‘For some time now many of us have harbored the knowledge or at least the suspicion that Marxism is an inadequate perspective for the critical analysis of advanced society. We have toyed with syntheses, those of the Frankfurt School, of the Italian phenomenological Marxists, of the Freudo-Marxists, of the French existential Marxists without completely satisfying results. Radicals who prefer action to theory also bear witness to the impasse of Marxism by their frantic flight from advanced society under the changing banner of some Hero of the colonized peoples, Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevarra, Mao and now Stalin himself. In this conjuncture Jean Baudrillard, in The Mirror of Production, has attempted a radical deconstruction of Marxism along with an alternative standpoint for today’s radicalism.
In The Mirror of Production (1973), Baudrillard marshalls his earlier analyses from Le systèm des objets (1968), La société de consummation (1970) and Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972) for a systematic critique of Marxism. His compelling conclusion is that Marx’s theory of historical materialism, whether it is attributed to the 1844 Manuscripts, to The German Ideology, to Capital, or to the entire corpus, is too conservative, too rooted in the assumptions of political economy, too dependent on the system of ideas that it seeks to overthrow to provide a framework for radical action. The fatal weakness in Marx comes not from his effort to outline a revolutionary social theory — Baudrillard does not dispute this imperative — but in the failure of historical materialism to attain this end.
For Baudrillard the conceptual grounds upon which Marx laid his critique of political economy were the “forms” of production and labor, forms that Marx did not subject to criticism and which were, in origin, those of political economy itself. When Marx unmasked an anthropology of needs and of use value behind the system of exchange value he was not transcending political economy but merely seeing its reverse side. Selecting representative quotes from the entire scope of Marx’s texts, from the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right to the Notes on Wagner, Baudrillard argues that Marx’s effort to plumb the “apparent movement of political economy” in order to reverse its theoretical flow in which use value derived from exchange value, far from dismantling political economy, only completed and “interiorized” it. Hence Marx’s argument against “abstract labor” by reference to “concrete” labor still relied on the rationalist Western concept of labor itself. In both cases “social wealth” is still conceived in terms of a universal activity of man, i.e., labor, that imposes an arbitrary, rationalist intentionality on all human activity. Benjamin Franklin and Marx agree that “man” is a “tool-making” animal.
New Left theorists have not often systematically interrogated Marx himself. The theory of historical materialism has not often been analyzed to see if its emphases and directions might not systematically obscure the contemporary social field. It is precisely this task that Baudrillard sets for himself and his judgment is severe: “… Marxism assists the ruse of capital. It convinces men that they are alienated by the sale of their labor power; hence it censors the much more radical hypothesis that they do not have to be the labor power, the `unalienable’ power of creating value by their labor.” Far from transcending political economy, Marxism, to Baudrillard, strengthens and extends its most basic propositions. Man is conceptualized as a producing animal just as in political economy, except that Marx wants to liberate his productive potential. This still leaves us with a metaphor or “mirror” of production through which alone every aspect of social activity is intelligible. And so contemporary French theorists remain trapped in this conceptual cage: Althusser sees theory as a “production,” Deleuze and Guattari give us an unconscious that is a “producer” of desire, the Tel Quel group refers to textual “production.”
But it was political economy that erected that “phantasm,” in Baudrillard’s words, of labor as the human essence. To whatever extent Marx was able to demystify its liberal usage, to extract it from the hegemony of bourgeois rule, he still turned it over to the working class, imposed it on them, as their central means of self-comprehension. Baudrillard would like to liberate the workers from their “labor power,” to have them, if they are to represent a radical alternative to the present system, think themselves under another sign than that of production.
Marx’s concept of labor is, in its deepest levels, identified with that of political economy. Man is confronted by nature as a natural necessity which he must act upon. Man does this by investing nature with value, a value that he then extracts. The scheme is one in which labor power utilizes technology to compel nature to yield its riches for human enjoyment. Both political economy and Marxism are at one here. Baudrillard points out that there is no symbolic exchange in this perspective, there is no reciprocal play of meanings and acts. Labor and nature are both reduced to “values” that require the proper means (technology) to actualize. Political economy might idealize labor into an individualist morality whereas historical materialism might materialize it in a notion of fulfillment: But both participate in the same anthropology of man seeking his telos in the conquest of nature, an anthropology that becomes mystifying when the system begins to create ecological catastrophes. Baudrillard argues that “By positing use value as the beyond of exchange value, one locks all transcendence into the single, internal alternative of the field of value. But qualitative production is now the realm of rational, positive finality; the transformation of nature is now the place of its objectification as a productive force under the sign of utility (the same is simultaneously true of human labor). Even before the stage of exchange value and of the equivalent time of abstract social labor, labor and production already constitute an abstraction, a reduction and an outrageous rationalization in the relation to the richness of symbolic exchange.” A utilitarian hypothesis encompasses the human project and nature, one that is arbitrary and unjustified, in both political economy and its critique.
