Notes
Translator’s Introduction
1. Le Systéme des objets (Paris: Denöel-Gonthier, 1968). Henceforth referred to as S. O. in the text.
2. György Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), p. 83.
3. La Société de consommation (Paris: Gallimard, 1970). Henceforth referred to as S.C. in the text.
4. Pour une critique de l’economie politique du signe (Paris: Gallimard, 1972). Further references to this translation will appear in the text.
5. The Mirror of Production, trans. and introduction by Mark Poster (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1975). Henceforth referred to as M.P. in the text.
6. “Translator’s Introduction” to The Minor of Production, p. 13.
7. John Fekete, The Critical Twilight (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), p. 225, note 12.
8. Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: Seabury, 1974), p. 93.
9. Quoted in Michel Bosquet, “Herbert Marcuse, professeur de liberté,” Le Nouvel Observateur, August 6, 1979, p. 17.
10. Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), p. 47.
11. It certainly fails to conjure up the dimensions of the object domain that Baudrillard has constructed in his critique. Let us call it “neo-capitalism,” affixing it to most of the world.
12. Fekete, p. 197.
13. Richard Bernstein, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), p. 182.
14. Jurgen Habermas, Theory and Practice, trans. John Viertel (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), p. 256.
15. Fekete, p. 197.
16. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), p. 182.
17. Mikel Dufrenne, Art et Politique (Paris: Une Générale d’Editions, 1974), p. 59.
18. Paul Piccone, Telos, No. 31 (Spring 1977), p. 195.
19. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (Frogmore, St Albans: Paladin, 1972). For his own reconsideration, see “Change the Object Itself: Mythology Today,” in Stephen Heath, trans., Image-Music-Text (Glasgow: Fontana, 1977), pp. 165–169.
20. Roland Barthes, Leçon (Paris: Seuil, 1977), pp. 14, 25.
21. Jean Baudrillard, L’èchange symbolique et la mort (Paris: Gallimard, 1976).
1. Sign- Function and Class Logic
1. Appeared in Communications, No. 13 (1969).
2. “Pratique,” with certain exceptions that should be dear to the reader and are often indicated by pratique in parentheses, has generally been translated “practice.” This distinguishes it from “praxis,” a term regularly used in Système des objects (Paris: Gallimard, 1968) but apparently later abandoned. Nevertheless, pratique does retain overtones of praxis and is not the same as usage in the simple utilitarian sense. Rather, it refers to a sort of operative mode, one of the various stances, or practical attitudes that may be reflected in one’s use of objects. That there are various pratiques that may be focused simultaneously upon a single object should be made amply clear in the sections later in this chapter concerning the TV-object (see especially Ritual and Rational Practices).—Translator’s note.
3. Baudrillard seems to use “catégone” for “classe” (especially catégone sociale-classe sociale) more often than would be usual in English. We have, however, used category quite strictly as a translation of catégorie because the latter has become a common term in structuralist writing. We cite from Piaget, Le Structuralisme (PUF), pp. 24; 25: “Il s’agit de l’invention des ‘catégories’ (MacLane, Eilenberg, etc.), c’est-à-dire d’une classe d’éléments y compris les fonctions qu’ils component, done accompagnée de morphismes.” A rough translation: “It involves the invention of ‘categories’ (MacLane, Eilenberg, etc.), that is to say, a class of elements including the functions they bear with them, thus a class accompanied by morphisms.”—Trans.
4. “Prestation” is rare in English or French Baudrillard develops and uses it so extensively that it almost becomes a term. The sense is most succinctly expressed when he refers to “the mechanism of social prestation a mechanism of discrimination and prestige.” The word indicates a feeling of obligation to an irrational code of social behavior.—Trans.
5. It will later be made clear (cf. For a General Theory) that symbolic exchange is radically separate from all values.—Trans.
6. Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class (Mentor, 1953).
7. Thus, in the centrally heated country villa, the peasant bed-warming pan disguises its anachronistic “folklore” character: it is said to be “useful in winter all the same.”
8. It is a contradiction in every logic, for the two systems of value are incompatible. Only the “functionalist” industrial aesthetic can imagine a harmonious reconciliation of function and form, because it is unaware of the social contradictions of its employment (exercise). Cf. below Luxury and the Ephemeral.
