6
For a General Theory
I
“The Ideological Genesis of Needs” 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.
The study of “The Art Auction” explored a particular case of the strategy of values in the passage from economic exchange value to sign exchange value. Continuing from that point, it is tempting to lay out a hypothetical general conversion table of all values that could serve as an orientation table for a general anthropology.
Use Value (UV)
1. UV—EcEV
2. UV—SgEV
3. UV—SbE
Economic Exchange Value (EcEV)
1. EcEV—UV
2. EcEV—SgEV
3. EcEV—SbE
Sign Exchange Value (SgEV)
1. SgEV—UV
2. SgEV—EcEV
3. SgEV—SbE
Symbolic Exchange (SbE)
1. SbE—UV
2. SbE—EcEV
3. SbE—SgEV
Here there is no attempt at a theoretical articulation of these various logics. There is simply an attempt to mark out the respective fields and the transit from one to the other.
1. UV—EcEV: The field of the process of production of exchange value, of the commodity form (forme-marchandise) etc., described by political economy. Productive consumption.
2. UV—SgEV: The field of the production of signs originating in the destruction of utility (“conspicuous consumption,” sumptuary value) “Unproductive” consumption (of time as well, in conspicuous idleness and leisure), in fact productive of differences: it is functional difference playing as a statutory difference (semi-automatic vs. entirely automatic washing machine). Here, the advertising process of conferring value transmutes use goods (biens d’usage) into sign values. Here technique and knowledge are divorced from their objective practice and recovered by the “cultural” system of differentiation. It is thus the extended field of consumption, in the sense we have given it of production, systems and interplay of signs. Of course, this field also includes the production of signs originating from economic exchange value (see 5 below).
3. UV—SbE: The field of consumption (consumation as opposed to the usual French, consommation), that is, of the destruction of use value (or of economic exchange value, cf. 6), no longer, however, in order to produce sign values, but in the mode of a transgression of the economic, reinstating symbolic exchange. The presentation, the gift, the festival (fete).
4. EcEV—UV: This is the process of “consumption” in the traditional economic sense of the term, that is, the reconversion of exchange value into use value (by private individuals in the act of purchase or by production in the productive consumption) 4 and 1 are the two moments of the cycle of classical (and Marxist) political economy, which does not take into account the political economy of the sign. It is also the field of the consecration of exchange value by use value, of the transfiguration of the commodity form into the object form (cf. below, “Beyond Use Value”).
5. EcEV—SgEV: The process of consumption according to its redefinition in the political economy of the sign. It includes the act of spending as production of sign value and, conjointly with 2, it comprises the field of sumptuary value. But here more accurately, we have the ascension of the commodity form into the sign form, the transfiguration of the economic into sign systems and the transmutation of economic power into domination and social caste privilege.
6. EcEV—SbE: While 2 and 5 describe the transfiguration of use value and exchange value into sign value (or again: of the object form and commodity form into sign form), 3 and 6 mark the transgression of these two forms (that is, of the economic) in symbolic exchange. According to our reformulation which implicates the sign form in the field of general political economy, 9 completes 3 and 6 as transgression of the sign form toward symbolic exchange.
There is no articulation between these three forms (which describe general political economy) and symbolic exchange. There is, on the contrary, a radical separation and transgression, an eventual deconstruction of these forms, which are codes of value. Accurately speaking, there is no symbolic “value,” there is only symbolic “exchange,” which defines itself precisely as something distinct from, and beyond value and code. All forms of value (object, commodity or sign) must be negated in order to inaugurate symbolic exchange. This is the radical rupture of the field of value.
7. SgEv—UV: Signs, like commodities, are at once use value and exchange value. The social hierarchies, the invidious differences, the privileges of caste and culture which they support, are accounted as profit, as personal satisfaction, and lived as “need” (need of social value-generation to which corresponds the “utility” of differential signs and their “consumption”).
8. SgEV—EcEV: This involves the reconversion of cultural privilege, of the monopoly of signs, etc., into economic privilege. Coupled with 5, this reconversion describes the total cycle of a political economy in which economic exploitation based on the monopoly of capital and “cultural” domination based on the monopoly of the code engender one another ceaselessly.
9. SgEV—SbE: The deconstruction and transgression of the sign form toward symbolic exchange (cf. 3 and 6).
10, 11, and 12. SbE—UV, EcEV, SgEV: All three describe a single process, the inverse of the transgression described in 3, 6, and 9—the process of breaking and reducing symbolic exchange, and the inauguration of the economic. Taken together, they amount to a kind of “cost analysis” of symbolic exchange under the abstract and rational jurisdiction of the various codes of value (use value, exchange value, sign value). For example, the objects involved in reciprocal exchange, whose uninterrupted circulation establishes social relationships, i.e., social meaning, annihilate themselves in this continual exchange without assuming any value of their own (that is, any appropriable value). Once symbolic exchange is broken, this same material is abstracted into utility value, commercial value, statutory value. The symbolic is transformed into the instrumental, either commodity or sign. Any one of the various codes may be specifically involved, but they are all joined in the single form of political economy which is opposed, as a whole, to symbolic exchange.
This “combined” interpretation of the matrix (grille) of values is only a first approach. It appears that certain correlations group together naturally, that certain are reversible, that certain values are convertible into one another, that certain are exclusive of each other. Some function term by term, others in a more complex cycle. Their general principles—utility, equivalence, difference, and ambivalence—are difficult to articulate clearly. And above all, it should be borne in mind that this remains a combinatory exploration, with its merely formal symmetries. There is no organizing theory behind it.
