Theory Underground · SAARUTU — Source Brief · Postwar French Theory Shelf
This brief reconstructs the argument of The Mirror of Production so it can be rebuilt and drafted from without the book in hand. It follows Baudrillard's own sequence (Preface, then Chapters I–V, each closing on an “Epistemology” section), and carries every load-bearing formulation as a complete, page-anchored block quote rather than as paraphrase, because those passages are what travel into later writing.
The working copy is a database/HTML rendering of the Telos 1975 edition that carries the print pagination inline as -- N -- markers, so every citation below is to the print page and needs no file-to-print offset. The rendering carries occasional OCR/typesetting slips; where one falls inside a quoted passage it is preserved verbatim and listed in the apparatus at the foot of the brief. Inline footnote-reference digits that the rendering folded into the running text are dropped from quotations as the apparatus markers they are.
The book is one sustained operation: to show that Marxism does not transcend political economy but completes and interiorizes it. The wedge is that Marx critiqued the contents of political economy while leaving its two governing forms untouched, the form of production and the form of representation (Preface, established below). Against production Baudrillard sets symbolic exchange, the reciprocal, ambivalent, non-accumulative circulation of gift and counter-gift drawn from Mauss by way of Bataille, which precedes the form of value and is what the form of value destroys.
The recurring claim is that production, labor, value, need, scarcity, and the unconscious are not anthropological universals awaiting liberation but historical products of one and the same separation, so a radical position has to think beyond value rather than reverse its internal flow. The name Baudrillard gives the move Marx could not make is the critique of the political economy of the sign (Chapter I). Each chapter closes on a self-standing “Epistemology” section that turns the screw from the contents of the analysis to the form of the model, and those sections carry the most aggressive claims, so they are read here as the load-bearing argument rather than as appendices.
The Preface states the premise. The critical theory of the mode of production never reaches the principle of production, so the form of production survives its own critique intact and goes on to underwrite revolutionary discourse.
Page 17A specter haunts the revolutionary imagination: the phantom of production. Everywhere it sustains an unbridled romanticism of productivity. The critical theory of the mode of production does not touch the principle of production. All the concepts it articulates describe only the dialectical and historical genealogy of the contents of production, leaving production as a form intact. This form reemerges, idealized, behind the critique of the capitalist mode of production.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 17.
Productivist discourse is the shared ground of the system and its challenge alike, which is why Baudrillard treats the consensus as suspect rather than as common sense.
Page 17The general formula is that of a productive Eros. Social wealth or language, meaning or value, sign or phantasm — everything is “produced” according to a “labor.” If this is the truth of capital and of political economy, it is taken up whole by the revolution only to capital's benefit. The capitalist system of production is to be subverted in the name of an authentic and radical productivity.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 17.
The productivism is read through Lacan: the scheme of production is the mirror in which the species recognizes itself, and what it recognizes there is the imaginary.
Pages 19–20At the level of all political economy there is something of what Lacan describes in the mirror stage: through this scheme of production, this mirror of production, the human species comes to consciousness [la prise de conscience] in the imaginary. Production, labor, value, everything through which an objective world emerges and through which man recognizes himself objectively — this is the imaginary. Here man is embarked on a continual deciphering of himself through his works, finalized by his shadow (his own end), reflected by this operational mirror, this sort of ideal of a productivist ego.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 19–20.
The diagnosis closes on the two forms Marx left unexamined, which sets the program for the whole book.
Page 20It is no longer worthwhile to make a radical critique of the order of representation in the name of production and of its revolutionary formula. These two orders are inseparable and, paradoxical though it may seem, Marx did not subject the form production to a radical analysis any more than he did the form representation. These are the two great unanalyzed forms of the imaginary of political economy that imposed their limits on him. The discourse of production and the discourse of representation are the mirror by which the system of political economy comes to be reflected in the imaginary and reproduced there as the determinant instance.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 20.
The chapter demands that the whole Marxist apparatus — productive forces, mode of production, relations of production, labor power — be questioned with the severity Marx aimed at exchange value. The hinge is the means/end split smuggled into the very definition of the human as producer.
Pages 21–22But is man's existence an end for which he must find the means? These innocent little phrases are already theoretical conclusions: the separation of the end from the means is the wildest and most naive postulate about the human race. Man has needs. Does he have needs? Is he pledged to satisfy them? Is he labor power (by which he separates himself as means from himself as his own end)? These prodigious metaphors of the system that dominates us are a fable of political economy retold to generations of revolutionaries infected even in their political radicalism by the conceptual viruses of this same political economy.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 21–22.
The first target is the assumption that use value names a beyond of political economy. It does not; it is the system's internal horizon, produced by exchange value.
Pages 22–23In the distinction between exchange value and use value, Marxism shows its strength but also its weakness. The presupposition of use value — the hypothesis of a concrete value beyond the abstraction of exchange value, a human purpose of the commodity in the moment of its direct relation of utility for a subject — is only the effect of the system of exchange value, a concept produced and developed by it. Far from designating a realm beyond political economy, use value is only the horizon of exchange value.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 22–23.
Marx is read as retaining use value as a concrete antecedent rather than radicalizing it; even his reply to Adolph Wagner (the “vir obscurus,” pages 23–24, citing the Notes on Wagner) leaves the priority of exchange value standing.
Pages 24–25In maintaining a kind of dialectical equilibrium between concrete, qualitative labor and abstract, quantitative labor, Marx gives logical priority to exchange value (the given economic formation). But in so doing, he retains something of the apparent movement of political economy: the concrete positivity of use value, a kind of concrete antecedent within the structure of political economy. He does not radicalize the schema to the point of reversing this appearance and revealing use value as produced by the play of exchange value.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 24–25.
The conclusion of the move: use value is the law of value's own residue.
Page 25Such is the twist by which exchange value retrospectively originates and logically terminates in use value. In other words, the signified “use value” here is still a code effect, the final precipitate of the law of value.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 25.
The chapter's most original technical move. The quality/quantity pair is not a reduction of the qualitative by the quantitative but a single binary scission — a “fork” — whose function is to universalize labor as such. The qualitative pole is the more dangerous, because it makes all human practice comparable as labor.
Page 27Ideology always thus proceeds by a binary, structural scission, which works here to universalize the dimension of labor. By dividing (or redividing into the qualitative structural effect, a code effect), quantitative labor spreads throughout the field of possibility. Henceforth there can be only labor — qualitative or quantitative. The quantitative still signifies only the commensurability of all forms of labor in abstract value; the qualitative, under the pretext of incommensurability, goes much further. It sinigifes the comparability of all human practice in terms of production and labor. Or better: the abstract and formal universality of the commodity labor power is what supports the “concrete” universality of qualitative labor.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 27. (“sinigifes” printed for signifies; preserved as printed.)
