7

Beyond Use Value

The status of use value in Marxian theory is ambiguous. We know that the commodity is both exchange value and use value. But the latter is always concrete and particular, contingent on its own destiny, whether this be in the process of individual consumption or in the labor process (In this case, lard is valued as lard, cotton as cotton they cannot be substituted for each other, nor thus “exchanged.”) Exchange value, on the other hand, is abstract and general. To be sure, there could be no exchange value without use value—the two are coupled; but neither is strongly implied by the other. “In order to define the notion of commodity, it is not important to know its particular content and its exact destination. It suffices that before it is a commodity—in other words, the vehicle (support) of exchange value—the article satisfy a given social need by possessing the corresponding useful property. That is all.¹ Thus, use value is not implicated in the logic peculiar to exchange value, which is a logic of equivalence. Besides, there can be use value without exchange value (equally for labor power as for products, in the sphere outside the market). Even if it is continually reclaimed by the process of production and exchange, use value is never truly inscribed in the field of the market economy: it has its own finality, albeit restricted. And within it is contained, from this standpoint, the promise of a resurgence beyond the market economy, money and exchange value, in the glorious autonomy of man’s simple relation to his work and his products.

So it appears that commodity fetishism (that is, where social relations are disguised in the qualities and attributes of the commodity itself) is not a function of the commodity defined simultaneously as exchange value and use value, but of exchange value alone. Use value, in this restrictive analysis of fetishism, appears neither as a social relation nor hence as the locus of fetishization. Utility as such escapes the historical determination of class. It represents an objective, final relation of intrinsic purpose (destination propre), which does not mask itself and whose transparency, as form, defies history (even if its content changes continually with respect to social and cultural determinations). It is here that Marxian idealism goes to work; it is here that we have to be more logical than Marx himself—and more radical, in the true sense of the word. For use value—indeed, utility itself—is a fetishized social relation, just like the abstract equivalence of commodities. Use value is an abstraction. It is an abstraction of the system of needs cloaked in the false evidence of a concrete destination and purpose, an intrinsic finality of goods and products. It is just like the abstraction of social labor, which is the basis for the logic of equivalence (exchange value), hiding beneath the “innate” value of commodities.

In effect, our hypothesis is that needs (i.e., the system of needs) are the equivalent of abstract social labor: on them is erected the system of use value, just as abstract social labor is the basis for the system of exchange value. This hypothesis also implies that, for there to be a system at all, use value and exchange value must be regulated by an identical abstract logic of equivalence, an identical code. The code of utility is also a code of abstract equivalence of objects and subjects (for each category in itself and for the two taken together in their relation); hence, it is a combinatory code involving potential calculation (we will return to this point). Furthermore, it is in itself, as system, that use value can be “fetishized,” and certainly not as a practical operation. It is always the systematic abstraction that is fetishized. The same goes for exchange value. And it is the two fetishizations, reunited—that of use value and that of exchange value—that constitute commodity fetishism.

Marx defines the form of exchange value and of the commodity by the fact that they can be equated on the basis of abstract social labor. Inversely, he posits the “incomparability” of use values. Now, it must be seen that:

1. For there to be economic exchange and exchange value, it is also necessary that the principle of utility has already become the reality principle of the object or product. To be abstractly and generally exchangeable, products must also be thought and rationalized in terms of utility. Where they are not (as in primitive symbolic exchange), they can have no exchange value. The reduction to the status of utility is the basis of (economic) exchangeability.

2. If the exchange principle and the utility principle have such an affinity (and do not merely coexist in the commodity), it is because utility is already entirely infused with the logic of equivalence, contrary to what Marx says about the “incomparability” of use values. If use value is not quantitative in the strictly arithmetical sense, it still involves equivalence. Considered as useful values, all goods are already comparable among themselves, because they are assigned to the same rational-functional common denominator, the same abstract determination. Only objects or categories of goods cathected in the singular and personal act of symbolic exchange (the gift, the present) are strictly incomparable. The personal relation (non-economic exchange) renders them absolutely unique. On the other hand, as a useful value, the object attains an abstract universality, an “objectivity” (through the reduction of every symbolic function).

3. What is involved here, then, is an object form whose general equivalent is utility. And this is no mere “analogy” with the formulas of exchange value. The same logical form is involved. Every object is translatable into the general abstract code of equivalence, which is its rationale, its objective law, its meaning—and this is achieved independently of who makes use of it and what purpose it serves. It is functionality which supports it and carries it along as code, and this code, founded on the mere adequation of an object to its (useful) end, subordinates all real or potential objects to itself, without taking any one into account at all. Here, the economic is born, the economic calculus. The commodity form is only its developed form, and returns to it continually.

