From: "Russell Pearson" <r.pearson-AT-clara.net>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Use Values
Date: Sun, 3 Aug 1997 13:44:50 +0100


"Am I a man, am I a machine? 'Oo can tell?" Baudrillard.

> KARL:  In your message you seem to be suggesting that Baudrillard
> was a semiotician and thereby a politcal economist. Your comments also
> seem to suggest that the semiotics of Braudrillard successfully refuted
> the political economy of Karl Marx. 

Not at all Karl, although the assertion that being a semiotician makes one
a political economist inadvertantly hits the nail on the head. de Saussure,
the originator of the 'theory of signs' apparently based his theory of the
arbitrary nature of the signified to the signified from a particular
understanding of marginal utility theory. I'll try and get some more
details on this since it might produce an interesting way of undermining
structuralist and post-structuralist 'refutations' of Marx.

> On the basis of your message I cannnot accept the imperialistic thesis
> you appear to be advancing:

This is the usual charge against Marx from post-structuralists- see eg
_White Mythologies_ Robert Young's 'represention' of historical thinking,
in which Marx becomes 'arrogant and aggrandising'. This book might make an
interesting comparison with Moore's assertions. 

> With regard to the commodity there obtains an inseparable, although
> contradictory, unity between use value and exchange value. There is no
> possibility that exchange value can be collapsed into the sphere of
> semiotics by flattening it into signifier. Exchange value and 
> use value in the form of the commodity cannot  necessarily bear the
> relationship that, according to you, Braudillard suggests as obtaining
> between signifier and signified.

As I pointed out this is Baudrillard's slight of hand. His compatriot
Foucault does a similar conjuring trick when he slides from a denial of
oppression in theories of consciousness to the denial of a locus of
oppression in the social. We are left wondering where do the two connect-
does one follow the other?

> The commodity is an objective fact of capitalism. As objective fact it
> is the contradictroy unity of use value and exchange value whereas, by
> contrast, there obtains (according to your account of Braudillard'
> semiotics) a contingent and external relationship between signifier and
> signified. 

An objective fact?? Baudrillard and his peers would have you for breakfast
on this one! For starters, how can an entity which is characterised by the
sociality of its prime component- viz value- an element that no chemist has
ever seen, and one that abounds in theorlogical niceties, be an objective
fact?

In short the commodity as a unity contains within itself a
> NECESSARY and INTERNAL contradiction between use value and exchange
> value whereas the signifier/signified binary is EXTERNALLY and
> CONTINGENTLY related. At the core of this discussion is the espousal of
> qualtitatively different kinds of contradiction.

Yes I agree, BUT, how can we be so sure that one is necessary and one
contigent, without attempting to erect one on the bedrock of natural
certainity called use and then oppose it in a classically binary way to its
artificial opposite called exchange?
 
> Thus the differece is ontological.

And Derrida would agree here!- "all ontology is hauntology" and the
commodity is one of its most spectral forms. There is no ontological
certainity, no objective facts when we approach the mystery of the
commodity, unless you want to ground it in natural use.

> 
> Singifier/signified and exchange value/use value (commodity) are, then,
> two ontologically distinct kinds of reality and therefore cannot be
> collapsed into each other. In short political economy together with the
> capitalist economic system cannot be imperialistically gobbled up by
> semiotics. 

Ah, but can we do the same as I suggested earlier, and gobble up semiotics
in Marxist theory?
And by the bye, lets reserve the already overworked term 'imperialism' for
the real thing, lest we drain ourselves with theories of 'cultural
imperialism' and the like.

Top of the morning to ya,


Russ.




     --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---