Version 1.1 · evidence-layer upgrade to the revised SAARUTU full-quote density standard: load-bearing fragments re-pulled as complete block quotes; cross-page welds split (pp. 61/62, 212/214) and within-page clips re-pulled whole; multi-locus passages added (four logics, satellite/alibi, signifier-fetishism, medium/model, ideology-as-form, “return each to his place”); reconstruction, section order, apparatus, and anomaly notes preserved.
| Section | Printed pp. |
|---|---|
| Translator’s Introduction (Charles Levin) | 1–28 |
| 1. Sign-Function and Class Logic | 29–62 |
| 2. The Ideological Genesis of Needs | 63–87 |
| 3. Fetishism and Ideology: The Semiological Reduction | 88–101 |
| 4. Gesture and Signature: The Semiurgy of Contemporary Art | 102–111 |
| 5. The Art Auction: Sign Exchange and Sumptuary Value | 112–122 |
| 6. For a General Theory | 123–129 |
| 7. Beyond Use Value | 130–143 |
| 8. Towards a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign | 143–163 |
| 9. Requiem for the Media | 164–184 |
| 10. Design and Environment, or How Political Economy Escalates into Cyberblitz | 185–203 |
| 11. Concerning the Fulfillment of Desire in Exchange Value | 204–214 |
The book extends the critique of political economy to the sign. Where Marx analyzed the commodity as the cell-form of capitalist value, Baudrillard analyzes the sign as the cell-form of a parallel and inseparable system, sign exchange value, and argues that the two forms are governed by one logic. The wager is announced flatly in the opening essay:
“This empiricist hypothesis is false. Far from the primary status of the object being a pragmatic one which would subsequently come to overdetermine a social value of the sign, it is the sign exchange value (valeur d’échange signe) which is fundamental—use value is often no more than a practical guarantee (or even a rationalization pure and simple).”
Ch. 1, p. 29.
From that inversion the whole volume unfolds. The essays were written across the late 1960s and early 1970s and do not form a treatise; they circle the same nucleus from different entries (objects, needs, fetishism, art, the auction, the media, design). Levin warns the reader against reading them as a finished system:
“Notes For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign is literally a commotion of ideas, sometimes inconsistent, issuing from a period of intense critical activity in which nothing was resolved.”
Intro, p. 7.
The reconstruction below follows the source’s own order, because the order is the argument: Chapters 1–3 build the critique of consumption, needs, and fetishism on a sociological and ideological footing; Chapters 4–5 test it on art and the auction; Chapter 6 lays out the formal apparatus; Chapters 7–8 deliver the two theoretical cores (the critique of use value, the critique of the sign); Chapters 9–11 deploy the apparatus against the media, design, and the desire-in-value.
Three positions recur and hold the book together, and they are worth fixing before the chapter walk because every essay redeploys them.
Stated first in Chapter 2 and formalized in Chapter 6. Every object can be taken under one of four logics, each with its own principle. The Chapter 2 statement:
“A functional logic of use value; 2. An economic logic of exchange value; 3. A logic of symbolic exchange; 4. A logic of sign value. The first is a logic of practical operations, the second one of equivalence, the third, ambivalence, and the fourth, difference. Or again: a logic of utility, a logic of the market, a logic of the gift, and a logic of status. Organized in accordance with one of the above groupings, the object assumes respectively the status of an instrument, a commodity, a symbol, or a sign.”
Ch. 2, p. 66.
And the gloss that fixes which logic is in play: “Only the last of these defines the specific field of consumption” (Ch. 2, p. 66). The Chapter 6 restatement, with the principles attached to each logic:
“postulated four different logics of value: • the functional logic of use value • the economic logic of exchange value • the differential logic of sign value • the logic of symbolic exchange with, for their respective principles’ utility, equivalence, difference, ambivalence.”
Ch. 6, p. 123.
The book’s master move, carried in full at each locus in the chapter bodies below (Ch. 1 p. 29; Ch. 7 p. 137; Ch. 8 pp. 156, 158; Ch. 2 p. 70 / Ch. 8 p. 155). In each paired form the second term does not stand outside the first as its concrete or natural ground; it is produced by the first as its guarantee. Use value is the satellite and alibi of exchange value; the signified-referent is the satellite and alibi of the signifier; denotation is the alibi of connotation; need is the alibi of the system.