The image and its payoff: the fork establishes the abstraction it pretends to escape, and the fetishism of labor crystallizes in the play between the two terms.
Pages 27–28But this “concrete” is an abuse of the word. It seems opposed to the abstract at the base of the fork, but in fact the fork itself is what establishes the abstraction. The autonomization of labor is sealed in the play of the two — from the abstract to the concrete, from the qualitative to the quantitative, from the exchange value to the use value of labor. In this structuralized play of signifiers, the fetishism of labor and productivity crystallizes.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 27–28.
Neither the use value of labor power nor the use value of products “exists” except as projections of the system of exchange value, the same fiction running through production, consumption, and signification.
Page 30In fact the use value of labor power does not exist any more than the use value of products or the autonomy of signified and referent. The same fiction reigns in the three orders of production, consumption, and signification. Exchange value is what makes the use value of products appear as its anthropological horizon. The exchange value of labor power is what makes its use value, the concrete origin and end of the act of labor, appear as its “generic” alibi.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 30.
This delivers the book's most-cited formula: the system does not merely exploit labor power, it produces the concept of man as labor power, and Marxism, by locating alienation in the sale, censors the deeper alienation in the identity itself.
Page 31In other words, the system of political economy does not produce only the individual as labor power that is sold and exchanged: it produces the very conception of labor power as the fundamental human potential. More deeply than in the fiction of the individual freely selling his labor power in the market, the system is rooted in the identification of the individual with his labor power and with his act of “transforming nature according to human ends.” In a work, man is not only quantitatively exploited as a productive force by the system of capitalist political economy, but is also metaphysically overdetermined as a producer by the code of political economy. In the last instance, the system rationalizes its power here. And in this Marxism assists the cunning of capital. It convinces men that they are alienated by the sale of their labor power, thus censoring the much more radical hypothesis that they might be alienated as labor power, as the “inalienable” power of creating value by their labor.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 31. (“In a work” printed for In a word; preserved as printed.)
From the same dialectical base, Marxism runs in two directions, and Baudrillard means to discredit both: an ethic that sanctifies labor, and an esthetic that sanctifies its negation.
Page 35On this dialectical base, Marxist philosophy unfolds in two directions: an ethic of labor and an esthetic of non-labor. The former traverses all bourgeois and socialist ideology. It exalts labor as value, as end in itself, as categorical imperative. Labor loses its negativity and is raised to an absolute value. But is the “materialist” thesis of man's generic productivity very far from this “idealist” sanctification of labor? In any case, it is dangerously vulnerable to this charge.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 35.
The ethic is documented through Benjamin's attack on the German workers' movement and its gospel of work, which Baudrillard quotes at length.
Pages 36–37Nothing was more corrupting for the German workers' movement than the feeling of swimming with the current. It mistook technical development for the current, the direction it believed it was swimming in. From there, there was only one step to take in order to imagine that industrial labor represented a political performance. With German workers the old Protestant ethic of work celebrated, in a secular form, its resurrection. The Gotha Program bore traces of this confusion. It defined work as ‘the source of all wealth and culture.’ To which Marx, even worse, objected that man possesses only his labor power, etc. However, the confusion spread more and more: and Joseph Dietzgen announced, ‘Work is the Messiah of the modern world. In the amelioration of labor resides the wealth that can now bring what no redeemer has succeeded in’.
Walter Benjamin, quoted by Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 36–37 (citing Benjamin, Poésie et révolution, 283).
The decisive turn is against the second direction. Non-work is refused as a beyond: it is the reverse mirage of work, structured by the same binary, and the temporal order it installs is still production's.
Page 40Work and non-work: here is a “revolutionary” theme. It is undoubtedly the most subtle form of the type of binary, structural opposition discussed above. The end of the end of exploitation by work is this reverse fascination with non-work, this reverse mirage of free time (forced time-free time, full time-empty time: another paradigm that fixes the hegemony of a temporal order which is always merely that of production). Non-work is still only the repressive desublimation of labor power, the antithesis which acts as the alternative.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 40. (“The end of the end of exploitation” printed, a probable doubling of the end of; preserved as printed.)
Against Kristeva's attempt to find in Marx a labor “outside value,” on the side of the body and discharge, Baudrillard insists Marx thought production strictly in terms of value.
Page 42She would have him read Bataille before he wrote — but also forget him when it is convenient. If there was one thing Marx did not think about, it was discharge, waste, sacrifice, prodigality, play, and symbolism. Marx thought about production (not a bad thing), and he thought of it in terms of value.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 42.
The relocation of the rupture is the section's load-bearing claim: the real break is not internal to value (abstract vs. concrete labor) but at the threshold of value itself.
Page 45In relation to symbolic exchange, this productive Eros represents the real rupture which Marx displaces and situates between abstract quantitative labor and concrete qualitative labor. The process of “valorization” begins with the process of the useful transformation of nature, the instauration of labor as generic finality, and the stage of use value. The real rupture is not between “abstract” labor and “concrete” labor, but between symbolic exchange and work (production, economics).
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 45.
The title-image arrives as the chapter's imperative.
Pages 46–47And in order to question the process which submits us to the destiny of political economy and the terrorism of value, and to rethink discharge and symbolic exchange, the concepts of production and labor developed by Marx (not to mention political economy) must be resolved and analyzed as ideological concepts interconnected with the general system of value. And in order to find a realm beyond economic value (which is in fact the only revolutionary perspective), then the mirror of production in which all Western metaphysics is reflected, must be broken.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 46–47.
The first epistemology section turns from contents to form: a concept is strategically explosive at its irruption and dies into ideology once universalized, where it joins a self-confirming metonymic chain and turns imperialist.
Pages 48–49From this point on they only evoke themselves in an indefinite metonymic process which goes as follows: man is historical; history is dialectical; the dialectic is the process of (material) production; production is the very movement of human existence; history is the history of modes of production, etc. This scientific and universalist discourse (code) immediately becomes imperialistic. All possible societies are called on to respond.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 48–49.
The flat declarative the brief returns to: the categories do not describe the primitive order, they only rebound on the society that produced them.
Page 49This constitutes a most astonishing theoretical aberration — and a most reactionary one. There is neither a mode of production nor production in primitive societies. There is no dialectic and no unconscious in primitive societies. These concepts analyze only our own societies, which are ruled by political economy. Hence they have only a kind of boomerang value.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 49.
The methodological inversion that follows from it.
