This is the book where Baudrillard sets the three orders of simulacra, the long argument about the political economy of death, and the wager on symbolic exchange into a single structure. The pieces that later circulate separately, the precession of the model over the real, the code, hyperreality, are assembled here around one claim: that the law of value has passed from its commodity form into a structural form, and that what this structural order excludes, and cannot answer, is symbolic exchange.
The argument runs on a single operation repeated across every domain. Production, the body, fashion, sexuality, death, and poetic language are each shown to be organised by a law of equivalence, and each is set against a form that the law of equivalence cannot absorb. That form is reversibility: the gift answered by the counter-gift, exchange reversed in sacrifice, the term of the langue reversed in the anagram, life reversed in death. Where there is equivalence there is accumulation, linearity, and value. Where there is reversibility there is the symbolic, and the symbolic is what every system organised by value must keep at bay.
The brief preserves the book's own order. A preface lays the thesis and the method. The first chapter takes the case of production and labour. The second sets out the three orders of simulacra and the passage into the code. The third and fourth carry the same operation into fashion and the body. The fifth, by far the longest and the book's centre of gravity, is the treatise on political economy and death. The sixth turns to Saussure's anagrams and the extermination of value in poetic language. The apparatus at the end gathers the source's anomalies preserved as printed, the places where Baudrillard states a position he will not take, and the formulations that recur across the corpus.
The Preface states the thesis in its first sentence and then states the method. The thesis is not that some societies run on symbolic exchange and others do not, but that symbolic exchange has ceased to organise the society we live in and now returns to it only as a haunting.
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Symbolic exchange is no longer the organising principle of modern society. Of course, the symbolic haunts modern social institutions in the form of their own death. Indeed, since the symbolic no longer rules these social forms, they experience it only as this haunting, and as a demand forever blocked by the law of value. Even though a certain idea of revolution has, since Marx, attempted to find a way past the law of value, it long since became a revolution in accordance with the Law. Even psychoanalysis gravitates around this haunting, which it fends off while at the same time circumscribing it within an individualised unconscious, thus reducing it, under the Law of the Father, to the obsessional fear of castration and the Signifier. Always the Law.
The opening move: symbolic exchange survives only as the repressed of the institutions that have displaced it, with both Marxist revolution and psychoanalysis named as forms that domesticate it rather than recover it.
From this the method follows. The three thinkers Baudrillard means to use are to be used against themselves, each turned past the point at which his own system stopped.
Pages 22 to 23
Indeed we must switch the targets of each of these three theories, and turn Mauss against Mauss, Saussure against Saussure and Freud against Freud. The principle of reversibility (the counter-gift) must be imposed against all the economistic, psychologistic and structuralist interpretations for which Mauss paved the way. The Saussure of the Anagrams must be set against Saussurian linguistics, against even his own restricted hypotheses concerning the anagram. The Freud of the death drive must be pitched against every previous psychoanalytic edifice, and even against Freud's version of the death drive.
The program in one passage. Mauss's gift, Saussure's anagrams, and Freud's death drive are recruited as the three figures of reversibility, each radicalised against the author who first stated it.
Reversibility is then named as the single form running under every domain, and the catalogue is given in full, since the list is the argument in miniature.
Page 23
Everywhere, in every domain, a single form predominates: reversibility, cyclical reversal and annulment put an end to the linearity of time, language, economic exchange, accumulation and power. Hence the reversibility of the gift in the counter-gift, the reversibility of exchange in the sacrifice, the reversibility of time in the cycle, the reversibility of production in destruction, the reversibility of life in death, and the reversibility of every term and value of the langue in the anagram. In every domain it assumes the form of extermination and death, for it is the form of the symbolic itself.
The master list of reversibilities. Each later chapter works one entry: production in chapter one, the langue in chapter six, life in death across chapter five.
The strategic claim is that a system run by the code cannot be opposed by the old revolutionary dialectic, which belonged to the commodity stage of value. What answers the code is disorder of a different order.
