of equality:
“Use value is given fundamentally as the instance (i.e., tribunal) before which all men are equal.”
Ch. 7, p. 138.
“Thus, use value, reflected back to the anthropological sphere, reconciles in the universal those who are divided socially by exchange value.”
Ch. 7, p. 138.
So its fetishism is more profound than that of exchange value:
“This is why use value fetishism is indeed more profound, more “mysterious” than the fetishism of exchange value.”
Ch. 7, p. 139.
The summary image:
“Use value is thus the crown and scepter of political economy”
Ch. 7, p. 138.
The political consequence is aimed at the Marxist horizon of liberation:
“it is no longer possible to posit use value as an alternative to exchange value. Nor, therefore, is it possible to posit the “restitution” of use value, at the end of political economy, under the sign of the “liberation of needs” and the “administration of things” as a revolutionary perspective.”
Ch. 7, p. 139.
“Every revolutionary perspective today stands or falls on its ability to reinterrogate radically the repressive, reductive, rationalizing metaphysic of utility. All critical theory depends on the analysis of the object form.”
Ch. 7, p. 139.
The closing section turns Marx’s own joke against him. The Crusoe myth is the bourgeois Terrestrial Paradise:
“Robinson Crusoe is the outcome of a total mutation that has been in progress since the dawn of bourgeois society (though truly theorized only since the eighteenth century).”
Ch. 7, p. 141.
And the pointed question that registers Marx’s blind spot:
“as Marx insists, what on earth has Friday got to do with this setup?”
Ch. 7, p. 141.
“In fact, nothing is clear about this fable.”
Ch. 7, p. 142.
The companion to Chapter 7, analyzing the sign form. The opening reframing dissolves the base/superstructure model: ideology is the form that traverses all production:
“Rather, it is the one and only form that traverses all the fields of social production. Ideology seizes all production, material or symbolic, in the same process of abstraction, reduction, general equivalence and exploitation.”
Ch. 8, p. 146.
The two reciprocal theses that fuse sign and commodity. The commodity carries the sign:
“It is because the structure of the sign is at the very heart of the commodity form that the commodity can take on, immediately, the effect of signification—not epiphenomenally, in excess of itself, as “message” or connotation—but because its very form establishes it as a total medium, as a system of communication administering all social exchange.”
Ch. 8, p. 146.
And the sign carries the commodity:
“It is because the logic of the commodity and of political economy is at the very heart of the sign, in the abstract equation of signifier and signified, in the differential combinatory of signs, that signs can function as exchange value (the discourse of communication) and as use value (rational decoding and distinctive social use).”
Ch. 8, p. 146.
Against Saussure and Benveniste, the “arbitrary” is relocated: it is not non-motivation but the institution of an equivalence that excludes ambivalence:
“The arbitrariness of the sign does not reside in its non-motivation—in the commonplace that the signifier “table” has no “natural” vocation to signify the concept or the reality of the table (any more than Tisch in German, etc.); it is rooted in the very fact of positing an equivalence between such and such an Sr and such and such an Sd.”
Ch. 8, p. 149.
“The sign is a discriminant: it structures itself through exclusion.”
Ch. 8, p. 149.
Equivocity and polyvalence leave the principle intact; only ambivalence halts it:
“equivalence has simply transmuted into polyvalence. Ambiguity itself is only the vacillation of a principle which, for all intents and purposes, rests intact.”
Ch. 8, p. 150.
“Only ambivalence (as a rupture of value, of another side or beyond of sign value, and as the emergence of the symbolic) sustains a challenge to the legibility, the false transparency of the sign; only ambivalence questions the evidence of the use value of the sign (rational decoding) and of its exchange value (the discourse of communication).”
Ch. 8, p. 150.
On the mirage of the referent: there is no difference in kind between referent and signified:
“there is no fundamental difference between the referent and the signified, and the spontaneous confusion which so often arises here can only be symptomatic: the referent has no other value than that of the signified, of which it wants to be the substantial reference in vivo, and which it only succeeds in extending in abstracto.”
Ch. 8, p. 155.
And Saussure’s “sheet of paper” is idealist because it gives the two terms in equivalence:
“sheet of paper theory of language (the double face of the sign one “cuts up”) is thus perfectly idealist.”
Ch. 8, p. 156.
Denotation rests on the myth of objectivity. Generalizing Barthes, denotation is the most subtle connotation:
“denotation is never really anything more than the most attractive and subtle of connotations.”