Pages 49–50Instead of exporting Marxism and psychoanalysis (not to mention bourgeois ideology, although at this level there is no difference), we bring all the force and questioning of primitive societies to bear on Marxism and psychoanalysis.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 49–50.
The chapter's payoff is an exact analogy to Marx on Feuerbach, turned against Marx.
Page 50At a much higher level, his critique falters under his own objection to Feuerbach of making a radical critique of the contents of religion but in a completely religious form. Marx made a radical critique of political economy, but still in the form of political economy. These are the ruses of the dialectic, undoubtedly the limit of all “critique.”
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 50.
Page 51Today we are exactly at the same point with respect to Marx. For us, the critique of political economy is basically completed. The materialist dialectic has exhausted its content in reproducing its form. At this level, the situation is no longer that of a critique: it is inextricable. And following the same revolutionary movement as Marx did, we must move to a radically different level that, beyond its critique, permits the definitive resolution of political economy. This level is that of symbolic exchange and its theory.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 51.
The preliminary to that change of terrain is named, and it is the program of Baudrillard's own work to come.
Page 51And just as Marx thought it necessary to clear the path to the critique of political economy with a critique of the philosophy of law, the preliminary to this radical change of terrain is the critique of the metaphysic of the signifier and the code, in all its current ideological extent. For lack of a better term, we call this the critique of the political economy of the sign.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 51.
The chapter traces the concept of Nature as it mutates in the eighteenth century, and argues that Marxism inherited the mutation. In the seventeenth century Nature meant a totality of laws within which meanings were exchanged.
Page 53As late as the 17th century, Nature signified only the totality of laws founding the world's intelligebility: the guarantee of an order where men and things could exchange their meanings [significations]. In the end, this is God (Spinoza's “Deus sive natura”).
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 53. (“intelligebility” printed for intelligibility; preserved as printed.)
The eighteenth century converts Nature into a potentiality of powers, which is the same event as its entry into technical domination.
Pages 53–54All this is shattered in the 18th century with the rise and “discovery” of Nature as a potentiality of powers (no longer a totality of laws); as a primordial source of life and reality lost and recovered, repressed and liberated; and as a deed projected into an atemporal past and an ideal future. This rise is only the obverse of an event: Nature's entry into the era of its technical domination. This is the definitive split between subject and Nature-object and their simultaneous submission to an operational finality.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 53–54.
Under science and production, Nature becomes the great Signified.
Page 54Under the objective stamp of Science, Technology, and Production, Nature becomes the great Signified, the great Referent. It is ideally charged with “reality”; it becomes the Reality, expressible by a process that is always somehow a process of labor, at once transformation and transcription.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 54.
Marxism, on this reading, denaturalized property and the market but kept two naturalist propositions intact, which Baudrillard lists.
Page 56Marx indeed “denaturalized” private property, the mechanisms of competition and the market, and the processes of labor and capital; but he failed to question the following naturalist propositions:
— the useful finality of products as a function of needs;
— the useful finality of nature as a function of its transformation by labor.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 56.
The section's recurring tell: to invoke Nature is already to invoke its domination.
Pages 55–56And it is by being sublimated and repressed that Nature becomes a metaphor of freedom and totality. Everything that speaks in terms of totality (and-or “alienation”) under the sign of a Nature or a recovered essence speaks in terms of repression and separation. Everything that invokes Nature invokes the domination of Nature.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 55–56.
Against Marx's image of the savage who must wrestle with Nature (quoted from Capital III), Baudrillard holds that primitive man does not measure himself against Nature at all, because Necessity is itself an effect of objectification.
Pages 58–59What is not recognized here — and what allies Marx with the foundations of political economy — is that in his symbolic exchanges primitive man does not guage himself in relation to Nature. He is not aware of Necessity, a Law that takes effect only with the objectification of Nature.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 58–59. (“guage” printed for gauge; preserved as printed.)
The claim about scarcity that the rest of the book leans on: scarcity is produced by the market, not given to it.
Page 59The Law takes its definitive form in capitalist political economy; moreover, it is only the philosophical expression of Scarcity. Scarcity, which itself arises in the market economy, is not a given dimension of the economy. Rather, it is what produces and reproduces economic exchange.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 59.
The three concepts are named as the fastening of political economy, with no dialectical route past them.
Page 60The wish to abolish scarcity is not furthered by restoring an integrated productivity. The concept of Scarcity itself, the concept of Necessity, and the concept of Production must be exploded because they rivet the bolt of political economy. No dialectic leads beyond political economy because it is the very movement of political economy that is dialectical.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 60.
The psychoanalytic triad of Law, Prohibition, and Repression is treated as the exact parallel of Necessity, Scarcity, and Need, and traced to the same objectification of Nature. Via Vernant, the myth of Lycurgus carries the argument, and Baudrillard insists it is no mere metaphor.
Pages 60–61Vernant cites the story of Lycurgus. Lycurgus kills his son Dryas or, in other versions, cuts off his foot believing he is trimming a vine. In another story, Phylacus makes his son impotent while trimming a tree or butchering livestock. Hence the violence against nature (the rupture of exchange with and symbolic obligation toward it) is immediately expiated. All the myths of a vengeful, bad, castrating nature take root here. And this is no mere metaphor, as the story clearly indicates. The rupture is immediately the foundation of castration, of the Oedipus complex (in this case parental, since the father emasculates the son), and of Law.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 60–61 (citing Vernant, Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs, 205).
The reversal at the section's core: Law is not the foundation of the symbolic order but the result of its loss.
Page 61But in no sense is it a fundamental structure. Neither Law nor Necessity exist at the level of reciprocity and symbolic exchange, where the break with nature that leads to the irreversibility of castration — and consequently to the entire becoming of history (the operational violence of man against nature) and of the unconscious (the redemption of the symbolic debt owed for this operational violence) — has not occurred. In this sense law, which is called the foundation of the symbolic order and of exchange, results instead from the rupture of exchange and the loss of the symbolic. This is why there is properly neither Necessity nor Scarcity nor Repression nor the Unconscious in the primitive order, whose entire symbolic strategy aims at exorcizing the apparition of Law.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 61.
The separation predates capitalism; it is rooted in the Judaeo-Christian dissociation of soul and Nature, which Baudrillard documents with a quotation on Christian anthropocentrism.
Page 63The separation is rooted in the great Judaeo-Christian dissociation of the soul and Nature. God created man in his image and created Nature for man's use. The soul is the spiritual hinge by which man is God's image and is radically distinguished from the rest of Nature (and from his own body): “Uniquely in its Western form, Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has ever known. In absolute contrast to ancient paganism and oriental religions, Christianity not only institutes a dualism of Man and Nature but also affirms that God's will is that man exploit Nature according to his own ends.”