Page 25
Perhaps death and death alone, the reversibility of death, belongs to a higher order than the code. Only symbolic disorder can bring about an interruption in the code. Every system that approaches perfect operativity simultaneously approaches its downfall.
The strategic thesis: against a system organised by the code, only the reversibility of death interrupts, and the system's own drive to perfection is what carries it toward collapse.
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Simulation must go further than the system. Death must be played against death: a radical tautology that makes the system's own logic the ultimate weapon. The only strategy against the hyperrealist system is some form of pataphysics, 'a science of imaginary solutions'; that is, a science-fiction of the system's reversal against itself at the extreme limit of simulation, a reversible simulation in a hyperlogic of destruction and death.
Death played against death. The strategy is not to oppose the system from outside but to push its own logic past the limit at which it reverses.
The Preface closes by qualifying the standing of the whole undertaking. Baudrillard puts the method's status on the record, and the qualification is itself a move made on the record rather than a concession wrung from him later.
Page 26
Strictly speaking, nothing remains for us to base anything on. All that remains for us is theoretical violence – speculation to the death, whose only method is the radicalisation of hypotheses. Even the code and the symbolic remain terms of simulation: it must be possible to extract them, one by one, from discourse.
The author's own account of his method. The book proceeds by the radicalisation of hypotheses rather than by demonstration, and the terms it relies on most, the code and the symbolic, are held to be themselves terms of simulation, not bedrock.
The chapter opens on what Baudrillard calls a revolution in value itself. The law of value had bound two dimensions, a referential one and a structural one, as if their coherence were natural. The revolution is the coming apart of the two, with the structural dimension freed from any reference.
Page 28
This revolution consists in the dislocation of the two aspects of the law of value, which were thought to be coherent and eternally bound as if by a natural law. Referential value is annihilated, giving the structural play of value the upper hand. The structural dimension becomes autonomous by excluding the referential dimension, and is instituted upon the death of reference.
The structural revolution of value, stated as the book's first move. The structural order does not supplement reference, it is instituted on its death.
The decisive twist is who performs this revolution. It is not opposition that ends the regime of production but capital itself, which abolishes its own determination by the means of production.
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The end of the era of production. It is not the revolution which puts an end to all this, it is capital itself which abolishes the determination of the social according to the means of production, substitutes the structural form for the commodity form of value, and currently controls every aspect of the system's strategy.
Capital, not revolution, ends the era of production. This reversal governs the chapter and licenses the later claim that capital only ever played at producing.
The regime that results is one of pure substitution, where every term is commutable with every other and nothing is anchored. Baudrillard's name for it is exact.
Page 31
This is the generalised brothel of capital, a brothel not for prostitution, but for substitution and commutation.
The generalised brothel of capital: total commutability as the characteristic effect of the code, distinguished from prostitution precisely because nothing is being sold, only substituted.
Labour is the first case worked in detail. Once value floats free of reference, labour ceases to be a power that could ground a reversal and becomes one sign circulating among others, exchangeable against its own opposite.
Page 32
This is because labour is not a power, it has become one sign amongst many. Like every other sign, it produces and consumes itself. It is exchanged against non-labour, leisure, in accordance with a total equivalence, it is commutable with every other sector of everyday life. No more or less 'alienated', it is no longer a unique, historical 'praxis' giving rise to unique social relations.
Labour demoted from power to sign. The point is aimed at the Marxist expectation that the truth of labour power could anchor a reversal; once labour is a sign exchanged against leisure, that anchor is gone.
This is also where the terminology of the workplace is read as a symptom. The shift in job titles registers the disappearance of the labourer into an abstraction.
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The semi-skilled worker was no longer a labourer, but merely a worker facing the total indifferentiation of labour, no longer struggling over the content of labour nor over specific wages, but struggling over the generalised form of labour and the political wage. The formation of the 'agent of production' is accompanied by his liberation from the most abstract form – much more abstract than the old semi-skilled worker, exploited to death: the mannequin of labour appeared, the lowest common denominator, the dumb waiter of labour's unreality principle.
