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1: The End of Production, by Jean Baudrillard in Symbolic Exchange and Death.
[by] Jean Baudrillard. (Sage, London, England, 1993). pp [6]-49. [Bibliographic Details] [View Documents] |
The Structural Revolution of Value
Saussure located two dimensions to the exchange of terms of the langue,
which he assimilated to money. A given coin must be exchangeable against
a real good of some value, while on the other hand it must be possible to
relate it to all the other terms in the monetary system. More and more,
Saussure reserves the term value for this second aspect of the system: every
term can be related to every other, their relativity, internal to the system
and constituted by binary oppositions. This definition is opposed to the
other possible definition of value: the relation of every term to what it
designates, of each signifier to its signified, like the relation of every coin
with what it can be exchanged against. The first aspect corresponds to the
structural dimension of language, the second to its functional dimension.
Each dimension is separate but linked, which is to say that they mesh and
cohere. This coherence is characteristic of the `classical' configuration of
the linguistic sign, under the rule of the commodity law of value, where
designation always appears as the finality of the structural operation of the
langue. The parallel between this `classical' stage of signification and the
mechanics of value in material production is absolute, as in Marx's
analysis: use-value plays the role of the horizon and finality of the system
of exchange-values. The first qualifies the concrete operation of the
commodity in consumption (a moment parallel to designation in the sign),
the second relates to the exchangeability of any commodity for any other
under the law of equivalence (a moment parallel to the structural
organisation of the sign). Both are dialectically linked throughout Marx's
analyses and define a rational configuration of production, governed by
political economy.
A revolution has put an end to this `classical' economics of value, a
revolution of value itself, which carries value beyond its commodity form
into its radical form.
This revolution consists in the dislocation of the two aspects of the law of
value, which were thought to be coherent and eternally bound as if by a
natural law. Referential value is annihilated, giving the structural play of
value the upper hand. The structural dimension becomes autonomous by
excluding the referential dimension, and is instituted upon the death of
reference. The systems of reference for production, signification, the
affect, substance and history, all this equivalence to a `real' content,
I indicated this structural revolution of the law of value in the term
`political economy of the sign'.
[4]
This term, however, can only be regarded
as makeshift, for the following reasons:
1. Does this remain a political-economic question? Yes, in that it is
always a question of value and the law of value. However, the mutation
that affects it is so profound and so decisive, the content of political
economy so thoroughly changed, indeed annihilated, that the term is
nothing more than an allusion. Moreover, it is precisely political to the
extent that it is always the destruction of social relations governed by the
relevant value. For a long time, however, it has been a matter of something
entirely different from economics.
2. The term `sign' has itself only an allusive value. Since the structural
law of value affects signification as much as it does everything else, its form
is not that of the sign in general, but that of a certain organisation which is
that of the code. The code only governs certain signs however. Just as the
commodity law of value does not, at a given moment, signify just any
determinant instance of material production, neither, conversely, does the
The classical law of value then operates simultaneously in every instance
(language, production, etc.), despite these latter remaining distinct according
to their sphere of reference.
Conversely, the structural law of value signifies the indeterminacy of
every sphere in relation to every other, and to their proper content (also
therefore the passage from the determinant sphere of signs to the
indeterminacy of the code). To say that the sphere of material production
and that of signs exchange their respective contents is still too wide of the
mark: they literally disappear as such and lose their specificity along with
their determinacy, to the benefit of a form of value, of a much more
general assemblage, where designation and production are annihilated.
The `political economy of the sign' was also consequent upon an
extension of the commodity law of value and its confirmation at the level of
signs, whereas the structural configuration of value simply and simultaneously
puts an end to the regimes of production, political economy,
representation and signs. With the code, all this collapses into simulation.
Strictly speaking, neither the `classical' economy nor the political economy
of the sign ceases to exist: they lead a secondary existence, becoming a sort
of phantom principle of dissuasion.
The end of labour. The end of production. The end of political economy.
The end of the signifier/signified dialectic which facilitates the accumulation
of knowledge and meaning, the linear syntagma of cumulative
discourse. And at the same time, the end of the exchange-value/use-value
dialectic which is the only thing that makes accumulation and social
production possible. The end of the linear dimension of discourse. The end
of the linear dimension of the commodity. The end of the classical era of
the sign. The end of the era of production.
It is not the revolution which puts an end to all this, it is capital itself
which abolishes the determination of the social according to the means of
production, substitutes the structural form for the commodity form of
value, and currently controls every aspect of the system's strategy.
This historical and social mutation is legible at every level. In this way
the era of simulation is announced everywhere by the commutability of
formerly contradictory or dialectically opposed terms. Everywhere we see
the same `genesis of simulacra': the commutability of the beautiful and the
ugly in fashion, of the left and the right in politics, of the true and the false
This process, which has for a long time been at work in culture, art,
politics, and even in sexuality (in the so-called `superstructural' domains),
today affects the economy itself, the whole so-called `infrastructural' field.
Here the same indeterminacy holds sway. And, of course, with the loss of
determination of the economic, we also lose any possibility of conceiving it
as the determinant agency.
Since for two centuries historical determination has been built up around
the economic (since Marx in any case), it is there that it is important to
grasp the interruption of the code.
The End of Production
We are at the end of production. In the West, this form coincides with the
proclamation of the commodity law of value, that is to say, with the reign
of political economy. First, nothing is produced, strictly speaking: everything
is deduced, from the grace (God) or beneficence (nature) of an
agency which releases or withholds its riches. Value emanates from the
reign of divine or natural qualities (which for us have become retrospectively
confused). The Physiocrats still saw the cycles of land and labour in
this way, as having no value of their own. We may wonder, then, whether
there is a genuine law of value, since this law is dispatch without attaining
rational expression. Its form cannot be separated from the inexhaustible
referential substance to which it is bound. If there is a law here, it is, in
contrast to the commodity law, a natural law of value.
A mutation shakes this edifice of a natural distribution or dispensing of
wealth as soon as value is produced, as its reference becomes labour, and
its law of equivalence is generalised to every type of labour. Value is now
assigned to the distinct and rational operation of human (social) labour. It
is measurable, and, in consequence, so is surplus-value.
The critique of political economy begins with social production or the
mode of production as its reference. The concept of production alone
allows us, by means of an analysis of that unique commodity called labour
power, to extract a surplus (a surplus-value) which controls the rational
dynamics of capital as well as its beyond, the revolution.
Today everything has changed again. Production, the commodity form,
labour power, equivalence and surplus-value, which together formed the
outline of a quantitative, material and measurable configuration, are now
things of the past. Productive forces outlined another reference which,
Now we have passed from the commodity law, of value to the structural
law of value, and this coincides with the obliteration of the social form
known as production. Given this, are we still within a capitalist mode? It
may be that we are in a hyper-capitalist mode, or in a very different order.
Is the form of capital bound to the law of value in general, or to some
specific form of the law of value (perhaps we are really already within a
socialist mode? Perhaps this metamorphosis of capital under the sign of the
structural law of value is merely its socialist outcome? Oh dear ...)? If
the life and death of capital are staked on the commodity law of value, if
the revolution is staked on the mode of production, then we are within
neither capital nor revolution. If this latter consists in a liberation of the
social and generic production of man, then there is no longer any prospect
of a revolution since there is no more production. If, on the other hand,
capital is a mode of domination, then we are always in its midst. This is
because the structural law of value is the purest, most illegible form of
social domination, like surplus-value. It no longer has any references
within a dominant class or a relation of forces, it works without violence,
entirely reabsorbed without any trace of bloodshed into the signs which
surround us, operative everywhere in the code in which capital finally holds
its purest discourses, beyond the dialects of industry, trade and finance,
beyond the dialects of class which it held in its `productive' phase -- a
symbolic violence inscribed everywhere in signs, even in the signs of the
revolution.
The structural revolution of value eliminated the basis of the `Revolution'.
The loss of reference fatally affected first the revolutionary systems
of reference, which can no longer be found in any social substance of
production, nor in the certainty of a reversal in any truth of labour power.
This is because labour is not a power, it has become one sign amongst
many. Like every other sign, it produces and consumes itself. It is
exchanged against non-labour, leisure, in accordance with a total equivalence,
it is commutable with every other sector of everyday life. No more
or less `alienated', it is no longer a unique, historical `praxis' giving rise to
unique social relations. Like most practices, it is now only a set of signing
operations. It becomes part of contemporary life in general, that is, it is
framed by signs. It is no longer even the suffering of historical prostitution
which used to play the role of the contrary promise of final emancipation
(or, as in Lyotard, as the space of the workers' enjoyment [jouissance]
which fulfils an unremitting desire in the abjection of value and the rule of
capital).
[6]
None of this remains true. Sign-form seizes labour and rids it of
every historical or libidinal significance, and absorbs it in the process of its
own reproduction: the operation of the sign, behind the empty allusion to
Today this is no longer the case since labour is no longer productive but
has become reproductive of the assignation to labour which is the general
habit of a society which no longer knows whether or not it wishes to
produce. No more myths of production and no more contents of production:
national balance sheets now merely retrace a numerical and statistical
growth devoid of meaning, an inflation of the signs of accountancy over
which we can no longer even project the phantasy of the collective will.
The pathos of growth itself is dead, since no-one believes any longer in the
pathos of production, whose final, paranoid and panic-stricken tumescence
it was. Today these codes are de tumescent. It remains, however, more
necessary than ever to reproduce labour as a social ritual [affectation], as a
reflex, as morality, as consensus, as regulation, as the reality principle. The
reality principle of the code, that is: an immense ritual of the signs of labour
extends over society in general -- since it reproduces itself, it matters little
whether or not it produces. It is much more effective to socialise by means
of rituals and signs than by the bound energies of production. You are
asked only to become socialised, not to produce or to excel yourself (this
classical ethic now arouses suspicion instead). You are asked only to
consider value, according to the structural definition which here takes on
its full social significance, as one term in relation to others, to function as a
sign in the general scenario of production, just as labour and production
now function only as signs, as terms commutable with non-labour,
consumption, communication, etc. -- a multiple, incessant, twisting relation
across the entire network of other signs. Labour, once voided of its energy
and substance (and generally disinvested), is given a new role as the model
of social simulation, bringing all the other categories along with it into the
aleatory sphere of the code.
An unnervingly strange state of affairs: this sudden plunge into a sort of
secondary existence, separated from you by all the opacity of a previous
life, where there was a familiarity and an intimacy in the traditional process
of labour. Even the concrete reality of exploitation, the violent sociality of
labour, is familiar. This has all gone now, and is due not so much to the
operative abstraction of the process of labour, so often described, as to the
passage of every signification of labour into an operational field where it
becomes a floating variable, dragging the whole imaginary of a previous
life along with it.
Beyond the autonomisation of production as mode (beyond the convulsions,
contradictions and revolutions inherent in the mode), the code of
production must re-emerge. This is the dimension things are taking on
today, at the end of a `materialist' history which has succeeded in
authenticating it as the real movement of society. (Art, religion and duty
have no real history for Marx -- only production has a history, or, rather, it
is history, it grounds history. An incredible fabrication of labour and
production as historical reason and the generic model of fulfilment.)
The end of this religious autonomisation of production allows us to see
that all of this could equally have been produced (this time in the sense of a
stage-production and a scenario) fairly recently, with totally different goals
than the internal finalities (that is, the revolution) secreted away within
production.
To analyse production as a code cuts across both the material evidence
of machines, factories, labour time, the product, salaries and money, and
the more formal, but equally `objective', evidence of surplus-value, the
market, capital, to discover the rule of the game which is to destroy the
logical network of the agencies of capital, and even the critical network of
the Marxian categories which analyse it (which categories are again only an
appearance at the second degree of capital, its critical appearance), in
order to discover the elementary signifiers of production, the social
relations it establishes, buried away forever beneath the historical illusion
of the producers (and the theoreticians).
Labour
Labour power is not a `power', it is a definition, an axiom, and its `real'
operation in the labour process, its `use-value', is only the reduplication of
this definition in the operation of the code. It is at the level of the sign,
never at the level of energy, that violence is fundamental. The mechanism
of capital (and not its law) plays on surplus-value -- the non-equivalence of
the salary and labour power. Even if the two were equivalent, even if
salaries were abolished (for the sale of labour power), man would still be
marked by this axiom, by this destiny of production, by this sacrament of
labour which sets him apart like a sex. The worker is no longer a man, nor
even a woman: it has its own sex, it is assigned this labour power as an end,
and marked by it as a woman is marked by her sex (her sexual definition),
as a Black is by the colour of his or her skin -- all signs and nothing but
signs.
We must distinguish what belongs to the mode and what belongs to the
code of production. Before becoming an element of the commodity law of
value, labour power is initially a status, a structure of obedience to a code.
Before becoming exchange-value or use-value, it is already, like any other
commodity, the sign of the operation of nature as value, which defines
production and is the basic axiom of our culture and no other. This
message, much more profoundly than quantitative equivalences, runs
We do not mean to invoke the prestige that may attach to a particular
type of labour when we say that labour is a sign, nor even the sense of
improvement signified by wage labour for the Algerian immigrant in
relation to his tribal community, or for the Moroccan kid from the High
Atlas Mountains whose only dream is to work for Simca, or for women in
our own society. In this case, labour refers to a strict value: betterment or a
different status. On the contemporary stage, labour no longer emerges
from this referential definition of the sign. There is no longer any proper
signification of a particular type of labour or of labour in general, but a
system of labour where jobs are exchanged. No more `right man in the
right place',
[7]
an old adage of the scientific idealism of production. There
are no more interchangeable but indispensable individuals in a determinate
labour process, since the labour process itself has become interchangeable:
mobile, polyvalent and intermittent structures of absorption, indifferent to
every object and even to labour itself, when understood according to its
classical operation and applied solely to localise each individual within a
social nexus where nothing converges except perhaps within the immanence
of this operational matrix, an indifferent paradigm which identifies
every individual according to a shared radical, or a syntagma which links
them into an indefinite combinatory mode.