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 63. The embedded quotation is footnoted only as “Science (Paris), March, 1967”; see the apparatus for the identification.
The consequence drawn from it explains, in passing, why science does not arise in Greece.
Pages 63–64This is why a scientific movement does not emerge in Greece. Greek rationality remains based on a conformity with nature radically distinguished from the Christian rationality and “freedom” based on the separation of man and nature and on the domination of nature.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 63–64.
Christianity is positioned as the hinge of the rupture, and political economy as its later actualization.
Page 64From ascetic practices to productive practices (and from the latter to consumer practices) there is thus desublimation; but the desublimation is only a metamorphosis of repressive sublimation. The ethical dimension is secularized under the sign of the material domination of nature. Christianity is thus on the hinge of a rupture of symbolic exchanges.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 64.
Because the analysis founds itself on the finished system, it can only describe the conditions of that system's reproduction, and it back-projects the model onto everything earlier.
Pages 65–66Basing the intelligibility of the contradictions of political economy on the structural givens of the finished system (capital), Marxist analysis cannot account for these basic coordinates of economic rationality — because the system of political economy tends to project itself retrospectively as a model and subordinates everything else to the genealogy of this model.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 65–66.
Page 66By pretending to illuminate earlier societies in the light of the present structure of the capitalist economy, it fails to see that, abolishing their difference, it projects onto them the spectral light of political economy.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 66.
A consequence Baudrillard presses by Marx's own logic: critique becomes possible only when the system has saturated, so in Marx's own time it was not yet possible.
Pages 66–67Thus we must conclude — and thereby grasping the relativity of Marxist analysis — that in Marx's time the system of political economy had not yet developed all its contradictions, hence that even for Marx radical critique was not yet possible nor was the real comprehension of earlier societies.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 66–67.
Where Chapter II handled the rewriting of Nature, Chapter III handles the rewriting of History. The thesis is stronger than rewriting: the concepts produce their own object.
Page 69Instead, the concepts of production and mode of production themselves “produce” and “reproduce” the concepts of Nature and History as their space time. The model produces this double horizon of extent and time: Nature is only its extent and History only its trajectory.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 69.
The method is named as Nietzschean perspectivism against the materialist-dialectical sign.
Pages 69–70This is not a perspective in the Nietzschean sense, which consists in deconstructing the imaginary universality of the solidest conceptual edifices (the subject, rationality, knowledge, history, dialectics) and restoring them to their relativity and symptomality, piercing the truth effect by which every system of interpretation doubles itself in the imaginary: in short, by unmasking ideology — in the present case, ideology under the materialist and dialectical sign of production.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 69–70.
An extended, polemical reading of Godelier. The formula Baudrillard hammers is Godelier's attempt to fit kinship into the base/superstructure grid.
Page 71Immediately, one reads: “Thus, the relations of kinship function both as elements of the infrastructure and as superstructure.” What could this possibly mean? The “mysterious” reason is clearly the will to preserve the distinction between the infrastructure and the superstructure; without which historical materialism collapses. All the rest is only reformist scrupulosity.
Maurice Godelier, quoted by Baudrillard, with Baudrillard's gloss, The Mirror of Production, page 71.
Page 72The theory results in a perfect sophism of recovery, undoubtedly the masterpiece of a structuralist materialism with “scientific” pretentions!
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 72.
The puzzle the Western analyst cannot think is non-production: that primitives do not produce a surplus they could produce.
Page 75Consider the production of a surplus. There is ever-renewed amazement at the fact that primtives do not produce a surplus “whereas they could produce one”! It is impossible to think this nongrowth, this non-productive desire. The West, as is logical with regard to its own assumptions, always thinks of it as an anomaly, a refusal to produce.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 75. (“primtives” printed for primitives; preserved as printed.)
Subsistence and exchange are the residue of the symbolic, not its precondition.
Pages 78–79Primitive “society” does not exist as an instance apart from symbolic exchange; and this exchange never results from an “excess” of production. It is the opposite: to the extent that these terms apply here, “subsistence” and “economic exchange” are the residue of symbolic exchange, a remainder. Symbolic circulation is primordial.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 78–79.
Godelier's “instituted scarcity” is turned inside out: this scarcity is the condition of symbolic exchange, not the market's privation.
Pages 79–80Godelier says that “Everything happens as if primitive societies had instituted scarcity.” But this “scarcity” is not the quantitative, restrictive scarcity of a market economy: it is neither privative nor antithetical to “abundance.” It is the condition of symbolic exchange and circulation. It is not the socio-cultural realm that limits “potential” production; instead, exchange itself is based on non-production, eventual destruction, and a process of continuous unlimited reciprocity between persons, and inversely on a strict limitation of exchanged goods.
Maurice Godelier, quoted by Baudrillard, with Baudrillard's gloss, The Mirror of Production, pages 79–80.
On the cost of the exercise of imposing the production grid, the polemic sharpens.
Pages 77–78These acrobatics of the reduction of factors and the remixing “in the dominant” is only conceptual violence. We now know that it is even more destructive than missionaries or venereal disease.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 77–78.
The imposition of the production grid is named, in the section's most cited phrase, a baptism.
Page 81For all these objects and men lost in their primitive limbo, this is the baptism of production: the baptism of labor and value for nature and goods lost in the gratuity of their richness; the baptism of the economic, of the mode of production, and of the determinant instance for all these exchanges that knew neither instance, determination, nor economic rationality. The materialist missionaries have arrived.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 81.
Godelier's gloss of magic as insurance on the productive forces of nature is rejected as vulgar rewriting.
Page 81The same blind determinism-in-several-instances leads to the same kind of incomprehension of magic: “For primitive man, labor is experienced and thought as the interior and indivisible unity of magic and technical knowledge.”
Maurice Godelier, quoted by Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 81.
Via Vernant, the cultivator contributes to the harvest by rite far more than by effort, so neither land nor effort is a factor of production.
Page 82Like the Greek peasant, the primitive “contributes much less to the harvest by his pains than by the periodic repetition of rites and festivals.” Neither land nor effort is a “factor of production.” Effort is not “invested labor power” recovered many times over in value at the end of a production process.
Baudrillard, with Vernant quoted, The Mirror of Production, page 82 (citing Vernant, Travail et nature dans la Grèce ancienne).
The governing rule of the symbolic cycle: nothing is taken from nature without being returned.