Ch. 8, p. 158.
Barthes, quoted in S/Z:
“Denotation is not the first among meanings, but pretends to be so; under this illusion, it is ultimately no more than the last of the connotations (the one that seems both to establish and to close the reading), the superior myth by which the text pretends to return to the nature of language, to language as nature”
Barthes, S/Z, quoted Ch. 8, p. 158.
So denotation is ideological to the second degree, naturalizing ideology itself:
“ideological to the second degree. It is the “superior myth” of which Barthes speaks. This is exactly the same ideological function we have discerned of use value in its relation to exchange value.”
Ch. 8, p. 159.
The closing warning against false transcendences of the sign that side with one of its terms:
“every attempt to surpass the political economy of the sign which takes its support from one of its constituent elements is condemned to reproduce its arbitrary character (ergo, ideology) in the alternated mode of Sd or Sr.”
Ch. 8, p. 160.
The positivity of the sign is positivized in the “R” of the (printed) Hjemslev formula ERC:
“It is this positive relation that makes a value of the sign.”
Ch. 8, p. 162.
And the essay ends on its most-quoted line:
“Only total revolution, theoretical and practical, can restore the symbolic in the demise of the sign and of value. Even signs must burn.”
Ch. 8, p. 163.
The volume’s most cited essay outside the theoretical core. It opens flatly:
“There is no theory of the media.”
Ch. 9, p. 164.
Marx circumscribed productive forces so that communication fell outside them:
“language, signs and communication in general found themselves excluded.”
Ch. 9, p. 164.
Baudrillard takes the second of two options, that production cannot be generalized to signs:
“the Marxist theory of production is irredeemably partial, and cannot be generalized.”
Ch. 9, p. 165.
“After the Requiem for the dialectic, it is necessary to toll the Requiem of the infra-and superstructure.”
Ch. 9, p. 166.
Against Enzensberger’s productivism (the media as a “gigantic potential of productive forces” to be liberated), the counter-thesis is formal:
“But it is not as vehicles of content, but in their form and very operation, that media induce a social relation; and this is not an exploitative relation: it involves the abstraction, separation and abolition of exchange itself. The media are not coefficients, but effectors of ideology.”
Ch. 9, p. 169.
The essay’s central concept, derived from Mauss. The media prevent response:
“They fabricate non-communication—this is what characterizes them, if one agrees to define communication as an exchange, as a reciprocal space of a speech and a response, and thus of a responsibility (not a psychological or moral responsibility, but a personal, mutual correlation in exchange).”
Ch. 9, p. 169.
Power is read through the gift:
“power belongs to the one who can give and cannot be repaid.”
Ch. 9, p. 170.
Hence the strategic conclusion (re-pulled whole):
“This is why the only revolution in this domain—indeed, the revolution everywhere: the revolution tout court—lies in restoring this possibility of response. But such a simple possibility presupposes an upheaval in the entire existing structure of the media.”
Ch. 9, p. 170.
The electoral system is the mass medium par excellence, the referendum:
“the referendum, where the response is implied in the question itself, as in the polls.”
Ch. 9, p. 171.
Literature is the same divorce of producer and user (reading as referendum):
“reading is nothing more than a referendum.”
Ch. 9, p. 171.
And consumer goods are themselves a medium without response:
“There is no response to a functional object: its function is already there, an integrated speech to which it has already responded, leaving no room for play, or reciprocal putting in play (unless one destroys the object, or turns its function inside out).”
Ch. 9, p. 171.
On McLuhan, a first locus of the medium/message formula:
“The medium is the message is not a critical proposition. But in its paradoxical form, it has analytic value”
Ch. 9, p. 172.
Against the predestinarian optimism of socialist media theory:
“Even God would approve of socialism: Christians say it all the time.”
Ch. 9, p. 172.
In May ’68 the media discharged their function precisely by preserving their form:
“they preserved their form; and this form, regardless of the context, is what inexorably connects them with the system of power.”
Ch. 9, p. 173.
“By broadcasting the events in the abstract universality of public opinion, they imposed a sudden and inordinate development on the movement of events; and through this forced and anticipated extension, they deprived the original movement of its own rhythm and of its meaning. In a word: they short-circuited it.”
Ch. 9, p. 173.
