Theory Underground · SAARUTU — Source Brief · Postwar French Theory Shelf
This brief reconstructs the argument of The Mirror of Production so it can be rebuilt and drafted from without the book in hand. It follows Baudrillard's own sequence (Preface, then Chapters I–V, each closing on an “Epistemology” section), and carries every load-bearing formulation as a complete, page-anchored block quote rather than as paraphrase, because those passages are what travel into later writing.
The working copy is a database/HTML rendering of the Telos 1975 edition that carries the print pagination inline as -- N -- markers, so every citation below is to the print page and needs no file-to-print offset. The rendering carries occasional OCR/typesetting slips; where one falls inside a quoted passage it is preserved verbatim and listed in the apparatus at the foot of the brief. Inline footnote-reference digits that the rendering folded into the running text are dropped from quotations as the apparatus markers they are.
The book is one sustained operation: to show that Marxism does not transcend political economy but completes and interiorizes it. The wedge is that Marx critiqued the contents of political economy while leaving its two governing forms untouched, the form of production and the form of representation (Preface, established below). Against production Baudrillard sets symbolic exchange, the reciprocal, ambivalent, non-accumulative circulation of gift and counter-gift drawn from Mauss by way of Bataille, which precedes the form of value and is what the form of value destroys.
The recurring claim is that production, labor, value, need, scarcity, and the unconscious are not anthropological universals awaiting liberation but historical products of one and the same separation, so a radical position has to think beyond value rather than reverse its internal flow. The name Baudrillard gives the move Marx could not make is the critique of the political economy of the sign (Chapter I). Each chapter closes on a self-standing “Epistemology” section that turns the screw from the contents of the analysis to the form of the model, and those sections carry the most aggressive claims, so they are read here as the load-bearing argument rather than as appendices.
The Preface states the premise. The critical theory of the mode of production never reaches the principle of production, so the form of production survives its own critique intact and goes on to underwrite revolutionary discourse.
Page 17A specter haunts the revolutionary imagination: the phantom of production. Everywhere it sustains an unbridled romanticism of productivity. The critical theory of the mode of production does not touch the principle of production. All the concepts it articulates describe only the dialectical and historical genealogy of the contents of production, leaving production as a form intact. This form reemerges, idealized, behind the critique of the capitalist mode of production.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 17.
Productivist discourse is the shared ground of the system and its challenge alike, which is why Baudrillard treats the consensus as suspect rather than as common sense.
Page 17The general formula is that of a productive Eros. Social wealth or language, meaning or value, sign or phantasm — everything is “produced” according to a “labor.” If this is the truth of capital and of political economy, it is taken up whole by the revolution only to capital's benefit. The capitalist system of production is to be subverted in the name of an authentic and radical productivity.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 17.
The productivism is read through Lacan: the scheme of production is the mirror in which the species recognizes itself, and what it recognizes there is the imaginary.
Pages 19–20At the level of all political economy there is something of what Lacan describes in the mirror stage: through this scheme of production, this mirror of production, the human species comes to consciousness [la prise de conscience] in the imaginary. Production, labor, value, everything through which an objective world emerges and through which man recognizes himself objectively — this is the imaginary. Here man is embarked on a continual deciphering of himself through his works, finalized by his shadow (his own end), reflected by this operational mirror, this sort of ideal of a productivist ego.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 19–20.
The diagnosis closes on the two forms Marx left unexamined, which sets the program for the whole book.
Page 20It is no longer worthwhile to make a radical critique of the order of representation in the name of production and of its revolutionary formula. These two orders are inseparable and, paradoxical though it may seem, Marx did not subject the form production to a radical analysis any more than he did the form representation. These are the two great unanalyzed forms of the imaginary of political economy that imposed their limits on him. The discourse of production and the discourse of representation are the mirror by which the system of political economy comes to be reflected in the imaginary and reproduced there as the determinant instance.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 20.
The chapter demands that the whole Marxist apparatus — productive forces, mode of production, relations of production, labor power — be questioned with the severity Marx aimed at exchange value. The hinge is the means/end split smuggled into the very definition of the human as producer.
Pages 21–22But is man's existence an end for which he must find the means? These innocent little phrases are already theoretical conclusions: the separation of the end from the means is the wildest and most naive postulate about the human race. Man has needs. Does he have needs? Is he pledged to satisfy them? Is he labor power (by which he separates himself as means from himself as his own end)? These prodigious metaphors of the system that dominates us are a fable of political economy retold to generations of revolutionaries infected even in their political radicalism by the conceptual viruses of this same political economy.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 21–22.