Labour (even in the guise of leisure), like a primary repression, pervades
This is the tendency of every current strategy that turns around labour:
`job enrichment,'
[8]
flexitime, mobility, retraining, continuing education,
autonomy, worker-management, decentralisation of the labour process,
even the Californian utopia of domestic cybernetics. Your quotidian roots
are no longer savagely ripped up in order to hand you over to the machine
-- you, your childhood, your habits, your relationships, your unconscious
drives, and even your refusal to work are integrated into it. You will easily
find a place for yourself amongst all of this, a personalised job, or, failing
that, there is a welfare provision calculated according to your personal
needs. In any case, you will no longer be abandoned, since it is essential
that everyone be a terminal for the entire system, an insignificant terminal,
but a term none the less -- not an inarticulate cry, but a term of the langue
and at the terminus of the entire structural network of the language. The
very choice of work, the utopia of a tailor-made job, signifies that the die is
cast, that the structure of absorption is total. Labour power is no longer
brutally bought and sold, it is designed, marketed and turned into a
commodity -- production re-enters the sign system of consumption.
An initial step of this analysis was to conceive the sphere of consumption
as an extension of the sphere of the forces of production. We must now do
the reverse. The entire sphere of production, labour and the forces of
production must be conceived as collapsing into the sphere of `consumption',
understood as the sphere of a generalised axiomatic, a coded
exchange of signs, a general lifestyle. In this way knowledge, the sciences,
attitudes (D. Verres, Le discours du capitalisme [Paris: L'herne, 1971],
p. 36: `Why not consider the attitudes of the workforce as one of the
resources to be managed by the boss?'), but also sexuality and the body,
the imagination (ibid., p. 74: `The imagination is all that remains bound to
the pleasure principle, whereas the psychical apparatus is subordinated to
the reality principle' (Freud). We must put a stop to this waste. The
imagination should be realised as a force of production, it should be
invested. The slogan of technocracy is: `Power to the Imagination!'). The
same goes for the unconscious, the revolution, and so on. True, all this is in
the process of being `invested' and absorbed into the sphere of value, but
not so much market value as accountable value; that is, it is not mobilised
for the sake of production, but indexed, allocated, summoned to play the
part of a functional variable. It has become not so much a force of
production as several pieces on the chessboard of the code, caught in the
same game-rules. The axiom of production now tends to be reduced to
factors, the axiom of the code reduces everything to a variable. One leads
This goes much further than Taylorism, or the Scientific Organisation of
Labour (SOL), but its spectre marks an essential milestone of investment
by the code. Two phases can be distinguished.
The `pre-scientific' phase of the industrial system, characterised by
maximum exploitation of labour power, is succeeded by the phase of
machinery and the preponderance of fixed capital, where `Objectified
labour appears not only in the form of product, or of the product employed
as the means of labour, but in the form of the force of production itself'
(Marx, Grundrisse [tr. Martin Nicolaus, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973],
p. 694). This accumulation of objectified labour which supplants living
labour as a force of production is subsequently multiplied to infinity by the
accumulation of knowledge: `The accumulation of knowledge and of skill,
of the general productive forces of the social brain, is thus absorbed into
capital, as opposed to labour, and hence appears as an attribute of capital,
and more specifically of
fixed capital' (ibid., p. 694).
In the phase of machinery, the scientific apparatus, the collective
labourer and the SOL, the `production process has ceased to be a labour
process in the sense of a process dominated by labour as its governing
unity' (ibid., p. 693). There is no longer any `original' force of production,
only a general machinery transforming the forces of production into
capital; or, rather, a machinery which manufactures both the force of
production and labour power. The whole social apparatus of labour is
forestalled by this operation. The collective machinery has begun to
produce social goals directly, and this is what produces production.
The hegemony of dead labour over living labour. Primitive accumulation
merely accumulates dead labour to the point that it can reabsorb living
labour. Or, in other words, it becomes Capable of controlling the
production of living labour for its own ends. This is why the end of
primitive accumulation marks the decisive turning point of political
economy: the transition to the preponderance of dead labour, to crystallised
social relations incarnated in dead labour, weighing down on society
in its entirety as the code of domination itself. Marx's greatest error was to
have retained a belief in the innocence of machines, the technical process
and science -- all of which were supposedly capable of becoming living
social labour once the system of capital was liquidated, despite the fact that
this is precisely what the system is based on. This pious hope springs from
having underestimated death in dead labour, and from thinking that death
is overcome in the living, beyond a certain crucial point, by a sort of
historical somersault of production.
Marx had, however, sensed this while noting that `objectified labour
confronts living labour within the process itself as the power which rules it;
a power which, as the appropriation of living labour, is the form of capital'
(Grundrisse, p. 693 [J. B.'s emphasis]). This also becomes apparent in the
We must again draw out all the consequences of this. When production
attains this circularity and turns in on itself, it loses every objective
determination. It incants itself as myth while its own terms have become
signs. Simultaneously, when this sphere of signs (including the media,
information, etc.) ceases to be a specific sphere for representing the unity
of the global process of capital, then we must not only say with Marx that
`the production process has ceased to be a labour process' (ibid., p. 693),
but that `the process of capital itself has ceased to be a production process'.
With the hegemony of dead labour over living labour, the whole dialectic
of production collapses. Following the same basic schema as the central
oppositions of rationalist thought (truth and falsity, appearance and
reality, nature and culture), all the oppositions according to which
Marxism operates (use-value/exchange-value, forces of production/
relations of production) are also neutralised, and in the same way.
Everything within production and the economy becomes commutable,
reversible and exchangeable according to the same indeterminate specularity
as we find in politics, fashion or the media. The indeterminate
specularity of the forces and relations of production, of capital and labour,
use-value and exchange-value, constitutes the dissolution of production
into the code. Today the law of value no longer lies so much in the
exchangeability of every commodity under the sign of a general equivalent,
as it does in a much more radical exchangeability of all the categories of
political economy (and its critique) in accordance with the code. All the
determinations of `bourgeois' thought were neutralised and abolished by
the materialist thought of production, which has brought everything down
to a single great historical determination. In its turn, however, this too is
neutralised and absorbed by a revolution of the terms of the system. Just as
other generations were able to dream of pre-capitalist society, we have
begun to dream of political economy as a lost object. Now, even its
discourse carries some referential force only because it is a lost object.
Marx:
On the whole, types of work that are consumed as services and not as products
separable from the worker hence not capable of existing as commodities
independently of him ... are of microscopic significance when compared with
the mass of capitalist production. They may be entirely neglected, therefore, and
can be dealt with under the category of wage-labour. (Capital [tr. Ben Fowkes,
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976], Vol. 1, pp. 1044-5)
This chapter of Capital was never written: the problem posed by this
disjunction, which confirms that between productive and unproductive
labour, is utterly insoluble. Every Marxist definition of labour is split, but
`Production for unproductive consumption is quite as productive as that
for productive consumption; always assuming that it produces or reproduces
capital' (Grundrisse, p. 306n). According to Marx's own definition,
there is a paradox here which results from an increasing sector of human
labour becoming unproductive without apparently preventing capital from
consolidating its dominance. In fact, however, this is all rigged in advance--
there are not two or three types of labour,
[9]
capital itself whispered these
pedantic distinctions to Marx, while never being stupid enough to believe
in them itself, always merely `naïvely' overlooking them. There is only one
sort of labour (a fundamental definition in fact), and as luck would have it
this is the one that Marx let slip through his fingers. Today all labour falls
under a single definition, that bastard, archaic and unanalysed category of
service-labour, and not the supposedly universal classical definition of
`proletarian' wage-labour.
This is not service-labour in the feudal sense, since labour has lost the
sense of obligation and reciprocity that it had in the feudal context, but in
the sense that Marx indicates: in service, prestation is inseparable from the
prestator -- an archaic aspect in the productivist vision of capital, but one
that's fundamental if capital is grasped as a system of domination, as a
system of `infeudation' to a labouring society, that is, to a certain type of
political society for which labour is the rule of the game. This is where we
are (if we weren't already there in Marx's time): the reduction of every
labour to a service, labour as pure and simple presence/occupation,
consumption of time, prestation of time. We make an `act' of labour as we
make an act of presence or an act of allegiance. In this sense, prestation is
in fact inseparable from the prestator. The service rendered conjoins the
body, time, space and grey matter. Whether this produces or not is a
matter of indifference as regards this personal indexation. Surplus-value
disappears, of course, and the meaning of wages changes (we will come
back to this later). It is not, however, a `regression' of capital towards
feudalism, but rather the dawn of its real domination, solicitation and total
conscription of the `person'. This is the tendency of every effort to
`retotalise' labour, making it into a total service where the prestator may be
more or less absent, but increasingly personally involved.
In this sense labour can no longer be distinguished from other activities,
particularly from its opposing term of free time, which, because it implies
the same mobilisation and the same investment (or the same productive
disinvestment), is today just as much a service rendered,
[10]
which, in
accordance with any standard of justice, should merit a wage (this is not
absolutely impossible).
[11]
In short, it is not only the imaginary distinction
between productive and unproductive labour which is shaken up, but also
the distinction between work and rest itself. There is quite simply no more
labour in the specific sense of the term, so Marx ultimately did well not to
write his chapter of Capital: it was condemned from the outset.
It is at precisely this moment that workers become `agents of production'.
This slippage of terminology -- such things have their own importance
-- ironically signifies the status of one who produces nothing. The semi-skilled
worker was no longer a labourer, but merely a worker facing the
total indifferentiation of labour, no longer struggling over the content of
labour nor over specific wages, but struggling over the generalised form of
labour and the political wage. The formation of the `agent of production' is
accompanied by his liberation from the most abstract form -- much more
abstract than the old semi-skilled worker, exploited to death: the mannequin
of labour appeared, the lowest common denominator, the dumb
waiter of labour's unreality principle. A pleasant euphemism: we no longer
work, but merely perform `acts of production'. This is the end of
production-culture, hence the a contrario appearance of the term `prductive'.
This `productive agent' is no longer characterised by its exploitation,
nor by its being raw material in a labour process; it is characterised
by its mobility and interchangeability, by being an insignificant inflection of
fixed capital. The `agent of production' designates the ultimate status of
Marx's worker who, as he said, `steps to the side of the production
process'.
The current phase, where `the process of capital itself ceases to be a
process of production', is simultaneously the phase of the disappearance of
the factory: society as a whole takes on the appearance of a factory. The
factory must disappear as such, and labour must lose its specificity in order
that capital can ensure the extensive metamorphosis of its form throughout
society as a whole. We must therefore formally recognise the disappearance
of the determinate sites of labour, a determinate subject of labour, a
determinate time of social labour, we must formally recognise the disappearance
of the factory, labour and the proletariat if we want to analyse
capital's current and real dominance.
[12]
The chain-store stage of society or
the factory superstructure, the virtual reserve army of capital, is at an end.
The principle of the factory and labour explodes and scatters over every
aspect of society in such a way that the distinction between the two
becomes `ideological'. It becomes one of capital's traps for maintaining the
factory's specific and privileged presence in the revolutionary imaginary.
Labour is everywhere, because there is no more labour. Labour now
reaches its definitive, completed form, its principle, which supports and
There will always be animal reserves and Indian reservations to hide the
fact that they are dead, and that we are all Indians. There will always be
factories to hide the death of labour, the death of production, or the fact
that they are everywhere and nowhere at once. For there is nothing with
which to fight capital today in determinate forms. On the contrary, should it
become clear that capital is no longer determined by something or other,
and that its secret weapon is the reproduction of labour as imaginary, then
capital itself would be close to exhaustion.
Wages
Labour, which in its completed form has no relation to any determinate
production, is also without any equivalent in wages. Wages are equivalent
to labour power only from the perspective of the quantitative reproduction
of labour power. When they become the sanction of the status of labour
power, the sign of obedience to the rule of the game of capital, wages no
longer possess any such meaning. They are no longer in any proportional
or equivalence relation at all,
[14]
they are a sacrament, like a baptism (or the
Extreme Unction), which turns you into a genuine citizen of the political
society of capital. Beyond the economic investment which constitutes the
worker's wage-revenue for capital (end of the salariat as exploitation,
beginning of the salariat as the `actionariat' of capitalist society -- the
worker's strategic function slides towards consumption as obligatory social
service), it is the other sense of the term `investment' which brings it into
the current phase of wage-status: capital invested the worker with a wage
just as one used to be invested with a charge or a responsibility. But capital
also invested the worker as one might `invest' a town, totally occupying it
and controlling all access.
[15]
It is not solely by means of wage-revenue that capital charges producers
to keep money in circulation and thus to become real reproducers of
capital, but more fundamentally by means of the wage-status by which they
are turned into purchasers of goods in the same way that capital itself is the
purchaser of labour. Every user uses consumer objects reduced to the
On the other hand, as soon as wages are detached from labour power,
nothing (not even the unions) stands in the way of an unlimited and
maximal wage demand. If there is a `right price' for a certain quantity of
labour force, a price can no longer be fixed on consensus and global
participation. The traditional wage demand is only a negotiation over the
producer's conditions. The maximalist demand is an offensive form of the
wage-earner's reversal of his status as a reproducer, a status to which he is
condemned by means of the wage. It is a challenge. The wage-earner wants
everything. His method is not only to aggravate the economic crisis of the
system but to turn every political constraint that the system imposes against
it.
The maximalist slogan runs: `maximum wage for minimum labour'. The
political result of this escalating reversal might indeed be to send the
system into orbit, in accordance with its own logic of labour as enforced
presence. For wage-earners operate no longer as producers, but rather in
terms of non-production, a role assigned them by capital. Neither do they
operate dialectically, their interventions are catastrophic.
