Chapter Two the Ideological of Needs

The rapturous satisfactions of consumption surround us, clinging to objects as if to the sensory residues of the previous day in the delirious excursion of a dream. As to the logic that regulates this strange discourse -- surely it compares to what Freud uncovered in The Interpretation of Dreams? But we have scarcely advanced beyond the explanatory level of naive psychology and the medieval dreambook. We believe in "Consumption" : we believe in a real subject, motivated by needs and confronted by real objects as sources of satisfaction. It is a thoroughly vulgar metaphysic. And contemporary psychology, sociology and economic science are all complicit in the fiasco. So the time has come to deconstruct all the assumptive notions involved -- object, need, aspiration, consumption itself -- for it would make as little sense to theorize the quotidian from surface evidence as to interpret the manifest discourse of a dream: it is rather the dream-work and the dream-processes that must be analyzed in order to recover the unconscious logic of a more profound discourse. And it is the workings and processes of an unconscious social logic that must be retrieved beneath the consecrated ideology of consumption.

1. Consumption as a Logic of Significations

The empirical "object," given in its contingency of form, color, material, function and discourse (or, if it is a cultural object, in its aesthetic finality) is a myth. How often it has been wished away! But the object is nothing. It is nothing but the different types of relations and significations that converge, contradict themselves, and twist around it, as such -- the hidden logic that not only arranges this bundle of relations, but directs the manifest discourse that overlays and occludes it.

The Logical Status of Objects

Insofar as I make use of a refrigerator as a machine, it is not an object. It is a refrigerator. Talking about refrigerators or automobiles in terms of "objects" is something else. That is, it has nothing to do with them in their "objective" relation to keeping things cold or transportation. It is to speak of the object as functionally decontextualized:

1. Either as an object of psychic investment [62] and fascination, of
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passion and projection -- qualified by its exclusive relation with the subject, who then cathects it as if it were his own body (a borderline case). Useless and sublime, the object then loses its common name, so to speak, and assumes the title of Object as generic proper name. For this reason, the collector never refers to a statuette or a vase as a beautiful statuette, vase, etc., but as "a beautiful Object." This status is opposed to the generic dictionary meaning of the word, that of the "object" plain and simple: "Refrigerator: an object that refrigerates..."

2. Or (between the Object, as proper name and projective equivalent of the subject, and the object, with the status of a common name and implement) as an object specified by its trademark, charged with differential connotations of status, prestige and fashion. This is the "object of consumption." It can just as easily be a vase as a refrigerator, or, for that matter, a whoopee cushion. Properly speaking, it has no more existence than a phoneme has an absolute meaning in linguistics. This object does not assume meaning either in a symbolic relation with the subject (the Object) or in an operational relation to the world (object-as-implement): it finds meaning with other objects, in difference, according to a hierarchical code of significations. This alone, at the risk of the worst confusion, defines the object of consumption.

Of Symbolic Exchange "Value"

In symbolic exchange, of which the gift is our most proximate illustration, the object is not an object: it is inseparable from the concrete relation in which it is exchanged, the transferential pact that it seals between two persons: it is thus not independent as such. It has, properly speaking, neither use value nor (economic) exchange value. The object given has symbolic exchange value. This is the paradox of the gift : it is on the one hand (relatively) arbitrary: it matters little what object is involved. Provided it is given, [63] it can fully signify the relation. On the other hand, once it has been given -- and because of this -- it is this object and not another. The gift is unique, specified by the people exchanging and the unique moment of the exchange. It is arbitrary, and yet absolutely singular.

As distinct from language, whose material can be dissassociated from the subjects speaking it, the material of symbolic exchange, the
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objects given, are not autonomous, hence not codifiable as signs. Since they do not depend on economic exchange, they are not amenable to systematization as commodities and exchange value.

What constitutes the object as value in symbolic exchange is that one separates himself from it in order to give it, to throw it at the feet of the other, under the gaze of the other (ob-jicere); one divests himself as if of a part of himself -- an act which is significant in itself as the basis, simultaneously, of both the mutual presence of the terms of the relationship, and their mutual absence (their distance). The ambivalence of all symbolic exchange material (looks, objects, dreams, excrement) derives from this: the gift is a medium of relation and distance; it is always love and aggression. [64]

From Symbolic Exchange to Sign Value

It is from the (theoretically isolatable) moment when the exchange is no longer purely transitive, when the object (the material of exchange) is immediately presented as such, that it is reified into a sign. Instead of abolishing itself in the relation that it establishes, and thus assuming symbolic value (as in the example of the gift), the object becomes autonomous, intransitive, opaque, and so begins to signify the abolition of the relationship. Having become a sign object, it is no longer the mobile signifier of a lack between two beings, it is `of' and `from' the reified relation (as is the commodity at another level, in relation to reified labor power). Whereas the symbol refers to lack (to absence) as a virtual relation of desire, the sign object only refers to the absence of relation itself, and to isolated individual subjects.

The sign object is neither given nor exchanged: it is appropriated, withheld and manipulated by individual subjects as a sign, that is, as coded difference. Here lies the object of consumption. And it is always of and from a reified, abolished social relationship that is "signified" in a code.

What we perceive in the symbolic object (the gift, and also the traditional, ritual and artisanal object) is not only the concrete manifestation of a total relationship (ambivalent, and total because it is ambivalent) of desire; but also, through the singularity of an object, the transparency of social relations in a dual or integrated group relationship. In the commodity, on the other hand, we perceive the opacity of social relations of production and the reality of the division of labor. What is revealed in the contemporary profusion of sign objects, objects of consumption, is precisely this
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opacity, the total constraint of the code that governs social value: it is the specific weight of signs that regulates the social logic of exchange.

The object-become-sign no longer gathers its meaning in the concrete relationship between two people. It assumes its meaning in its differential relation to other signs. Somewhat like Levi-Strauss' myths, sign-objects exchange among themselves. Thus, only when objects are autonomized as differential signs and thereby rendered systematizable can one speak of consumption and of objects of consumption.

A Logic of Signification

So it is necessary to distinguish the logic of consumption, which is a logic of the sign and of difference, from several other logics that habitually get entangled with it in the welter of evidential considerations. (This confusion is echoed by all the naive and authorized literature on the question.) Four logics would be concerned here:

1. A functional logic of use value;

2. An economic logic of exchange value;

3. A logic of symbolic exchange;

4. A logic of sign value.

The first is a logic of practical operations, the second one of equivalence, the third, ambivalence, and the fourth, difference.

Or again: a logic of utility, a logic of the market, a logic of the gift, and a logic of status. Organized in accordance with one of the above groupings, the object assumes respectively the status of an instrument, a commodity, a symbol, or a sign.