II
A second phase consists in extracting some dominant articulation from this moving ensemble of production and reproduction, of conversion, transgression and reduction of values. The first that presents itself can be formulated thus.
or: sign value is to symbolic exchange what exchange value (economic) is to use value.
That is to say that between symbolic exchange and sign value there is the same reduction, the same process of abstraction and rationalization (cf. “Fetishism and Ideology” concerning the body, the un-conscious, etc.) as between the multiple “concrete” use values and the abstraction of exchange value in the commodity. Consequently, the form of the equation, if it is accepted, implies that an identical process is at work on both sides of the equation. This process is none other than that of political economy (traditionally directed upon the second relation: 
). This implies analyzing the first relation in terms of a political economy of the sign, which is articulated in the political economy of material production and countersigns it in the process of ideological labor. This sign economy exists, more or less, in the form of theoretical linguistics and, more generally, semiology. But these latter carefully avoid placing their analyses under the rubric of political economy (which implies a critique of the political economy of the sign, following the same theoretical procedure as Marx). This, however, is what they amount to without knowing it they are simply the equivalent, in the domain of signs and meaning, of classical bourgeois political economy prior to its critique by Marx.
If the political economy of the sign (semiology) is susceptible to a critique in the same way as classical political economy, it is because their form is the same, not their content: sign form and commodity form.
This second phase has moved from a matrix (grille) and from a more or less mechanical combinatory of values to a relation of forms and to an homology of the ensemble it is a considerable advance, but not decisive. This relation effectively articulates the various logics of value; but if the homology is to be fully coherent, there must be a horizontal relation to reinforce the vertical one. Not only must sign value be to symbolic exchange what exchange value is to use value (the relation posited above), but also sign value must be to exchange value what symbolic exchange is to use value. That is:
Now, if sign value and exchange value (sign form and commodity form) really are implicated, by reason of their logical form, in the framework of a general political economy, we can claim no affinity of the same order linking symbolic exchange and use value—quite the contrary, because the former implies the transgression of the latter, the latter the reduction of the former (cf. in 1, 3 and 10–12). The formula then is not coherent, so much the more so in that the integration of symbolic exchange as a factor homogeneous to the others in the relation does not take into account what has been posited: that the symbolic is not a value (i.e., not positive, autonomisable, measurable or codifiable) It is the ambivalence (positive and negative) of personal exchange—and as such it is radically opposed to all values.
II
These incoherencies finally result in bursting the formula and in a general restructuring.
1. In place of the sign as global value, it is necessary to make its constituent elements, the signifier and the signified, appear.
2. Then, the definitive correlation between sign form and commodity form is established thus:
or: exchange value is to use value what the signifier is to the signified.
The horizontal implication—exchange value is to the signifier what use value is to the signified (i.e., the logical affinity of exchange value and the signifier on the one hand, and of use value and the signified on the other)—will emerge from the analysis of the respective vertical implications. On this basis, we will say that this homologous relation (this time coherent) describes the field of general political economy.
3. The homologous relation being saturated, symbolic exchange finds itself expelled from the field of value (or the field of general political economy). This corresponds to the radical definition as the alternative to and transgression of value.
4. The bar marking the process of reduction, or of rational abstraction, which (it is believed) separates use value from exchange value, and signified from signifier, is displaced. The fundamental reduction no longer takes place between UV and EV, or between signifier and signified.1 It takes place between the system as a whole and symbolic exchange.
The bar which separates use value from exchange value, and that which separates the signified from the signifier is a line of formal logical implication. It does not radically separate these respective terms; rather, it establishes a structural relation between them (and similarly between exchange value and signifier, between use value and signified). In fact, all these relations form a system in the framework of political economy. And the logical organization of this entire system denies, represses and reduces symbolic exchange. 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). Thus, we arrive at the following general distribution of terms:
that is to say, a single great opposition between the whole field of value (where the process of material production [commodity form] and the process of sign production [sign form] are articulated through the same systematic logic) and the field of non-value, of symbolic exchange.
General Political Economy / Symbolic Exchange
A critique of general political economy (or a critical theory of value) and a theory of symbolic exchange are one and the same thing. It is the basis of a revolutionary anthropology. Certain elements of this anthropology have been elaborated by Marxist analysis, but it has since proved unable to develop them to the critical point of departure.
The present theory posits three essential tasks, beginning from and going beyond Marxist analysis.
1. The extension of the critique of political economy to a radical critique of use value, in order to reduce the idealist anthropology which it still subtends, even in Marx (whether at the level of “needs” of individuals or at the level of the “use value of labor”). A critique of use value fetishism is necessary—an analysis of the object form in its relations to the commodity form.
2. The extension of the critique of political economy to the sign and to systems of signs is required in order to show how the logic, free play and circulation of signifiers is organized like the logic of the exchange value system; and how the logic of signifieds is subordinated to it tactically, as that of use value is subordinated to that of exchange value. Finally, we need a critique of signifier-fetishism—an analysis of the sign form in its relation to the commodity form. In the global relation.
these two initial points aim toward a critical theory of the three terms which Marxist analysis has not yet mastered. In fact, strictly speaking, Marx offers only a critical theory of exchange value. The critical theory of use value, signifier, and signified remains to be developed.