9. Here it is not a question of individual vanity that wishes to possess more beautiful objects than others: the latter derives from psychological living, from the conscious relation of rivalry. The social goal of ostentation and all the social mechanism of value are largely unconscious, and are exercised by the subjects without their own knowledge. The conscious games of prestige and rivalry are only the refraction of these finalities and constraints in consciousness.
10. F. Stuart Chapin, Contemporary American Institutions (New York: Harper, 1935), Ch. XIX: A Measurement of Social Status. Cf. also Dennis Chapman, The Home and Social Status (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955).
11. Cf. Jean Baudrillard, Le Système des objects.
12. For certain categories the differential scale is relatively impoverished (electric household gadgets, TV, etc.). For others (seats, wall units), the hierarchical paradigm of models and series will be rich.
13. “Spéculaire,” cf. note about Lacan below in “Toward a Political Economy of the Sign.”—Trans.
14. Thus at every social level, giving education to children is an essential tactical element but on certain levels this form of fulfillment conflicts with fulfillment through the possession of objects.
15. This is also the paradox of fashion: everyone outfits himself in distinctive signs that end up belonging to everyone. Riesman evaluates the paradox in successive types of civilizations the other-directed, which is conformist, succeeds the inner-directed, which endeavors to distinguish itself.
16. Cf. on this point George Katona, The Powerful Consumer (New York: McGraw Hill, 1960), and the notion of inconspicuous consumption.
17. See below, Luxury and the Ephemeral.
18. Undoubtedly even a class society, as we will see later.
19. Thus the proportion of workers who want their children to complete higher education is much lower than that of individuals belonging to the privileged classes.
20. Cf. Sartre’s café waiter whose oversignificant actions art intended not so much to do something as to show how well it is done.
21. “Bygone” is used as a translation of “l’Ancien” because there are major objections to the obvious choices of antique, old, prior, etc. It refers to an article that is sanctified because of belonging to another era, yet which exists in the present Antique is close, but would exclude the pseudo antique, the bourgeois kitsch of Louis XV or XVI bedsteads actually produced in Plattsburg (or Paris, for that matter). The simultaneous incarnation of petty bourgeois cravings for both old and new in the same object is too juicy to be missed. Baudrillard himself refers to it (note below).—Trans.
22. Alternatively, in a whole panoply of fashionably “deviant” objects—monstrous, astonishing, bizarre, vicious—such as flourish today in the shop windows on the Left Bank. There is an entire hell of “unique” objects (or objects with limited distribution) in their usefulness or eccentricity, an entire hell of the luxury object that at heart dreams of the Faubourg St. Honoré. That is to say that its forced originality must be interpreted as the challenge of the marginal intellectual classes to all “legitimate” spheres privileged by industrial society.
23. The only ones to remain refractory—provisionally—to the baroque of the bygone are the peasants, whose aspirations pass toward the functional modern serial object via the rejection of signs of the past, and the workers because they still escape cultural mobility and have no worthwhile status to defend or to legitimize. On the ‘bygone,’ cf. Systéme des objets.
24. It is a tendency that, in its principles of “discreteness” (objects are individual, distinct unities in their form and function) and redundancy, is opposed to the modern principles of the environment: fluidity, polyvalence, combinatory and mobile integration of elements.
25. The employment of domestic personnel for this purpose (maid, cleaning woman, housekeeper, etc.) is an essential social criterion. To have a maid is to leave the middle class.
26. Cf. below, Design and Environment.—Trans.
27. The mixture that today is in fashion everywhere, in advertising, decoration, clothing, testifies to the same “liberty”: Mondrian-like geometricism coexists peacefully with the psychedelic version of art nouveau.