Symbolic exchange is not a fourth value alongside the others. It is what the entire field of value excludes. The decisive structural claim of Chapter 6 is that the bar separating the system of value from symbolic exchange is not a bar of implication but a line of radical exclusion:
“The bar that separates all these terms from symbolic exchange is not a bar of structural implication, it is a line of radical exclusion (which presupposes the radical alternative of transgression).”
Ch. 6, p. 128.
Because the symbolic is not itself a value, it can be named only negatively, from outside:
“It is the symbolic that continues to haunt the sign, for in its total exclusion it never ceases to dismantle the formal correlation of Sr and Sd. But the symbolic, whose virtuality of meaning is so subversive of the sign, cannot, for this very reason, be named except by allusion, by infraction (effraction). For signification, which names everything in terms of itself, can only speak the language of values and of the positivity of the sign.”
Ch. 8, p. 161.
Levin situates the book inside Western Marxism and reads it as the point where that tradition turns on itself. He places the eleven essays between Système des objets (1968) and La Société de consommation (1970) on one side and The Mirror of Production (1973) on the other, and resists any clean “break” narrative; even where Baudrillard discards Marxism he is still working through problematics common to Western Marxism. The operative phrase for what Baudrillard does to political economy:
“Indeed, what Baudrillard means, in practical terms, when he claims to “extend the critique of political economy to the sign” is that he wishes to include Marx and positivism (with structuralism as the latter’s archetypical modern representative), under the heading of political economy, in order to critique the whole lot in one go.”
Intro, p. 6.
Levin’s reconstruction of the core argument is the cleanest short statement of it in the volume, and worth holding as a gloss on Chapters 7–8. The binary-privilege insight:
“argument boils down to the insight that the articulation of binary terms must always privilege one side of the opposition, as the means of setting the system in motion. Thus, in the commodity system, it is exchange value that is privileged over use value precisely because exchange value is the system’s principle of circulation.”
Intro, p. 17.
And the alibi structure, as Levin states it for the sign:
“like use value, the nether side of the structural equation of the sign functions as the alibi for its privileged term, revealing what for Baudrillard is the basic form of the ideological process: a binary reduction establishing a complementary (i.e., asymmetrical) relation between arbitrarily isolated terms, which institutionalizes a linear, non-reciprocal exchange.”
Intro, p. 19.
Levin also marks the book’s vulnerability in his own terms, the “gaping lacuna” in Baudrillard’s discourse, quoting the passage carried whole at Ch. 8, p. 161:
“It is the symbolic which never ceases to dismantle the formal correlation of signifier and signified. But the symbolic, whose virtuality of meaning is so subversive of the sign, cannot, for this very reason, be named except by allusion, by infraction (effraction). For signification, which names everything in terms of itself, can only speak the language of values and of the positivity of the sign”
Baudrillard, quoted Intro, p. 161.
And the charge of over-reach, which he attributes to Mikel Dufrenne:
“There is clearly substance to this, especially given the way Baudrillard begins to resort to a version of the noble savage theme, Mikel Dufrenne, for one, has accused him of getting carried away with his argument in precisely this way.”
Intro, pp. 23–24.
He closes by marking the later trajectory toward simulation:
“It should be no surprise, then, that Baudrillard moves straight from his critique of the sign to a reality problematic in which he begins to take cybernetics, systems theory, communication theory and (as their archetype) McLuhanism (“the medium is the message”) at their face value.”
Intro, p. 27.
The longest essay, and the one that does the sociological groundwork. Its move is to demote use value and install sign exchange value as the fundamental category for a sociology of consumption, then to show that the distinctive function of objects is, at bottom, a discriminating (class) function.
Baudrillard opens on the Trobriand distinction between the Kula (symbolic exchange of bracelets and collars organizing status) and the Gimwali (commerce of primary goods), then claims the principle survives the institution:
“The Kula and the Potlatch have disappeared, but not their principle, which we will retain as the basis of a sociological theory of objects—and this is undoubtedly all the more true to the extent that objects multiply and differentiate themselves.”
Ch. 1, p. 30.
Veblen supplies the engine. The function of the subservient classes, women, servants, is to display the standing of the master through vicarious consumption:
“This notion of vicarious consumption is crucial: it leads us back to the fundamental theorem of consumption, which is that the latter has nothing to do with personal enjoyment (although the woman is pleased to be beautiful), but that rather it is a restrictive social institution that determines behavior before even being considered in the consciousness of the social actors.”
Ch. 1, p. 31.
The everyday object today carries a functional simulacrum (make-believe): the conflict between an aristocratic morality of otium and a puritan work ethic forces the object to disguise its prestige function behind a functional alibi.