4. Now, contrary to the anthropological illusion that claims to exhaust the idea of utility in the simple relation of a human need to a useful property of the object, use value is very much a social relation. Just as, in terms of exchange value, the producer does not appear as a creator, but as abstract social labor power, so in the system of use value, the consumer never appears as desire and enjoyment, but as abstract social need power (one could say Bedürfniskraft, Bedurfnisvermögen, by analogy with Arbeitskraft, Arbeitsvermögen).

The abstract social producer is man conceived in terms of exchange value. The abstract social individual (the person with “needs”) is man thought of in terms of use value. There is a homology between the “emancipation” in the bourgeois era of the private individual given final form by his needs and the functional emancipation of objects as use values. This results from an objective rationalization, the surpassing of old ritual and symbolic constraints. In a radically different type of exchange, objects did not have the status of “objectivity” that we give them at all. But henceforward secularized, functionalized and rationalized in purpose, objects become the promise of an ideal (and idealist) political economy, with its watchword “to each according to his needs.”

At the same time, the individual, now disengaged from all collective obligations of a magical or religious order, “liberated” from his archaic, symbolic or personal ties, at last private and autonomous, defines himself through an “objective” activity of transforming nature—labor—and through the destruction of utility for his benefit: needs, satisfactions, use value.

Utility, needs, use value: none of this ever comes to grips with the finality of a subject up against his ambivalent object relations, or with symbolic exchange between subjects. Rather, it describes the relation of the individual to himself conceived in economic terms —better still, the relation of the subject to the economic system. Far from the individual expressing his needs in the economic system, it is the economic system that induces the individual function and the parallel functionality of objects and needs.2 The individual is an ideological structure, a historical form correlative with the commodity form (exchange value), and the object form (use value). The individual is nothing but the subject thought in economic terms, rethought, simplified, and abstracted by the economy. The entire history of consciousness and ethics (all the categories of occidental psycho-metaphysics) is only the history of the political economy of the subject.

Use value is the expression of a whole metaphysic: that of utility. It registers itself as a kind of moral law at the heart of the object—and it is inscribed there as the finality of the “need” of the subject. It is the transcription at the heart of things of the same moral law (Kantian and Christian) inscribed on the heart of the subject, positivizing it in its essence and instituting it in a final relation (with God, or to some transcendent reality). In both cases, the circulation of value is regulated by a providential code that watches over the correlation of the object with the needs of the subject, under the rubric of functionality—as it assures, incidentally, the coincidence of the subject with divine law, under the sign of morality.

This is the same teleology that seals the essence of the subject (his self-identity through the recognition of this transcendent finality). It establishes the object in its truth, as an essence called use value, transparent to itself and to the subject, under the rational banner of utility. And this moral law effects the same fundamental reduction of all the symbolic virtualities of the subject and the object. A simple finality is substituted for a multiplicity of meanings. And it is still the principle of equivalence that functions here as the reducer of symbolic ambivalence:

1. It establishes the object in a functional equivalence to itself in the single framework of this determined valence: utility. This absolute signification, this rationalization by identity (its equivalence to itself) permits the object to enter the field of political economy as a positive value.

2. The same absolute simplification of the subject as the subject of moral consciousness and needs permits him to enter the system of values and practices of political economy as an abstract individual (defined by identity, equivalence to himself).

Thus the functionality of objects, their moral code of utility, is as entirely governed by the logic of equivalence as is their exchange value status. Hence, functionality falls just as squarely under the jurisdiction of political economy. And if we call this abstract equivalence of utilities the object form, we can say that the object form is only the completed form of the commodity form. In other words, the same logic (and the same fetishism) plays on the two sides of the commodity specified by Marx: use value and exchange value.