28. The same analysis can be made with respect to furniture (no longer according to the material, but to the function). The last word in functional furniture is the mobile element, which, stacked with a few cushions, can turn into a bed, seats, wall units, bookshelves, or anything at all (a pure object) at the whim of its owner. It is the Arch-furnishing, the totally polyvalent manifestation of an audacious, incontestably “rational” analytic formula. And this formula paradoxically revives those of the Middle Ages or of poor peasant living, where the same element—the trunk—would also serve as table, bench, cupboard, etc. The meaning, however, is evidently reversed; far from being a solution to poverty, the contemporary mobile element is the synthesis of all these differentiated functions and of all luxurious distinctions. It is the culmination of simplicity and upon the (bad) faith of this apparent simplicity its designers make of it the “popular” and economical solution of the future! The prices, which are always realistic, unpityingly translate the social logic, these simple forms are a costly refinement. Here again formal innovation is justified in terms of severity, economy, “structure,” sometimes even in terms of penury and urgency: “If necessary, your bed can be turned into a dresser,” etc. Why bother? It is only a game, and one that only plays upon necessity fashion is pre-eminent here Technical—real—innovation does not have at heart the goal of genuine economy, but the game of social distinction.
29. “function de durer … ‘en dur.’”—Trans.
30. Fashion embodies a compromise between the need to innovate and the other need to change nothing in the fundamental order. It is this that characterizes “modern” societies. Thus it results in a game of change. In this game, the new and the old are functionally equivalent. If one adheres to lived psychology, one would see there two inverse tendencies: the need to change and the nostalgic need for old things. In fact the function of the new look and of the old fashion is the alteration at all levels, it is the result of a logical constraint of the system—old and new are not relative to contradictory needs: they are the “cyclical” paradigm of fashion. “Modern” is the new and the old which no longer have temporal value. For the same reason, “modern” has nothing to do with actual practicality, with a real change, with a structural innovation. New and old, neologism and archaism are homogeneous in the game of changes.
31. Nevertheless, one would have to take into account the latent, psycho collective functions of the “hard” and the solid—powerful functions of integration that also are included in the social budget.
32. Of course, there is also a question of price: the most audacious and thus the most ephemeral fashion is also the most costly in all domains. But the price only comes to sanction a logical process of discrimination.
33. This pure prestige value of the object as such, a magical prestation independent of its function emerges in the limiting cases (which we gratuitously burden with the label “prelogical mentality,” although it is quite simply a question of social logic), where for example, a broken TV set, vacuum cleaner or watch, or a car out of gas are still prestige elements in the African bush.
34. This “economic fetishism” or the fetishism of revenue production in fact realizes a compromise between the impossibility—socially defined—of being autonomously culturally defined, and the injunction of an industrial (capitalist) society with a very strong economic imperative.
35. Just as neither the bourgeoisie nor the proletariat has ever been alone, confronted by the other, nor have they ever existed in the pure state in real society. This does not hinder class logic and strategy from being defined, and from acting concretely according to this antagonistic model.
36. André Piatier, “Structures and Perspectives of European Consumption” (Paris, 1967), published by Reader’s Digest Selection.
37. A much more suspect procedure than Chapin’s scale of the living room, cited above.
38. Regarding “practices” as marks of social destiny, see above.
39. Thus the fact of acquiring a certain model a month or a day before others can constitute a radical privilege.
2. The Ideological Genesis of Needs
1. This piece first appeared in Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie, 1969.
2. Investissement: this is the standard, and literal, French equivalent of Freud’s Besetzung, which also means investment in ordinary German. The English, however, have insisted on rendering this concept by coining a word that sounds more technical: cathexis, to cathect, etc. The term has been used here mainly to draw attention to the psychoanalytic sense, which vanes in intensity and precision, of Baudrillard’s investissement, investor. Loosely, Freud’s concept involves the quantitative transfer of psychic energy to parts of the psyche, images, objects, etc.—Trans.
3. Not epistemologically given!—Trans.
4. Thus the structure of exchange (cf. Lévi-Strauss) is never that of simple reciprocity. It is not two simple terms, but two ambivalent terms that exchange, and the exchange establishes their relationship as ambivalent.
5. In the logic of the commodity, all goods or objects become universally commutable. Their (economic) practice occurs through their price. There is no relationship either to the subject or to the world, but only a relation to the market.
6. The same goes for food: as a “functional need,” hunger is not symbolic. Its objective is satiation. The food object is not substitutable. But it is well known that eating can satisfy an oral drive, being a neurotic substitute for lack of love. In this second function, eating, smoking, collecting objects, obsessive memorization can all be equivalent: the symbolic paradigm is radically different from the functional paradigm. Hunger as such is not signified, it is appeased. Desire, on the other hand, is signified throughout an entire chain of signifiers. And when it happens to be a desire for something experienced as lost, when it is a lack, an absence on which the objects that signify it have come to be inscribed, does it make any sense to treat such objects literally, as if they were merely what they are? And what can the notion of need possibly refer to, in these circumstances?