The less there is to do, the more wage increases must be demanded,
since the minimal job is a more obvious sign of an absurdity than that of
enforced presence. This is the `class' that capital transforms in its own
image: even robbed of its exploitation, the use of its labour power, it
couldn't pay capital too much for this denial of production, this loss of
identity, this debauchery. The exploited can demand only the minimum,
but lower their status and they are free to demand everything.
[16]
The
striking thing about this is that capital can follow into these fields with
relative ease. It is not too much for the unions to make those wage-earners
without consciousness aware of the wage--labour equivalence which capital
itself has abolished. It is not too much for the unions to channel this
unlimited wage-blackmail into the wholesome straits of negotiation.
Without the unions, the workers would immediately demand 50 per cent,
100 per cent or 200 per cent increases -- and perhaps get them! There are
examples of this in the United States and Japan.
[17]
Money
The homology Saussure established between labour and the signified on
the one hand, and wages and the signifier on the other, is a kind of matrix
which can be used as a base from which to survey political economy in its
entirety. Today, however, the contrary proves to be the case: signifiers are
severed from signifieds and wages are severed from labour. The escalating
play of the signifier parallels the escalation of wages. Saussure was right:
political economy is a language [langue], and the same mutation that
affects linguistic signs when they lose their referential status also affects the
1. Production is severed from every reference or social finality. It then
enters a growth phase. We must not interpret this growth as an acceleration,
but in another sense, as something which marks and brings about
the end of production. This is characterised by a significant divergence
between production, on the one hand, and a relatively contingent and
autonomous consumption, on the other. When, after the crisis of 1929, and
especially after the Second World War, consumption began to be literally
`planned', that is, took on the force at once of a myth and of a controlled
variable, we enter a phase where neither production nor consumption
retains any proper determinations nor respective ends. Both become
caught in a cycle or spiral, they are overcome by a confusion propagated by
growth which leaves the traditional social objectives of production and
consumption well behind. This process has only itself as an end. It no
longer targets needs or profits. It is not an acceleration of productivity, but
a structural inflation of the signs of production, an oscillation and
proliferation of every sign, including monetary signs. It is the era of rocket
launching programmes, Concorde, and total war strategies, of the proliferation
of industrial estates, social or individual infrastructural facilities,
training programmes and recycling, etc. -- production for production's sake
in accordance with a constraint of reinvestment at any cost (reinvestment
no longer operating as the rate of surplus-value). The crowning achievement
of this reproductive planning promises to be anti-pollution measures,
where the entire `productive' system will recycle and therefore eliminate its
own waste products. This huge equation adds up to zero; not nothing,
however, because the dialectic of pollution and anti-pollution `produces'
inchoate aspirations to growth without end.
2. The monetary sign is severed from every social production and then
enters a phase of speculation and limitless inflation. Inflation is to money
what the escalation of wages is to the sale of labour power, and what
growth is to production. In each case, the same split releases the same
burst of frantic activity and the same virtual crisis: the splitting of wages
and the `right price' of labour power, and the splitting of money and real
production, both result in the loss of a system of reference. Abstract social
labour time on the one hand and the gold-standard on the other lose their
function as indices and criteria of equivalence. Wage inflation and
monetary inflation (as well as growth) are therefore of the same type and
are inseparable.
[18]
Purged of finalities and the affects of production, money becomes
speculative. From the gold-standard, which had already ceased to be the
representative equivalent of a real production but still retains traces of this
in a certain equilibrium (little inflation, the convertibility of money into
gold, etc.), to hot money and generalised flotation, money is transformed
from a referential sign into its structural form -- the `floating' signifier's own
logic, not in Lévi-Strauss's sense, where it has not yet discovered its
Hot money: a name given to Euro-dollars, doubtless in order to
characterise the senseless circulations of the monetary sign. Now, however,
we should more accurately say that money has become `cool', this
term designating, following McLuhan and Riesman, an intense but nonaffective
relativity of terms, a play sustained purely by the rules of the
game, the commutation of terms and the exhaustion of these commutations.
By contrast, `hot' characterises the referential phase of the sign, with
its singularity and the opacity of its signified in the real, its very powerful
affect and its minimal commutability. We are right in the middle of the
sign's cool phase. The current system of labour is cool, every structural
assemblage is, generally speaking, cool, while both `classical' production
and labour, hot processes par excellence, have been replaced by unlimited
growth bound to a disinvestment of the contents and process of labour,
which are cool processes.
Coolness is the pure play of the values of discourse and the commutations
of writing. It is the ease and aloofness of what now only really plays
with codes, signs and words, the omnipotence of operational simulation.
To whatever extent affects or systems of reference remain, they remain
hot. Any `message' keeps us in the hot. We enter the cool era when the
medium becomes the message. And this is precisely what has taken place
with money. Once a certain phase of disconnection has been reached,
money is no longer a medium or a means to circulate commodities, it is
circulation itself, that is to say, it is the realised form of the system in its
twisting abstraction.
Money is the first `commodity' to assume the status of a sign and to
escape use-value. Henceforth, it intensifies the system of exchange-value,
turning it into a visible sign, and in this way makes the transparency of the
market (and therefore of rarity too) visible. Today, however, money
sanctions a further step: it also escapes exchange-value. Freed from the
market itself, it becomes an autonomous simulacrum, relieved of every
message and every signification of exchange, becoming a message itself and
exchanging amongst itself. Money is then no longer a commodity since it
no longer contains any use-value or exchange-value, nor is it any longer a
general equivalent, that is, it is no longer a mediating abstraction of the
market. Money circulates at a greater rate than everything else, and has no
common measure with anything else.
We could of course say that this has always been the case that since the
first light shone on the market economy, money circulated at the highest
rate and drew every other sector into this acceleration. And throughout the
history of capital there is a distortion of all the different levels (financial,
industrial, agricultural, but also consumer goods, etc.) according to the
Strikes
Within a system of production, strikes were historically justified as
organised violence for purposes of snatching a fraction of surplus-value, or
else power, from the opposing violence of capital. Today this form of the
strike is dead:
1. It is dead because capital is in a position to leave every strike to
continue until it rots, precisely because we are no longer in a system of
production (maximalisation of surplus-value). Profits be damned so
long as the reproduction of the form of social relations is saved!
2. It is dead because such strikes change nothing fundamental: contemporary
capital merely redistributes itself, a matter of life or death for
it. At best, strikes merely snatch only what, in the end, capital would
have conceded anyway.
So if relations of production, and with them the class struggle, fall into
orchestrated social and political relations, then clearly all that can intervene
in this cycle is what escapes the organisation and definition of class as:
-- a representative historical agency;
Only those who escape the swings and roundabouts of production and
representation can disrupt these mechanisms and provoke, from the depths
of their blinded state, a return to the `class struggle', which might indeed
mark the end of this struggle as a locus within the `political'. It is here that
the intervention of immigrants in recent strikes
[20]
takes on meaning.
Because millions of workers find themselves, by means of the mechanics
of discrimination, deprived of all representative authority, their appearance
on the Western stage of the class struggle carries the crisis of
representation to a crucial level. Kept classless by society as a whole,
including the unions (and, on this point, with the economic-racial complicity
of their `rank and file': for the organised proletarian `class', centred on
its relations with political-economic forces with the bourgeois capitalist
class, the immigrant is `objectively' an enemy of the class), the immigrants
play, through the action of this social exclusion, the role of analysts of the
relation between workers and the unions, and, more generally, of the
relation between the `class' and every representative authority of the
`class'. They are deviant as regards the system of political representation
and of every authority who claims to speak in their name.
This situation will not last: unions and bosses have sensed the danger and
have begun to reintegrate the immigrants as `temporary full citizens', fulltime
extras on the stage of the `class struggle'.
The Autopsy of the Unions The Renault strike of March--April 1973
constituted a general repetition of this crisis. Apparently confused,
uncoordinated, manipulated and, in the final analysis, a failure (except for
the extraordinary terminological victory that consisted in the replacement
of the once taboo term `semi-skilled worker' with the term `agent of
production'!), this strike was in reality the beautiful swan song of the
unions, caught between their rank and file and the bosses. From the outset
it was a `savage' strike, unleashed by semi-skilled immigrant workers. The
CGT,
[21]
however, had a weapon ready to counter this accidental war:
The stakes at this level are extraordinary. The entire edifice of society
threatens to collapse with the unions' legitimacy and representativity.
Adjudicators and other mediating bodies no longer count for much. Even
the police are useless without the unions if the latter cannot police the
factories and elsewhere. In May '68, it was the unions who saved the
regime, but now their knell is being sounded. The import of the stakes is
profoundly expressed in the utter confusion of events such as the Renault
strike and May '68 (and this holds good for student demonstrations just as
it does for the Renault strikes). To strike or not to strike. Where do we
stand on this? No-one can decide any more. What are the objectives?
Where are the enemy? What are we talking about? The Geiger counters
that the unions, parties and micro-groups used to measure the masses'
readiness for combat are thrown into turmoil. The student movement is
too fluid for the hands of those who would like to structure it according to
their own objectives: don't they have any objectives? In any case, it did not
want to become objectified behind its back. The workers went back to work
without gaining a thing, while eight days beforehand they had refused
when they were offered palpable benefits. In fact, this confusion is similar
to what happens in dreams: it betrays a resistance or a censorship acting on
the dream-content itself. Here it betrays something of vital importance,
something difficult, however, for the proletarians themselves to accept: the
social struggle has been displaced from the traditional, external enemy of
the class, management and capital, onto the internal class enemy, the
proper representative authority for the class, the party or the union. These
The Corrupted Proletariat The crisis of representation is the crucial
political aspect of the latest social movements. In itself, this crisis may
prove fatal to the system, and already we can see the emerging outline (in
the unions themselves) of its formal overcoming (its recuperation) in a
generalised schema of self-management. No more delegation of power --
everyone will be fully responsible for production! The new ideological
generation is coming! But it will have a great deal to do, because this crisis
is intricately bound up with another crisis, deeper still, which touches
production itself, the very system of productivity. And there again,
indirectly of course, the immigrants are in the position of analysts. Just as
they analyse the `proletariat's' relation to its representative agencies, they
analyse the workers' relation to their own labour power, their relation to
themselves as a productive force (and not only to a few of them, selected as
representative authorities). This is because they have recently been
extracted from a non-productivist tradition; because they had to be socially
destructured in order to be thrown into the process of Western labour, and
because, in return, it is they who thoroughly destructure the general
process and morality of production which dominates Western societies.
It is just as if their forced recruitment into the European market
provoked an increasing corruption of the European proletariat as regards
labour and production. It is no longer simply a matter of `clandestine'
practices of resistance to labour (go-slows, wastage, absenteeism, etc.),
which have never stopped. This time the workers downed tools openly,
collectively and spontaneously, just like that, suddenly, asking for nothing,
negotiating nothing, to the great despair of both unions and management,
and started work again just as spontaneously, as a group, the following
Monday. Neither failure nor victory, it was not a strike, it was just a
`stoppage', a euphemism which says far more than the term `strike'. The
whole discipline of labour collapses, all the moral norms and practices that
industrial colonisation has imposed on Europe for two centuries disintegrate
and are forgotten with apparent ease, without the `class struggle'
There is a direct relation between the ultra-colonisation of immigrant
workers (since the colonies were not profitable where they were, they had
to be imported) and the industrial de-colonisation which affects every
sector of society (everywhere, in schools and in factories, we move from
the hot phase of the investment of labour to the cynical and cool execution
of tasks). Because they have most recently left their `savage' indifference
for `rational' labour, these immigrants (and the young or rural semi-skilled
workers) are in a position to analyse Western society with the recent,
fragile, superficial and arbitrary collectivisation enforced by labour, this
collective paranoia, which has spawned a morality, a culture and a myth.
We have forgotten that it was only two centuries ago that this industrial
discipline was imposed, at unprecedented cost, on the West itself, that it
has never quite succeeded and is beginning to crack dangerously (it will
barely have lasted as long, indeed, as overseas colonisation).
Strike for Strike's Sake
Strike for strike's sake is the true condition of the
contemporary struggle. Unmotivated, with neither objective nor political
referent, it is the oppositional response adopted against a production which
is also unmotivated, with neither a referent, nor a social use-value, nor
any other finality than its own -- production for production's sake, in short,
a system which has become only a system of reproduction, revolving
around itself in a gigantic tautology of the labour process. Strike for strike's
sake is the complementary tautology, but, since it unveils a new form of
capital corresponding to the final stage of the law of value, it is also
subversive.
Strikes have at last ceased to be a means, and only a means, of putting
pressure on the relation of political forces and the power game. It becomes
an end. Even on their own ground they negate, by means of a radical
parody, the sort of finality without end that production has become.
In production for production's sake, there is no more waste. We have no
use for this term, which means something only in a restricted utilitarian
Corresponding to the absurd circularity of a system where one labours
only to produce more labour is the demand for strikes for strikes' sake (at
any rate, this is the point at which the majority of `protest' strikes have
today come to an end). `Pay us for the days we are on strike' basically
means `pay us in order that we may reproduce strikes for strikes' sake'.
This is the reversal of the absurdity of the system in general.
Today, all products, labour included, are beyond both use and futility.
There is no more productive labour, only reproductive labour. In the same
way there is no more `productive' or `unproductive' consumption, only a
reproductive consumption. Leisure is as productive as labour, factory
labour as `unproductive' as leisure or the service industries, it is irrelevant
what formula we use. This indifference precisely marks the phase of the
completion of political economy. Everyone is reproductive; that is, everyone
has lost the concrete finality which once marked them out from one
another. Nobody produces any more. Production is dead, long live
reproduction!
The Genealogy of Production The system currently reproduces capital
according to its most rigorous definition, as the form of social relations,
rather than in its vulgar sense as money, profits and the economic system.