Only the last of these defines the specific field of consumption. Let us compare two examples:

The wedding ring: This is a unique object, symbol of the relationship of the couple. One would neither think of changing it (barring mishap) nor of wearing several. The symbolic object is made to last and to witness in its duration the permanence of the relationship. Fashion plays as negligible a role at the strictly symbolic level as at the level of pure instrumentality.

The ordinary ring is quite different: it does not symbolize a relationship. It is a non-singular object, a personal gratification, a sign in the eyes of others. I can wear several of them. I can substitute them. The ordinary ring takes part in the play of my accessories and the constellation of fashion. It is an object of consumption.

Living accommodations: The house, your lodgings, your apartment: these terms involve semantic nuances that are no doubt
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linked to the advent of industrial production or to social standing. But, whatever one's social level in France today, one's domicile is not necessarily perceived as a "consumption" good. The question of residence is still very closely associated with patrimonial goods in general, and its symbolic scheme remains largely that of the body. Now, for the logic of consumption to penetrate here, the exteriority of the sign is required. The residence must cease to be hereditary, or interiorized as an organic family space. One must avoid the appearance of filiation and identification if one's debut in the world of fashion is to be successful.

In other words, domestic practice is still largely a function of determinations, namely: symbolic (profound emotional investment, etc.), and economic (scarcity).

Moreover, the two are linked: only a certain "discretionary Income" permits one to play with objects as status signs -- a stage of fashion and the "game" where the symbolic and the utilitarian are both exhausted. Now, as to the question of residence -- in France at least -- the margin of free play for the mobile combinatory of prestige or for the game of substitution is limited. In the United States, by contrast, one sees living arrangements indexed to social mobility, to trajectories of careers and status. Inserted into the global constellation of status, and subjugated to the same accelerated obsolescence of any other object of luxury, the house truly becomes an object of consumption.

This example has a further interest: it demonstrates the futility of any attempt to define the object empirically. Pencils, books, fabrics, food, the car, curios -- are these objects? Is a house an object? Some would contest this. The decisive point is to establish whether the symbolism of the house (sustained by the shortage of housing) is irreducible, or if even this can succumb to the differential and reified connotations of fashion logic: for if this is so, then the home becomes an object of consumption -- as any other object will, if it only answers to the same definition: being, cultural trait, ideal, gestural pattern, language, etc. -- anything can be made to fit the bill. The definition of an object of consumption is entirely independent of objects themselves and exclusively a function of the logic of significations.

An object is not an object of consumption unless it is released from its psychic determinations as symbol; from its functional determinations as instrument; from its commercial determinations as product; and is thus liberated as a sign to be recaptured by the formal logic of fashion, i. e., by the logic of differentiation.
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The Order of Signs and Social Order

There is no object of consumption before the moment of its substitution, and without this substitution having been determined by the social law, which demands not only the renewal of distinctive material, but the obligatory registration of individuals on the scale of status, through the mediation of their group and as a function of their relations with other groups. This scale is properly the social order, since the acceptance of this hierarchy of differential signs and the interiorization by the individual of signs in general (i. e., of the norms, values, and social imperatives that signs are) constitutes the fundamental, decisive form of social control -- more so even than acquiescence to ideological norms.

It is now clear that there is no autonomous problematic of objects, but rather the much more urgent need for a theory of social logic, and of the codes that it puts into play (sign systems and distinctive material).

The Common Name, the Proper Name, and the Brand Name

Let us recapitulate the various types of status of the object according to the specific and (theoretically) exhaustive logics that may penetrate it:

1. The refrigerator is specified by its function and irreplaceable in this respect. There is a necessary relation between the object and its function. The arbitrary nature of the sign is not involved. But all refrigerators are interchangeable in regard to this function (their objective "meaning").

2. By contrast, if the refrigerator is taken as an element of comfort or of luxury (standing), then in principle any other such element can be substituted for it. The object tends to the status of sign, and each social status will be signified by an entire constellation of exchangeable signs. No necessary relation to the subject or the world is involved. There is only a systematic relation obligated to all other signs. And in this combinatory abstraction lie the elements of a code.

3. In their symbolic relationship to the subject (or in reciprocal exchange), all objects are potentially interchangeable. Any object can serve as a doll for the little girl. But once cathected, it is this one and not another. The symbolic material is relatively arbitrary, but the subject-object relation is fused. Symbolic discourse is an idiom.

The functional use of the object occurs in relation to its technical structure and its practical manipulation. It relates to the common name: e. g., refrigerator. The use of the symbol-object occurs in the context of its concrete presence and through the proper name proper to it. Possession and passion baptize the object (in the metaphorical name of the subject), affixing their seal to it. The "consumption of
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the object occurs in the context of its brand name, which is not a proper name, but a sort of generic Christian name. [65]

2. Consumption as a Structure of Exchange and Differentiation

Of the Invalidity of the Notion of the Object and Need

We can see now that objects have no meaning except in those logical contexts that can mingle, often contradictorily, on the plane of one object alone; and that these various significations depend on the index and modalities of commutation possible within the framework of each logic. And so what possible meaning can any classification, definition, or categorization of objects in themselves have when the object (once again taken in the widest sense of the term) is commutable according to many rules (the rules of equivalence in the functional and economic domain; the rules of difference in the domain of signs; the rule of ambivalence in that of the symbolic)? Is it when the discourse of the conscious and the unconscious gets entangled in the object -- the full discourse of denotation, the parallel discourse of connotation, the internal discourse of the subject and social discourse of relationship -- even the entirely latent discourse, in the object, of the symbolic absence of the subject from himself and the other? [66] And what possible foundation could there be for all the possible theories of needs, more or less indexed as they are to these would-be categories and classifications of objects? In such an area of flux, empirical formalizations are devoid of meaning. The situation is reminiscent of Borges' zoological classification: "Animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor; (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, etc., etc.,... ." [67] All classifications of objects and needs are neither more logical nor less surrealist than this.
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Need and Mana

To reduce the conceptual entity "object" is, by the same token, to deconstruct the conceptual entity "need." We could explode that of the subject as well.

Subject, object, need: the mythological structure of these three ideas is identical, triply elaborated in terms of the naive factuality and the schemas of a primary level psychology.