The inversion of “symbolic” in the media sense, from production of meaning to reproduction:
“the subversive act is no longer produced except as a function of its reproducibility.23 It is no longer created, it is produced directly as a model, like a gesture. The symbolic has slipped from the order of the very production of meaning to that of its reproduction, which is always the order of power.”
Ch. 9, p. 174.
McLuhan’s formula corrected, a second locus of medium/model:
“In fact, the essential Medium is the Model.”
Ch. 9, p. 175.
The counter-example that names the alternative (re-pulled whole):
“The real revolutionary media during May were the walls and their speech, the silk-screen posters and the hand-painted notices, the street where speech began and was exchanged—everything that was an immediate inscription, given and returned, spoken and answered, mobile in the same space and time, reciprocal and antagonistic.”
Ch. 9, p. 176.
“The street is, in this sense, the alternative and subversive form of the mass media”
Ch. 9, p. 176.
So no critical reversal suffices; the concept of medium must disappear:
“it is the very concept of medium that disappears—and must disappear: speech exchanged dissolves the idea and function of the medium, and of the intermediary, as does symbolic land reciprocal exchange.”
Ch. 9, p. 177.
Baudrillard takes Jakobson’s transmitter–message–receiver schema as the ideological matrix, the political economy of communications:
“It is the equivalent of this political economy in the field of communications.”
Ch. 9, p. 178.
“There is no code for ambivalence; and without a code, no more encoder, no more decoder: the extras flee the stage.”
Ch. 9, p. 179.
The deepest claim ties it back to Chapter 8:
“the theory of signification serves as a nuclear model for communication theory, and the arbitrariness of the sign (that theoretical schema for the repression of meaning) takes on its political and ideological scope in the arbitrariness of the theoretical schema of communication and information.”
Ch. 9, p. 180.
Enzensberger’s cybernetic remedy is refused, because reversibility is not reciprocity:
“Reversibility has nothing to do with reciprocity.”
Ch. 9, p. 181.
“it thus integrates the contingency of any such response in advance.”
Ch. 9, p. 181.
Yielding what he names decentralized totalitarianism:
“one might refer to as decentralized totalitarianism.”
Ch. 9, p. 181.
Eco’s oppositional reading is judged mere textual variation; the genuine model is graffiti:
“it is only a question of textual variation.”
Ch. 9, p. 183.
“it simply smashes the code. It doesn’t lend itself to deciphering as a text rivaling commercial discourse; it presents itself as a transgression.”
Ch. 9, p. 184.
The closing rule:
“What is strategic in this sense is only what radically checkmates the dominant form.”
Ch. 9, p. 184.
The historical-genetic essay: it dates the political economy of the sign to the Bauhaus. Before the Bauhaus there were, properly speaking, no objects:
“Before the Bauhaus there were, properly speaking, no objects”
Ch. 10, p. 185.
The Bauhaus universalizes the semantization of the environment, total functionality and total semiurgy at once:
“Total functionality, total semiurgy.”
Ch. 10, p. 185.
And it marks the birth of a political economy of the sign, on the model of the industrial revolution, neither revolutionary nor utopian:
“The Bauhaus is neither revolutionary nor utopian.”
Ch. 10, p. 186.
The aesthetic is redefined away from beauty:
“In fact, aesthetics in the modern sense of the term no longer has anything to do with the categories of beauty and ugliness.”
Ch. 10, pp. 187–188.
It becomes the theory of a generalized compatibility of signs, a semiological idealism:
“has become the theory of a generalized compatibility of signs, of their internal coherence (signifier-signified) and of their syntax. Aesthetic value connotes the internal functionality of an ensemble, it qualifies the (eventually mobile) equilibrium of a system of signs. It simply translates the fact that its elements communicate amongst themselves according to the economy of a model, with maximal integration and minimal loss of information (a harmonized interior in the tonality of blue, or “playing” upon the blues and greens; the crystalloid structures of the residential ensemble, the “naturalness” of “green spaces”). The aesthetic is thus no longer a value of style or of content; it no longer refers to anything but to communication and sign exchange. It is an idealized semiology, or a semiological idealism.”
Ch. 10, p. 188.
It is a cold order, exercising a cold seduction:
“This aesthetic order is a cold order. Functional perfection exercises a cold seduction, the functional satisfaction of a demonstration and an algebra.”
Ch. 10, p. 188.