The first target is the assumption that use value names a beyond of political economy. It does not; it is the system's internal horizon, produced by exchange value.
Pages 22–23In the distinction between exchange value and use value, Marxism shows its strength but also its weakness. The presupposition of use value — the hypothesis of a concrete value beyond the abstraction of exchange value, a human purpose of the commodity in the moment of its direct relation of utility for a subject — is only the effect of the system of exchange value, a concept produced and developed by it. Far from designating a realm beyond political economy, use value is only the horizon of exchange value.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 22–23.
Marx is read as retaining use value as a concrete antecedent rather than radicalizing it; even his reply to Adolph Wagner (the “vir obscurus,” pages 23–24, citing the Notes on Wagner) leaves the priority of exchange value standing.
Pages 24–25In maintaining a kind of dialectical equilibrium between concrete, qualitative labor and abstract, quantitative labor, Marx gives logical priority to exchange value (the given economic formation). But in so doing, he retains something of the apparent movement of political economy: the concrete positivity of use value, a kind of concrete antecedent within the structure of political economy. He does not radicalize the schema to the point of reversing this appearance and revealing use value as produced by the play of exchange value.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 24–25.
The conclusion of the move: use value is the law of value's own residue.
Page 25Such is the twist by which exchange value retrospectively originates and logically terminates in use value. In other words, the signified “use value” here is still a code effect, the final precipitate of the law of value.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 25.
The chapter's most original technical move. The quality/quantity pair is not a reduction of the qualitative by the quantitative but a single binary scission — a “fork” — whose function is to universalize labor as such. The qualitative pole is the more dangerous, because it makes all human practice comparable as labor.
Page 27Ideology always thus proceeds by a binary, structural scission, which works here to universalize the dimension of labor. By dividing (or redividing into the qualitative structural effect, a code effect), quantitative labor spreads throughout the field of possibility. Henceforth there can be only labor — qualitative or quantitative. The quantitative still signifies only the commensurability of all forms of labor in abstract value; the qualitative, under the pretext of incommensurability, goes much further. It sinigifes the comparability of all human practice in terms of production and labor. Or better: the abstract and formal universality of the commodity labor power is what supports the “concrete” universality of qualitative labor.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 27. (“sinigifes” printed for signifies; preserved as printed.)
The image and its payoff: the fork establishes the abstraction it pretends to escape, and the fetishism of labor crystallizes in the play between the two terms.
Pages 27–28But this “concrete” is an abuse of the word. It seems opposed to the abstract at the base of the fork, but in fact the fork itself is what establishes the abstraction. The autonomization of labor is sealed in the play of the two — from the abstract to the concrete, from the qualitative to the quantitative, from the exchange value to the use value of labor. In this structuralized play of signifiers, the fetishism of labor and productivity crystallizes.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 27–28.
Neither the use value of labor power nor the use value of products “exists” except as projections of the system of exchange value, the same fiction running through production, consumption, and signification.
Page 30In fact the use value of labor power does not exist any more than the use value of products or the autonomy of signified and referent. The same fiction reigns in the three orders of production, consumption, and signification. Exchange value is what makes the use value of products appear as its anthropological horizon. The exchange value of labor power is what makes its use value, the concrete origin and end of the act of labor, appear as its “generic” alibi.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 30.
This delivers the book's most-cited formula: the system does not merely exploit labor power, it produces the concept of man as labor power, and Marxism, by locating alienation in the sale, censors the deeper alienation in the identity itself.
Page 31In other words, the system of political economy does not produce only the individual as labor power that is sold and exchanged: it produces the very conception of labor power as the fundamental human potential. More deeply than in the fiction of the individual freely selling his labor power in the market, the system is rooted in the identification of the individual with his labor power and with his act of “transforming nature according to human ends.” In a work, man is not only quantitatively exploited as a productive force by the system of capitalist political economy, but is also metaphysically overdetermined as a producer by the code of political economy. In the last instance, the system rationalizes its power here. And in this Marxism assists the cunning of capital. It convinces men that they are alienated by the sale of their labor power, thus censoring the much more radical hypothesis that they might be alienated as labor power, as the “inalienable” power of creating value by their labor.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 31. (“In a work” printed for In a word; preserved as printed.)
From the same dialectical base, Marxism runs in two directions, and Baudrillard means to discredit both: an ethic that sanctifies labor, and an esthetic that sanctifies its negation.