What speaks in terms of need is magical thinking. The subject and the object having been posited as autonomous and separated entities -- as specular [68] and distinct myths -- it then becomes necessary to establish their relation. This is accomplished, of course, with the concept of need. Incidentally -- all else remaining equal -- the concept resembles that of mana. [69] Conceiving exchange as an operation between two separated terms, each existing in isolation prior to the exchange, one has to establish the existence of the exchange itself in a double obligation: that of giving and that of returning. Thus it is necessary to imagine (as Mauss and the native apparently do) an immanent power in the object, the hau, whose force haunts the recipient of the object and incites him to divest himself of it. The insurmountable opposition between the terms of the exchange is thus reduced at the price of a tautological, artificial, magical, supplementary concept, of which Lévi-Strauss, in his critique, has worked out the economics in positing exchange directly as structure. Thus, the psychologist, economist, etc., having provided themselves with a subject and an object, can barely rejoin them but for the grace of need. But this concept can only explain the subject-object relation in terms of adequation, the functional response of subjects to objects, and vice versa. It amounts to a kind of functionalist nominalism, which precipitates the whole psycho--- ideology of optimality, equilibrium, functional regulation
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and adaptation of needs .

In fact, the operation amounts to defining the subject by means of the object and the object in terms of the subject. It is a gigantic tautology of which the concept of need is the consecration. Metaphysics itself has never done anything else and, in Western thought, metaphysics and economic science (not to mention traditional psychology) demonstrate a profound solidarity, mentally and ideologically, in the way they posit the subject and tautologically resolve its relation to the world. Mana, vital force, instincts, needs, choices, preferences, utilities, motivations: it is always a question of the same magical copula, the equal sign in "A = A." Metaphysics and economics jostle each other at the same impasses, over the same aporias, the same contradictions and dysfunctions, condemning each from the start to unlimited circular speculation by positing the autonomy of the subject and its specular reflection in the autonomy of the object.

The "Circle" of Power

But we know that the tautology is never innocent -- no more than the finalism that underlies the entire mythology of needs. Such run-arounds are always the rationalizing ideology of a system of power: the dormant virtue of opium, the refrains of "Que Sera Sera": like Borges' animal categories ("included in the present Classification"), or like the theological pronouncement: "When a given subject purchases such and such an object, this behavior is a function of his particular choices and preferences." At bottom, under the umbrella of the logical principle of identity, such admirable metaphors for the void sanction the circular principle of a system of power, the reproductive finality of the order of production. This is why economic science does not dispense with the concept of need. It could easily do so, for its calculations operate at the level of statistical demand. But the notion is urgently required for ideological support.

The legitimacy of production rests on a petitio principii, i. e., that people discover a posteriori and almost miraculously that they need what is produced and offered at the marketplace (and thus, in order that they should experience this or any particular need, the need must already exist inside people as a virtual postulation). And so it appears that this begging of the question -- this forced rationalization -- simply masks the internal finality of the order of production. To become an end in itself, every system must dispel the question of its real teleology. Through the meretricious legitimacy of needs and satisfactions, the entire question of the social and political finality of productivity is repressed.
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One could object that this is not a forced rationalization, since the discourse of needs is the subject's spontaneous form of interpreting his relation to objects and to the world. But this is precisely the problem. In his attempt to recapture this discourse, the analyst of modern society reproduces the misconstruction of naive anthropology: he naturalizes the processes of exchange and signification.

Thus social logic itself escapes him. It is true that all magical thinking draws a certain measure of efficacy from the empirical manipulation and theoretical misunderstanding of its own procedures. Thus, speculation on needs converges with the long tradition of speculation on mana. It is mythical thought that reflects in the mirror of economic "rationality."

Interdisciplinary Neo-Humanism, or Psycho-Social Economics

It thus proves necessary to reconstruct social logic entirely. Nothing is more instructive in this regard than the adulterous relations that obtain between the economic and the social sciences. Virtuous thinkers have done their utmost for a generation now to reconcile these estranged disciplines (in the name of Man, their dada). They have striven to attenuate all that is profoundly inadmissible -- obscene -- for their disciplines in the very existence of the others and in the haunting memory of a knowledge that escapes them. Economics in particular can only delay the eruption, in the midst of its calculations, of a psychological logic of the unconscious or of an equally unconscious logic of social structures. The logic of ambivalence on the one hand, of difference on the other, are incompatible with the logic -- sacred to economics -- of equivalence. To foil their literally destructive influence, "economic science" will throw in its lot with desiccated and inoffensive forms of psychology and sociology, i. e., the latter as traditional disciplines -- all in the name of pious interdisciplinary study. One never thinks, from this viewpoint, of introducing social or psychological dimensions of a specific nature: rather, one simply adds to the criteria of individual utility ("rational" economic variables) a pinch of "irrational" individual psychology (motivational studies, depth psychology) and some interpersonal social psychology (the individual need for prestige and status) -- or simply a kind of global socio-culture. In short, one looks for context.

Some examples: certain studies (Chombart de Lauwe) reveal in the lower orders an abnormal consumption of meat: too little, or too much. As long as one consumes meat along the mean, one partakes of economic rationality. No problems. Otherwise, one produces the psychological: the need for prestige, conspicuous under or
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over-consumption, etc. Hence, the social and the psychological are defined as the "economically pathological"! Another social analyst, Katona, discovers his "discretionary income" and his cultural implications with relish: he explores, beyond purchasing power, a "propensity to buy that reflects the motivations, the tendencies and the expectations of the clientele!" [70] Such are the maudlin illuminations of psycho-economics.

Or sometimes it is observed (when it becomes impossible to ignore) that the individual is never alone, that he is determined by his relation to others. And so Robinsonades are abandoned for micro- sociological bricolage. American sociology has somehow been arrested at this point. Even Merton, with his theory of the reference group, always works on groups that in fact are empirically given and with the empirical notion of aspiration as a lubricant of the social dynamic.

Psychologism goes hand in hand with culturalism, another benign version of a sociology that refuses to live dangerously: needs are functions of the particular history and culture of each society. This is the zenith of liberal analysis, beyond which it is congenitally incapable of thinking. The postulate of man endowed with needs and a natural inclination to satisfy them is never questioned. It is simply immersed in a historical and cultural dimension (very often defined in advance, and by other means); and then, by implication, impregnation, interaction, articulation or osmosis, it is recontextualized in a social history or a culture that is understood really as a second nature! All this culminates in overblown "character structures," cultural types writ large that are given as structures, though they are only empirical totalizations of distinctive traits, and -- again -- basically gigantic tautologies, since the "model" is composed of an admixture of the characteristic traits it is intended to explain.