By not submitting use value to this logic of equivalence in radical fashion, by maintaining use value as the category of “incomparability,” Marxist analysis has contributed to the mythology (a veritable rationalist mystique) that allows the relation of the individual to objects conceived as use values to pass for a concrete and objective —in sum, “natural”—relation between man’s needs and the function proper to the object. This is all seen as the opposite of the abstract, reified “alienated” relation the subject would have toward products as exchange values. The truth of the subject would he here, in usage, as a concrete sphere of the private relation, as opposed to the social and abstract sphere of the market.3 (Marx does provide a radical analysis of the abstraction of the private individual as a social relation in another connection, however.) Against all this seething metaphysic of needs and use values, it must be said that abstraction, reduction, rationalization and systematization are as profound and as generalized at the level of “needs” as at the level of commodities. Perhaps this was not yet very clear at an anterior stage of political economy, when one could imagine that if the individual was alienated by the system of exchange value, at least he would return to himself, become himself again in his needs and in the moment of use value. But it has become possible today, at the present stage of consummative mobilization,4 to see that needs, far from being articulated around the desire or the demand of the subject, find their coherence elsewhere: in a generalized system that is to desire what the system of exchange value is to concrete labor, the source of value. All the drives, symbolic relations, object relations and even perversions—in short, all the subject’s labor of cathexis—are abstracted and given their general equivalent in utility and the system of needs, as all values and real social labor find their general equivalent in money and in coin. Everything surging from the subject, his body and his desire, is dissociated and catalyzed in terms of needs, more or less specified in advance by objects. All instincts are rationalized, finalized and objectified in needs—hence symbolically cancelled. All ambivalence is reduced by equivalence. And to say that the system of needs is a system of general equivalence is no metaphor: it means that we are completely immersed in political economy. This is why we have spoken of fetishism of me value. If needs were the singular, concrete expression of the subject, it would be absurd to speak of fetishism. But when needs erect themselves more and more into an abstract system, regulated by a principal of equivalence and general combinative, then certainly the same fetishism is in play. For this system is not only homologous to that of exchange value and the commodity; it expresses the latter in all its depth and perfection.

Indeed, just as exchange value is not a substantial aspect of the product, but a form that expresses a social relation, so use value can no longer be viewed as an innate function of the object, but as a social determination (at once of the subject, the object, and their relation). In other words, just as the logic of the commodity extends itself indifferently to men and things and makes men (all obedient to the same law) appear only as exchange value—thus the restricted finality of utility imposes itself on men as surely as on the world of objects. It is illogical and naive to hope that, through objects conceived in terms of exchange value, that is, in his needs, man can fulfill himself otherwise than as use value. However, such is the modern humanist vulgate: through the functionality, the domestic finality of the exterior world, man is supposed to fulfill himself qua man. The truth is something else entirely. In an environment of commodities and exchange value, man is no more himself than he is exchange value and commodity. Encompassed by objects that function and serve, man is not so much himself as the most beautiful of these functional and servile objects. It is not only Homo oeconomicus who is turned entirely into use value during the process of capitalist production. This utilitarian imperative even structures the relation of the individual to himself. In the process of satisfaction, he valorizes and makes fruitful his own potentialities for pleasure; he “realizes” and manages, to the best of his ability, his own “faculty” of pleasure, treated literally like a productive force. Isn’t this what all of humanist ethics is based on—the “proper use” of oneself?

In substance, Marx says: “Production not only produces goods; it produces people to consume them, and the corresponding needs.” This proposition is most often twisted in such a way as to yield simplistic ideas like “the manipulation of needs” and denunciations of “artificial needs.”5 It is necessary to grasp that what produces the commodity system in its general form is the concept of need itself, as constitutive of the very structure of the individual—that is, the historical concept of a social being who, in the rupture of symbolic exchange, autonomizes himself and rationalizes his desire, his relation to others and to objects, in terms of needs, utility, satisfaction and use value.

Thus, it is not merely such and such a value that reduces symbolic exchange, or emerges from its rupture; it is first the structural opposition of two values: exchange value and use value, whose logical form is the same, and whose dual organization punctuates the economic. We are faced here at a global anthropological level with the same schema of “semiological reduction” analyzed above in the section on “Fetishism and Ideology.” In that study, we demonstrated the way in which this binary oppositive structuration constituted the very matrix of ideological functioning—from the fact that this structuration is never purely structural: it always plays to the advantage of one of the two terms. Structural logic always redoubles in a strategy (thus masculine-feminine, to the profit of the former, conscious-unconscious, to the advantage of consciousness, etc.).