What is at stake in Baudrillard’s critique of Marx is the gravitational center of the system of political economy. For Marx, the primary place (determinant instance) of capitalism is in the structure of the means of production and the relations of production. Over against political economy, which sought the deep structure of capitalism in the process of exchange value, in the determination of the price of the commodity through the “free” intercourse of demands and supplies, Marx shifted the center toward the “real” act of the production and the consumption of products. But for Baudrillard, in both cases the real logic is the same: it is the investment of things with value; it is the placing of a sign on a thing and the logic of this process of signification is the true essence of capital. The difference between Marx and political economy is not as great as their agreement. The Marxist critique unmasked the “abstractions” of exchange value in favor of the “concrete” processes of use value, of production and labor. But Marx’s concepts were not at all radical; they did not reach the root of the matter. All Marx did was to set forth the repressed side of the equations of political economy. Instead of the shadows of the market place, we are sent to an equally obscure underside of the system: the place of production. Following this displacement of the center of the system to its “human side,” Marx unraveled the threads of the entire social field through the “mirror of production,” at the same time unmasking the exploitative nature of the system. Instead of the “justice” of exchange equivalence, we have the unjust extraction of surplus-value from the laborer, or, alternatively, the alienation of his life energies. In the process of Marx’s analysis, however, the social sphere is filtered, inexorably, through the concepts of production and labor which become the unquestioned metaphysical reference points of social reality.
The problem is not that Marx is an economic determinist, that he does not value highly enough the “finer” aspects of human culture. It is not a question of replacing a “materialist” theory with an “idealist” one. Rather, the problem is that he did not penetrate the central logic of political economy, which is, to Baudrillard, its logic of signification. Marx theorized the origin of political economy as a transformation of the mode of production and relations of production. But there has been a second decisive change in political economy that Marx did not recognize and this involved a “process of social abstraction” that refers not to the commodity but to the sign. The chief merit of Baudrillard’s thought is to articulate a critique of the political economy of the sign which he regards as the dominant social form of advanced capitalism. Political economy had generated its mode of signification from the outset, during the Renaissance, but Marx was unable to theorize this object because first, like Ricardo and the others, he was tied to the mirror of production, and, second, because his discourse, like theirs, was representational and hence incapable of seeing the radically new form of social exchanges.
Baudrillard employs the concepts of contemporary structural linguistics to develop his critique. Structuralists break down the linguistic sign into a signifier (a language term), a signified (an intended meaning), and a referent (an object pointed to by the signifier). Structuralists merely theorize the signifier, in search of its systematic quality, relegating the signified and the referent to an obscure horizon of their science. What they have been able to do is to show that signifiers have become abstracted from the subject (the signified) and from the social world of objects (the referent). While they claim this situation is natural and inevitable, Baudrillard argues that the essence of political economy is precisely this separation; the increasing autonomization of the signifier not simply in the realm of language but in all aspects of social exchange. Marx foresaw that capitalism would corrupt all values, moral, cultural, sexual, etc., by the force of the exchange value of the commodity. Baudrillard asserts that the strategy of the capitalist system is to generate this abstract structure of signification of which the commodity is merely one example. What happens in political economy is this: “the signified and the referent are now abolished to the sole profit of the play of signifiers, of a generalized formalization where 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 profit only of its commutation and exchange value. The sign no longer designates anything at all. It approaches in its truth its structural limit which is to refer back only to other signs. All reality then becomes the place of a semiological manipulation, of a structural simulation. And whereas the traditional sign… is the object of a conscious investment, of a rational calculation of signifieds, here it is the code that becomes the instance of absolute reference.” Here we are beyond the stable bourgeois world of the nineteenth century where the consumer carefully weighed his money against the value of the commodity, carefully estimated his need against his resources. This stable, comfortable, knowable world where words clearly referred to things, where ideas represented reality, where values corresponded to needs, where commodities had unquestioned value, was the world of Marx and his thought. There could simply not be articulated a “revolution” in underarm deodorants, the incorporation (imaginary or real) of personal qualities through the purchase of commodities, or a “clean bomb.” Baudrillard’s critique of the sign allows him to render the situation of advanced capitalism with much more concreteness than traditional Marxism. Whole realms of contemporary protest (Blacks, Women, Youth, etc.) and critique (consumption, sex, language, the media, etc.) can be seen better in relation to the repressiveness of the code than in relation to the mode of production. The dramatic tension in the system comes from its difficulty in reproducing the code, while production itself becomes merely an ideological support of the system. (It delivers the goods.)