Pages 82–83Above all, it must never be interrupted because nothing is ever taken from nature without being returned to it. Primitive man does not chop one tree or trace one furrow without “appeasing the spirits” with a counter-gift or sacrifice. This taking and returning, giving and receiving, is essential. It is always an actualization of symbolic exchange through gods. The final product is never aimed for.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 82–83.
Marx's mythology-vanishes argument is offered as the materialist version of the same retrospective error.
Page 83is Achilles possible side by side with powder and lead? Or is the Iliad at all compatible with the printing press and steam press?
Marx, quoted by Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 83 (citing the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 310–311).
Pages 83–84This crushing argument masks the entire problematic of the symbolic under a functionalist, finalist retrospective view of mythology (and magic) in which it only awaits man's rational and technical domination in order to disappear.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 83–84.
Working the Grundrisse passage on labor as a category “immeasurably old” yet wholly modern, Baudrillard presses the distinction between an analytic concept (limited validity) and an ideological one (unlimited validity).
Pages 84–85This abstraction is precisely what creates the problem. At the same time that it produces the abstract universality of labor (of labor power), our epoch produces the universal abstraction of the concept of labor and the retrospective illusion of the validity of this concept for all societies. Concrete, actual, limited validity is that of an analytic concept; its abstract and unlimited validity is that of an ideological concept.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 84–85.
The “anatomy of the ape” passage and Althusser's celebration of it are conceded as a break with evolutionism, then renamed as a simulation model rather than a real escape from finalism.
Page 86Althusser saw in this passage a theoretical revolution in relation to navie genetic evolutionism. This is certainly so, and evolutionism is dead. But isn't this retroactive structuralism still an ideological process, now in the sense of a structural reconstruction through a simulation model instead of empiricist, finalist evolutionism? First, it is not certain that the comparison with the anatomy of the ape is anything more than a metaphor.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 86. (“navie” printed for naive; preserved as printed.)
The case in point is the placement of primitive objects in the esthetic category, which Baudrillard refuses outright.
Page 89In the kindest yet most radical way the world has ever seen, they have placed these objects in a museum by implanting them in an esthetic category. But these objects are not art at all. And, precisely their nonesthetic character could at last have been the starting point for a radical perspective on (and not an internal critical perspective leading only to a broadened reproduction of) Western culture.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 89.
The materialist merely substitutes one virus for another.
Pages 89–90Hence in the materialist interpretation there is only a replacement of “art” by “economics,” “the esthetic virus” by “the virus of production and the mode of production.” What has been said of the one applies equally to the other.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 89–90.
The linkage that organizes the whole chapter, stated as a correlation Baudrillard shares with Marx but reads at a more partial level.
Pages 89–90We agree with Marx when he says that there is a correlation between the analysis of our society's contradictions and the comprehension of earlier societies, but only if we note the partial level at which they both remain within historical materialism. The blindness about primitive societies is necessarily linked to a weakness in the radical critique of political economy.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 89–90.
Marxism defines the slave by subtraction from the salaried worker. Baudrillard insists this reads a symbolic relation through an economic grid that did not yet apply.
Pages 93–94And the specificity of slavery resides, by deduction, in the master's ownership of the slave's labor power. But this is only an analytic reconstruction. Because one reunites two elements consequently separated, it does not follow that their sum clarifies the earlier state. The radical difference is precisely that they were not separated and that what comes to pass from the separation is not readable through anticipation, except by an abuse of analytical power.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 93–94.
The master–slave bond is reciprocity and obligation, not the relation of two autonomous subjects that alienation presupposes.
Page 94A relation of reciprocity exists between them — not in the modern and psychological sense of a bi-univocal relation of two individualized subjects, that is, in the individualism-altruism context that circumscribes our morality — but in the sense of an obligation, of a structure of exchange and obligation where the specification of the terms of exchange in autonomous subjects, where the partition (as we know it), does not yet exist.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 94.
Alienation belongs not to the slave but to the “free” worker, whose liberation is precisely his accession to private ownership of himself.
Pages 94–95The free worker finds his identity in the mirror of his labor power. His property, his “liberation” as a worker, signifies his accession to privatized individuality, that is, to alienation. He is alienated not insofar as he sells his labor power, but insofar as he is an owner, “disposing” of it as if it were his own goods.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 94–95.
Domination is therefore distinguished sharply from alienation and exploitation.
Page 95Domination, as distinct from alienation and exploitation, does not involve the objectification of the dominated, but an obligation that always carries an element of reciprocity.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 95.
The artisan owns labor power and instruments alike, but the categories “means of production” and “productive force” misdescribe him because production and consumption are not yet separated functions. The governing analogy is language.
Page 97This situation can be illustrated by the example of language. Language is not produced by certain people and consumed by others; everyone is at the same time a producer and a consumer. In fact, there are neither producers nor consumers and what is established is not the general equivalence of individuals vis-à-vis language, but an immediate reciprocity of exchange through language.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 97.
Artisanal and artistic work is symbolic because it is destruction as much as production.
Page 99Work is a process of destruction as well as of “production,” and in this way work is symbolic. Death, loss and absence are inscribed in it through this dispossession of the subject, this loss of the subject and the object in the scansion of the exchange.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 99.
Through Vernant on the Greek polis, the social bond rests not on a division of labor but on philia.
Page 100The unity of the polis is not based on a distribution of tasks, a division of labor, a functional differentiation, but on a “philia,” a political community of citizens defined as peers. There is no human or social function of labor. “The social bond is established beyond the craft at that level where the citizens can reciprocally love one another.”
Baudrillard, with Vernant quoted, The Mirror of Production, page 100 (citing Vernant, “Le travail et la pensée technique,” in Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs).
The praxis/poiesis distinction is carried as the mark of what counts as noble activity.
Page 101Praxis, a noble activity, is always one of use, as distinct from poesis which designates fabrication. Only the former, which plays and acts, but does not produce, is noble.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 101.
The definitional core of “symbolic” in the book: the five separations political economy treats as evident, all of them excluded by symbolic relations.
Pages 102–103The symbolic must never be confused with the psychological. The symbolic sets up a relation of exchange in which the respective positions cannot be autonomized:
— neither the producer and his product;
— nor the producer and the user;
— nor the producer and his “concrete” essence, his labor power;
— nor the user and his “concrete” essence, his needs;
— nor the product and its “concrete” finality, its utility.
All these distinctions, which are evident in psychology and political economy, are excluded by symbolic relations.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 102–103.
The political payoff: the artisan-as-master underwrites the utopia of self-management, which Baudrillard reads as the slave interiorizing his own master.
Page 104But such mastery is absurd since its definition encloses itself in terms of labor and use value. The individual who “controls” his labor is an idealization of this basic constraint. It is simply the slave who has become his own master, since the master-slave couple is interiorized in the same individual without ceasing to function as an alienated structure. He “disposes” of himself; he is his own usufruct.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 104.