Precisely the same thing is going on here. In the correlation:

use value and signified do not have the same weight as exchange value and signifier respectively. Let us say that they have a tactical value—whereas exchange value and signifier have strategic value. The system is organized along the lines of a functional but hierarchized bipolarity. Absolute preeminence redounds to exchange value and the signifier. Use value and needs are only an effect of exchange value. Signified (and referent) are only an effect of the signifier (we will return to this point later).6 Neither is an autonomous reality that either exchange value or the signifier would express or translate in their code. At bottom, they are only simulation models, produced by the play of exchange value and of signifiers. They provide the latter with the guarantee of the real, the lived, the concrete, they are the guarantee of an objective reality for which, however, in the same moment, these systems qua systems substitute their own total logic. (Even the term “substitute” is misleading, in this context. It implies the existence somewhere of a fundamental reality that the system appropriates or distorts. In fact, there is no reality or principle of reality other than that directly produced by the system as its ideal reference.) Use value and the signified do not constitute an elsewhere with respect to the systems of the other two; they are only their alibis.

We have seen, in a first approximation, that the field of political economy generalizes and saturates itself through the system of use value (that is, the extension of the process of abstraction and productive rationality to the entire domain of consumption through the system of needs as system of values and productive forces). In this sense, use value appears as the completion and fulfillment of exchange value (of political economy in general). The fetishism of use value redoubles and deepens the fetishism of exchange value.

That is a starting point. But it is necessary to see that the system of use value is not only the double, transposition or extension of that of exchange value. It functions simultaneously as the latter’s ideological guarantee (and once again, if this is so, it is because it is logically structured in the same way). It is understood, of course, that it is a naturalizing ideology we are concerned with here. Use value is given fundamentally as the instance (i.e., tribunal) before which all men are equal. On this view, need, leaving aside any variation in the means of satisfying it, would be the most equally distributed thing in the world.7 Men are not equal with respect to goods taken as exchange value, but they would be equal as regards goods taken as use value. One may dispose of them or not, according to one’s class, income, or disposition; but the potentiality for availing oneself of them nevertheless exists for all. Everyone is equally rich in possibilities for happiness and satisfaction. This is the secularization of the potential equality of all men before God, the democracy of “needs.” Thus, use value, reflected back to the anthropological sphere, reconciles in the universal those who are divided socially by exchange value.

Exchange value erases the real labor process at the level of the commodity, such that the latter appears as an autonomous value. Use value fares even better: it provides the commodity, inhuman as it is in its abstraction, with a “human” finality. In exchange value, social labor disappears. The system of use value, on the other hand, involves the resorption without trace of the entire ideological and historical labor process that leads the subject in the first place to think of himself as an individual, defined by his needs and satisfaction, and thus ideally to integrate himself into the structure of the commodity.

Thus, without ceasing to be a system in historical and logical solidarity with the system of exchange value, that of use value succeeds in naturalizing the latter and offers it that universal and atemporal guarantee without which the exchange value system simply couldn’t reproduce itself (or doubtless even be produced in its general form).

Use value is thus the crown and scepter of political economy:

• In its lived reality: it is the immanence of political economy in everyday life, down to the very act in which man believes he has rediscovered himself. He does not rediscover his objects except in what they serve; and he does not rediscover himself except through the expression and satisfaction of his needs—in what he serves.

• In its strategic value: ideologically, it seals off the system of production and exchange, thanks to the institution of an idealist anthropology that screens use value and needs from their historical logic in order to inscribe them in a formal eternity that of utility for objects, that of the useful appropriation of objects by man in need.

This is why use value fetishism is indeed more profound, more “mysterious” than the fetishism of exchange value. The mystery of exchange value and the commodity can be unmasked, relatively—it has been since Marx—and raised to consciousness as a social relation But value in the case of use value is enveloped in total mystery, for it is grounded anthropologically in the (self-) “evidence” of a naturalness, in an unsurpassable original reference. This is where we discover the real “theology” of value—in the order of finalities’ in the “ideal” relation of equivalence, harmony, economy and equilibrium that the concept of utility implies. It operates at all levels between man and nature, man and objects, man and his body, the self and others. Value becomes absolutely self-evident, “la chose la plus simple.” Here the mystery and cunning (of history and of reason) are at their most profound and tenacious.

If the system of use value is produced by the system of exchange value as its own ideology—if use value has no autonomy, if it is only the satellite and alibi of exchange value, though systematically combining with it in the framework of political economy—then it is no longer possible to posit use value as an alternative to exchange value. Nor, therefore, is it possible to posit the “restitution” of use value, at the end of political economy, under the sign of the “liberation of needs” and the “administration of things” as a revolutionary perspective.

Every revolutionary perspective today stands or falls on its ability to reinterrogate radically the repressive, reductive, rationalizing metaphysic of utility. All critical theory depends on the analysis of the object form.8 This has been absent from Marxist analysis. With all the political and ideological consequences that this implies, the result has been that all illusions converged on use value, idealized by opposition to exchange value, when it was in fact only the latter’s naturalized form.