7. Borges, cued in Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York; Vintage, 1970), p. xv.
8. Speculaire: The adjective specular and the noun specularity occur often in Baudrillard’s analyses of ideology. They deliberately recall the mirror-like relations of the Imaginary order, which is opposed to the Symbolic order in Lacanian psychoanalysis. For the best introduction to Lacan in English, see Anthony Wilden, The Language of the Self (New York: 1968) and System and Structure (London: 1972). The latter work is less informative with respect to Lacan specifically, but attempts a curious synthesis that may fruitfully be compared with Baudrillard’s work. Wilden is more sympathetic toward traditional Marxist assumptions and to mainstream social science in the form of cybernetics systems theory, etc. With the work of Lévi-Strauss, Lacan and others behind them, both have in common a concern for the apparently special or traditionally unaccountable status of symbolic exchange, a critique of the “digital bias” (Wilden) in the Western epistème (which, by definition, would include the nineteenth-century revolutionary critique of or version of political economy); and both attempt to reexamine such basic concepts as need, desire, the subject, object, etc.—Trans.
9. According to Marcel in The Gift (London: Rouledge, 1970).
10. Chombart de Lauwe, Pour une Socrologie des Aspirations (Gonthier) and George Katona, The Society of Mass Consumption.
11. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Mentor, 1953), p. 35.
12. Ibid., p. 43.
13. Georges Bataille, La Part Maudite (Les Editions de Minuit, 1967).
14. See the analysis of an analogous type of operation in the chapter below on The Art Auction.
15. “Free” time brings together the “right” to work and the “liberty” to consume in the framework of the same system: it is necessary for time to be “liberated” in order to become a sign function and take on social exchange value, whereas labor time, which is constrained time, possesses only economic exchange value. Cf. Part I of this essay; one could add a definition of symbolic time to that of the object. It would be that which is neither economically constrained nor “free” as sign-function, but bound, that is, inseparable from the concrete act of exchange—a rhythm.
16. Veblen, op. cit., p. 88.
17. Cf. “universal” furniture (or “universal” clothing in Roland Barthes’ study of fashion): as the epitome of all functions, it becomes once again opposable to them, and thus simply one more term in the paradigm. Its value isn’t universal, but derived from relative distinction. Thus all the “universal” values (ideological, moral, etc.) become again—indeed, perhaps are produced from the outset as—differential values.
18. In relation to this one, the other functions are secondary processes. They certainly constitute part of the sociological domain. But the logic of difference (like the primary process) constitutes the proper object of genuine social science.
19. Any more than originality, the specific value, the objective merit is belonging to the aristocratic or bourgeois class. This is defined by signs, to the exclusion of “authentic” values. See Goblot, La Barrière et le Niveau (Presse Universitaire de France, 1967).
20. On this point, see Ruyer, La Nutrition Psychique.
21. English in the original.—Trans.
22. Consommativité: Baudrillard’s neologism obviously suggests a parallel with the term “productivity,” and all that connotes.—Trans.
23. It is so true that consumption is a productive force that, by significant analogy, it is often subsumed under the notion of profit: “Borrowing makes money.” “Buy, and you will be rich.” It is exalted not as expenditure, but as investment and profitability.
24. Hence, it is vain to oppose consumption and production, as is so often done, in order to subordinate one to the other, or vice versa, in terms of causality or influence. For in fact we are comparing two heterogeneous sectors: productivity, that is, and abstract and generalized exchange value system where labor and concrete production are occluded in laws—the modes and relations of production; secondly, a logic, and a sector, that of consumption, which is entirely conceived in terms of motivations and individual, contingent, concrete satisfactions. So, properly speaking, it is illegitimate to confront the two. On the other hand, if one conceives of consumption as production, the production of signs, which is also in the process of systematization on the basis of a generalization of exchange value (of signs), then the two spheres are homogeneous—though, at the same time, not comparable in terms of causal priority but homologous from the viewpoint of structural modalities. The structure is that of the mode of production.