Reproduction has always been understood as, and determined by, an
`increasing' reproduction of the mode of production, even though it
became necessary to conceive of the mode of production as a
modality
(and not the only one) of the mode of reproduction. Productive forces and
the relations of production, the sphere of material productivity in other
words, are perhaps only one of many possible, and therefore historically
relative, conjunctions of the process of reproduction. Reproduction is a
form which far outstrips economic exploitation, and so the play of
productive forces is not its necessary condition.
The historical status of the `proletariat' (the industrial wage-earners)
Instead of extending the concepts of the proletariat and exploitation to
racial or sexual oppression and such like, we should ask ourselves if it is not
the other way round. What if the fundamental status of the worker, like the
mad, the dead, nature, beasts, children, Blacks and women, was initially to
be not exploited but excommunicated? What if he was initially not deprived
and exploited but discriminated against and branded?
My hypothesis is that there has never been a genuine class struggle
except on the grounds of this discrimination: sub-humans struggle against
their status as beasts, against the abjection of the caste division that
condemns them to the sub-humanity of labour. This lies behind every
strike and every revolt, and today it is still behind the most `wage-related'
demonstrations. Hence their virulence. Having said that, today the
proletarian is a `normal' being, the worker has been promised the dignity
of a full `human being', and, moreover, in accordance with this category,
he seizes onto every dominant discrimination: he is racist, sexist and
repressive. As regards today's deviants and whoever is discriminated
against, no matter what their social standing, he has sided with the
bourgeoisie and the normal human being. How true: the fundamental law
of this society is not the law of exploitation, but the code of normality.
May '68: The Illusion of Production The first shockwaves of this transition
from production to pure and simple reproduction took place in May
'68. They struck the universities first, and the faculty of human sciences
first of all, because that was where it became most evident (even without a
clear `political' consciousness) that we were no longer productive, only
reproductive (and that lecturers, science and culture were themselves only
relays in the general reproduction of the system). All this was experienced
as total futility, irresponsibility (`What are sociologists for?'), as a relegation,
and provoked the student movement of '68 (rather than the absence
of prospects, since there are always plenty of prospects in reproduction -- it
was rather the places, the spaces where something actually happens that
had ceased to exist).
These shockwaves are still being felt. They cannot but reach the very
limits of the system, as soon as entire sectors of society topple from the
rank of productive forces to the pure and simple status of reproductive
forces. Although this process was first felt in the cultural sectors of science,
justice and the family -- the so-called `superstructural' sectors -- it is clear
today that it is progressively affecting the entire so-called `infrastructural'
sector: a new generation of partial, savage and occasional strikes since '68
testify no longer to the `class struggle' of a proletariat attached to
production, but to the revolt of those who, even in the factories, are
attached to reproduction.
Nevertheless, in this same sector there are marginal, anomic groups who
are the first to register these effects: young semi-skilled workers brought
directly from rural areas into the factories, immigrants, non-union
members; and so on. For all the above mentioned reasons, the `traditional',
organised and unionised proletariat have looked likely to be the
last to react, since it is they who can entertain the illusion of `productive'
labour for longest. The consciousness of being, in relation to everyone
else, the true `producers` and, albeit at the cost of the exploitation,
nevertheless being at the very source of social wealth is a `proletarian'
consciousness which is reinforced and sanctioned by the organisation,
constituting what is certainly the most solid ideological defence against the
destructuration of the current system which, far from turning whole strata
of the population into proletarians or, as Marxian theory proper has it,
expanding the exploitation of `productive' labour, aligns everybody under
the same reproductive worker status.
`Productive' manual workers, more than anybody else, thrive on the
illusion of production just as they experience their leisure under the illusion
of freedom.
As long as these things are experienced as sources of wealth or
satisfaction, as use-value, then the worst, most alienated and exploited
labour is bearable. As long as we can still discover a `production'
corresponding (even if this is only in the imagination) to individual or
social needs (this is why the concept of need is so fundamental and so
mystifying), the worst individual or historical situations are bearable
because the illusion of production is always the illusory coincidence of
production and use-value. Those who today believe in the use-value of
their labour power -- the proletariat -- are virtually the most mystified and
the least susceptible to this revolt which grabs people from the depths of
their total futility and the circular manipulation which turns them into pure
markers of senseless reproduction.
The day that this process spreads to all of society, May '68 will assume
the form of a general explosion, and the problem of the link between the
students and the workers will no longer be posed: it merely betrays the gulf
that separates those in the current system who still believe in their own
labour force and those who no longer believe in it.
Political Economy as a Model of Simulation
From now on political economy is the real for us, which is to say precisely
that it is the sign's referential, the horizon of a defunct order whose
simulation preserves it in a `dialectical' equilibrium. It is the real, and
therefore the imaginary, since here again the two formerly distinct
categories have fused and drifted together. The code (the structural law of
value) uses the systematic reactivation of political economy (the restricted
market law of value) as our society's imaginary-real. Furthermore, the
appearance of the restricted form of value is an attempt to obscure its
radical form.
Profit, surplus-value, the mechanics of capital and the class struggle: the
entire critical discourse on political economy is staged as a referential
discourse. The mystery of value is enacted on stage (of course, the mystery
has simply acquired a new value: the structural law of value has become
mysterious): everyone agrees as to the `determining instance' of economics,
and this has become `obscene'.
[23]
This is a provocation. Capital no
longer looks to nature, God or morality, but strictly to political economy
and its critique for its alibis, and lives through its own denunciation from
within itself -- feedback or a dialectical stimulus. Hence the essential role
played by Marxian analysis in designer capital.
The same scenario is played out in economics as Bourdieu and Passeron
describe it, taking place in the academic system whose alleged autonomy
enables it to reproduce the class structure of society very efficiently.
Similarly, the alleged autonomy of political economy (or rather its value as
a determining agency) enables it to reproduce, just as efficiently, capital's
symbolic function, its real domination over life and death established by
the code, and which is continually stirring up political economy as a
medium, an alibi and a fig-leaf.
A machine has to function if it is to reproduce relations of production. A
commodity must have a use-value in order to sustain the system of
exchange-value. This was the first-level scenario. Simulation is today at the
second level: a commodity must function as an exchange-value in order
better to hide the fact that it circulates like a sign and reproduces the
code.
[24]
Society has to reproduce itself as class society, as class struggle, it must
`function' at the Marxian-critical level in order the better to mask the
system's real law and the possibility of its symbolic destruction. Marcuse
pointed out a long time ago that dialectical materialism was getting out of
hand: far from being deconstructed by the forces of production, the
relations of production from now on submit to the forces of production
(science, technology, etc.) and find a new legitimacy in them. There again,
we must pass on to the second level: the social relations of symbolic
domination utterly submit to the mode of production (both the forces of
production and the relations of production), where we find, in the apparent
Hence the necessity of resurrecting and dramatising political economy in
the form of a movie script, to screen out the threat of symbolic destruction.
Hence the kind of crisis, the perpetual simulacrum of a crisis, we are
dealing with today.
In the aesthetic stage of political economy, the finality--without--end of
production, the ethical, ascetic myth of accumulation and labour collapses.
Capital, to avoid the risk of bursting from these liquefied values, thus
becomes nostalgic once more for its great ethical epoch when production
had a meaning, the golden age of shortages and the development of the
forces of production. In order to re-establish finalities and to reactivate the
principle of economics, we must generate shortages once again. Hence
ecology, where the danger of absolute scarcity reinstates an ethic of energy
conservation.
Hence the crisis of energy and raw materials, a real blessing for a system
which, in the mirror of production, only reflects a fluctuating, empty form.
The crisis will enable the return of a lost referentiality to the economic
code, and will give the principle of production a gravity that evaded it. We
will rediscover a taste for ascesis, that pathetic investment born of lack and
deprivation.
The whole recent ecological turn had already taken up this process of
regeneration during the crisis -- no longer a crisis of overproduction as in
1929 -- of the involution of the system, recycling its lost identity.
[25]
A crisis
no longer of production, but of reproduction (hence the impossibility of
grasping how much truth and how much simulacrum there may be in this
crisis). Ecology is production haunted by shortages and using itself as a
resource, once more discovering a natural necessity where the law of value
is tried out again. But ecology is too slow. A sudden crisis, as happened
with oil, constitutes a more energetic therapy. The less oil there is, the
more we will become aware of how much production there is. From the
moment that the place of raw materials is noted again, labour power will
also resume its rightful place, and the entire mechanism of production will
become intelligible once more. Production has been given another chance.
So don't panic. On the eve of the intensive mobilisation of labour power,
when the ethics of labour power threatened to collapse, the crisis of
material energy came at the right time to mask the truly catastrophic
destruction of the finality of production, and displaced it onto a simple
internal contradiction (but we know that the system thrives on its contradictions).
There is still an illusion in thinking that the capitalist system, at a certain
threshold of increased reproduction, passes irreversibly from a strategy of
shortage to a strategy of abundance. The current crisis proves that this
strategy is reversible. The illusion still comes from a naïve faith in a reality
of shortage or a reality of abundance, and therefore from the illusion of a
real opposition between these two terms. When these two terms are quite
The indeterminacy affecting terms, the neutralisation of a dialectical
opposition into a pure and simple structural alternation, produces the
characteristic effect of an uncertainty surrounding the reality of the crisis.
Everyone tries to stave off the unbearable simulacrum-effect -- characteristic
of everything that issues from the systematic operation of the code -- as a
conspiracy. It is comforting to think that it was `great capital' that
provoked the crisis, because it restores a real political-economic agency
and the presence of a (hidden) subject of the crisis, and therefore an
historical truth. The terror of the simulacrum is over. So much the better: it
is better to have the omnipresent political-economic fatality of capital than
not, so long as it is clearly true. Better the economic atrocities of capital --
profit, exploitation -- than to face up to the situation we are in, where
everything operates or breaks down through effects of the code. Misconstrual
[méconnaissance] of the `truth' of this global domination (if there is a
global domination) is proportional to the crisis itself, where it is revealed
for the first time on a massive scale.
The 1929 crisis was still a crisis of capital, measured by its rates of
reinvestment, surplus-value and profit, a crisis of (over)production measured
by the social finalities of consumption. The crisis is resolved by
regulating demand in an endless exchange of finalities between production
and consumption. From now on (and conclusively after the Second World
War), production and consumption cease to be opposed and possibly
contradictory poles. At a stroke, the entire economic field loses all internal
determinacy along with the very possibility of a crisis. It no longer survives
except as a process of economic simulation at the fringes of a process of
reproduction, into which it is entirely absorbed.
[26]
Have there ever been real shortages to grant the economic principle a
reality, so that today we could say that it is disappearing and no longer
functions save as a myth, an alternative myth, moreover, to that of
abundance? In the course of history, have shortages ever had a use-value,
an irreducible economic finality, so that today we could say that it has
disappeared in the cycle of reproduction, merely consolidating the code's
hegemonic control over genuine matters of life and death? We are saying
that in order for the economy to produce itself (and this is all it ever
produces), it needs this dialectical tension between scarcity and abundance.
For the system to reproduce itself, however, it now requires only
the mythical operation of the economy.
It is because the entire economic sphere has been defused that everything
can be expressed in terms of political economy and production.
Economics, preferably in its Marxian variety, becomes the explicit discourse
May '68 marked the decisive step in the naturalisation of political
economy. Because the shock of May '68 shook the system down to the
depths of its symbolic organisation, it has given urgency to a vital transition
from `superstructural' (moral, cultural, etc.) ideologies to an ideologisation
of the infrastructure itself. By giving official status to oppositional discourse,
capital will consolidate its power under cover of economic and
political legislation. Political economy, Marxian political economy, has
sealed the rift of May '68, just as the unions and the left-wing parties
`negotiated' the crisis on the ground. The hidden referent of economics and
politics has therefore been dug up only in order to retrieve a catastrophic
situation, and today it continues to be circulated, generalised and desperately
reproduced, since the catastrophic situation opened up by May '68 is
not over.
If we dared, we would say that economics and its critique are only
superstructural; we will not dare, however, since to do so would only be to
twist this old image around -- where would the infrastructure be then? Etc.
It would also provide economics with a chance to reappear one day in
accordance with the see-saw effect which itself belongs to the code. We
have been tricked too often with the infrastructure to start this mask-play
up again. The system itself has put an end to infra-- and superstructural
determinations. Today it pretends to take political economy as the
infrastructure because Marx kindly whispered this alternative strategy to it,
but actually capital has never really functioned on this imaginary distinction,
it is not that naïve. Its potency comes directly from its simultaneous
development at every level, and from never having fundamentally posed
itself the question of determination, the cunning distinction of agencies, or
`ideology'. It has never confused itself with production, as did Marx and
every subsequent revolutionary who believed and still believes in production,
confusing their phantasies with their lunatic hopes. For its part,
capital is content to extend its laws in a single movement, inexorably
occupying all the interstices of life without confusing its priorities. If it has
set men to work, capital has also impelled them to culture, needs,
languages and functional idioms, information and communication; it
directs them to rights, to liberty and sexuality, it forces the instinct of
preservation and the death instinct upon them; it has set them up
everywhere in accordance with myths that are simultaneously opposed and
indifferent. This is its only law: indifference. To set up a hierarchy of
In the immense polymorphous machine of contemporary capital, the
symbolic (gift and counter-gift, reciprocity and reversal, expenditure and
sacrifice) no longer counts for anything, nature (the great referential of the
origin and substance, the subject/object dialectic, and so on) no longer
counts, political economy itself only survives in a brain-dead state, but all
these phantoms continue to plague the operational field of value. Perhaps
here, on an immense scale, we can discern the echo of what Marx drew to
our attention: every event first passes through an historical existence
before being revived under a parodical form. In our day, however, these
two phases telescope, since good old materialist history has itself become a
process of simulation, no longer even offering the chance of a grotesque,
theatrical parody: today the terror based on things voided of their
substance exerts itself directly, and simulacra immediately anticipate every
determination of our lives. Now, rather than theatre and the imaginary,
there is a fierce strategy of neutralisation that no longer leaves any
significant place for a Napoleon III-type slapstick, an historical farce
which, to Marx's mind, is effortlessly overcome by real history. It is a
different matter as regards the simulacra which eliminate both ourselves
and history simultaneously. But perhaps all this arises from a general
illusion in Marx concerning the possibilities for a revolution of the system.