In Le systém des objets, Baudrillard analyzed consumption through a critique of the sign. The prejudice in favor of production as the active moment and consumption as passive originated with the political economy but was confirmed by Marx. This productivist ideology produces an absence in social theory: it cannot account for the articulated complexity of a symbolic exchange in consumption. Baudrillard asserts that consumption is as “active” an exchange as production. In consumption there is an active appropriation of signs, not the simple destruction of an object. What is consumed is not simply a material object that satisfies an all too rational need, but a symbolic meaning in which the consumer places himself in a communication structure where an exchange occurs which is profoundly tied to the whole system of political economy. In order for the system to be reproduced there must be not simply the reproduction of labor power but the continuous reproduction of the code.
To Baudrillard, the present system of signs in consumption entails a serious distortion of human exchange. Under political economy, every level of social exchange is reduced from symbolic reciprocity to the “terrorism” of the “code.” Baudrillard’s critique of political economy leads not simply to another productivist ideology, but penetrates the system in a radical way: the abstraction from the symbolic reciprocity of exchanges to the abstract, discontinuous manipulation of the code. It is the very genius of political economy, a genius that makes it immune to traditional Marxist critiques, that the signs exchanged in communication have no referent. Capitalism detaches the signifier from the signified, making the signifier its own signified. What is crucial about, say, a given underarm deodorant, is not that it has a given exchange value or a given use value, not that the workers who produced it were alienated or exploited. The secret of this commodity is that it can totally transcend all of these “referents,” that it can become a totally detached object of exchange and that the person who consumes it can find a “meaning” in it to be appropriated that is totally divorced from the mechanisms of production and distribution. What is consumed is not a thing, laden with materiality and the complex cycle that finally derives from labor and nature, but purely and simply an element in a code.
There can be no internal contradiction endangering the system of monopoly capital because, as long as it controls the code, consumption can be indefinitely extended. There is no referent against which to define a finitude of needs because the code is its own referent and there is no end to the consumption of the code. As long as the code is not dismantled, there will be no difficulty for the system in getting workers to produce. Hence production is no longer the locus of the contradiction. In Baudrillard’s analysis, the very form of social meanings becomes the central articulation of social theory, not as a pure form but as a structured form that is in movement, in transition. His theory avoids the mistake of having the theoretical model divided into aspects (economic, politics, ideology) that are those of the dominant ideology itself. He is adept at exposing the pitfalls of historical materialism when it seeks to comprehend pre-capitalist structures: for example, Godelier’s stumbling acrobatics in his concepts of structure in dominance and determinant instance.
Yet, there are serious difficulties with Baudrillard’s position. Over against the sign structure of political economy, its code, he counterposes something that he calls “symbolic exchange.” Henri Lefebvre has argued that capitalism’s structure employs “signals” increasingly in order to command integration and acceptance. By collapsing the signified into the signifier, the signal leaves no room for judgment or criticism, as in the statement “We are in the Free World.” He opposed the spoken word (la parole) to signals denoting a free structure of face-to-face discourse. Baudrillard moves in the same direction as Lefebvre, with many of the same difficulties. Advanced capitalism creates places of “non-marked” terms (Blacks, women, youth, those on welfare). These groups are defined by their lack of responsibility, and hence, they are at a “zero point” of the code where their speech does not count. Thus, they are in a truly radical position because they must oppose not simply an inequality in the code, but the code itself. And they do so, as in the French events of May, 1968, by a spontaneous resort to la parole.
In the act of speech there is a reciprocal giving and taking of meanings that transcend the abstraction and manipulation of the sign. There is a discharge of energy and meaning, a pure loss as well as a gain. This is the essence of symbolic exchange to Baudrillard. In political economy, on the contrary, there is never a loss; everything, even war, always results in an accumulation of value, a re-investment. This is the secret of capitalism as compared with other systems: its inexorable growth. Even when it tries to give some of its value away, to share power through participation becomes co-optation. Symbolic exchange is simply impossible as the system was designed precisely to destroy it through a long process of abstraction and separation. Yet, this celebration of la parole implies a false assumption about the total presence of the exchangers. It implies an ontology of centered presence; as Baudrillard says, “we are always totally there.” Perhaps there is some dialectic of presence and absence that could account for miscomprehension as well as for symbolic exchange in social interactions. But Baudrillard had not given it to us.
There are strong echoes of the Frankfurt School in Baudrillard. He designates the same groups as Marcuse as the radical edge of the system; he employs Marcuse’s concepts like repressive desublimation; and he speaks like Marcuse of a “refusal” as the revolutionary act. But there are still more theoretical affinities with Habermas. The resort to symbolic exchange is like the German’s effort to complement the concept of labor with the concept of symbolic interaction, to addend Weber to Marx. Yet, with the background of French structuralism, Baudrillard is able to re-conceptualize the structure of society in a way in which Habermas is not. For the latter, symbolic interaction is added to labor, whereas for Baudrillard the whole theoretical object shifts in its nature. In a later phase of his thought, Habermas employs a notion of an ideal-speaking situation, enlisting a concept of communication in the critical theory of society. This, of course, is very close to the concept of la parole in Baudrillard, and both suffer from serious weaknesses in political implication. In sum, there are deep confluences in two of the main centers of contemporary critical theory.