Design separates utility and the aesthetic only to reunite them ideally, consecrating sign exchange value:
“is thus itself no more than a superabstraction that consecrates the system of sign exchange value by delineating the utopia behind which the latter dissimulates.”
Ch. 10, p. 189.
So functional liberation is assignment to a code:
“amounts to nothing more than being assigned to a code and a system.”
Ch. 10, p. 191.
And the Bauhaus revolution is puritan, on the Weberian model of worldly asceticism:
“revolution is puritan. Functionalism is ascetic.”
Ch. 10, p. 192.
“mutatis mutandis, entirely valid for the rational calculus of signs.”
Ch. 10, p. 192.
Functionalism breeds its own counter-discourse. The surrealist object emerges as the functional object’s derision and transgression:
“The surrealist object emerges at the same epoch as the functional object, as its derision and transgression.”
Ch. 10, p. 192.
It plays on the distance the functionalist calculus opens between the object and itself:
“the distance instituted by the functionalist calculus between the object and itself”
Ch. 10, p. 193.
With the move from object to system, surrealism can survive only as folklore:
“surrealism can survive only as a folklore.”
Ch. 10, p. 194.
And with that move the whole field becomes total design, metadesign:
“total design, metadesign.”
Ch. 10, p. 195.
The crisis is semiological: the Bauhaus postulate of denotation breaks down:
“There is no truth of the object, and denotation is never more than the most beautiful of connotations.”
Ch. 10, p. 196.
Hence fashion appropriates the whole system; nothing escapes design:
“Nothing escapes design: that is its fate.”
Ch. 10, p. 198.
Cybernetic idealism retains only the use value of the message and forgets the hegemony of the code:
“idealism of messages forgets that it is the hegemony of the code that is installed behind their accelerated circulation.”
Ch. 10, p. 199.
And “environment” designates by antiphrasis the death of the proximate world:
“designates by antiphrasis that from which one is separated, it designates the end of the proximate world”
Ch. 10, p. 201.
The gold-standard analogy fixes the historical claim, the death of Nature as referent (re-pulled whole):
“The gold of the signified-referent has disappeared, it is the end of the gold exchange standard. The sign is no longer convertible into its reference value, as is seen in the trend of the current international situation, where there is no longer anything but the free interrelation of floating currencies). The great signified, the great referent. Nature, is dead, replaced by environment, which simultaneously designates and designs its death and the restoration of nature as simulation model”
Ch. 10, p. 202.
And man himself becomes environment, an object of manipulation:
“Man no longer even confronts his environment; he himself is virtually part of the environment to be protected.”
Ch. 10, p. 203.
The closing essay turns from the system to the subject. It opens on the department-store raid where goods were offered for free:
“Nobody could figure out what to take—or else they took insignificant items they could easily have filched on any normal shopping day. If you had fifty million dollars, what would you do with it? Chaos. Faced with the disposal of free time at will, the same immediate panic surfaces in us. How do we get rid of it? And we could adduce further examples, such as the French 400-meter runner in the European championships, who, 100 meters from the finish line, wilts in his final effort and finishes third. “When I sensed I was going to win,” he said afterward, “something inside me broke.” Or the French tennis player at a tournament in Spain two sets ahead and the match in hand with an ailing opponent, he blows the match point and goes down to defeat—“irresistibly,” one could say—and to the general amazement of the spectators. Not to mention Poulidor, the eternal runner-up whose fame is derived precisely from this chronic incapacity to wrap up victory. When we say of someone that he “almost” won, that he fell just short of winning, what is supposed to have been missed? Don’t these phrases indicate in a way that victory would have been the worst thing that could have happened to him, that victory would have been failure? These are just slips of the will, of the drive for appropriation and satisfaction, performance and supremacy, which is supposed to be the deepest of human motivations. Freud advanced the exploration of human psychology immensely, taking such minutiae as his starting point. But the fantastic perspectives thus revealed have scarcely ruffled the composure of general anthropology, economic “science,” or the “humanities.” Psychoanalysis itself has helped to circumscribe these anomalies with depth psychology (“everybody has his unconscious and its his business”). And so, almost miraculously, we find they have no equivalent in social or political practice, where an essentially fail-safe rationality reigns supreme. It is this indefatigability of general postulates about man in economic, social and political matters that we shall interrogate from the categorical perspective of exhaustion and failure. The more or less experimental and limiting case of the department store shows that once exchange value has been neutralized, use value disappears with it.”