He had clearly seen the extent to which there already lurked in capital in
his own time a capacity for it to undermine its own bases and go `into
overdrive'. He clearly saw that capital tended to reduce, if not totally
eliminate, the labour power in its processes, and substitute a dead labour
power for it. Since, however, he thought that living labour power was the
objective, historical and necessary foundation of capital, he could only
think that it was digging its own grave. The illusion is that capital buried
labour power. More subtly, however, it turns labour power into the second
term of a stable opposition with capital. It makes this rupturing energy
which should shatter the relations of production into a term homogeneous
with the relations of production, in a simulation of opposition under the
sign of dead labour. From now on a single hegemonic agency (dead labour)
divides into capital and living labour. The antagonism is resolved by a
binary apparatus of coded operativity. But what, you might ask, of surplus-value
and production? Alright, capital doesn't give a damn. Without
lending capital a Marxist's intuition (even though Marx did everything he
could to alert capital to what was waiting for it: if it persisted in playing on
the terrain of production, it was heading for its death in the short term --
the economy was a fatal trap for capital), everything happened as if it had
clearly understood Marx on this point and had, in consequence, `chosen' to
liquidate production so as to go onto another kind of strategy. I am saying
That is why the only acts that accompany capital's real domination are
situated in the field of this radical indeterminacy and break with this
dissuasive economic strategy.
We will not destroy the system by a direct, dialectical revolution of the
economic or political infrastructure. Everything produced by contradiction,
by the relation of forces, or by energy in general, will only feed back
into the mechanism and give it impetus, following a circular distortion
similar to a Moebius strip. We will never defeat it by following its own logic
of energy, calculation, reason and revolution, history and power, or some
finality or counter-finality. The worst violence at this level has no purchase,
and will only backfire against itself. We will never defeat the system on the
plane of the real: the worst error of all our revolutionary strategies is to
believe that we will put an end to the system on the plane of the real: this is
their imaginary, imposed on them by the system itself, living or surviving
only by always leading those who attack the system to fight amongst each
other on the terrain of reality, which is always the reality of the system. This
is where they throw all their energies, their imaginary violence, where an
implacable logic constantly turns back into the system. We have only to do
it violence or counter-violence since it thrives on symbolic violence -- not in
the degraded sense in which this formula has found fortune, as a violence
`of signs', from which the system draws strength, or with which it `masks'
its material violence: symbolic violence is deduced from a logic of the
symbolic (which has nothing to do with the sign or with energy): reversal,
the incessant reversibility of the counter-gift and, conversely, the seizing of
power by the unilateral exercise of the gift.
[27]
We must therefore displace everything into the sphere of the symbolic,
where challenge, reversal and overbidding are the law, so that we can
respond to death only by an equal or superior death. There is no question
here of real violence or force, the only question concerns the challenge and
the logic of the symbolic. If domination comes from the system's retention
of the exclusivity of the gift without counter-gift -- the gift of work which
can only be responded to by destruction or sacrifice, if not in consumption,
which is only a spiral of the system of surplus-gratification without result,
therefore a spiral of surplus-domination; a gift of media and messages to
which, due to the monopoly of the code, nothing is allowed to retort; the
gift, everywhere and at every instant, of the social, of the protection
agency, security, gratification and the solicitation of the social from which
nothing is any longer permitted to escape -- then the only solution is to turn
So hostages are taken. On the symbolic or sacrificial plane, from which
every moral consideration of the innocence of the victims is ruled out, the
hostage is the substitute, the alter-ego of the `terrorist' -- the hostage's
death for the terrorist's. Hostage and terrorist may thereafter become
confused in the same sacrificial act. The stakes are death without any
possibility of negotiation, and therefore return to an inevitable overbidding.
Of course, they attempt to deploy the whole system of negotiation,
and the terrorists themselves often enter into this exchange scenario in
terms of this calculated equivalence (the hostages' lives against some
ransom or liberation, or indeed for the prestige of the operation alone).
From this perspective, taking hostages is not original at all, it simply
creates an unforeseen and selective relation of forces which can be resolved
either by traditional violence or by negotiation. It is a tactical action. There
is something else at stake, however, as we clearly saw at The Hague over
the course of ten days of incredible negotiations: no-one knew what could
be negotiated, nor could they agree on terms, nor on the possible
equivalences of the exchange. Or again, even if they were formulated, the
`terrorists' demands' amounted to a radical denial of negotiation. It is
precisely here that everything is played out, for with the impossibility of all
negotiation we pass into the symbolic order, which is ignorant of this type
of calculation and exchange (the system itself lives solely by negotiation,
even if this takes place in the equilibrium of violence). The system can only
respond to this irruption of the symbolic (the most serious thing to befall it,
basically the only `revolution') by the real, physical death of the terrorists.
This, however, is its defeat, since their death was their stake, so that by
bringing about their deaths the system has merely impaled itself on its own
violence without really responding to the challenge that was thrown to it.
Because the system can easily compute every death, even war atrocities,
but cannot compute the death-challenge or symbolic death, since this death
has no calculable equivalent, it opens up an inexpiable overbidding by
other means than a death in exchange. Nothing corresponds to death
except death. Which is precisely what happens in this case: the system itself
is driven to suicide in return, which suicide is manifest in its disarray and
defeat. However infinitesimal in terms of relations of forces it might be, the
colossal apparatus of power is eliminated in this situation where (the very
excess of its) derision is turned back against itself. The police and the army,
all the institutions and mobilised violence of power whether individually or
The challenge has the efficiency of a murderer. Every society apart from
ours knows that, or used to know it. Ours is in the process of rediscovering
it. The routes of symbolic effectiveness are those of an alternative politics.
Thus the dying ascetic challenges God ever to give him the equivalent of
this death. God does all he can to give him this equivalent `a hundred times
over', in the form of prestige, of spiritual power, indeed of global
hegemony. But the ascetic's secret dream is to attain such an extent of
mortification that even God would be unable either to take up the
challenge, or to absorb the debt. He will then have triumphed over God,
and become God himself. That is why the ascetic is always close to heresy
and sacrilege, and as such condemned by the Church, whose function it is
merely to preserve God from this symbolic face-to-face, to protect Him
from this mortal challenge where He is summoned to die, to sacrifice
Himself in order to take up the challenge of the mortified ascetic. The
Church will have had this role for all time, avoiding this type of
catastrophic confrontation (catastrophic primarily for the Church) and
substituting a rule-bound exchange of penitences and gratifications, the
impressario of a system of equivalences between God and men.
The same situation exists in our relation to the system of power. All
these institutions, all these social, economic, political and psychological
mediations, are there so that no-one ever has the opportunity to issue this
symbolic challenge, this challenge to the death, the irreversible gift which,
like the absolute mortification of the ascetic, brings about a victory over all
power, however powerful its authority may be. It is no longer necessary
that the possibility of this direct symbolic confrontation ever takes place.
And this is the source of our profound boredom.
This is why taking hostages and other similar acts rekindle some
fascination: they are at once an exorbitant mirror for the system of its own
repressive violence, and the model of a symbolic violence which is always
forbidden it, the only violence it cannot exert: its own death.
Labour and Death
Other societies have known multiple stakes: over birth and kinship, the
soul and the body, the true and the false, reality and appearance. Political
economy has reduced them to just one: production. But then the stakes
were large, the violence extreme and hopes too high. Today this is over.
The system has rid production of all real stakes. A more radical truth is
Every stake is symbolic. There have only ever been symbolic stakes.
This dimension is etched everywhere into the structural law of value,
everywhere immanent in the code.
Labour power is instituted on death. A man must die to become labour
power. He converts this death into a wage. But the economic violence
capital inflicted on him in the equivalence of the wage and labour power is
nothing next to the symbolic violence inflicted on him by his definition as a
productive force. Faking this equivalence is nothing next to the equivalence,
qua signs, of wages and death.
The very possibility of quantitative equivalence presupposes death. The
equivalence of wages and labour power presupposes the death of the
worker, while that of any commodity and any other presupposes the
symbolic extermination of objects. Death makes the calculation of equivalence,
and regulation by indifference, possible in general. This death is not
violent and physical, it is the indifferent consumption of life and death, the
mutual neutralisation of life and death in sur-vival, or death deferred.
Labour is slow death. This is generally understood in the sense of
physical exhaustion. But it must be understood in another sense. Labour is
not opposed, like a sort of death, to the `fulfilment of life', which is the
idealist view; labour is opposed as a slow death to a violent death. That is
the symbolic reality. Labour is opposed as deferred death to the immediate
death of sacrifice. Against every pious and `revolutionary' view of the
`labour (or culture) is the opposite of life' type, we must maintain that the
only alternative to labour is not free time, or non-labour, it is sacrifice.
All this becomes clear in the genealogy of the slave. First, the prisoner of
war is purely and simply put to death (one does him an honour in this way).
Then he is `spared' [épargné] and conserved [conservé] (=servus), under
the category of spoils of war and a prestige good: he becomes a slave and
passes into sumptuary domesticity. It is only later that he passes into servile
labour. However, he is no longer a `labourer', since labour only appears in
the phase of the serf or the emancipated slave, finally relieved of the
mortgage of being put to death. Why is he freed? Precisely in order to
work.
Labour therefore everywhere draws its inspiration from deferred death.
It comes from deferred death. Slow or violent, immediate or deferred, the
scansion of death is decisive: it is what radically distinguishes two types of
organisation, the economic and the sacrificial. We live irreversibly in the
first of these, which has inexorably taken root in the différance of death.
The scenario has never changed. Whoever works has not been put to
death, he is refused this honour. And labour is first of all the sign of being
judged worthy only of life. Does capital exploit the workers to death?
Paradoxically, the worst it inflicts on them is refusing them death. It is by
The substance of labour and exploitation is indifferent in this symbolic
relation. The power of the master always primarily derives from this
suspension of death. Power is therefore never, contrary to what we might
imagine, the power of putting to death, but exactly the opposite, that of
allowing to live -- a life that the slave lacks the power to give. The master
confiscates the death of the other while retaining the right to risk his own.
The slave is refused this, and is condemned to a life without return, and
therefore without possible expiation.
By removing death, the master removes the slave from the circulation of
symbolic goods. This is the violence the master does to the slave,
condemning him to labour power. There lies the secret of power (in the
dialectic of the master and the slave, Hegel also derives the domination of
the master from the deferred threat of death hanging over the slave).
Labour, production and exploitation would only be one of the possible
avatars of this power structure, which is a structure of death.
This changes every revolutionary perspective on the abolition of power.
If power is death deferred, it will not be removed insofar as the suspension
of this death will not be removed. And if power, of which this is always and
everywhere the definition, resides in the act of giving without being given,
it is clear that the power the master has to unilaterally grant life will only be
abolished if this life can be given to him -- in a non-deferred death. There is
no other alternative; you will never abolish this power by staying alive,
since there will have been no reversal of what has been given. Only the
surrender of this life, retaliating against a deferred death with an immediate
death, constitutes a radical response, and the only possibility of
abolishing power. No revolutionary strategy can begin without the slave
putting his own death back at stake, since this is what the master puts off in
the différance from which he profits by securing his power. Refuse to be
put to death, refuse to live in the mortal reprieve of power, refuse the duty
of this life and never be quits with living, in effect be under obligation to
settle this long-term credit through the slow death of labour, since this slow
death does not alter the future of this abject dimension, in the fatality of
power. Violent death changes everything, slow death changes nothing, for
there is a rhythm, a scansion necessary to symbolic exchange: something
has to be given in the same movement and following the same rhythm,
otherwise there is no reciprocity and it is quite simply not given. The
strategy of the system of power is to displace the time of the exchange,
substituting continuity and mortal linearity for the immediate retaliation of
death. It is thus futile for the slave (the worker) to give little by little, in
infinitesimal doses, to the rope of labour on which he is hung to death, to
give his life to the master or to capital, for this `sacrifice' in small doses is no
longer a sacrifice -- it doesn't touch the most important thing, the différance
of death, and merely distils a process whose structure remains the same.
We could in fact advance the hypothesis that in labour the exploited
The very modality of the response to the slow death of labour leaves the
master the possibility of, once again, repeatedly, giving the slave life
through labour. The accounts are never settled, it always profits power, the
dialectic of power which plays on the splitting of the poles of death, the
poles of exchange. The slave remains the prisoner of the master's dialectic,
while his death, or his distilled life, serves the indefinite repetition of
domination.
This domination increases as the system is charged with neutralising the
symbolic retaliation by buying it back through wages. If, through labour,
the exploited attempts to give his life to the exploiter, the latter wards off
this restitution by means of wages. Here again we must take a symbolic
radiograph. Contrary to all appearances and experience (capital buys its
labour power from the worker and extorts surplus labour), capital gives
labour to the worker (and the worker himself gives capital to the
capitalist). In German this is Arbeitgeber: the entrepreneur is a `provider of
labour'; and Arbeitnehmer: it is the capitalist who gives, who has the
initiative of the gift, which secures him, as in every social order, a pre-eminence
and a power far beyond the economic. The refusal of labour, in
its radical form, is the refusal of this symbolic domination and the
humiliation of being bestowed upon. The gift and the taking of labour
function directly as the code of the dominant social relation, as the code of
discrimination. Wages are the mark of this poisonous gift, the sign which
epitomises the whole code. They sanction this unilateral gift of labour, or
rather wages symbolically buy back the domination exercised by capital
through the gift of labour. At the same time, they furnish capital with the
possibility of confining the operation to a contractual dimension, thus
stabilising confrontation on economic ground. Furthermore, wages turn
the wage-earner into a `consumer of goods', reiterating his status as a
`consumer of labour' and reinforcing his symbolic deficit. To refuse labour,
to dispute wages is thus to put the process of the gift, expiation and
economic compensation back into question, and therefore to expose the
fundamental symbolic process.