“At the limit is the gadget: pure gratuitousness under a cover of functionality, pure waste under cover of an ethic of practicality. In any case, all objects, even futile ones, are objects of labor: housekeeping, organizing, tinkering, repairing—every-where homo faber is the double of homo-otiosus.”
Ch. 1, p. 32.
Chapin’s “living-room scale” (twenty-three items, status read off the furniture) is dismissed as “the most naive empiricism” (p. 34); indexing strata on a balance sheet of objects is a vicious circle:
“It is well known that objects tell a great deal about the social status of their owner, but there we have a vicious circle in the objects, one identifies a social category which has, in the final analysis, already been described on the basis of these objects (among other criteria). The recurring induction hides a circular deduction.”
Ch. 1, p. 35.
The corrective is to read objects in their syntax and rhetoric, as a class dialect:
“That is to say, they use it in their own way: they play with it, they break its rules, they speak it with their class dialect.”
Ch. 1, p. 37.
The lapses and contradictions of this discourse are the sociological object:
“On the contrary, this discourse always expresses in this very syntax a neurosis of mobility, of inertia or of social regression.”
Ch. 1, pp. 37–38.
Baudrillard focuses on the mobile middle classes, the “floating hinge of a stratified society,” because their objects carry an ambiguous status:
“That is what gives objects in this “milieu” a fundamentally ambiguous status: behind their triumph as signs of social promotion they secretly proclaim (or avow) social defeat.”
Ch. 1, p. 40.
Their proliferation is anchored, in Bourdieu’s phrase, in a “rhetoric of despair” (p. 41). Two organizing modes govern this petty-bourgeois rhetorical order:
“rhetorical order is governed by two essential modes: on the one hand, saturation and redundance; on the other, symmetry and hierarchy. Obviously there are numerous overlappings (thus symmetry is also redundancy, but it includes centrality). Nonetheless the two modes are quite distinct, the one (saturation-redundancy) expressing the inorganic, the other (symmetry-hierarchy) expressing the organic structure of this order.”
Ch. 1, p. 41.
The detail is dense and meant to be retrieved. The tactic of the pot and its saucer:
“The table is covered with a table cloth which itself is protected by a plastic table cloth. Drapes and double drapes are at the windows. We have carpets, slipcovers, coasters, wainscoting, lampshades. Each trinket sits on a doily, each flower in its pot, and each pot in its saucer. Everything is protected and surrounded. Even in the garden each cluster is encircled with wire-netting, each path is outlined by bricks, mosaics or flagstones. This could be analyzed as an anxious compulsion to sequestration, as an obsessional symbolism the obsession of the cottage owner and small capitalist is not merely to possess, but to underline what he possesses two or three times.”
Ch. 1, p. 42.
The class double-bind is stated exactly:
“It is a class which has gone far enough to interiorize the models of social success, but not far enough to avoid simultaneously interiorizing the defeat.”
Ch. 1, p. 43.
The taste for the bygone is read the same way, as legitimacy-seeking:
“For all these reasons the taste for the bygone is characterized by the desire to transcend the dimension of economic success, to consecrate a social success or a privileged position in a redundant, culturalized, symbolic sign.”
Ch. 1, p. 43.
And the moral fanaticism of housekeeping, in which objects are disciplined like children:
“The objects here are entirely equivalent to children in whom one must first instill good manners, who must be “civilized” by submitting them to the formal imperatives of politeness.”
Ch. 1, p. 45.
The immense unpaid labor of housewives escapes the national accounts because it answers a symbolic, not an economic, calculus:
“If the immense work of housewives (children and objects) never appears in the national accounts, it is undoubtedly because these accounts are too abstract to take into consideration anything other than formal social revenue production. But it is also because, in its profound intention, this labor does not emerge from an economic calculus but from a symbolic and statutory calculus dictated by the relative social class configurations.”
Ch. 1, p. 46.
The privileged stage disavows polish and varnish for the values of “frankness” and the “natural,” whose function is in fact social discrimination:
“On the contrary, it is deduced from lower-class devotion to the artificial, to the baroque affectation of decorum, to the moral values of the veiled, the clothed, the cared for, the preened, to the moral values of effort. Here “preparation” is a cultural fault. Propriety (repressive conditioning) and manners in the matter of objects, which in another age were the cultural signs of the bourgeoisie, are stigmatized as the distinctive marks of the petty bourgeois classes who have outfitted themselves with them. The essential function of the values of “sincerity,” “authenticity,” “starkness,”—inner walls of bare concrete, unfinished timbers—is thus a function of discrimination (distinction), and their definition is first social.”