Ch. 11, pp. 204–205.
The sporting failures are read as “slips of the will”:
“When I sensed I was going to win,” he said afterward, “something inside me broke.”
Ch. 11, p. 204.
The hypotheses: there is no use value without exchange value, and use value issues from the code:
“There is no use value without exchange value.”
Ch. 11, p. 205.
The compressed statement of the book’s terminus (re-pulled whole):
“The sign is the apogee of the commodity. Fashion and the commodity are a single, identical form. The differentiation of the commodity is inscribed, from the outset, in the form of sign exchange value (and not in a quantitative logic of profit). The commodity achieves its apotheosis when it is able to impose itself as a code, that is, as the geometric locus of the circulation of models, and hence as the total medium of a culture (and not only of an economy).”
Ch. 11, p. 206.
The trinomial of value is totalitarian and excludes ambivalence:
“This trinomial delineates a total, coherent universe of value where man is supposed to fulfill himself through the final satisfaction of his needs. According to rational calculation, he is reputed to be continuously raising his rate of value production. Relayed from one summit to the other of the great axiological triangle, he can effectively only hope to transcend himself, to positivize himself, in values. His movement traces the boundaries of a value world that has coincided for centuries with the definition of humanism. This triangulation of value defines a full, positive world, relentlessly completed by the plus sign: the logic of surplus value (inseparable from value). It is a world in which man is incapable of selling himself short. Hence, the value process is equivalent to a phantasmic organization, in which desire is fulfilled and lack resolved; in which desire is achieved and performed; and in which the symbolic dimension and all difference are abolished. Value is totalitarian. It excludes ambivalence”
Ch. 11, p. 206.
What the failures reveal is the contrary demand, the radical necessity of lack:
“to lose, misplace, dispossess oneself, or give up. And this isn’t some masochistic reversal of a more fundamental economy aimed toward value, performance and achievement, but the inverse and radical necessity of lack (manque). Every fulfillment of desire in value returns to this contrary extremity, because with the termination of satisfaction, it alone preserves the subject’s questioning concerning his own desire. Such is the foundation of ambivalence.”
Ch. 11, p. 207.
Hence the diagnostic coinage, the falling rate of enjoyment (re-pulled whole):
“all this begins to look like a tendency we might want to call the falling rate of enjoyment. According to a mysterious counter economy of lost opportunity, it is this lively, basic denial of value, this latent violence toward the principle of identity and equivalence, this vacillation beyond satisfaction which, in the last instance, assures the subject in his being.”
Ch. 11, pp. 207–208.
Baudrillard settles on Eros and the death instinct, the latter fulfilled in the commodity cycle:
“the sublime and repetitive world of the commodity could well be considered the field in which the death instinct attains its fulfillment.”
Ch. 11, p. 208.
Ambivalence is distinguished from dialectical negation:
“Ambivalence is not the dialectical negation of value it is the incessant potentiality of its annulment”
Ch. 11, p. 209.
The critique of the raid’s organizers reprises the verdict on use-value idealism; desire is fulfilled in the rule, not in liberty:
“desire has little vocation to fulfillment in “liberty,” but rather in the rule—not in the transparency of a value content, but in the opacity of the code of value. This is the desire of the code”
Ch. 11, p. 209.
The crowd’s refusal is reread as resistance to use value itself:
“their resistance to use value, insofar as the latter is at bottom only a ruse of exchange value.”
Ch. 11, p. 211.
And pricelessness does not suffice; the unilateral gift is as cold as charity:
“Having played with value, they have inevitably extracted a little surplus from it, in the form of domination.”
Ch. 11, p. 211.
The book’s closing move, the only sufficient gesture (the v1.0 weld is split to its own pages). First, p. 212:
“To break the circuit of exchange value, it is necessary to restore exchange itself—not value (not even use value).”
Ch. 11, p. 211.
Then the criterion of what eludes value, also p. 212:
“only that which assumes its meaning through continual reciprocal exchange eludes exchange value, in the gift and counter-gift, in the ambivalence of an open relationship, and never in a final relation of value.”
Ch. 11, p. 212.
And the last line, p. 214:
“the reciprocity of a speech that everywhere today is being eradicated by the terrorism of value.”
Ch. 11, p. 212.
The same handful of moves recur across the essays. Each locus is now carried as a full quote in the chapter body above; this index points to where, so the pattern can be read across the volume without re-fragmenting it.