The error is form, not content. The image the brief returns to is the drunkard's key.
Page 107It works in the imaginary like the man who, having lost his key in a dark alley, looks for it in a lighted area because, he says, that it is the only place where he could find it. Thus, historical materialism does not know how to grasp earlier societies in their symbolic articulation. It only finds in them what it could find under its own light, that is, its artificial mode of production.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 107.
With Cardan (Castoriadis), the more radical hypothesis is floated: the categories may be empty even here.
Page 108Along with Cardan one can offer the still more radical hypothesis that not only have the categories of historical materialism no meaning outside of our society, but that perhaps in a fundamental way they no longer have any meaning for us.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 108.
And the diagnosis that materialism mistakes symptoms of the founding rupture for the contradictions themselves.
Pages 108–109Materialist logic, seeing only the contradictions that are accessible to dialectical or structural schemas, perhaps sees only the symptoms, at the interior of the system, of that rupture which founds the system itself.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 108–109.
The longest chapter, and where the positive thesis (the mutation from form-commodity to form-sign) and the political thesis (a transversal, non-dialectical subversion) are stated.
Historical materialism is read as Hegelian: capitalism is the privileged moment that gathers all history toward its own abolition.
Page 112Capital is thus an end and all history is gathered in the final process of its abolition. Or better, it is the only mode of production whose critique becomes possible in its real terms; this is why the revolution that puts an end to it is definitive.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 112.
The needle is the suspicious neatness of theory and reality arriving together.
Page 113As if by chance, the reality of the mode of production enters the scene at the moment when someone is discovered who invents the theory of it. As if by chance, at the same moment that the class struggle enters its overt and decisive phase, it discovers the theory that takes account of it scientifically and objectively (whereas the blind and latent class struggles in earlier societies only produced ideologies). This conjunction is a little too neat and irresistibly evokes the Hegelian trajectory in which the saga of Spirit is completely illuminated retrospectively, only to culminate in the discourse of Hegel himself.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 113.
The section's title-image: history as the Renaissance vanishing point, historical materialism as its geometry.
Page 114Thus, history can only be, at bottom, the equivalent of the ideal point of reference that, in the classical and rational perspective of the Renaissance, allows the spatial imposition of an arbitrary, unitary structure. And historical materialism could only be the Euclidean geometry of this history.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 114.
The Althusserian position Baudrillard works against is quoted in full: the capitalist present produces scientific truth as empirical fact, licensing the primacy of the present over the past.
Page 116If the present form of capitalist production has produced scientific truth itself in its invisible reality (Wirklichkeit, Erscheinung, Erfahrung), in its self-consciousness, its own phenomenon is therefore its own self-criticism in act (en acte) — then it is perfectly clear why the present's retrospection of the past is no longer ideology but true knowledge, and we can appreciate the legitimate epistemological primacy of the present over the past.
Louis Althusser, quoted by Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 116 (citing Reading Capital, 125).
The first objection: the “break” is a vicious circularity, a model that verifies itself.
Page 117It is the self-verification of a model that is achieved through the adequacy of the rational (itself) and the real. In fact, this break of which Marxism avails itself is equivalent, as in all “science,” to the establishment of a principle of rationality that is only the rationalization of its own process.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 117.
The second objection: granting the historical argument, Marx's own moment was too early, which would make Marxism the theory of a surpassed stage.
Page 117But with the addition that, strictly speaking, in Marx's time, the commodity form had not at all attained its generalized form, and has had a long history since Marx. Thus Marx was not in a historical position to speak scientifically, to speak the truth. In that case, another break imposes itself, one that would risk making Marxism appear as a theory of a surpassed stage of commodity production, hence, as an ideology.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 117.
Baudrillard takes Marx's three-stage genealogy of exchange value from The Poverty of Philosophy.
Page 1191. Only the surplus of material production is exchanged (in archaic and feudal production, for example). Vast sectors remain outside the sphere of exchange and commodities.
2. The entire volume of “industrial” material production is alienated in the exchange (capitalist political economy).
3. Even what is considered unalienable (divided, but not exchanged) — virtue, love, knowledge, consciousness — also falls into the sphere of exchange value. This is the era of “general corruption,” of “universal venality,” “the time when each object, physical or moral, is brought to market as a commodity value in order to be priced at its exact value.”
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 119 (drawing on Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy).
The intervention is to insist on a decisive mutation between phases 2 and 3 that Marx neutralized as a mere superstructural extension.
Page 120There is a decisive mutation between phase 2 and phase 3. Phase 3 is as revolutionary in relation to phase 2 as phase 2 is in relation to phase 1.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 120.
Pages 121–122This mutation concerns the passage from the form-commodity to the form-sign, from the abstraction of the exchange of material products under the law of general equivalence to the operationalization of all exchanges under the law of the code.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 121–122.
The monopoly that matters is of the code, not of the means of production.
Page 127The monopolistic stage signifies less the monopoly of the means of production (which is never total) than the monopoly of the code.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 127.
The form-sign passage, the book's most-extracted statement of the sign that refers only to other signs.
Pages 127–128The form-sign describes an entirely different organization: the signified and the referent are now abolished to the sole profit of the play of signifiers, of a generalized formalization in which the code no longer refers back to any subjective or objective “reality,” but to its own logic. The signifier becomes its own referent and the use value of the sign disappears to the benefit of its commutation and exchange value alone. The sign no longer designates anything at all. It approaches its true structural limit which is to refer back only to other signs. All reality then becomes the place of a semiurgical manipulation, of a structural simulation.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 127–128.
The first principle of the generalized system is not exploitation but the imposition of a code.
Pages 129–130With the generalization of political economy, it becomes more and more evident that its first principle is not in the exploitation of labor as a productive force, where Marxist analysis examined it, but in the imposition of a form, of a general code of rational abstraction, in which capitalist rationalization of material production is only a particular case.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 129–130.
Page 132For the system no longer needs universal productivity; it requires only that everyone play the game.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 132.
The new subversion comes from those expelled into the non-marked positions of the code, and it aims at the code itself rather than at inequality within it.
Page 134The Black revolt aims at race as a code, at a level much more radical than economic exploitation. The revolt of women aims at the code that makes the feminine a non-marked term. The youth revolt aims at the extremity of a process of racist discrimination in which it has no right to speak.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 134.
Pages 135–136Not the accession of women to power, that is, the turning of the code to their favor, but the abolition of the code.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 135–136.
Foucault is invoked: confinement spreads from the asylum to civil society as such.