The terminological evidence: 'agent of production' and the mannequin of labour as the names for a worker who now produces nothing and contests only the form of labour.
From here Baudrillard states the hypothesis that has made the chapter notorious, and states it with the qualification built in. He does not assert that capital decided to liquidate production. He says everything happens as if it had only ever played at it.
Page 57
I am saying that everything happens as if, because it is not completely certain that capital ever had this productivist view of itself (Marx was basically the only one who had, and he projected this phantasy onto it as an historical truth); it is more likely that it only ever played at production, even if this meant that production had to be abandoned at a later stage, were it to draw capital into fatal contradictions. Has capital ever taken production seriously? Don't be so stupid: at the height of the seriousness of production, capital is doubtless only a simulation.
Capital only ever played at production. The claim is hedged in its own grammar, 'everything happens as if,' and the productivist reading is assigned to Marx as a projection rather than refuted directly.
The chapter's final movement, the section titled Labour and Death, is where the book's deeper claim first surfaces: that what underwrites the wage relation is not exploitation but death. The strategy against such a system is the gift it cannot return.
Page 58
To defy the system with a gift to which it cannot respond save by its own collapse and death. Nothing, not even the system, can avoid the symbolic obligation, and it is in this trap that the only chance of a catastrophe for capital remains. The system turns on itself, as a scorpion does when encircled by the challenge of death.
The gift capital cannot answer. This is the operational form of 'death played against death' from the Preface, transposed onto capital.
Then the claim about labour and death, stated flatly. Labour power is not founded on production but on a death the worker undergoes in order to be exchangeable at all.
Page 60
Labour power is instituted on death. A man must die to become labour power. He converts this death into a wage. But the economic violence capital inflicted on him in the equivalence of the wage and labour power is nothing next to the symbolic violence inflicted on him by his definition as a productive force.
Labour power instituted on death. The symbolic violence, being defined as a productive force, is ranked above the economic violence of the wage bargain.
Page 60
Labour is slow death. This is generally understood in the sense of physical exhaustion. But it must be understood in another sense. Labour is not opposed, like a sort of death, to the 'fulfilment of life', which is the idealist view; labour is opposed as a slow death to a violent death. That is the symbolic reality.
Labour as slow death, with the meaning specified against the obvious one: not exhaustion, but deferred death set against the immediacy of a violent, sacrificial death.
The account of power that follows inverts the usual picture. Power is not the right to kill. It is the monopoly over the deferral of death, the granting of a survival the subject cannot give himself.
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Power is therefore never, contrary to what we might imagine, the power of putting to death, but exactly the opposite, that of allowing to live – a life that the slave lacks the power to give. The master confiscates the death of the other while retaining the right to risk his own.
Power redefined as the monopoly on deferred death rather than the right to kill. The master's power is the confiscation of the other's death.
The same inversion is read into the German word for employer, which Baudrillard takes literally. The one who pays is figured as the one who gives, so that the wage wards off a restitution the worker is trying to make.
Page 62
Contrary to all appearances and experience (capital buys its labour power from the worker and extorts surplus labour), capital gives labour to the worker (and the worker himself gives capital to the capitalist). In German this is Arbeitgeber: the entrepreneur is a 'provider of labour'; and Arbeitnehmer: it is the capitalist who gives, who has the initiative of the gift.
Arbeitgeber read literally: the wage relation cast as a one-way gift, with the employer holding the initiative of the gift and the worker reduced to receiving.
The chapter ends on the system's management of mortality as an accounting problem, with the figure left exactly as printed.
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A compromise results from this, an absurd equilibrium (we can afford to keep 35 per cent of all leukaemia sufferers alive). Assessing the marginal costs of death. Anything above this level and we let them die. But this is not cynical economics, on the contrary, the economy prevents the system from following the conclusions of its own logic and barring people's access to death.
Death as a marginal-cost calculation. The figure of 35 per cent of leukaemia sufferers is preserved as printed; it returns in chapter five's account of euthanasia statistics.
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