From: "Karl Carlile" <joseph-AT-indigo.ie> Subject: Re: M-TH: Use Values Date: Fri, 1 Aug 1997 11:39:02 -0700 KARL: Hi Russell! RUSSELL: Now like-wise, Baudrillard argues exchange value can have no anchor in a reality of use, production or labour. 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. On the basis of your message I cannnot accept the imperialistic thesis you appear to be advancing: 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. 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. 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. Thus the differece is ontological. 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. Greetings, Karl Baudrillard does not discount social relations. What Baudrillard is arguing is that _both_ the social relations _and_ the 'code' exist, but (if I understand him rightly) that what really matters is the 'reproduction' of the code. This code is like the hidden hand of classical political economy and it maintains an almost Weberian iron grip on every aspect of our everyday lives. This code he argues, doesn't have any connection to such 'realities' as use being usurped by exchange. To expand, in his essay 'The End of Production' in _Symbolic Exchange and Death_ (Sage 1993 [Gallimard 1976]) he argues that we can see society on two levels. On the 'first level scenario' a commodity must have a use value to sustain the system of exchange values, but on the second level, a commodity functions as exchange value to hide the fact that it circulates like a sign and reproduces the code. (1993:31) Thus everthing is simulated, or as he likes to put it we are in a society of simulacra- ie a world of copies to which there is no orginal. Why is this so? As with many structuralists meaning and existence itself are pre-determined by the operation of the 'system of meaning', or code of semiotics, but with the post-structuralist rider that the very code of signs has broken down. Baudrillard argues that the relationship between the signified and signifier has broken down (it was an illusion all the time anyway he argues), and with it the relationship between use and exchange value. NB On the sign and the symbolic: Baudrillard distinguishes between the two- the latter appears to refer to pre-capitalist 'gift societies' where the objects exchanged have a symbolic meaning in terms of the social structure they form part of. Postone remarks that such societies are characterised by a complusion to these social mores, (god help you if you don't return the gift and more!), whereas ours is characterised by the social nexus of the commodity form. ---------- From: Russell Pearson <r.pearson-AT-clara.net> To: marxism-thaxis-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU Subject: Re: M-TH: Use Values Date: 31 July 1997 13:45 > Karl: Hi Russell! I am not sure as to what you are driving at in the message copied > below. Are you subscribing to the above opinion of Baudrillard. If so can you elaborate a > littel on how "no real distinction can be made between exchange and use values" given > that "uses are as much symolic as material". >James: the leap to the proposition 'no real distinction can be made between exchange and use values' >is a not justified - except to eternalise capitalist social relations as a hyperreality of codes -because >exchange value is not a symbolic code but a social relation. OK, I'm playing devil's advocate here! Whilst nothing gets my goat more than gung ho Baudrillardrians, but I do think that the old codger has a point or two. Baudrillard himself has a very keen and subtle (if wicked and heretical) understanding of Marxist philosophy and he uses it with great skill to undermine wooden headed workerist politics. With this in mind I'd like to consider him a bit more. Baudrillard argues that we are probably living in a 'hyper-capitalist mode', but what really differentiates him from the usual materialist understanding of social relations is his reliance on semiotics. This linguistic theory argues that 'signs' such as words are made of a binary unity of the signifier (the sound or shapes of letters that make up a word) and the signified (the idea we form of the 'thing' referred to). The sign is the unity of the two. What this theory does is to undermine any notion of grounding language in the signifier- the word 'cat' has an arbitrary relationship to the furry quadriped sitting in my front room. The feline could have been known by the signifier 'dog' 'tree' or 'Karl Marx'. Thus meaning has no anchor in 'real objects'- the 'referent' the ding in sich is bracketted out and can't be accessed via the words we use to designate it. Now like-wise, Baudrillard argues exchange value can have no anchor in a reality of use, production or labour. Baudrillard does not discount social relations. What Baudrillard is arguing is that _both_ the social relations _and_ the 'code' exist, but (if I understand him rightly) that what really matters is the 'reproduction' of the code. This code is like the hidden hand of classical political economy and it maintains an almost Weberian iron grip on every aspect of our everyday lives. This code he argues, doesn't have any connection to such 'realities' as use being usurped by exchange. To expand, in his essay 'The End of Production' in _Symbolic Exchange and Death_ (Sage 1993 [Gallimard 1976]) he argues that we can see society on two levels. On the 'first level scenario' a commodity must have a use value to sustain the system of exchange values, but on the second level, a commodity functions as exchange value to hide the fact that it circulates like a sign and reproduces the code. (1993:31) Thus everthing is simulated, or as he likes to put it we are in a society of simulacra- ie a world of copies to which there is no orginal. Why is this so? As with many structuralists meaning and existence itself are pre-determined by the operation of the 'system of meaning', or code of semiotics, but with the post-structuralist rider that the very code of signs has broken down. Baudrillard argues that the relationship between the signified and signifier has broken down (it was an illusion all the time anyway he argues), and with it the relationship between use and exchange value. NB On the sign and the symbolic: Baudrillard distinguishes between the two- the latter appears to refer to pre-capitalist 'gift societies' where the objects exchanged have a symbolic meaning in terms of the social structure they form part of. Postone remarks that such societies are characterised by a complusion to these social mores, (god help you if you don't return the gift and more!), whereas ours is characterised by the social nexus of the commodity form. Russ --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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