Page 135So it was that madness was confined (Michel Foucault) at the threshold of Western rationality. Today it is the same for all civil society, which has become a place of confinement where tranquillized man is closely watched.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 135.
The subversion is therefore named transversal and non-dialectical.
Pages 139–140The radical subversion is transversal to the extent that it crosses the contradictions connected with the mode of production, and non-dialectical to the extent that there is no dialectical negativity in the relation between a repressed, non-marked term and a marked term. There can only be transgression of the line and deconstruction of the code.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 139–140.
The deflationary conclusion for the Left.
Page 140The working class is no longer the gold standard of revolts and contradictions. There is no longer a revolutionary subject of reference.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 140.
The hopeful counter-evidence Baudrillard reads is the latent refusal of work itself.
Page 141Not the open revolt of a few, but the immense, latent defection, the endemic, masked resistance of a silent majority, but one nostalgic for the spoken word and for violence. Something in all men profoundly rejoices in seeing a car burn.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 141.
The cultural revolution reverses materialist logic: the production of social relations determines the mode of material reproduction, not the reverse.
Page 142Against the materialist postulate according to which the mode of production and the reproducion of social relations are subordinated to relations of material production, one can ask if it is not the production of social relations that determiens the mode of material reproduction (the development of productive forces and relations of production).
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 142. (“reproducion” for reproduction and “determiens” for determines; preserved as printed.)
Page 142A genealogy of social relations shows many criteria of domination other than the private ownership of the means of production. Species, race, sex, age, language, culture, signs of either an anthropological or cultural type — all these criteria are criteria of difference, of signification and of code.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 142.
The diagnosis of capitalism's fatal weakness.
Page 143It is directly at the level of the production of social relations that capitalism is vulnerable and en route to perdition. Its fatal malady is not its incapacity to reproduce itself economically and politically, but its incapacity to reproduce itself symbolically.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 143.
Consumption is the worked example: it cannot be made into true expenditure because expenditure under this system is always reinvestment.
Page 145It cannot make consumption a true consummation, a festival, a waste. To consume is to start producing again. All that is expended is in fact invested; nothing is ever totally lost.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 145.
Page 146Just as in 1929, when the system almost died from an inability to circulate production, so today it is perishing from an inability to circulate the spoken word. Because it is a system of production, it can only reproduce itself.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 146.
Borrowing Bourdieu's analysis of the formal autonomy of the scholarly and cultural systems, Baudrillard generalizes the mechanism of ideology.
Page 148The ideological process, as it emerges in Bourdieu's analysis, has not changed and it can be generalized as follows: ideology always proceeds by an autonomization of a partial totality; all autonomized partial totalities immediately have an ideological value.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 148 (drawing on Bourdieu, La reproduction).
The economic sphere is itself such a field, and its autonomization is shared by capitalism and Marxism alike.
Page 148But all partial fields, in particular the economic, can, for the same reason, act as ideological fields, once erected as an autonomous instance (and even determinant). But the autonomization of the economic sphere is common to capitalism and to Marxism.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 148.
Page 149Political economy as a science of the detached is thus properly ideological and the critique of political economy, when it wishes itself to be “scientific” (materialist), only serves to reinforce its object as a detached abstraction. There are no economic truths, or better, we have fashioned the truth of the economic as an arbitrary instance.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 149.
The section closes by setting the symbolic against the whole imaginary of political economy, and the cultural revolution against the economic-political one.
Page 151The symbolic is the abolition of the imaginary of political economy (and of all other detached fields).
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 151.
The chapter's most provocative move: the nineteenth-century conjunction of theory and movement was not a miracle but a mutual neutralization.
Page 152The sacrilegious hypothesis is here imposed that the conjuncture in the 19th century of Marxist theory and the workers' movement perhaps had not been the miracle of history — the greatest event in history, says Althusser — but a process of reciprocal reduction and neutralization.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 152.
The Nietzschean line the brief returns to.
Page 155Nietzsche is right: the workers have elevated into a cardinal value the very sign of their slavery, just as the Christians did with suffering.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 155.
Class itself is read as a bourgeois, rationalist category.
Page 157In a sense, there has always been and there will always be only one class, the bourgeoisie. This capitalist bourgeois class is defined not only by the ownership of the means of production, but by the rational finality of production.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 157.
So the proletariat's only meaningful negation is of its own definition as a productive class.
Page 158It must not negate itself insofar as it is deprived of the means of production (which is, unfortunately, the “objective” Marxist definition of class); it negates itself insofar as it is defined in terms of production and political economy.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 158.
With Capital, the immediate revolt is reconverted into a deferred historical finality awaiting capitalism's maturation.
Page 160With Capital, one moves from the revolutionary utopia to a fully historical dialectic, from an immediate and radical revolt to an objective consideration of the situation. It is necessary that capitalism “mature,” that it inwardly become a social system through its own negation.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 160.
The hinge example, that Marx did not write for the machine-breakers.
Page 162In the era when Marx began to write, workers were breaking machines. Marx did not write for them. He had nothing to say to them. In his eyes they were even wrong; it was the industrial bourgeoisie that was revolutionary.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 162.
Page 163For utopia is never written for the future; it is always already present.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 163.
The closing section concedes Marx is “objectively” right while holding that the objectivity was bought by objectifying an immediate convulsion into a deferred dialectic.
Pages 163–164In effect, Marx “objectified” the convulsion of a social order, its current subversion, the speech of life and death, the liberator of the very movement, in a long-term dialectical revolution, in a spiraling finality that was only the endless screw of political economy.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 163–164.
The attack on the category of alienation is total: there is no lost identity to recover.
Page 166Instead of deluding men with a phantasm of their lost identity, of their future autonomy, this notion itself must be abolished. What an absurdity it is to pretend that men are “other,” to try to convince them that their deepest desire is to become “themselves” again! Each man is totally there at each instant. Society also is totally there at each instant.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 166.
The book's positive figure of the revolutionary, carried in its own roll-call.
Page 166Courderoy, the Luddites, Rimbaud, the Communards, the people of the savage strikes, those of May, 1968 — in every case the revolution does not speak indirectly; they are the revolution, not concepts in transit. Their speech is symbolic and it does not aim at an essence. In these instances, there is speech before history, before politics, before truth, speech before the separation and the future totality. He is truly a revolutionary who speaks of the world as non-separated.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 166.
The final sentences locate the utopian against accumulation and power.
Page 167Utopia wants speech against power and against the reality principle which is only the phantasm of the system and its indefinite reproduction. It wants only the spoken word; and it wants to lose itself in it.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 167.