Ch. 1, p. 46.
Design’s claim that objects progress toward the harmonious synthesis of form and function masks the social function of formal innovation:
“One allows it to be understood that, according to a continuous progress, objects would obey an internal aesthetic logic which would ultimately lead them to appear in their “truth,” in the harmonious synthesis of their function and their form. This is the fundamental theory of design.26 Now the hypothesis of a progressive advancement from model to model toward an ideal state of the environment—a hypothesis which secretly rests upon the representation of technological progress—implies a whole ideology, for it masks the social function of formal innovation, which is a function of cultural discrimination.”
Ch. 1, p. 47.
On fashion and class, the formulation that recurs across the book (“speaks to all in order to return each to his place”; see Ch. 1 p. 60 and Ch. 9 p. 177) arrives here with the “luxury of heirs”:
“Now, this is quite obviously false, fashion, like mass culture, speaks to all in order to better return each one to his place. It is one of those institutions that best restores cultural inequality and social discrimination, establishing it under the pretense of abolishing it. It wishes to be beyond social logic, a kind of second nature in fact, it is entirely governed by the social strategy of class “Modern” transitoriness of objects (and other signs) is in fact the luxury of heirs.”
Ch. 1, p. 51.
The set-piece distinction between the object status and the objective status of the television. Before it transmits images the TV is first a thing bought and possessed:
“Now it is obvious that before being the vehicle of images, a transmitter addressing a receiver, the TV is first a “set” sold by a manufacturer to an individual. It is an object, bought and possessed. Undoubtedly its status is never just that, at any level of the social scale, but this primary status secretly induces a great number of ambiguous cultural behaviors in image reception.”
Ch. 1, p. 53.
Its possession is a certificate of citizenship, and its function becomes a proof function:
“As in John Stuart Mill, the possession of such and such an object is in itself a social service as a certificate of citizenship the TV is a token of recognition, of integration, of social legitimacy. At this level of almost unconscious response it is the object that is in question, not its objective function—and it no longer has an objective function, but a proof function.”
Ch. 1, p. 54.
Crucially, empirical study can only deliver a logic of stratification (continuous gradation), whereas theory reveals a logic of class:
“Empirical studies only make, and can only make, apparent a logic of stratification (distinction-inclusion-transition by plateaus—a continuous ascent); theoretical analysis makes a class logic emerge (distinction-exclusion). There are those for whom TV is an object, there are those for whom it is a cultural exercise: on this radical opposition a cultural class privilege is established that is registered in an essential social privilege.”
Ch. 1, p. 57.
The Reader’s Digest “civilization of A’s” survey is read as a binary that neutralizes class antagonism:
“Thus, the old bogey of the duel between antagonistic classes is conjured away in a statistical dichotomy: there are still two terms, but they are no longer in conflict—they change into the two poles of a social dynamic.”
Ch. 1, p. 59.
“This binary schema is a magic schema of integration: the arbitrary division of distinctive signs on the same scale allows the suggestion of an international model of distinction (the A’s), all the while preserving an international model of democracy, the idea of Europe—which is in fact quite simply that of the virtual homogenization of all social categories under the beneficent constellation of objects.”
Ch. 1, p. 60.
The essay closes on the strongest formulation of the political stake. First the discrimination thesis (p. 61):
“In this perspective, which is not legible at the level of the apparent mechanisms, consumption and the values of consumption are defined as the very criterion of a new discrimination: adherence to these values acts as a new morality for the use of slaves.”
Ch. 1, p. 61.
Then the master/slave morality, restated on the next page (p. 62):
“It must be asked whether certain classes are not consecrated to finding their salvation in objects, consecrated to a social destiny of consumption and thus assigned to a slave morality (enjoyment, immorality, irresponsibility) as opposed to a master morality (responsibility and power).”
Ch. 1, p. 62.
Hence the verdict on the “consumer society”:
“In this sense it is absurd to speak of a consumer society as if consumption were a system of universal values appropriate to all men because of being founded upon the satisfaction of individual needs, when really it is an institution and a morality, and in this way an element of the strategy of power in any society, past or future.”
Ch. 1, p. 62.
And on the discipline that studies it:
“Here sociology is most of the time both a dupe and an accomplice: it takes the ideology of consumption for consumption itself.”
Ch. 1, p. 62.
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