Page 35On this dialectical base, Marxist philosophy unfolds in two directions: an ethic of labor and an esthetic of non-labor. The former traverses all bourgeois and socialist ideology. It exalts labor as value, as end in itself, as categorical imperative. Labor loses its negativity and is raised to an absolute value. But is the “materialist” thesis of man's generic productivity very far from this “idealist” sanctification of labor? In any case, it is dangerously vulnerable to this charge.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 35.
The ethic is documented through Benjamin's attack on the German workers' movement and its gospel of work, which Baudrillard quotes at length.
Pages 36–37Nothing was more corrupting for the German workers' movement than the feeling of swimming with the current. It mistook technical development for the current, the direction it believed it was swimming in. From there, there was only one step to take in order to imagine that industrial labor represented a political performance. With German workers the old Protestant ethic of work celebrated, in a secular form, its resurrection. The Gotha Program bore traces of this confusion. It defined work as ‘the source of all wealth and culture.’ To which Marx, even worse, objected that man possesses only his labor power, etc. However, the confusion spread more and more: and Joseph Dietzgen announced, ‘Work is the Messiah of the modern world. In the amelioration of labor resides the wealth that can now bring what no redeemer has succeeded in’.
Walter Benjamin, quoted by Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 36–37 (citing Benjamin, Poésie et révolution, 283).
The decisive turn is against the second direction. Non-work is refused as a beyond: it is the reverse mirage of work, structured by the same binary, and the temporal order it installs is still production's.
Page 40Work and non-work: here is a “revolutionary” theme. It is undoubtedly the most subtle form of the type of binary, structural opposition discussed above. The end of the end of exploitation by work is this reverse fascination with non-work, this reverse mirage of free time (forced time-free time, full time-empty time: another paradigm that fixes the hegemony of a temporal order which is always merely that of production). Non-work is still only the repressive desublimation of labor power, the antithesis which acts as the alternative.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 40. (“The end of the end of exploitation” printed, a probable doubling of the end of; preserved as printed.)
Against Kristeva's attempt to find in Marx a labor “outside value,” on the side of the body and discharge, Baudrillard insists Marx thought production strictly in terms of value.
Page 42She would have him read Bataille before he wrote — but also forget him when it is convenient. If there was one thing Marx did not think about, it was discharge, waste, sacrifice, prodigality, play, and symbolism. Marx thought about production (not a bad thing), and he thought of it in terms of value.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 42.
The relocation of the rupture is the section's load-bearing claim: the real break is not internal to value (abstract vs. concrete labor) but at the threshold of value itself.
Page 45In relation to symbolic exchange, this productive Eros represents the real rupture which Marx displaces and situates between abstract quantitative labor and concrete qualitative labor. The process of “valorization” begins with the process of the useful transformation of nature, the instauration of labor as generic finality, and the stage of use value. The real rupture is not between “abstract” labor and “concrete” labor, but between symbolic exchange and work (production, economics).
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 45.
The title-image arrives as the chapter's imperative.
Pages 46–47And in order to question the process which submits us to the destiny of political economy and the terrorism of value, and to rethink discharge and symbolic exchange, the concepts of production and labor developed by Marx (not to mention political economy) must be resolved and analyzed as ideological concepts interconnected with the general system of value. And in order to find a realm beyond economic value (which is in fact the only revolutionary perspective), then the mirror of production in which all Western metaphysics is reflected, must be broken.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 46–47.
The first epistemology section turns from contents to form: a concept is strategically explosive at its irruption and dies into ideology once universalized, where it joins a self-confirming metonymic chain and turns imperialist.
Pages 48–49From this point on they only evoke themselves in an indefinite metonymic process which goes as follows: man is historical; history is dialectical; the dialectic is the process of (material) production; production is the very movement of human existence; history is the history of modes of production, etc. This scientific and universalist discourse (code) immediately becomes imperialistic. All possible societies are called on to respond.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 48–49.
The flat declarative the brief returns to: the categories do not describe the primitive order, they only rebound on the society that produced them.
Page 49This constitutes a most astonishing theoretical aberration — and a most reactionary one. There is neither a mode of production nor production in primitive societies. There is no dialectic and no unconscious in primitive societies. These concepts analyze only our own societies, which are ruled by political economy. Hence they have only a kind of boomerang value.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, page 49.
The methodological inversion that follows from it.
Pages 49–50Instead of exporting Marxism and psychoanalysis (not to mention bourgeois ideology, although at this level there is no difference), we bring all the force and questioning of primitive societies to bear on Marxism and psychoanalysis.
Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, pages 49–50.
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