Wages are no longer `grabbed' today. You too are given a wage, not in
exchange for labour, but so that you spend it, which is itself another kind of
labour. In the consumption or use of objects, the wage-consumer finds
Every domination must be bought back, redeemed. This was formerly
done through sacrificial death (the ritual death of the king or the leader),
or even by ritual inversion (feasts and other social rites: but these are still
forms of sacrifice). This social game of reversal comes to an end with the
dialectic of the master and the slave, where the reversibility of power cedes
its place to a dialectic of the reproduction of power. The redemption of
power must always, however, be simulated, and this is done by the
apparatus of capital where formal redemption takes place throughout
the immense machine of labour, wages and consumption. Economics is the
sphere of redemption par excellence, where the domination of capital
manages to redeem itself without ever really putting itself at stake. On the
contrary, it diverts the process of redemption into its own infinite
reproduction. This is perhaps where we find the necessity of economics and
its historical appearance, at the level of societies so much more vast and
mobile than primitive groups, where the urgency of a system of redemption
which could be measured, controlled and infinitely extended (which rituals
cannot be) all at the same time, and which above all would not put the
exercise and heredity of power back into question. Production and
consumption are an original and unprecedented solution to this problem.
By simulating redemption in this new form, the slide from the symbolic
into the economic allows the definitive hegemony of political force over
society to be secured.
Economics miraculously succeeds in masking the real structure of power
by reversing the terms of its definition. While power consists in unilateral
giving (of life in particular, see above), a contrary interpretation has been
successfully imposed: power would consist in a unilateral taking and
appropriation. Under cover of this ingenious retraction, real symbolic
domination can continue to do as it will, since all the efforts of those under
this domination will rush into the trap of taking back from power what it
has taken from them, even `taking power' themselves, thus blindly pushing
on along the lines of their domination.
In fact, labour, wages, power and revolution must all be read against the
grain:
-- labour is not exploitation, it is given by capital;
-- wages are not grabbed, capital gives them too -- it does not buy a labour
power, it buys back the power of capital;
[29]
-- the slow death of labour is not endured, it is a desperate attempt, a
challenge to capital's unilateral gift of labour;
-- the only effective reply to power is to give it back what it gives you, and
this is only symbolically possible by means of death.
However, if, as we have seen, the system itself deposes economics,
removes its substance and its credibility, then, in this perspective, doesn't it
put its own symbolic domination back into question? No, since the system
brings about the overall reign of its power strategy, the gift without
counter-gift, which becomes fused with deferred death. The same social
relations are set up in the media and in consumption, where we have seen
(`Requiem pour les Media' [Utopie, 4, 1971]) that there is no possible
response or counter-gift to the unilateral delivery of messages. We were
able to interpret (CERFI's project concerning automobile accidents) auto-slaughter
as
the price that the collective pays to its institutions ...: the State's gifts inscribe a
´debt' in the collective accounts book. Gratuitous death is then merely an
attempt to absorb this deficit. The blood on the roads is a desperate form of
compensation for the State's tarmac gifts. The accident thus takes its place in the
space that institutes a symbolic debt towards the State. It is likely that the more
this debt grows, the more marked will be the tendency towards the accident.
Every `rational' strategy for curbing this phenomenon (prevention, speed limits,
rescue services, repression) is effectively negligible. They simulate the possibility
of integrating the accident into a rational system, and are therefore incapable of
grasping the root of the problem: balancing a symbolic debt which founds,
legitimates and reinforces the collective dependency on the State. On the
contrary, these `rational' strategies accentuate the phenomenon. In order to
avert the effects of accidents, they propose to institute more mechanisms, more
state institutions, supplementary `gifts', which are simply means of aggravating
the symbolic debt.
In this way the struggle is everywhere opposed to a political authority
(cf. Pierre Clastres, Society against the State [tr. R. Hurley and A. Stein,
New York: Zone Books, 1990]), which sets all the power it can draw from
its showers of gifts -- the survival it maintains and the death it withdraws --
above the struggle in order to stockpile and then distil it for its own ends.
Nobody really accepts this bonus forever, you give what you can,
[30]
but
power always gives more so as to serve better, and an entire society or a
few individuals can go to great lengths, even their own destruction, to put
an end to it. This is the only absolute weapon, and the mere collective
threat of it can make power collapse. Power, faced with this symbolic
`blackmail' (the barricades of '68, hostage-taking), loses its footing: since it
thrives on my slow death, I will oppose it with my violent death. And it is
because we are living with slow death that we dream of a violent death.
Even this dream is unbearable to power.
Note from page 7:
1. If it were only a question of the ascendancy of exchange-value over use-value (or the
ascendancy of the structural over the functional dimension of language), then Marx and
Saussure have already signalled it. Marx almost turns use-value into the medium or the
alibi, pure and simple, of exchange-value. His entire analysis is based on the principle of
equivalence at the core of the system of exchange-value. But if equivalence is at the core
of the system, there is no indeterminacy in the global system (there is always a dialectical
determinacy and finality of the mode of production). The current system, however, is
itself based on indeterminacy, and draws impetus from it. Conversely, it is haunted by
the death of all determinacy.
Note from page 7:
2. [See Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, tr. Charles
Levin, St Louis, MO: Telos, 1972 -- tr.]
Note from page 9:
3. Theoretical production, like material production, loses its determinacy and begins to
turn around itself, slipping abysally [en abyme] towards a reality that cannot be found.
This is where we are today: undecidability, the era of floating theories, as much as
floating money. No matter what perspective they come from (the psychoanalytic
included), no matter with what violence they struggle and claim to rediscover an
immanence, or a movement without systems of reference (Deleuze, Lyotard, etc.), all
contemporary theories are floating and have no meaning other than to serve as signs for
one another. It is pointless to insist on their coherence with some `reality', whatever that
might be. The system has removed every secure reference from theory as it has from any
other labour power. Theory no longer has any use-value, the theoretical mirror of
production has also cracked. So much the better. What I mean is that the very
undecidability of theory is an effect of the code. Let there be no illusions: there is no
schizophrenic `drift' about this flotation of theories, where flows pass freely over the
body without organs (of what, capital?). It merely signifies that any theory can from now
on be exchanged against any other according to variable exchange rates, but without any
longer being invested anywhere, unless it is the mirror of their writing.
Note from page 10:
4. [Cf. Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, tr. I. H. Grant, London: Athlone, 1992
-- tr.]
Note from page 13:
5.[In English in the original -- tr.]
Note from page 14:
6. [In English in the original -- tr.]
Note from page 17:
7. Marx, that cunning Jesuit, was not far from recognising this with his concept of the
collective labourer:
Note from page 18:
8. Free time is, so to speak, a form of `complex labour', in the sense that, as opposed to
simple labour, it accords with the definition of service: solidarity of the prestation and
the prestator, non-equivalence to a time of abstract social labour, non-equivalence to a
wage which reproduces labour power. Marx would have been able to see this were he
not myopically concerned with productive labour and the multiple distinctions which
together tend to salvage the subject of history: the productive worker. `The reification of
labour power, driven to perfection, would shatter the reified form by cutting the chain
that ties the individual to the machinery', writes Marcuse. `[Automation] would open
the dimension of free time as the one in which man's private and societal existence
would constitute itself' (Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man [London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1964], p. 37). Instead of phantasising over free time, Marcuse understood
that the system, throughout the technical progress and automation, produces free time
as the extreme reification of labour power, as the accomplished form of abstract social
labour time, simply by being the inverted simulation of non-labour.
Note from page 18:
9. Paid unemployment already provides an example of this (one year of severance pay in
France at the time of writing). In certain other countries, however, it has been replaced
by a `negative taxation' scheme, which provides for a basic minimum wage for all,
housewives, the handicapped, the young unemployed, to be deducted from eventual
paid labour. Unemployment quite simply disappears here as a critical conjunction (with
all the political implications it used to have). Labour becomes an option, while wages
become a certificate of existence, an automatic inscription in the social apparatus.
Capital still remains as wages, but this time in its pure form -- freed from a labour (as the
signifier, following Saussure's analogy, was freed from the signified) which was only an
occasional content of capital.
Note from page 18:
10. Throughout the social evolution of housing, we can see how capital's strategy has
displaced itself from an economic process to an extensive process.
Note from page 19:
11. Thus the Californian utopia of the cybernetic disintegration of the `tertiary metropolis':
home-based computer labour. Labour is pulverised into every pore of society and
everyday life. As well as labour power, the space-time of labour also ceases to exist:
society constitutes nothing but a single continuum of the processes of value. Labour has
become a way of life. Nothing can reinstate the factory walls, the golden age of the
factory and class struggle against the ubiquity of capital, surplus-value and labour,
against their inevitable disappearance as such. The worker merely nourishes the
imaginary of the struggle, just as the cop nourishes the imaginary of repression.
Note from page 19:
12. The concept of surplus-value has simply lost any meaning as regards a system which,
from reproducing labour power in order to generate profit and surplus-value, has now
become reproductive of life in its entirety through advanced redistribution or reinjection
of every equivalent of social surplus labour. From this point on, surplus-value is
everywhere and nowhere. Capital no longer has any `incidental expenses', nor on the
other hand has it any `profit' in the sense of a unilateral extortion. The law of the system
requires that you give yourself up to its redistributions in order that it circulates and that
each and everyone, caught in the tightly woven net of this incessant redistribution, might
become a manager, while the whole group becomes able to manage its own surplus-value,
thus implicating oneself fundamentally within the everyday political order of
capital. And just as, viewed from the point of view of capital, surplus-value has lost all
meaning, it has also lost all meaning from the point of view of the exploited. The
distinction between a fraction of labour returning as a wage and a remainder called
surplus-value has lost all meaning from the point of view of the worker who used to
reproduce her labour power as a wage, but now reproduces her entire life in a
generalised process of labour.
Note from page 19:
13. [Baudrillard is playing on the French term investissement, used to translate Freud's
Besestzung, rendered in English as `cathexis'. The French term covers the political and
libidinal economic sense of `investment' as well as the military sense of the `occupation'
of hostile territory -- tr.]
Note from page 20:
14. Other parallel forms of maximalist reversal: equal wages for all, the struggle against
qualifications. All these forms seek the end of the division of labour (the end of labour as
social relation) and the end of the law of equivalence in the field of wages and labour
power, which is of fundamental importance for the system. Therefore they indirectly
target the very form of political economy.
Note from page 20:
15. This same phenomenon arises in the `developing' countries. There is no upper limit to
the cost of raw materials once they, outside the grasp of economics, become the sign and
the gauge of the acceptance of a global political order, a peaceful planetary co-existence
where the developing countries are forcibly socialised under the great powers. The
escalation of prices then becomes a challenge, not only to the wealth of the Western
countries, but also to the political system of peaceful co-existence in the face of a single
predominant global political class. Whether this class is capitalist or communist is of
minor importance.
Note from page 21:
16. The energy crisis gave both `types' of inflation an alibi and a perfect deterrent in one go.
From this point on, inflation as a structural crisis internal to the system may be plausibly
blamed on the `Overvaluation' of energy and raw materials by the countries that produce
them. Disaffection with the productivist system, which, amongst other things, is
expressed in the maximal wage challenge, may be counteracted by the threat of poverty,
that is, by threatening the use-value of the economic system itself.
Note from page 23:
17. [See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia I,
tr. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H. R. Lane, London: Athlone, 1984, for an exposition of the
`Deleuzian unconscious' -- tr.]
Note from page 24:
18. This intervention, however, is not exclusive of any other group deprived of social
representation. When young women, high school students, homosexuals and even
`proles' become `savages', or if we admit that basically the unions do not represent them
at all, but only themselves, then we all in like manner become `immigrants'. On the
other hand, these groups might cease to be `immigrants'. There are then no `immigrants
as such', and they do not constitute a new historical subject, a neo-proletariat who would
take over as the other.
Note from page 24:
19. [Confédération générale du travail, the French Trades Union Congress -- tr.]
Note from page 29:
20. [For an exposition of the Great Confinement, see Michel Foucault, Madness and
Civilisation, tr. Richard Howard, London: Tavistock, 1967 -- tr.]
Note from page 31:
21. As an illustration of this, we might analyse an advert for the Banque Nationale de Paris
(BNP), which reads: `I am interested in your money -- fair's fair -- lend me your money
and you may profit from my bank.'
Note from page 31:
22. So just as there had been (for Marx as well) a naturalist phantasy of use-value, there is
for us today an economistic phantasy of exchange-value.
Note from page 32:
23. The American Senate has gone to the extent of calculating what it would cost to bring
water back to the purity it had before the European conquest of the Americas (the `1491
standard', Christopher Columbus having landed, as we know, in 1492): $350 million.
These millions matter little, however, since what the Senators are in fact calculating is
the cost of bringing the system itself back to the original purity of primitive accumulation,
the golden age of labour power. The 1890, or indeed 1840, standard?
Note from page 33:
24. There are, of course, contradictions remaining between the structural and the market
law of value, just as, in a previous phase, there were between the law of the market and
resistant pre-capitalist values (which contradictions have not completely disappeared).
In this way, the ultimate end of the system is the control of death: death is one of the
structural markings of life, it also clashes with economic imperatives and a traditional
logic of profit (the enormous cost of long-term care, hospitalisation, and so on). A
compromise results from this, an absurd equilibrium (we can afford to keep 35 per cent
of all leukaemia sufferers alive). Assessing the marginal costs of death. Anything above
this level and we let them die. But this is not cynical economics, on the contrary, the
economy prevents the system from following the conclusions of its own logic and barring
people's access to death.