Tautology is at work everywhere. Thus, in the theory of "consumption models": social situations can be as important as taste in determining the level of consumption (in France, sweets are inseparable from their use by parents as instruments of education). "It would thus be possible, when one got acquainted with the sociological significance of products, to paint the portrait of a society with the aid of the products that correspond to these norms. Reference groups and membership groups could be understood at the level of consumer behavior." Or, again, the concept of "role" in the work of Lazarsfeld and others: the good housekeeper is supposed
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to do the washing herself, use a sewing machine, and refrain from using instant coffee. The "role" plays the same function in the relation of the subject to social norms as need does in relation to objects. The same circle and the same white magic.

In the end, it is discovered that you can break down the purchase of a car into a whole constellation of possible motivations: biographical, technical, utilitarian, psychosymbolic (overcompensation, aggressiveness), sociological (group norms, desire for prestige, conformism or originality). The worst of it all is that every one of these is equally valid. It would be difficult to imagine a case where any one wouldn't apply. Often they formally contradict each other: the need for security versus the need to take risks; the desire to conform versus the need to be distinctive, etc. And which are determinant? How do you structure or rank them? In an ultimate effort, our thinkers strain to make their tautology dialectical: they talk about ongoing interaction (between the individual and the group, from one group to another, from one motivation to another). But the economists, hardly fond of dialectical variables, quickly retreat to their measurable utilities.

The confusion is quite irreparable, in fact. Without entirely lacking in interest, the results obtained at these different levels of abstraction (needs, social aspirations, roles, models of consumption, reference groups, etc.) are partial and misleading. Psycho-social economics is a sort of near-sighted, cross-eyed hydra. But it surveys and defends something, for all that. It exorcises the danger of a radical analysis, whose object would be neither the group nor the individual subject at the conscious level, but social logic itself, for which it is necessary to create a principle of analysis.

We have already asserted that this logic is a logic of differentiation. But this is not a question, as should be clear by now, of treating prestige, status, distinction, etc., as motivations, a level that has been largely thematized by contemporary sociology. At any rate, it is little more than a para-sociological extension of the traditional psychological givens. There is no doubt that individuals (or individuated groups) are consciously or subconsciously in quest of social rank and prestige and, of course, this level of the object should be incorporated into the analysis. But the fundamental level is that of unconscious structures that organize the social production of differences.

The Logic of Sign Exchange: The Production of Differences

Even before survival has been assured, every group or individual experiences a vital pressure to produce themselves meaningfully in a system of exchange and relationships. Concurrently with the production
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of goods, there is a push to elaborate significations, meaning -- with the result that the one-for-the-other exists before the one and the other exist for themselves.

The logic of exchange is thus primordial. In a way, the individual is non-existent (like the object of which we spoke at the beginning). At any rate, a certain language (of words, women, or goods) is prior to the individual. This language is a social form in relation to which there can properly speaking be no individuals, since it is an exchange structure. This structure amounts to a logic of differentiation on two simultaneous planes:

1. It differentiates the human terms of the exchange into partners, not individuated, but nevertheless distinct, and bound by the rules of exchange.

2. It differentiates the exchange material into distinct and thus significant elements.

This is true of language communication. It applies also to goods and products. Consumption is exchange. A consumer is never isolated, any more than a speaker. It is here that total revolution in the analysis of consumption must intervene: Language cannot be explained by postulating an individual need to speak (which would pose the insoluble double problem of establishing this need on an individual basis, and then of articulating it in a possible exchange). Before such questions can even be put, there is, simply, language -- not as an absolute, autonomous system, but as a structure of exchange contemporaneous with meaning itself, and on which is articulated the individual intention of speech. Similarly, consumption does not arise from an objective need of the consumer, a final intention of the subject towards the object; rather, there is social production, in a system of exchange, of a material of differences, a code of significations and invidious (statuaire) values. The functionality of goods and individual needs only follows on this, adjusting itself to, rationalizing, and in the same stroke repressing these fundamental structural mechanisms.

The origin of meaning is never found in the relation between a subject (given a priori as autonomous and conscious) and an object produced for rational ends -- that is, properly, the economic relation, rationalized in terms of choice and calculation. It is to be found, rather, in difference, systematizable in terms of a code (as opposed to private calculation) -- a differential structure that establishes the social relation, and not the subject as such.

Veblen and Invidious Distinction

We should refer at this point to Veblen, who, even if he posited the logic of differentiation more in terms of individuals than of classes, of
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prestige interaction rather than of exchange structure, nevertheless offers in a way far superior to those who have followed him and who have pretended to surpass him the discovery of a principle of total social analysis, the basis of a radical logic, in the mechanisms of differentiation. This is not a superadded, contextual variable, situationally given, but a relational variable of structure. All of Veblen's work illustrates how the production of a social classification (class distinctions and statutory rivalry) is the fundamental law that arranges and subordinates all the other logics, whether conscious, rational, ideological, moral, etc.

Society regulates itself by means of the production of distinctive material: "The end of acquisition is conveniently held to be the consumption of the goods accumulated...but it is only in a sense far removed from its native meaning that consumption of goods can be said to afford the incentive from which accumulation proceeds.... Possession of wealth confers honors: it is an invidious distinction." [71]

Leisure

"Conspicuous abstention from labor becomes the conventional index of reputability." [72] Productive labor is degrading: the tradition never dies; it is only reinforced as social differentiation increases in complexity. In the end, it takes on the axiomatic authority of an absolute prescription -- even alongside the moral reprobation of idleness and the reactive valorization of labor so strong in the middle classes (and today recuperated ideologically by the ruling class itself): a président directeur général works a fifteen- hour day, devotedly -- it is his token of affected servitude. In fact, this reaction-formation proves, to the contrary, the power of leisure- nobility value as a deep-seated, unconscious representation.

Leisure is thus not a function of a need for leisure in the current sense of enjoying free time and functional repose. It can be invested in activities, provided they do not involve economic necessity. Leisure may be defined as any consumption of unproductive time. Now, this has nothing to do with passivity: it is an activity, an obligatory social phenomenon. Time is not in this instance "free," it is sacrificed, wasted, it is the moment of a production of value, of an invidious production of status, and the social individual is not free to escape it. No one needs leisure, but everyone is called upon to provide evidence of his availability for unproductive labor. The consumption of empty time is a form of potlatch. Here, free time is a material of exchange
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and signification. Like Bataille's "accursed share," [73] it assumes value in the exchange itself -- or in destruction -- and leisure is the locus of this symbolic operation. [74]

The style of contemporary leisure provides a kind of experimental verification: left to himself, the conditions for creative freedom at last realized, the man of leisure looks desperately for a nail to hammer, a motor to dismantle. Outside the competitive sphere, there are no autonomous needs. Spontaneous motivation doesn't exist. But for all that, he can't permit himself to do nothing. At a loss for something to do with his free time, he nevertheless urgently "needs" to do nothing (or nothing useful), since this has distinctive social value.