For Baudrillard, as for the Frankfurt School, there is a major problem of defining the limits of Marx’s achievement. In France, Baudrillard’s reading of Marx’s texts is unusual in that it does not divide them up, favoring one group or another. Instead, he criticizes Marx on the basis of a claim against themes that exist throughout the corpus. While in the 1950s in France there was a fascination with the early texts, especially the 1844 Manuscripts, by humanists, Catholics, existentialists and independent Marxists, the more recent trend, that of Althusser’s circle, has been to reject the early Marx in favor of a “mature” Marx who is placed at a later and later date in his career. By stressing the unity of the texts, even if it is a unity to be criticized, Baudrillard returns us to an integral view of Marx.
Baudrillard’s attitude toward Marx is deeply ambivalent. In Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe he placed himself squarely within Marxist thought as one who was pursuing further the critique of political economy. But in The Mirror of Production there are places where Marx is completely rejected. This comes through in the sections he devotes to epistemology, sections that conclude each chapter. His effort is to call into question the nature of the theoretical model of historical materialism, not simply its contents. The charge against Marx is not so much that he imposed his concept of production on pre-capitalist societies where it has no place, but that historical materialism becomes ideological when it forgets its historical limits and pretends to universality, an error that is characteristic of the whole tradition of Western thought. The problem is not simply one of a lapse of memory, a momentary theoretical slippage, but, Baudrillard argues, one that is implicit in the deepest epistemological premises of Marx. The first error derives from Marx’s Hegelianism which asserts an overly absolute truth value to historical materialism because capitalism creates the conditions for universal, scientific knowledge. Ironically, this is the Althusserian position that attributes to Marxist knowledge the quality of finality. All of history can be objectively read by Marxism because of a favored historical position. With this claim Marxism gives up its own self-relativization: it is dependent upon a certain historical conjuncture, but at the same time, this conjuncture affords it an absolute priority over all previous ages. Marxism becomes ideological not where Althusser thinks, in its relation to practice, but in its truth claims, its scientificity. This problem has been raised many times before and needs no commentary here.
But there is a second difficulty that Baudrillard outlines. Marx erects a “model” of social structure and social change and Baudrillard objects to the analytic nature of Marxist concepts. Not only does capitalism fail to provide a standpoint for a universal theory, but it does not even offer the critical theorist the perspective from which to comprehend earlier societies. It is illegitimate for Marxism to project its notion of the mode of production onto earlier social systems. In this charge Baudrillard has placed himself on theoretical thin ice.
He wants to say that the Marxist model misses the radicality of the difference between earlier societies and capitalism as well as the radicality that would make a difference between capitalism and a future society all because of its analytic model. The model of production prevents a sighting of the symbolic nature of exchanges in primitive society; it absorbs that society into its own likeness and projects a vision of it back only in its relative difference, its underdeveloped mode of production. But to claim that this inadequacy in Marxism is due to the analytic nature of its concepts and to claim that a standpoint in the present, however critical, provides no basis for illuminating past structures courts the danger of pure relativism. The difficulty that Baudrillard presents is that of how to make radical discontinuities intelligible. He wants to claim a deep rupture between primitive society and political economy; but historical, analytic models make intelligible only continuities or relative differences.
For his own part, Baudrillard presents a history of social systems that in barest outline goes from pre-industrial societies of symbolic exchange, to political economy, and then to a third phase in which the full development of political economy is reached in the complete negation of symbolism. A fourth stage is implied in which we return to symbolism. This history is marked by discontinuity and itself implies an analytic of signification systems; but neither of these elements are theorized by Baudrillard. In other words, the incompleteness and obscurities of his critique of the epistemology of historical materialism return and emerge in his own standpoint. The direction of his critique is well taken: the inherent teleology in Marxism and its overly continuous model are open to attack. But Baudrillard has not shown us the way toward a discontinuous model that avoids finalizing all history in the present but allows for some sort of totalization, however fragmentary, that provides for a critical standpoint that can illuminate current practice. His failure here leaves him with only an empty invocation for a spontaneous overthrow of the code à la May, 1968.
All in all, Baudrillard’s hypothesis of a critique of the political economy of the sign offers a promising direction for radical theory. It combines semiology a notion of everyday life that increasingly appear to offer the best options for theoretical development.’
Baudrillard, Jean. The Mirror of Production. 1973. trans. Mark Poster, 1975. Telos Press, 1975. 1-15. Print.