Note from page 36:
25. The gift, under the sign of gift-exchange, has been made into the distinguishing mark of
primitive `economies', and at the same time into the alternative principle to the law of
value and political economy. There is no worse mystification. The gift is our myth, the
idealist myth correlative to our materialist myth, and we bury the primitives under both
myths at the same time. The primitive symbolic process knows nothing of the gratuity of
the gift, it knows only the challenge and the reversibility of exchanges. When this
reversibility is broken, precisely by the unilateral possibility of giving (which pre-supposes
the possibility of stockpiling value and transferring it in one direction only),
then the properly symbolic relation is dead and power makes an appearance: it will
merely be deployed thereafter throughout the economic apparatus of the contract. It is
our (operational) fiction, our metaphysics, the idea that it is possible to accumulate
stock-value in its head (capital), to make it increase and multiply: this is the trap of the
accumulation and capital. It is equally our fiction, however, to think that we may
relinquish it absolutely (with the gift). The primitives know that this possibility does not exist,
that the arresting of value on one term, the very possibility of isolating a segment
of exchange, one side of the exchange, is unthinkable, that everything has a compensation,
not in the contractual sense, but in the sense that the process of exchange is
unavoidably reversible. They base all their relations on this incessant backfire,
ambivalence and death in exchange, whereas we base our order on the possibility of
separating two distinct poles of exchange and making them autonomous. There follows
either the equivalent exchange (the contract) or the inequivalent exchange that has no
compensation (the gift). But both, as we shall see, obey the same dislocation of the
process and the same autonomisation of value.
Note from page 41:
26. This is no doubt especially true in the phase of physical abjection and savage
exploitation, in capitalist `prostitution' under the market law of value. How much of this
remains in our phase, the structural law of value?
Note from page 42:
27. This is particularly clear when wages are unilaterally bestowed, imposed in `negative
taxation' without any labour in return. The wage-earner without equivalence: in this
trans-economie contract, we see a pure domination and pure subservience to the gift and
the premium emerge.
Note from page 43:
28. That is symbolic exchange. We must emphasise that it stands opposed to the entire
liberal or Christian humanist ideology of the gift. The gift is the source and even the
essence of power. Only the counter-gift, the reversibility of symbolic exchange,
abolishes power.
1: The End of Production
[p. 7]
loading the sign with the burden of `utility', with gravity -- its form of
representative equivalence -- all this is over with. Now the other stage of
value has the upper hand, a total relativity, general commutation,
combination and simulation -- simulation, in the sense that, from now on,
signs are exchanged against each other rather than against the real (it is not
that they just happen to be exchanged against each other, they do so on
condition that they are no longer exchanged against the real). The
emancipation of the sign: remove this `archaic' obligation to designate
something and it finally becomes free, indifferent and totally indeterminate,
in the structural or combinatory play which succeeds the previous
rule of determinate equivalence. The same operation takes place at the
level of labour power and the production process: the annihilation of any
goal as regards the contents of production allows the latter to function as a
code, and the monetary sign, for example, to escape into infinite speculation,
beyond all reference to a real of production, or even to a gold-
standard. The flotation of money and signs, the flotation of `needs' and
ends of production, the flotation of labour itself -- the commutability of
every term is accompanied by speculation and a limitless inflation (and we
really have total liberty -- no duties, disaffection and general disenchantment;
but this remains a magic, a sort of magical obligation which
keeps the sign chained up to the real, capital has freed signs from this
`naïvety' in order to deliver them into pure circulation). Neither Saussure
nor Marx had any presentiment of all this: they were still in the golden age
of the dialectic of the sign and the real, which is at the same time the
`classical' period of capital and value. Their dialectic is in shreds, and the
real has died of the shock of value acquiring this fantastic autonomy.
Determinacy is dead, indeterminacy holds sway. There has been an extermination
(in the literal sense of the word) of the real of production and
the real of signification.
[3]
[p. 8]
structural law of value signify any pre-eminence of the sign whatever. This
illusion derives from the fact that Marx developed the one in the shadow of
the commodity, while Saussure developed the other in the shadow of the
linguistic sign. But this illusion must be shattered. The commodity law of
value is a law of equivalences, and this law operates throughout every
sphere: it equally designates the equivalence in the configuration of the
sign, where one signifier and one signified facilitate the regulated exchange
of a referential content (the other parallel modality being the linearity of
the signifier, contemporaneous with the linear and cumulative time of
production).
[p. 9]
in every media message, the useful and the useless at the level of objects,
nature and culture at every level of signification. All the great humanist
criteria of value, the whole civilisation of moral, aesthetic and practical
judgement are effaced in our system of images and signs. Everything
becomes undecidable, the characteristic effect of the domination of the
code, which everywhere rests on the principle of neutralisation, of
indifference.
[5]
This is the generalised brothel of capital, a brothel not for
prostitution, but for substitution and commutation.
[p. 10]
although in contradiction with the relations of production, remained a
reference, that of social wealth. An aspect of production still supports both
a social form called capital and its internal critique called Marxism. Now,
revolutionary demands are based on the abolition of the commodity law of
value.
[p. 11]
what it designates, is to replicate itself. In the past, labour was used to
designate the reality of a social production and a social objective of
accumulating wealth. Even capital and surplus-value exploited it -- precisely
where it retained a use-value for the expanded reproduction of capital
and its final destruction. It was shot through with finality anyway -- if the
worker is absorbed in the pure and simple reproduction of his labour
power, it is not true that the process of production is experienced as
senseless repetition. Labour revolutionises society through its very abjection,
as a commodity whose potential always exceeds pure and simple
reproduction of value.
[p. 12]
[p. 13]
beneath commodities from the outset: to remove indeterminacy from
nature (and man) in order to submit it to the determinacy of value. This is
confirmed in the constructionist mania for bulldozers, motorways, `infrastructures',
and in the civilising mania of the era of production, a mania for
leaving no fragment unproduced, for countersigning everything with
production, without even the hope of an excess of wealth. Producing in
order to mark, producing in order to reproduce the marked man. What is
production today apart from this terrorism of the code? This is as clear for
us as it was for the first industrial generations, who dealt with machines as
with an absolute enemy, harbingers of total destructuration, before the
comforting dream of a historical dialectic of production developed. The
Luddite practices which arose everywhere to some extent, the savagery of
attacking the instrument of production (primarily attacking itself as the
productive force), endemic sabotage and defection bear lengthy testimony
to the fragility of the productive order. Smashing machines is an aberrant
act if they are the means of production, if any ambiguity remains over their
future use-value. If, however, the ends of this production collapse, then the
respect due to the means of production also collapses, and the machines
appear as their true end, as direct and immediate operational signs of the
social relation to death on which capital is nourished. Nothing then stands
in the way of their destruction. In this sense, the Luddites were much
clearer than Marx on the impact of the irruption of the industrial order,
and today, at the catastrophic end of this process, to which Marx himself
has misled us in the dialectical euphoria of productive forces, they have in
some sense exacted their revenge.
[p. 14]
every aspect of life in the form of a control, a permanent occupation of
spaces and times regulated according to an omnipresent code. Wherever
there are people, they must be fixed, whether in schools, factories, on the
beach, in front of the TV, or being retrained. Generalised and permanent
mobilisation. Such labour is not, however, productive in the sense of
`original'; it is nothing more than the mirror of society, its imaginary, its
fantastic reality principle. Perhaps its death drive.
[p. 15]
to equations and balance sheets of forces, and the other tends towards
mobile and aleatory sets, which neutralise whatever escapes or resists them
by connection and not by annexation.
[p. 16]
formula according to which, at a certain stage of capital, man `steps to
the side of the production process, instead of being its chief actor' (ibid.,
p. 705). This formula goes well beyond political economy and its critique,
since it literally signifies that it is a matter no longer of a production
process, but of a process of exclusion and relegation.
[p. 17]
this was happening from the outset. In the Grundrisse, Marx says: `Labour
becomes productive only by producing its own opposite [that is, capital]'
(p. 305n), from which we may logically conclude that if labour comes to
reproduce itself, as is the case today within the compass of the `collective
labourer', it ceases to be productive. This is the unforeseen consequence of
a definition which did not even consider that capital might take root in
something other than the `productive', precisely, perhaps, in labour voided
of its productivity, in `unproductive' labour, somehow neutralised, where
capital simply eludes the dangerous determinacy of `productive' labour and
can begin to establish its total domination. By misunderstanding `unproductive
labour', Marx concedes the real undefined character of labour on
which the strategy of capital is based.
[p. 18]
[p. 19]
confirms the principles elaborated in the course of history in those other
social spaces that preceded manufacturing industry and served as a model
for it: the asylum, the ghetto, the general hospital, the prison -- all the sites
of enclosure and concentration that our culture has hidden in its march to
civilisation. Today, all these determinate sites are themselves losing even
their own limits, they are spread throughout global society since the asylum
form, carceral form and discrimination have begun to invest the whole
social space, every moment of real life.
[13]
All these things -- factories,
asylums, prisons, schools -- still exist, and will no doubt continue to exist
for an indefinite period, as warning signs, to divert the reality of the
domination of capital into an imaginary materiality. There have always
been churches to hide the death of God, or to hide the fact that God was
everywhere, which amounts to the same thing.
[p. 20]
functional status of the production of services, just as capital uses labour
power. Everyone is thus invested with the fundamental mentality of
capital.
[p. 21]
categories of political economy. The same process ramifies in two other
directions.
[p. 22]
signified, but in the sense that it is well rid of every signified (every `real'
equivalent) as a brake to its proliferation and its unlimited play. Money can
thus be reproduced according to a simple play of transfers and writings,
according to an incessant splitting and increase of its own abstract
substance.
[p. 23]
speed at which it circulates. These distortions still persist today, as the
resistance of national currencies (bound up with a market, a production
and a local equilibrium) to international speculative currencies testifies. It
is, however, the latter that is leading the offensive, because it is what
circulates at the highest rate, it is what drifts and floats: a simple play of
flotation can ruin any national economy. In accordance with a differential
rate of rotation, every sector is thus directed by this high intensity flotation
which, far from being a baroque, epiphenomenal process (`What is the
Stock Market for?'), is the purest expression of the system. We discover
this scenario everywhere: in the inconvertibility of currencies into gold, or
in the inconvertibility of signs into their systems of reference; in the
floating and generalised convertibility of currencies amongst themselves,
or in the mobility and the endless structural play of signs. But we also
discover this in the flotation of all the categories of political economy once
they lose their gold-reference, labour power and social production: labour
and non-labour, labour and capital, become commutable, all logic has
dissolved; and we discover this in the flotation of all the categories of
consciousness where the mental equivalent of the gold-standard, the
subject, has been lost. There are no more authorities to which to refer,
under whose jurisdiction producers could exchange their values in accordance
with controlled equivalents: the end of the gold-standard. There are
no more authorities to which to refer, under whose aegis a subject could
exchange objects dialectically, or exchange their determinations around a
stable identity in accordance with definite rules: the end of the conscious
subject. (We are tempted to say that this is the reign of the unconscious.)
The logical consequence of this is, if the conscious subject is the mental
equivalent of the gold-standard, then the unconscious is the mental
equivalent of speculative currency and hot money. Today, individuals,
disinvested as subjects and robbed of their fixed relations, are drifting,
in relation to one another, into an incessant mode of transferential
fluctuations: flows, connections, disconnections, transference/counter-
transference. Society as a whole could easily be described in terms of the
Deleuzian unconscious,
[19]
or of monetary mechanics (or indeed in the
Riesmanian terms of `other-directedness', which is already, unfortunately
in Anglo-Saxon and therefore barely schizophrenic terms, the flotation of
identities). Why privilege the unconscious here (even if it is orphan and
schizophrenic)? The unconscious is that mental structure contemporaneous
with the most radical, current phase of dominant exchange; it is
contemporaneous with the structural revolution of value.
[p. 24]
-- a productive historical agency.
[p. 25]
namely spreading the strike to other factories or to other sectors of the
workforce, thus taking advantage of the now ritual spring mass demonstrations.
Yet even this mechanism of control, which had been repeatedly
tested ever since 1968, which the unions counted they could rely on for
generations to come, let them down this time. Even the non-savage rank
and file (at Seguin, Flins and Sandouville) were sometimes on strike and
sometimes back at work (which is also important), without paying heed to
the `advice' from their unions. The unions were constantly being caught
off-guard. The workers wanted nothing to do with whatever the unions
won from management and put before them. Those concessions they drew
from the workers in order to relaunch negotiations with management were
rejected by the management, who then closed down the factories.
Management appealed to the workers while ignoring the unions, and in
fact deliberately forced the crisis in order to force the unions to retreat:
couldn't they control all the workers? The unions' social legitimacy, and
even their existence, was at issue. Hence the bosses' (and all levels of
government) adoption of a `hard line'. It was no longer a question of a test
of strength between the organised (unionised) proletariat and the bosses,
but of a test of representativity for the unions, under pressure from both the
rank and file and management. Such tests result from every savage strike
over the last few years sparked off by non-union personnel, rebellious
youth, immigrants: the classless.
[p. 26]
are the authorities to which the workers delegate their power, which is
turned against them under the form of management or government
delegations of power. Capital itself only alienates labour power and its
product, its only monopoly is production. Parties and unions alienate social
power from the exploited and have a monopoly on representation. Calling
them into question is a revolutionary historical development. But this
development is paid for by a loss of clarity, a loss of resolution, an apparent
regression, the absence of continuity, logic and objectives, etc. This is
because everything becomes uncertain when it is a matter of confronting
one's own repressive agency, of driving the unionist, shop steward, official
or spokesperson from one's own head. But the confusing character of
spring '73 indicates precisely that we have fundamentally located the
problem: the unions and parties are dead, all that remains for them to do is
die.