Registered by Baudrillard's own lights, in his words, so a researcher can see where the book hedges, concedes, or holds a position only loosely.
The whole second route — generalizing the critique of political economy into a critique of the sign — is offered as a hypothesis, not a result, and is hedged repeatedly.
Pages 123–124Once again, this is only an exploratory hypothesis. It postulates a dialectical continuity between the political economy of the commodity and the political economy of the sign (hence of the critique of the one and of the other).
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 123–124.
Page 118This hypothesis, which pushes Marx to the limit, may still not be tenable. It is possible that the extension of the sphere of productive forces, which amounts to a radicalization of the concept, is such that the concept itself would have to go.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 118.
He leaves the framing question genuinely three-way open, including the possibility that the “mode of production” never applied at all.
Page 124— Are we always within the capitalist mode of production? If the answer is yes, we readily accept classical Marxist analysis.
— Are we within a later mode, so different in its structure, in its contradictions and in its mode of revolution, that one must distinguish it radically from capitalism (while maintaining that it is always a question of a mode of production which is determinant as such)?
— Are we, quite simply, within a mode of production at all, and have we ever been in one?
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 124.
Marx is granted his achievement: the concept's strategic power at its irruption is affirmed, and the quarrel is with its universalization afterward.
Pages 47–48By radicalizing the concepts of production and mode of production at a given moment, Marx made a break in the social mystery of exchange value. The concept thus takes all its strategic power from its irruption, by which it dispossesses political economy of its imaginary universality. But, from the time of Marx, it lost this advantage when taken as a principle of explication.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 47–48.
The analysis of the value-form is affirmed as fundamental, not discarded.
Page 45, note 33This entire analysis of the mystery of value remains fundamental.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 45, note 33.
And even while displacing the epicenter from material production, the book concedes that revolt still appears at the level of production itself.
Page 140However, something else appears at the very level of the production process. Here also a secret defection lurks and expands as the ulcer of capitalism.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 140.
Each is preserved verbatim where it falls in a quote above; a researcher copying a passage off should restore the corrected reading. All are in this digital rendering and should be checked against a print copy where wording is load-bearing.
Slips elsewhere in the rendering that fall outside the passages quoted here, noted for anyone working from the same file: “Mirrow of Production” (Poster's introduction, page 1); “semilogical” for semiological (page 8); “stave's status” for slave's status (page 95); “ress at the extortion” for less at the extortion (page 135). The credits-page table of contents (pages 4–5) omits the subsection “Political Revolution and Cultural Revolution” (page 141), which the front table of contents lists.
Mark Poster's notes flag references he could not complete or locate; a researcher drafting from Baudrillard's citations should treat these as unresolved.
The passage on Christianity as “the most anthropocentric religion the world has ever known” (page 63) is footnoted only as “Science (Paris), March, 1967.” The source is Lynn White Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” Science 155, no. 3767 (March 10, 1967): 1203–07. The missing author and the “(Paris)” tag are slips in the citation; preserved as printed.
Footnoted to the level needed to draft from the brief without returning to the book. Forms follow the citations as printed in the Telos edition, with note numbers in brackets.
The text. Baudrillard, Jean. The Mirror of Production. Translated with an introduction by Mark Poster. St. Louis: Telos Press, 1975. Originally Le Miroir de la production. Tournai: Casterman, 1973.
Baudrillard, Jean. Le système des objets. Paris: Gallimard, 1968.
Baudrillard, Jean. La société de consommation. Paris: Denöel, 1970. [n. 104]
Baudrillard, Jean. Pour une critique de l'économie politique du signe. Paris: Gallimard, 1972. [n. 5]
Baudrillard, Jean. “Fétichisme et idéologie.” Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse 2 (Fall 1970). [n. 94]
Marx, Karl. The German Ideology. New York: International Publishers, 1947. [nn. 3, 4, 85]
Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. New York: International Publishers, 1904. [nn. 8, 10, 69]
Marx, Karl. Grundrisse. Translated by Martin Nicolaus. London: Pelican, 1973. [nn. 11, 71, 73, 75]
Marx, Karl. Capital. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. Vols. I and III. [nn. 18, 19, 28, 31, 32, 36, 51, 57]
Marx, Karl. The Poverty of Philosophy. New York: International Publishers, 1936. [n. 92]
Marx, Karl. “Notes on Wagner.” Theoretical Practice 5 (Spring 1972): 51–52. [n. 6]
Easton, Loyd D., and Kurt H. Guddat, eds. Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society. New York: Anchor, 1969. [n. 17]
Marcuse, Herbert. “On the Concept of Labor.” Telos 16 (Summer 1973): 9–37. [nn. 16, 21, 22, 23]
Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. New York: Vintage, 1962. [n. 29]
Benjamin, Walter. Poésie et révolution. Paris: Denöel, 1971. [n. 24]
Lafargue, Paul. The Right to Be Lazy. Translated by C. Kerr. Chicago: Kerr, 1917. [n. 25]
Kristeva, Julia. “La sémiotique et la production.” Semiotica 2. [n. 30]
Naville, Pierre. Le nouveau léviathan. Paris: Rivière, 1954. [n. 7]
Vernant, Jean-Pierre. Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs. Paris: Maspero, 1966. [nn. 38, 81]
Vernant, Jean-Pierre. Travail et nature dans la Grèce ancienne. [nn. 68, 82]
Godelier, Maurice. “Sur les sociétés précapitalistes” and “L'anthropologie économique.” In L'anthropologie, science des sociétés primitives? Paris: Denöel, 1971. [nn. 44–67]
Sahlins, Marshall. “La première société d'abondance.” Les Temps Modernes (October 1968): 641–680. [nn. 37, 49, 72]
White, Lynn, Jr. “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” Science 155, no. 3767 (March 10, 1967): 1203–07. [n. 41; printed as “Science (Paris), March, 1967”]
Althusser, Louis, and Étienne Balibar. Reading Capital. Translated by Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books, 1972. [nn. 87–90]
Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness. [nn. 91, 109]
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Capitalisme et schizophrénie: L'Anti-Œdipe. Paris: Minuit, 1972. [n. 39]
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Raw and the Cooked. Translated by John and Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper and Row, 1969. [n. 77]
Bourdieu, Pierre, and Jean-Claude Passeron. La reproduction. Paris: Minuit, 1970. [n. 106]
Kalivoda, Robert. Marx et Freud. Paris: Editions anthropos, 1971. [n. 110]
“Cardan” (Cornelius Castoriadis), ed. Socialisme ou Barbarie, 1949–1965. [n. 86]
Rolle, Pierre. Introduction à la sociologie du travail. Paris: Larousse, 1970. [n. 84]