25. Cf. besoin and besogne. Baudrillard here draws attention to the etymological connection between the French term for need and the archaic word besogne, which commonly referred to labor, a heavy burden, etc., as well as meaning to need.—Trans.
26. In both senses of the term: technical and social.
27. A hypothesis: labor itself did not appear as a productive force until the social order (the structure of privilege and domination) absolutely needed it to survive, since the power based on personal and hierarchical relations was no longer sufficient by itself. The exploitation of labor is a last resort for the social order Access to work is still refused to women as socially subversive.
28. Nonetheless, this emergence of needs, however formal and subdued, is never without danger for the social order—as is the liberation of any productive force. Apart from being the dimension of exploitation, it is also the origin of the most violent social contradictions, of class struggle. Who can say what historical contradictions the emergence and exploitation of this new productive force—that of needs—holds in store for us?
29. There is no other basis for aid to underdeveloped countries.
30. Robots remain the ultimate and ideal phantasm of a total productivist system. Still better, there is integrated automation. However, cybernetic rationality is devouring itself, for men are necessary for any system of social order and domination. Now, in the final analysis, this amounts nonetheless to the aim of all productivity, which is a political goal.
31. The term itself has been “recuperated,” for it presupposes an original purity and delineates the capitalist system as a maleficent instance of perversion revealing yet another moralizing vision.
32. Or, more simply, in a system of generalized exchange.
3. Fetishism and Ideology: The Semiological Reduction
1. This article first appeared in Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse Vol. II (Autumn 1970).
2. De Brosses, Du Culte des dieux fetiches (1760).
3. Being de facto rationalists, they have often gone so far as to saturate with logical and mythological rationalizations a system of representations that the aborigines knew how to reconcile with more supple objective practices.
4. In this system, use value becomes obscure and almost unintelligible, though not as an original value which has been lost but more precisely as a function derived from exchange value. Henceforth, it is exchange value that induces use value (i.e., needs and satisfactions) to work in common with it (ideologically), within the framework of political economy.
5. In this way labor power as a commodity is itself “fetishized.”
6. In my Le Système des objects (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), pp. 103ff.
7. Now this is how the body, re-elaborated by the perverse structure as phallic idol, manages to function simultaneously as the ideological model of socialization and of fulfillment. Perverse desire and the ideological process are articulated on the same “sophisticated” body. We will return to this later.
8. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques. trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Atheneum, 1975), p. 188.
9. Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914), in Collected Papers (New York: Basic Books, 1959), Vol. IV, p. 46.
10. Ideological discourse is also built up out of a redundancy of signs, and in extreme cases, forms a tautology. It is through this specularity, this “mirage within itself,” that it conjures away conflicts and exercises its power.
11. These terms are drawn from Georges Bataille, L’Erotisme (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1957).
12. The whole illusion of the Sexual Revolution is here society could not be split, divided and subverted in the name of a sex and a body whose current presentation has the ideological function of veiling the subject’s division and subversion. As usual, everything holds together: the reductive function that this mythical nudity fulfills in relation to the subject divided by sex and castration is performed simultaneously on the macroscopic level of society divided by historical class conflicts. Thus the sexual revolution is a subsidiary of the industrial revolution or of the revolution of abundance (and of so many others) all are decoys and ideological metamorphoses of an unchanged order.
13. Cf. Alain Laurent in Communications, No 10.
14. The fact that from the very first this great structural opposition is a functional, hierarchical, logistic difference for the social order, the fact that if there must be two sexes it is so that one may be subjected to the other, makes clear the ambiguity of “sexual liberation.” Since this “liberation” is that of everyone’s sexual needs as assigned to his sex in the framework of the ideological-structural model of bisexuality, any reinforcement of sexual practices in this sense can only reinforce this structure and the ideological discrimination that it bears In our “liberal” society of “mixedness,” the separation between masculine and feminine models has never ceased to entrench and crystallize itself since the start of the industrial era. Today, in spite of pious, liberal pathos over the question, it is taking on ever more generalized forms.
15. Also, logically, this “liberation,” like that of any other productive force, takes on the force of a moral imperative. Everyone is called upon (be it in the name of hygiene, even) to become conscious of his unconscious, not to let this productive potential he fallow, to make his unconscious emerge in order to “personalize” it. Absurd, perhaps, but coherent with the logic of the ideological system.