Even today, what claims the average individual, through the holidays and during his free time, is not the liberty to "fulfill" himself (in terms of what? What hidden essence will surge to the fore?). He must verify the uselessness of his time -- temporal surplus as sumptuous capital, as wealth. Leisure time, like consumption time in general, becomes emphatic, trade-marked social time -- the dimension of social salvation, productive of value, but not of economic survival. [75]

Veblen pushed the law of distinctive value very far: "the canon of honorific waste may, immediately or remotely, influence the sense of duty, the sense of beauty, the sense of utility, the sense of devotional or ritualistic fitness, and the scientific sense of truth." [76]

The Law of Distinctive Value and its Paradox

This law of value can play on wealth or on destitution. Conspicuous luxury or conspicuous austerity answer to the same fundamental rule. What appears as an insoluble formal contradiction at the level of the empirical theory of needs falls into place, arranged according to this law, in a general theory of distinctive material.

Thus, churches are traditionally more sumptuous in the fashionable districts, but class imperative can impose a type of
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ascetic religiosity: Catholic pomp becomes the fact of the lower classes whereas, among Protestants, the spareness of the chapel only testifies to the greater glory of God (and establishes the distinctive sign of the class as well). There are innumerable examples of this paradox of value -- of spartan wealth. People manipulate the subtle starkness of modern interiors. You pay through the nose to eat practically nothing. To deny oneself is a luxury! This is the sophistry of consumption, for which the refusal to validate a value is merely a hierarchical nuance in its formal verification. [77]

It is important to grasp that behind all these alleged finalities -- functional, moral, aesthetic, religious and their contradictions -- a logic of difference and super-difference is at work. But it is always repressed, since it belies the ideal finality of all the corresponding behavior. This is social reason, social logic. It transverses all values, all materials of exchange and communication.

In principle, nothing is immune to this structural logic of value. Objects, ideas, even conduct are not solely practiced as use values, by virtue of their "objective" meaning, in terms of their official discourse -- for they can never escape the fact that they may be potentially exchanged as signs, i. e., assume another kind of value entirely in the very act of exchange and in the differential relation to the other that it establishes. The differential function of sign exchange always overdetermines the manifest function of what is exchanged, sometimes entirely contradicting it, repossessing it as an alibi, or even producing it as an alibi. This explains how the differential function materializes indifferently in opposite or contradictory terms: the beautiful or the ugly, the moral or the immoral, the good or the bad, the ancient or the new. The logic of difference cuts across all formal distinctions. It is equivalent to the primary process and the dream work: it pays no heed to the principle of identity and non-contradiction. [78]

Fashion

This deep-seated logic is akin to that of fashion. Fashion is one of the more inexplicable phenomena, so far as these matters go: its
[p. 79]
compulsion to innovate signs, its apparently arbitrary and perpetual production of meaning -- a kind of meaning drive -- and the logical mystery of its cycle are all in fact of the essence of what is sociological. The logical processes of fashion might be extrapolated to the dimension of "culture" in general -- to all social production of signs, values and relations.

To take a recent example: neither the long skirt nor the mini-skirt has an absolute value in itself -- only their differential relation acts as a criterion of meaning. The mini-skirt has nothing whatsoever to do with sexual liberation; it has no (fashion) value except in opposition to the long skirt. This value is, of course, reversible: the voyage from the mini- to the maxi-skirt will have the same distinctive and selective fashion value as the reverse; and it will precipitate the same effect of "beauty."

But it is obvious that this "beauty" (or any other interpretation in terms of chic, taste, elegance, or even distinctiveness) is nothing but the exponential function -- the rationalization -- of the fundamental processes of production and reproduction of distinctive material. Beauty ("in itself") has nothing to do with the fashion cycle. [79] In fact, it is inadmissible. Truly beautiful, definitively beautiful clothing would put an end to fashion. The latter can do nothing but deny, repress and efface it -- while conserving, with each new outing, the alibi of beauty.

Thus fashion continually fabricates the "beautiful" on the basis of a radical denial of beauty, by reducing beauty to the logical equivalent of ugliness. It can impose the most eccentric, dysfunctional, ridiculous traits as eminently distinctive. This is where it triumphs -- imposing and legitimizing the irrational according to a logic deeper than that of rationality.

3. The System of Needs and of Consumption
as a System of Productive Forces

It would appear that a "theory of needs" has no meaning. Only a theory of the ideological concept of need would make any sense. Before certain false problems have been overcome and radically reformulated, any reflection on the genesis of needs would have as little foundation as, for example, a history of the will. A form of the chimerical dialectic of being and appearance, soul and body still persists in the subject-object of dialectic of need. Ideological speculation of this sort has always appeared as a "dialectical" game
[p. 80]
of ceaseless interaction in a mirror: when it is impossible to determine which of two terms engenders the other and one is reduced to making them reflect or produce each other reciprocally, it is a sure sign that the terms of the problem itself must be changed.

So it proves necessary to examine how economic science -- and behind it, the political order -- operates the concept of need.

The Myth of Primary Needs

The legitimacy of the concept is rooted in the alleged existence of a vital anthropological minimum that would be the dimension of "primary needs" -- an irreducible zone where the individual chooses himself, since he knows what he wants: to eat, to drink, to sleep, to make love, to find shelter, etc. At this level, he cannot, it is supposed, be alienated in his need as such: only deprived of the means to satisfy it.

This bio-anthropological postulate directly launches the insoluble dichotomy of primary and secondary needs: beyond the threshold of survival, man no longer knows what he wants. And it is here that he becomes properly "social" for the economist: i. e., vulnerable to alienation, manipulation, mystification. On one side of the imaginary line, the economic subject is prey to the social and the cultural; on the other, he is an autonomous, inalienable essence. Note that this distinction, by conjuring away the socio-cultural in secondary needs, permits the recuperation, behind the functional alibi of survival-need, of a level of individual essence: a human essence grounded in nature. Moreover, this all proves quite versatile as an ideology. It has a spiritualist as well as a rationalist version. Primary and secondary needs can be separated in order to refer the former back to animality, the latter to the immaterial. [80] Or one can simply reverse the whole procedure by positing primary needs as (alone) objectively grounded (thus rational), and treat the others as subjectively variable (hence irrational). But this ideology is quite coherent in its overall features, because it always defines man a priori as an essence (or a rationality) that the social merely obscures.