Marx and Crusoe

Marx says in Volume I of Capital (Part 1, Section 4): “So far as (a commodity) is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants, or from the point that those properties are the product of human labor. It is as clear as noonday that man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by Nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him.

“The mystical character of commodities does not originate, therefore, in their use value.

“The categories of bourgeois economy consist of … forms of thought expressing with social validity the conditions and relations of a definite historically determined mode of production, viz., the production of commodities. The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labor as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production.

“Since Robinson Crusoe’s experiences are a favorite theme with political economists, let us take a look at him on his island … All the relations between Robinson and the objects that form this wealth of his own creation are here so simple and clear as to be intelligible without exertion, even to Mr. Baudrillard.9 And yet those relations contain all that is essential to the determination of value.”

Having quite justifiably played his joke at the expense of the bourgeois economists and their interminable Robinsonnades, Marx would have done well to examine his own use of the Crusoe myth. For by opposing the obscure mysticism of commodity value to the simplicity and transparency of Crusoe’s relation to his wealth, he fell into a trap. If one hypothesizes (as Marxists do) that all the ideology of bourgeois political economy is summed up in the myth of Robinson Crusoe, then it must be admitted that everything in the novel itself agrees with the mystical theology and metaphysics of bourgeois thought, including (and above all) this “transparency” in man’s relation to the instruments and products of his labor.

This ideal confrontation of man with his labor capacity (Arbeitsvermögen) and with his needs is not only abstract because it is separated out from the sphere of political economy and commercial social relations; it is abstract in itself: not abstracted from political economy, but abstract because it epitomizes the abstraction of political economy itself, that is, the ascension of exchange value via use value, the apotheosis of the economic in the providential finality of utility.

Robinson Crusoe is the outcome of a total mutation that has been in progress since the dawn of bourgeois society (though truly theorized only since the eighteenth century). Man was transformed simultaneously into a productive force and a “man with needs.” The manufacturers and the ideologues of Nature divided him between themselves. In his labor, he became a use value for a system of production. Simultaneously, goods and products became use values for him, taking on a meaning as functions of his needs, which were henceforth legalized as “nature.” He entered the regime of use value, which was also that of “Nature.” But this was by no means according to an original Finality rediscovered. All these concepts (needs, nature, utility) were born together, in the historical phase that saw the systematization of both political economy and the ideology that sanctions it.

The myth of Robinson Crusoe is the bourgeois avatar of the myth of Terrestrial Paradise. Every great social order of production (bourgeois or feudal) maintains an ideal myth, at once a myth of culmination and a myth of origin. Theology supported itself on the myth of the fulfillment of man in the Divine Law; political economy is sustained on the great myth of human fulfillment according to the natural law of needs. Both deal in the same finality an ideal relation of man to the world through his needs and the rule of Nature; and an ideal relationship with God through faith and the divine rule of Providence. Of course, this ideal vocation is lived from the outset as lost or compromised. But the finality tarries, and use value, entombed beneath exchange value, like the natural harmony of Earthly Paradise broken by sin and suffering, remains inscribed as an invulnerable essence to be disinterred at the last stage of History, in a promised future redemption. The logic and ideology are the same: under the sign of a bountiful nature, where the primitive hunting and gathering mode of production, anterior to the feudal mode, is highlighted, and from which serfdom and labor are made to disappear, the myth of Earthly Paradise describes the ideality of feudal relations (suzerainty and fealty of vassals). Likewise, the Crusoe myth describes, in a “transparent” isolation (where the anterior mode of agriculture and craftsmanship reappears, and the laws of the market and exchange disappear), the ideality of bourgeois relations individual autonomy, to each according to his labor and his needs, moral consciousness bound to nature—and, if possible, some Man Friday, some aboriginal servant. (But if Crusoe’s relations to his labor and his wealth are so “clear,” as Marx insists, what on earth has Friday got to do with this setup?)

In fact, nothing is clear about this fable. Its evidence of simplicity and transparency is, as that of the commodity for Marx, “abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.” There is nothing clear and natural in the fact of “transforming nature according to one’s needs” or in “rendering oneself useful” as well as things. And there was no need for this moral law of use value to have escaped the critique of political economy the whole system and its “mystery” were already there with Robinson on his island, and in the trumped-up immediacy of his relation to things.