4. Gesture and Signature Semiurgy in Contemporary Art
1. Le gestuel is difficult to translate: it is opposed to geste as us extension, not contradiction. Yet it is the latter that is usually translated as “gesture.” Briefly, le gestuel refers to a sort of complex, or paradigm, of gestures, and this is the simplest way to grasp the term. However, constantly referring to “the gestural” is awkward in English, and various renderings are thus to be found in the text. There is another sense in which le gestuel refers to a congealment, petrifaction or crystallization of gestures, of single, relatively independent, unsolicited, physical actions into sequences that take on an almost magical, incantatory aspect. For clarification we have taken a brief passage from Baudrillard’s Le Système des objects (Paris: 1968) pp. 57–58: “Still in the analysis of ambient values, when we broach the study of functional forms (that may be called forms drawn in profile, dynamic, etc.), we see that their stylization is inseparable from that of the gestuel humain (the complex of human gestures) that goes with them. Stylization always signifies the elision of muscular energy and of work. All the processes of the elision of primary functions to the profit of the secondary functions of relation and calculation or of the elision of the drives to the profit of culture (culturalité) have for a practical and historical mediation at the level of objects the fundamental elision of the gestures of effort (gestuel d’effort), the passage from a universal gestural paradigm of work to a universal gestural paradigm of control. It is there that a millenarian status of objects, their anthropomorphic status, definitively comes to an end, in the abstraction of the sources of energy.” And further along: “this profound, gestural relation of man to objects that epitomizes the integration of man with the world and with social structures … is still a constraint … a complex of gestures and of forces, of symbols and of functions, illustrated and stylized by human energy. The splendor of this relation of conformity remains subordinated to the relational constraint.”—Trans.
2. This is not peculiar to painting: this ambiguous apprehension defines the consumption of all cultural goods.
3. As is shown by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things.
4. In the end, Soulages copies himself well and Fautrier admits he does not always know whether a given canvas is his work.
5. Thus, no longer at the level of “creation” this time, but of appropriation, the collection of objects has no other temporality than that of the cycle that it constitutes: it is outside of “real” time.
6. Moreover, this structural homology not only constitutes art as a series, but also the world itself as “mechanical.” The world only really becomes mechanical from the moment it can no longer be evoked save mechanically.
7. And for which the reference to the world becomes secondary—just as the exercise of collection is valued above the thematic of the objects collected.
5. The Art Auction: Sign Exchange and Sumptuary Value
1. The very considerable problems posed by the analysis of use value will be taken up later in the chapter, Beyond Use Value.
2. Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class and Goblot, La Barrière et le Niveau.
3. Cf. the chapter below on Symbolic Value and Aesthetic Function.
4. “The price at which a canvas is sold is not the measure of its value in the same way as for an article of consumption. The price only has meaning at the very instant of sale, by the game of competition in which it is the relative equivalent of the absolute values and significations to which the painting refers.” P. Dard and J. Michner, Etude sur l’Exchange de Valeur. In fact, it is no longer a price but a wager (enjeu). Moreover, for real players, money won in the game remains marked by it and cannot be spent for useful economic purposes: it must be put back into the game, poured back into it, “burned”—in a way, it is the part maudite of Bataille.
5. “Within this community there is a traffic of paintings on the basis of a competition among peers, while from the point of view of the global society, paintings are retained in and by this community—that is, the latter functions on the basis of a social discrimination. Yet this community presents itself as open by the competitive aspect of acquisition … There we are at the frontiers of strategies of domination, where the possibility of individual mobility masks social discrimination.” P. Dard and J. Michner, Etude sur l’Echange de Valeur.
6. From that moment on, the economic can also serve as rationalization. The market for paintings is sometimes placed under the rubric of “love of art,” sometimes under that of “good investment.”
7. All else being equal, it is the same discrimination that dedicates the immense majority to use value in consumption, and to the functional enjoyment of products—the dominant class strategically reserves for itself the manipulation of exchange value, of capital and of surplus value.
6. For a General Theory
1. We will return (in Toward a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign) to the problem of the referent, which only exists in an integrated relation to the signified (such that they are often confused).