In fact, the "vital anthropological minimum" doesn't exist: in all societies, it is determined residually by the fundamental urgency of an excess: the divine or sacrificial share, sumptuous discharge, economic profit. It is this pre-dedication of luxury that negatively determines the level of survival, and not the reverse (which is an idealist fiction). Advantages, profits, sacrifice (in the sense of social wealth) and "useless" expenditures are all deducted in advance. And the priority of this claim works everywhere at the expense of the
[p. 81]
functional side of the balance sheet -- at the expense, where necessary, of minimal subsistence.

There have never been "societies of scarcity" or "societies of abundance," since the expenditures of a society (whatever the objective volume of its resources) are articulated in terms of a structural surplus, and an equally structural deficit. An enormous surplus can coexist with the worst misery. In all cases, a certain surplus coexists with a certain poverty. But the crucial point is that it is always the production of this surplus that regulates the whole. The survival threshold is never determined from below, but from above. Eventually, one might hypothesize, there will be no survival at all, if social imperatives demand it: the newborn will be liquidated (like prisoners of war, before a new constellation of productive forces made slavery profitable). The Siane of New Guinea, enriched through contact with Europeans, squandered everything in feasts, without ceasing to live below the "vital minimum." It is impossible to isolate an abstract, "natural" stage of poverty or to determine absolutely "what men need to survive." It may please one fellow to lose everything at poker and to leave his family starving to death. We know it is often the most disadvantaged who squander in the most "irrational" way. The game flourishes in direct relation to underdevelopment. There is even a narrow correlation between underdevelopment, the size of the poor classes, and the tentacular spread of the church, the military, domestic personnel, and expensive and useless sectors in general.

Conversely, just as survival can fall well below the vital minimum if the production of surplus value requires it, the threshold of obligatory consumption can be set well above the strictly necessary -- always as a function of the production of surplus value: this is the case in our societies, where no one is free to live on raw roots and fresh water. From which follows the absurdity of the concept of "discretionary income" (the complement of the "vital minimum" concept): "the portion of his income the individual is free to spend as he pleases." In what way am I more free buying clothing or a car than buying my food (itself very sophisticated)? And how am I free not to choose? Is the purchase of an automobile or clothing "discretionary" when it is the unconscious substitute for an unrealistic desire for certain living accommodations? The vital minimum today, the minimum of imposed consumption, is the standard package. [81] Beneath this level, you are an outcast. Is loss of status -- or social non-existence -- less upsetting than hunger?
[p. 82]

In fact, discretionary income is an idea rationalized at the discretion of entrepreneurs and market analysts. It justifies their manipulation of secondary needs, since, in their view, these don't touch on the essential. The line of demarcation between essential and inessential has quite a precise double function:

1. To establish and preserve a sphere of individual human essence, which is the keystone of the system of ideological values.

2. To obscure behind the anthropological postulate the actual productivist definition of "survival": during the period of (capital) accumulation, what is "essential" is what is strictly necessary for the reproduction of the labor force. In the growth phase, however, it is what is necessary to maintain the rate of growth and surplus value.

The Emergence of Consummativity: [82] Need-Productive Force

One can generalize this conclusion by saying that needs -- such as they are -- can no longer be defined adequately in terms of." the naturalist-idealist thesis -- as innate, instinctive power, spontaneous craving, anthropological potentiality. Rather, they are better defined as a function induced (in the individual) by the internal logic of the system: more precisely, not as a consummative force liberated by the affluent society, but as a productive force required by the functioning of the system itself, by its process of reproduction and survival. In other words, there are only needs because the system needs them.

And the needs invested by the individual consumer today are just as essential to the order of production as the capital invested by the capitalist entrepreneur and the labor power invested by the wage laborer. It is all capital.

Hence, there is a compulsion to need and a compulsion to consume. One can imagine laws sanctioning such constraint one day (an obligation to change cars every two years). [83]

To be sure, this systematic constraint has been placed under the sign of choice and "liberty," and hence appears as entirely opposed to the labor process as the pleasure principle is to the reality principle. In fact, the "liberty," to consume is of the same order as the freedom offered by the labor market. The capitalist system was erected on this liberty -- on the formal emancipation of the labor force (and not on the concrete autonomy of work, which it abolishes). Similarly, consumption is only possible in the abstraction of a system based on
[p. 83]
the "liberty" of the consumer. It is necessary that the individual user have a choice, and become through his choice free at last to enter as a productive force in a production calculus, exactly as the capitalist system frees the laborer to sell, at last, his labor power.

And just as the fundamental concept of this system is not, strictly speaking, that of production, but of productivity (labor and production disengage themselves from all ritual, religious, and subjective connotations to enter the historical process of rationalization); so, one must speak not of consumption, but of consummativity: even if the process is far from being as rationalized as that of production, the parallel tendency is to move from subjective, contingent, concrete enjoyment to an indefinite calculus of growth rooted in the abstraction of needs, on which the system this time imposes its coherence -- a coherence that it literally produces as a by-product of its productivity. [84]

Indeed, just as concrete work is abstracted, little by little, into labor power in order to make it homogeneous with the means of production (machines, energy, etc.) and thus to multiply the homogeneous factors into a growing productivity -- so desire is abstracted and atomized into needs, in order to make it homogeneous with the means of satisfaction (products, images, sign-objects, etc.) and thus to multiply consummativity.

The same process of rationalization holds (atomization and unlimited abstraction), but the ideological role of the concept of need is expanded: with all its hedonist illusions, need-pleasure masks the objective reality of need-productive force. Needs and labor [85] are therefore two modalities of the same exploitation [86] of productive forces. The saturated consumer appears as the spellbound avatar of the wage laborer.
[p. 84]

Thus it should not be said that "consumption is entirely a function of production": rather, it is consummativity that is a structural mode of productivity. On this point, nothing has really changed in the historical passage from an emphasis on "vital" needs to "cultural" needs, or "primary" needs to "secondary" ones. The slave's only assurance that he would eat was that the system needed slaves to work. The only chance that the modern citizen may have to see his "cultural" needs satisfied lies in the fact that the system needs his needs, and that the individual is no longer content just to eat. In other words, if there had been, for the order of production, any means whatever of assuring the survival of the anterior mode of brutal exploitation, there would never have been much question of needs. [87] Needs are curbed as much as possible. But when it proves necessary, they are instigated as a means of repression. [88]