The book’s most repeated argument, that the second term is the alibi of the first. Carried whole at: use value as the “practical guarantee” / “rationalization pure and simple” of sign exchange value (Ch. 1, p. 29); use value and signified as having only “tactical value” against the “strategic value” of exchange value and signifier (Ch. 7, p. 137); the signified-referent as the reference alibi for the signifier (Ch. 8, p. 156); denotation as the most subtle connotation (Ch. 8, p. 158); need as the magical copula (Ch. 2, p. 70).
The identity claim, that the two forms share the same form and not their content. Carried whole at: the object form as the completed form of the commodity form, the same fetishism on both sides (Ch. 7, p. 134); the corrected homology EcEV/UV :: Sr/Sd (Ch. 6, p. 127); the design / Bauhaus homology to the birth of political economy (Ch. 10, pp. 186, 190). Semiology is cast as classical bourgeois political economy prior to its critique (Ch. 6, p. 127; Ch. 8).
The rejection of false consciousness and of base / superstructure. Carried whole at: the closing summary of the ideological process (Ch. 3, p. 101); ideology as a social logic that substitutes for another (Ch. 5, p. 119); ideology as the one and only form that traverses all social production (Ch. 8, p. 147); the Requiem for infra- and superstructure (Ch. 9, p. 169).
The discrimination-under-cover-of-democracy move. Carried whole at: fashion and the luxury of heirs (Ch. 1, p. 51); the binary “magic schema of integration” of the A’s and non-A’s (Ch. 1, p. 60); the media as forced socialization (Ch. 9, p. 177).
Per the book’s own distribution, not equalized. Sustained engagement (figures doing philosophical work across multiple essays): Marx (the model and the target throughout; the limit of his critique fixed at Ch. 6, p. 129; the Crusoe reversal at Ch. 7); Veblen (the engine of Chs. 1–2 and the precursor named at Ch. 5, p. 116); Saussure / Benveniste (the sustained antagonist of Ch. 8); Barthes (denotation / connotation, S/Z, Ch. 8; reading-as-referendum, Ch. 9); Enzensberger (the sustained foil of Ch. 9); the Bauhaus / Gropius (the historical origin of Ch. 10). Single-move or pivot figures (introduced for one concept, then dropped): Malinowski (Kula / Gimwali), Mauss (mana, gift, though the gift recurs as a register), Lévi-Strauss (exchange as structure; totem; body decoration), Bataille (the “accursed share”), Borges (the zoological list), Merton (reference group), Goblot (the baccalauréat / caste, Ch. 5), Weber (worldly asceticism, Chs. 1 and 10), McLuhan (“the medium is the message,” corrected to “the Medium is the Model,” Ch. 9), Brecht (Theory of Radio), Jakobson (the communication schema), Eco (oppositional codes), Hjelmslev (the ERC formula), Derrida / Tel Quel (the party of the Sd, the idealism of the referent, Ch. 8), Freud (narcissism / charm, Ch. 3; the death instinct, Ch. 11), Marcuse (“repressive desublimation”), Magritte / Lautréamont / Carelman (surrealism, Ch. 10), Rauschenberg / Warhol / Soulages (seriality, Ch. 4).
Introduced or operationalized here, with first locations: sign exchange value (valeur d’échange signe), the fundamental category, Ch. 1, p. 29; sign-object / object form, Chs. 1, 7; functional simulacrum, Ch. 1, p. 33; fetishism of the signifier / passion for the code, Ch. 3, p. 92; the semiological reduction of the symbolic, Ch. 3, pp. 99–100; consummativity (need as productive force), Ch. 2, p. 82; the four logics and their principles (utility, equivalence, difference, ambivalence), Ch. 2 / Ch. 6; the homology EcEV/UV :: Sr/Sd and the bar of radical exclusion, Ch. 6, pp. 127–128; speech without response and decentralized totalitarianism, Ch. 9, pp. 169, 181; the Medium is the Model, Ch. 9, p. 177; semiurgy and metadesign, Ch. 10, pp. 185, 202; the falling rate of enjoyment and the desire of the code, Ch. 11, pp. 207, 209. The volume’s signature lines for retrieval, each carried whole above: “there are only needs because the system needs them” (p. 82); “use value is thus the crown and scepter of political economy” (p. 138); “Even signs must burn” (p. 163); “The sign is the apogee of the commodity” (p. 206).