[p. 27]
strictly speaking. Discontinuity, latitudinarianism, indiscipline as regards
working hours, indifference with regard to wage pressure, to surplus,
promotion, accumulation, forecasting. You do only what you have to, then
stop and go back to it later. This is exactly the behaviour that inhabitants of
`developing countries' were reproached for by the colonists, who found it
impossible to train the inhabitants to obey value and labour, rational and
continuous time, the concept of saving wages, and so on. It is only by
sending them abroad that the inhabitants were finally integrated into the
labour process. And it is at precisely this point that Western workers start
to `regress' more and more into the behaviour of `underdeveloped'
inhabitants. It is not that seeing the Western proletariat in the grip of
corruption constitutes a revenge for colonisation in its most advanced form
(importing manual labour), although one day it might have to be the turn
of the proletariat to be exported to the developing countries in order to
relearn the historical and revolutionary values of labour.
[p. 28]
economy. It relies on a pious critique of the system. Concorde, the space
programme, etc., are not a waste of resources; on the contrary, since the
system, having reached this high point of `objective' futility, produces and
reproduces labour itself. Besides, this is precisely what everyone (including
the workers and the unions) demands of it. Everything revolves around
jobs (the social is just a matter of job creation), and in order to keep their
jobs, the British unions are prepared to transform Concorde into a
supersonic bomber. Inflation or unemployment? Long live inflation!
Labour, like social security, has come to be just another consumer good to
be distributed throughout society. The enormous paradox is that the less
labour becomes a productive force, the more it becomes a product. This is
not the least important characteristic of the current mutations of the
capitalist system, the revolution from the specific stage of production to the
stage of reproduction. It has less and less need of labour power in order to
function and grow, while there are increasing demands on it to produce
more and more labour.
[p. 29]
is primarily one of incarceration, concentration and exclusion. The
seventeenth-century incarceration described by Foucault
[22]
expands grotesquely
in the age of industrial manufacture. Didn't `industrial' labour
(which, unlike cottage industries, is collective, controlled, and stripped of
the means of production) evolve within the first great hôpitaux généraux?
In the beginning, society, in the process of rationalisation, incarcerated its
idle, its wanderers, its deviants, gave them an `occupation' and fixed them,
imposed its rational principle of labour on them. But these outcasts
contaminated the process of rationalisation in turn, and the rupture
produced when society instituted its principle of rationality spilled over the
whole of the society of labour: the Great Confinement is a model in
miniature, later generalised in the industrial system of every society that,
under the sign of labour and productivist finality, became a concentration
camp, a detention centre or a prison.
[p. 30]
[p. 31]
[p. 32]
movement of political economy and the revolution, a new legitimacy and
the most perfect alibi.
[p. 33]
simply alternatives, the strategic definition of neo-capitalism is to pass into
not a phase of abundance (consumption, repressive desublimation, sexual
liberation, etc.) but a phase of systematic alternation between the two terms
-- shortage and abundance -- because neither retains a reference, nor
therefore an antagonistic reality, and therefore because the system is
indifferent to which one it employs.
[p. 34]
of a whole society, the vulgate of every analysis. Sociologists,
human scientists, etc. (even Christians, especially Christians of course),
turn to Marxism as the discourse to which they refer. A whole new Divine
Left is rising. Everything has become `political' and `ideological' by the
same endless drift of the operation of integration. The newsflash is
political, sport is political, not to mention art: reason is everywhere on the
side of the class struggle. The entire latent discourse of capital has become
manifest, we notice a widespread jubilation secure in the assumption of
this `truth'.
[p. 35]
agencies would be far too dangerous a game, and would run the risk of
backfiring. No, better to level out, neutralise, cover over and indifferentiate,
which is what it knows how to do; that's how it follows its law. But it
also dissimulates this fundamental process under the `determinant' mask of
political economy.
[p. 36]
that everything happens as if, because it is not completely certain that
capital ever had this productivist view of itself (Marx was basically the only
one who had, and he projected this phantasy onto it as an historical truth);
it is more likely that it only ever played at production, even if this meant
that production had to be abandoned at a later stage, were it to draw
capital into fatal contradictions. Has capital ever taken production seriously?
Don't be so stupid: at the height of the seriousness of production,
capital is doubtless only a simulation.
[p. 37]
the principle of its power back against the system itself: the impossibility of
responding or retorting. To defy the system with a gift to which it cannot
respond save by its own collapse and death. Nothing, not even the system,
can avoid the symbolic obligation, and it is in this trap that the only chance
of a catastrophe for capital remains. The system turns on itself, as a
scorpion does when encircled by the challenge of death. For it is
summoned to answer, if it is not to lose face, to what can only be death.
The system must itself commit suicide in response to the multiplied challenge
of death and suicide.
[p. 38]
massed together, can do nothing against this lowly but symbolic death. For
this death draws it onto a plane where there is no longer any response
possible for it (hence the sudden structural liquefaction of power in '68, not
because it was less strong, but because of the simple symbolic displacement
operated by the students' practices). The system can only die in exchange,
defeat itself to lift the challenge. Its death at this instant is a symbolic
response, but a death which wears it out.
[p. 39]
dawning, however, and the system's victory allows us to glimpse this
fundamental stake. It is even retrospectively becoming possible to analyse
the whole of political economy as having nothing to do with production, as
having stakes of life and death. A symbolic stake.
[p. 40]
deferring their death that they are made into slaves and condemned to the
indefinite abjection of a life of labour.
[p. 41]
renders his life to the exploiter and thereby regains, by means of this very
exploitation, a power of symbolic response. There was counter-power in
the labour process as the exploited put their own (slow) death at stake.
Here we agree with Lyotard's hypothesis on the level of libidinal economics:
the intensity of the exploited's enjoyment [jouissance] in their very
abjection. And Lyotard is right. Libidinal intensity, the charge of desire
and the surrendering of death are always there in the exploited,
[28]
but no
longer on the properly symbolic rhythm of the immediate retaliation, and
therefore total resolution. The enjoyment of powerlessness (on sole
condition that this is not a phantasy aimed at reinstating the triumph of
desire at the level of the proletariat) will never abolish power.
[p. 42]
herself reproducing exactly the same symbolic relation of slow death as she
undergoes in labour. The user experiences exactly the same deferred death
in the object (she does not sacrifice it, she `uses' it and `uses' it functionally)
as the worker does in capital. And just as wages buy back this unilateral
gift of labour, the price paid for the object is only the user buying back the
object's deferred death. The proof of this lies in the symbolic rule which
states that what falls to you without charge (lotteries, presents, gambling
wins) must not be devoted to use, but spent as pure loss.
[p. 43]
[p. 49]
1: The End of Production
[p. nts]
The product is transformed from the direct product of the individual producer into a
social product, the joint product of a collective labourer, i. e., a combination of
workers, each of whom stands at a different distance from the actual manipulation of
the object of labour. With the progressive accentuation of the co-operative character
of the labour process, there necessarily occurs a progressive extension of the concept
of productive labour, and of the concept of the bearer of that labour, the productive
worker. In order to work productively, it is no longer necessary for the individual
himself to put his hand to the object; it is sufficient for him to be an organ of the
collective labourer, and to perform any one of its subordinate functions. The
definition of productive labour given above, the original definition, is derived from the
nature of material production itself, and it remains correct for the collective labourer,
considered as a whole. But it no longer holds good for each member taken
individually. (Capital, pp. 643-4 [J. B.'s emphases])
Job training, qualification and education, etc., are other forms of complex labour.
There is also a temptation to analyse them in terms of surplus-value, of the reinvestment
by capital of science, training and research, of a constant capital superadded to the
ordinary worker. Adam Smith writes: `A man educated at the expense of much labour
and time ... may be compared to one of those expensive machines' (The Wealth of
Nations [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976] Vol. 1, p. 118). This is an error.
Instruction, education and training are not long-term investments. They are rather the
direct social relation of domestication and control. Capital doesn't look for any complex
labour in this, but indulges in absolute waste, sacrificing an enormous part of its `surplus-value'
in the reproduction of its hegemony.
In the beginning, workers' housing was simply a `dorm', a branch of the factory, a
functional site for the reproduction of labour power, a strategic site for both manufacture
and business. Housing was not invested with the form of capital.
Gradually, housing is invested as a space-time marked by a direct and generalised
process of the control of social space. It becomes a site of reproduction, not of labour,
but of the habitat itself as a specific function, as a direct form of social relation; no longer
the reproduction of the worker, but of the inhabitant herself, the user. After the
proletariat, the `user' has become the ideal type of the industrial slave. The user of
goods, of words, the user of sex, the user of labour herself (the worker, or the `agent of
production', becomes the user of the factory and of her labour as individual and
collective equipment, as a social service), the user of transport, but also the user of her
life and death.
This decentred, extensive strategy, this all-out attack, the use or appropriation of use-value
is the ultimate form of the self-management of social control.
Before the oil crisis, the Arabs made traditional wage demands: petrol must be sold at
the right price. Now, however, these demands have turned around and become
unlimited and maximal.
To begin with, this is the first time that capital (in its front line institution, namely
international finance capital) has so clearly and openly stated the law of equivalence,
and, surprisingly, in the form of an advertising slogan. These things are usually unstated;
commercial exchange is seen as immoral, and all publicity tries to cover this up as a
matter of urgency. We may therefore be sure that this candour is a second-degree mask.
Secondly, its apparent aim is to convince people on economic grounds to do
themselves a good turn and take their money to the BNP. Its real strategy remains
unofficial, however: to convince people by this `man to man' capitalist openness, saying
`let's not be sentimental about this', `no more of the ideology of dependence', `cards on
the table', etc., and so to seduce people by means of the obscenity of revealing the
hidden, immoral law of equivalence. This is a `macho' complicity where men share the
obscene truth of capital. Hence the smell of lechery about his advert, the salaciousness
and smuttiness of the eyes glued to your money as if it were your genitals. The technique
used by the advert is a perverse provocation which is much more subtle than the
simplistic seduction of the smile (such as was the theme of the Société Générale's [a bank
-- tr.] counter-offensive: `It is not the banker who should smile, but the client'). People
are seduced by the obscenity of the economic, taken to the level of the perverse
fascination that the very atrocity of capital exercises on them. From this perspective the
slogan quite simply signifies: `I am interested in your arse -- fair's fair -- lend me your
buttocks and I'll bugger you', which is not to everyone's distaste.
Behind the humanist morality of exchange there is a profound desire for capital, a
vertiginous desire for the law of value; and this complicity, both economic and non-economic,
is what the advert, perhaps without knowing it, seeks to recover, testifying to
an intuition for politics.
Thirdly, the advertising executives could not have been unaware that this advert, with
its vampiric image, scared the middle classes, so that to emphasise their lecherous
complicity with this direct attack would provoke negative reactions. Why did they take
this risk? Here we have the strangest trap: the advert was made to consolidate the
resistance to the law of profit and equivalence so as to be better able to impose the
equivalence of capital, profit, and the economic in general (the `fair's fair') at a time
when this is no longer true, when capital has displaced its strategy and so is able to state
its `law' since it is no longer its truth. Announcing this law is nothing more than a
supplementary mystification.
Capital no longer thrives on the rule of any economic law, which is why the law can be
made into an advertising slogan, falling into the sphere of the sign and its manipulation.
The economic is only the quantitative theatre of value. This, as well as the fact that the
role of money in all this is only a pretext, is expressed by the advert in its own way.
Hence the commutability of the advert itself, which can operate at every level, for
example:
-- I am interested in your unconscious -- fair's fair -- lend me your phantasies and you
may profit from my analysis;
-- I am interested in your death -- fair's fair -- take out a life insurance policy and I will
make your death into a fortune;
-- I am interested in your productivity -- fair's fair -- lend me your labour power and you
may profit from my capital;
and so on. This advert could serve as a `general equivalent' for all real social relations.
Finally, if the advert's basic message is not equivalence, a = a, fair's fair (no-one is
fooled, as the advertising executives well know), could it be surplus-value (the fact that
the operation ends up, for the banker and for capital, showing the equation: a = a + a')?
The advert can barely conceal this truth, and everyone can sense it. Capital slips in and
out of the shadows here, almost unmasking itself, but it is not serious since what the
advert really says comes neither from the order of quantitative equivalence, nor from
surplus-value, but from the order of the tautology:
not: a = a
nor: a = a + a'
but: A is A
That is: a bank is a bank, a banker is a banker, money is money, and you can have
none of it. While pretending to state the economic law of equivalence, the advert
actually states the tautological imperative, the fundamental rule of domination. For
whether a bank is a bank, or indeed whether a table is a table, or whether 2 + 2 = 4 (and
not 5 as Dostoyevsky had it), is the real capitalist credence. When capital says `I am
interested in your money', it feigns profitability in order to secure credibility. This
credibility comes from the economic order (creditability), while the credence attached to
the tautology sums up in itself the identity of the capitalist order and comes from the
symbolic order.
For us, in the structural play of the code, exchange-value plays the same role as use-value
used to play in the market law of value, the role of the simulacrum of reference.
In like fashion, the current monetary system dreams of gold and a gold standard to
stabilise and regenerate fiduciary values. The current state of affairs is that free and
unlimited speculation on the grounds of the loss of the gold-referent edges closer every
moment to catastrophe: an arbitrariness and an inflation of such proportions that the
authority of money itself is toppled and loses all its credibility. Again we have a cyclical
regeneration by means of reference; a `critical' regeneration is necessary in order to
prevent financial exchanges from reaching the limits of unreality, where they would be
destroyed.
There is in fact a constant play between the two forms of value, controlled by a
strategy aiming at intensifying the crisis. And although the crisis seems to require a
solution, it is this solution already.
1: The End of Production, by Jean Baudrillard in Symbolic Exchange and Death.
[by] Jean Baudrillard. (Sage, London, England, 1993). pp [6]-49. [Bibliographic Details] [View Documents]
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