Controlled Desublimation

The capitalist system has never ceased to make women and children work first (to whatever, extent possible). Under absolute constraint, it eventually "discovered" the great humanitarian and democratic principles. Schooling was only conceded piece by piece, and it was not generalized until it had imposed itself on the system -- like universal suffrage -- as a powerful means of social control and integration (or as a means of acculturation to industrial society). During the phase of industrialization, the last pennyworth of labor power was extorted without compunction. To extract surplus value, it was hardly necessary to prime the pump with needs. Then capital, confronted by its own contradictions (over-production, falling rate of profit), tried at first to surmount them by totally restructuring its accumulation through destruction, deficit budgeting and bankruptcy. It thus averted a redistribution of wealth, which would have placed the existing relations of production and structures of power seriously in question. But as soon as the threshold of rupture had been reached, capital was already, unearthing the individual qua consumer. He was no longer simply the slave as labor power. This
[p. 85]
was truly a "production." And in bringing it off, capital was only delivering up a new kind of serf: the individual as consumption power [89]

This is the point of departure for an analysis of consumption at the political level: it is necessary to overcome the ideological understanding of consumption as a process of craving and pleasure, as an extended metaphor on the digestive functions -- where the whole issue is naturalized according to the primary scheme of the oral drive. It is necessary to surpass this powerful imaginary preconception in order to define consumption not only structurally as a system of exchange and of signs, but strategically as a mechanism of power. Now, the question of consumption is not clarified by the concept of needs, nor by theories of their qualitative transformation, or their massive extension: these phenomena are no more than the characteristic effect, at the individual level, of a certain monopolistic productivity, of a totalitarian economy (capitalist or socialist) driven to conjuring up leisure, comfort, luxury, etc.; briefly, they are the ultimate realization of the private individual as a productive force. The system of needs must wring liberty and pleasure from him as so many functional elements of the reproduction of the system of production and the relations of power that sanction it. It gives rise to these private functions according to the same principle of abstraction and radical "alienation" that was formerly (and still today) the case for his labor power. In this system, the "liberation" of needs, of consumers, of women, of the young, the body, etc., is always really the mobilization of needs, consumers, the body. ... It, is never an explosive liberation, but a controlled emancipation, a mobilization whose end is competitive exploitation.

It would appear that even the most deep-seated forces, the unconscious instincts, can be mobilized in this way by the "strategy of desire." We are now at the very heart of the concept of controlled desublimation (or "repressive desublimation," as Marcuse would say). At the limit, retranscribed in this primary psychoanalysis, the consumer appears as a knot of drives (future productive forces) repressed by the system of ego defense functions. These functions must be "desublimated" -- hence, the deconstruction of the ego functions, the conscious moral and individual functions, to the benefit of a "liberation" of the id and the super-ego as factors of integration, participation and consumption -- to the benefit of a kind of total consuming immorality in which the individual finally submerges himself in a pleasure principle entirely controlled by production planning.
[p. 86]

To sum up: man is not simply there first, equipped with his needs, and designated by nature to fulfill and finalize himself qua Man. This proposition, which smacks of spiritualist teleology, in fact defines the individual function in our society -- the functional myth of productivist society. The whole system of individual values -- this religion of spontaneity, liberty, creativity, etc. -- is bloated with the productivist option. Even the vital functions are immediately "functions" of the system.

We must reverse the terms of the analysis, and abolish the cardinal reference to the individual, for even that is the product of this social logic. We must abandon the constitutive social structure of the individual, and even his lived perception of himself: for man never really does come face to face with his own needs. This is not only true of "secondary" needs (where the individual is reproduced according to the finalities of production considered as consumption power). It applies equally well to "survival" needs. In this instance, man is not reproduced as man: he is simply regenerated as a survivor (a surviving productive force). If he eats, drinks, lives somewhere, reproduces himself, it is because the system requires his self-production in order to reproduce itself: it needs men. If it could function with slaves, there would be no "free" workers. If it could function with asexual mechanical robots, there would be no sexual reproduction. [90] If the system could function without feeding its workers, there would be no bread. It is in this sense that we are all, in the framework of this system, survivors. Not even the instinct of self-preservation is fundamental: it is a social tolerance or a social imperative. When the system requires it, it cancels this instinct and people get excited about dying (for a sublime cause, evidently).

We do not wish to say that "the individual is a product of society" at all. For, as it is currently understood, this culturalist platitude only masks the much more radical truth that, in its totalitarian logic, a system of productivist growth (capitalist, but not exclusively) can only produce and reproduce men -- even in their deepest determinations: in their liberty, in their needs, in their very unconscious -- as productive forces. The system can only produce and reproduce individuals as elements of the system. It cannot tolerate exceptions.
[p. 87]

Generalized Sign Exchange and the Twilight of "Values"

So today everything is "recuperable." [91] But it is too simple to argue that first there are needs, authentic values, etc., and then they are alienated, mystified, recuperated, or what have you. This humanitarian Manicheanism explains nothing. If everything is "recuperable," it is because everything in monopoly capitalist society [92] -- goods, knowledge, technique, culture, men, their relations and their aspirations -- everything is reproduced, from the outset, immediately, as an element of the system, as an integrated variable.

The truth is -- and this has been recognized for a long time in the area of economic production -- that use value no longer appears anywhere in the system. The determining logic of exchange value is, however, as ubiquitous as ever. This must be recognized today as the truth of the sphere of "consumption" and the cultural system in general. In other words, everything, even artistic, intellectual, and scientific production, even innovation and transgression, is immediately produced as sign and exchange value (relational value of the sign).

A structural analysis of consumption is possible to the extent that "needs," consumption behavior and cultural behavior are not only recuperatea, but systematically induced and produced as productive forces. Given this abstraction and this tendency toward total systematization, such an analysis is entirely possible, if it in turn is based on an analysis of the social logic of production and the generalized exchange of signs.

Chapter Two: The Ideological Genesis of Needs

Note from page [63]: 1. This piece first appeared in Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie, 1969.

Note from page [63]: 2. Investissement: this is the standard, and literal, French equivalent of Freud's Besetzung, which also means investment in ordinary German. The English, however,have insisted on rendering this concept by coining a word that sounds more technical:cathexis, to cathect, etc. The term has been used here mainly to draw attention to the psychoanalytic sense, which varies in intensity and precision, of Baudrillard's investissement, investir. Loosely, Freud's concept involves the quantitative transfer of psychic energy to parts of the psyche, images, objects, etc. --Trans.

Note from page 64: 3. Not epistemologically given! -- Trans.

Note from page 65: 4. Thus the structure of exchange (cf. Levi-Strauss) is never that of simple reciprocity. It is not two simple terms, but two ambivalent terms that exchange, and the exchange establishes their relationship as ambivalent.

Note from page 69: 5. In the logic of the commodity, all goods or objects become universally commutable. Their (economic) practice occurs through their price. There is no relationship either to the subject or to the world, but only a relation to the market.

Note from page 69: 6. The same goes for food: as a "functional need," hunger is not symbolic. Its objective is satiation. The food object is not substitutable. But it is well known that eating can satisfy an oral drive, being a neurotic substitute for lack of love. In this second function, eating, smoking, collecting objects, obsessive memorization can all be equivalent: the symbolic paradigm is radically different from the functional paradigm. Hunger as such is not signified, it is appeased. Desire, on the other hand, is signified throughout an entire chain of signifiers. And when it happens to be a desire for something experienced as lost, when it is a lack, an absence on which the objects that signify it have come to be inscribed, does it make any sense to treat such objects literally, as if they were merely what they are? And what can the notion of need possibly refer to, in these circumstances?

Note from page 69: 7. Borges, cited in Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1970). p. xv.

Note from page 70: 8. Speculaire: The adjective specular and the noun specularity occur often in Baudrillard's analyses of ideology. They deliberately recall the mirror-like relations of the Imaginary order, which is opposed to the Symbolic order in Lacanian psychoanalysis. For the best introduction to Lacan in English, see Anthony Wilden, The Language of the Self (New York: 1968) and System and Structure (London: 1972). The latter work is less informative with respect to Lacan specifically, but attempts a curious synthesis that may fruitfully be compared with Baudrillard's work. Wilden is more sympathetic toward traditional Marxist assumptions and to mainstream social science in the form of cybernetics, systems theory, etc. With the work of Lévi-Strauss, Lacan and others behind them, both have in common a concern for the apparently special or traditionally unaccountable status of symbolic exchange, a critique of the "digital bias" (Wilden) in the Western epistème (which, by definition, would include the 19th century revolutionary critique of or version of political economy): and both attempt to reexamine such basic concepts as need, desire, the subject, object, etc. --Trans.

Note from page 70: 9. According to Marcel Mauss in The Gift (London: Routledge, 1970).

Note from page 73: 10. Chombart de Lauwe, Pour une Sociologie des Aspirations (Gonthier) and George Katona, The Society of Mass Consumption.

Note from page 76: 11. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class(New York: Mentor, 1953), p. 35.

Note from page 76: 12. Ibid., p. 43.

Note from page 77: 13. Georges Bataille, La Part Maudite (Les Editions de Minuit, 1967).

Note from page 77: 14. See the analysis of an analogous type of operation in the chapter below on The Art Auction.

Note from page 77: 15. "Free" time brings together the "right" to work and the "liberty" to consume in the framework of the same system: it is necessary for time to be "liberated" in order to become a sign-function and take on social exchange value, whereas labor time, which is constrained time, possesses only economic exchange value. Cf. Part I of this essay: one could add a definition of symbolic time to that of the object. It would be that which is neither economically constrained nor "free" as sign-function, but , that is, inseparable from the concrete act of exchange -- a rhythm.

Note from page 77: 16. Veblen, op. cit., p. 88.

Note from page 78: 17. Cf. "universal" furniture (or "universal" clothing in Roland Barthes' study of fashion): as the epitome of all functions, it becomes once again opposable to them, and thus simply one more term in the paradigm. Its value isn't universal, but derived from relative distinction. Thus all the "universal" values (ideological, moral, etc.) become again -- indeed, perhaps are produced from the outset as -- differential values.

Note from page 78: 18. In relation to this one, the other functions are secondary processes. They certainly constitute part of the sociological domain. But the logic of difference (like the primary process) constitutes the proper object of genuine social science.

Note from page 79: 19. Any more than originality, the specific value, the objective merit is belonging to the aristocratic or bourgeois class. This is defined by signs, to the exclusion of "authentic" values. See Goblot, La Barriere et le Niveau (Presse Universitaire de France, 1967).

Note from page 80: 20. On this point, see Ruyer, La Nutrition Psychique. The Ideological Genesis of Needs

Note from page 81: 21. English in the original. -Trans.

Note from page 82: 22. Consommativité: Baudrillard's neologism obviously suggests a parallel with the term "productivity," and all that connotes. -- Trans.

Note from page 82: 23. It is so true that consumption is a productive force that, by significant analogy, it is often subsumed under the notion of profit: "Borrowing makes money." "Buy, and you will be rich." It is exalted not as expenditure, but as investment and profitability.

Note from page 83: 24. Hence, it is vain to oppose consumption and production, as is so often done, in order to subordinate one to the other, or vice versa, in terms of causality or influence. For in fact we are comparing two heterogeneous sectors: productivity, that is, and abstract and generalized exchange value system where labor and concrete production are occluded in laws -- the modes and relations of production; secondly, a logic, and a sector, that of consumption, which is entirely conceived in terms of motivations and individual, contingent, concrete satisfactions. So, properly speaking, it is illegitimate to confront the two. On the other hand, if one conceives of consumption as production, the production of signs, which is also in the process of systematization on the basis of a generalization of exchange value (of signs), then the two spheres are homogeneous -- though, at the same time, not comparable in terms of causal priority, but homologous from the viewpoint of structural modalities. The structure is that of the mode of production.

Note from page 83: 25. Cf. besoin and besogne. Baudrillard here draws attention to the etymological connection between the French term for need and the archaic word besogne, which commonly referred to labor, a heavy burden, etc., as well as meaning to need. -- Trans.

Note from page 83: 26. In both senses of the term: technical and social.

Note from page 84: 27. A hypothesis: labor itself did not appear as a productive force until the social order (the structure of privilege and domination) absolutely needed it to survive, since the power based on personal and hierarchical relations was no longer sufficient by itself. The exploitation of labor is a last resort for the social order. Access to work is still refused to women as socially subversive.

Note from page 84: 28. Nonetheless, this emergence of needs, however formal and subdued, is never without danger for the social order -- as is the liberation of any productive force. Apart from being the dimension of exploitation, it is also the origin of the most violent social contradictions, of class struggle. Who can say what historical contradictions the emergence and exploitation of this new productive force -- that of needs -- holds in store for us?

Note from page 85: 29. There is no other basis for aid to underdeveloped countries.

Note from page 86: 30. Robots remain the ultimate and ideal phantasm of a total productivist system. Still better, there is integrated automation. However, cybernetic rationality is devouring itself, for men are necessary for any system of social order and domination. Now, in the final analysis, this amounts nonetheless to the aim of all productivity, which is a political goal.

Note from page 87: 31. The term itself has been "recuperated," for it presupposes an original purity and delineates the capitalist system as a maleficent instance of perversion, revealing yet another moralizing vision.

Note from page 87: 32. Or, more simply, in a system of generalized exchange.