7. Beyond Use Value
1. Marx, Capital, Vol. I. I have been unable to find this passage in the exact form Baudrillard cites it. But see Marx’s Grundrise (New York: Vintage, 1973), for example, at the bottom of p. 404.—Trans.
2. By the same token, there is no fundamental difference between “productive” consumption (direct destruction of utility during the process of production) and consumption by persons in general. The individual and his “needs” are produced by the economic system like unit cells of its reproduction. We repeat that “needs” are a social labor, a productive discipline. Neither the actual subject nor his desire is addressed in this scheme. It follows that there is only productive consumption at this level.
3. Consumption itself is only apparently a concrete operation (in opposition to the abstraction of exchange). For what is consumed isn’t the product itself, but its utility. Here the economists are right consumption is not the destruction of products, but the destruction of utility. In the economic cycle, at any rate, it is an abstraction that is produced or consumed as value (exchangeable in one case, useful in another). No where is the “concrete” object or the “concrete” product concerned in the matter (what do these terms mean, anyway?): but, rather, an abstract cycle, a value system engaged in its own production and expanded reproduction. Nor does consumption make sense as a destruction (of “concrete” use value). Consumption is a labor of expanded reproduction of use value as an abstraction, a system, a universal code of utility—just as production is no longer in its present finality the production of “concrete” goods but the expanded reproduction of the exchange value system. Only consumation (consummation) escapes recycling in the expanded reproduction of the value system—not because it is the destruction of substance, but because it is a transgression of the law and finality of objects—the abolition of their abstract finality. Where it appears to consume (destroy) products, consumption only consummates their utility. Consumption destroys objects as substance the better to perpetuate this substance as a universal, abstract form—hence, the better to reproduce the value code. Consumation (play, gift, destruction as pure loss, symbolic reciprocity) attacks the code itself, breaks it, deconstructs it. The symbolic act is the destruction of the value code (exchange and use), not the destruction of objects in themselves. Only this act can be termed “concrete,” since it alone breaks and transgresses the abstraction of value.
4. See the chapter above on The Ideological Genesis of Needs.
5. It should be pointed out that Marx’s formulations in this domain (and the anthropology that they imply) are so vague as to permit culturalist interpretations of the type: “Needs are functions of the historical and social context.” Or in its more radical version “Needs are produced by the system in order to assure its own expanded reproduction”—that is, the sort of interpretation that takes into account only the multiple content of needs, without submitting the concept of need itself and the system of needs as form to a radical critique. [As in Marx’s Grundrisse, p. 527, where both the “culturalist” and “more radical” position are mixed.—Trans.]
6. In Toward a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign.
7. Here Baudrillard alludes to the rationalist lineage of anthropological substantialism. See the first paragraph of Descartes’ Discourse on Method, which Baudrillard parodies here.—Trans.
8. Critical theory must also take the sign form into account. We shall observe that an identical logic regulates the organization of the sign in the present-day system; it turns the signified (referent) into the satellite term, the alibi of the signifier, the play of signifiers, and provides the latter with a reality guarantee.
9. Any resemblance to a living person is purely coincidental.
8. Toward a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign
1. It should be noted here that alienation itself is one of these magical concepts devoted to sealing up an artificial disjunction—here, the disjunction between the consciousness of the subject and his own ideal content (his rediscovered totality).
2. Thus the “critical” denunciation of artificial needs and the manipulation of needs converges in the same mystification the unconditional exaltation of consumption.
3. For the specialized sense in which Baudrillard uses the term “object” here, see the penultimate discussion in this volume: Design and Environment: The Blitz of Political Economy.—Trans.
4. Two types of analysis have grappled with this parallel fetishism of the commodity and the sign: the critique of political economy, or theory of material production, inaugurated by Marx, and critical semiology, or the theory of textual production, led more recently by the Tel Quel group.
5. The term “symbol” is here intended in the classic semio-linguistic sense of an analogical variant of the sign. In contrast, we will always use the term symbol (the symbolic, symbolic exchange) in opposition to and as a radical alternative to the concept of the sign and of signification.
6. The resolution of the sign entails the abolition of the Sr and the Sd as such, but not the abolition, toward some mystical nothingness, of the material and operation of meaning. The symbolic operation of meaning is also exercised upon phonic, visual, gestural (and social) material, but according to an entirely different logic, to the question of which we shall return later.
7. Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics (Miami, 1971).
8. Ibid.
9. This facsimile of the concrete concept (concept “en dur”) only transliterates the fetish of realism, and of substance, the last stage of idealism fantasizing matter. (For more on “en dur,” cf. J.-M. Lefebvre, N.R.F., February 1970, No 1: “The referent is not truly reality it is the image we make of reality … it is a signified determined by an intention carried toward things (!) and not considered in its simple relation to the Sr, as is usual in linguistics. From the Sd-concept, I pass to the referent as a concrete approach to the world.”) It is, however, on these intermingled vestiges of idealism and materialism deriving from all the confines of Western metaphysics, that semiology is based. The position of Lefebvre is moreover characteristic of the cunning with which “reality” succeeds in resurrecting itself surreptitiously behind all semiological thought, however critical, in order to establish more firmly the strategy of the sign. It thus gives witness to the impossibility of escaping the metaphysical problems posed by the sign without radically challenging semiological articulation itself. In effect, Lefebvre says: “The referent is not reality (i.e., an object whose existence I can test, or control): we relate to it as real, but this intentionality is precisely an act of mind that belies its reality, which makes a fiction, an artificial construction out of it.” Thus, in a kind of flight in advance, the referent is drained of its reality, becomes again a simulacrum, behind which, however, the tangible object immediately re-emerges. Thus, the articulation of the sign can gear down in infinite regress, while continually reinventing the real as its beyond and its consecration. At bottom, the sign is haunted by the nostalgia of transcending its own convention, its arbitrariness; in a way, it is obsessed with the idea of total motivation. Thus it alludes to the real as its beyond and its abolition. But it can’t “jump outside its own shadow” for it is the sign itself that produces and reproduces this real, which is only its horizon—not its transcendence. Reality is the phantasm by means of which the sign is indefinitely preserved from the symbolic deconstruction that haunts it.
10. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (New York, 1959), p. 113.
11. Of course, it is not impossible at all. But such an analysis would depend for its full impact on our grasp of the whole process of development of the political economy of the sign. To this we shall return later.
12. In the “staggered scheme of connotation the entire sign is transformed into the signifier of another signified 
[See Part IV of “Elements of Semiology,” in Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology (Boston, 1968), p. 89, and also his discussion of “Myth as a Semiological System,” in Mythologies (Frogmore: St Albans, 1973), esp P. 115.—Trans.]
13. Roland Barthes, “Rhetorique de l’Image,” in Communications 4 (1964).
14. It is no accident here if the mythical scheme of infrastructure and superstructure resurfaces at least implicitly in the field of signification: denotative infrastructure and ideological superstructure.
15. Roland Barthes, S/Z (New York, 1974), p. 9.
16. The analysis could be extended to the level of metalanguage (a system of signification staggered in reverse):
where the entire sign is transformed into the Sd of a new Sr. In the end, the signified of metalinguistic denotation is only an effect of the Sr, only a simulation model whose coherence derives from the regulated exchange of signifiers. It would be interesting to push, to the verge of paradox:
• The hypothesis (though it is scarcely even that) that the historical event is volatilized in its successive coding by the media, that it is invented and manipulated by the simple operation of the code. The historical event then appears as a combinatory effect of discourse;
• The hypothesis, in the same mode, at the metalinguistic level, that the object of a (given) science is only the effect of its discourse. In the carving out and separation of the field of knowledge the rationality of a science is established through its exclusion of the remainder (the same process, as we have seen, is involved in the institution of the sign itself) or, to take this even further, that this (scientific) discourse posits its object as a simulation model, purely and simply. It is known, after all, that a science is established in the last instance as the language-consensus of a scientific community.
17. See Beyond Use Value, in this volume.
18. The impasse is much more subtle in the case of the “liberation of the signifier.” We shall return to this problem.
19. All the arbitrariness and positivity of the sign is amassed on this line separating the two levels of the sign. This structural-inclusive copula establishes the process of signification as positive and occults its prior function —the process of reducing and abolishing meaning (or non-meaning: ambivalence); the process of misunderstanding and denegation with which, moreover, the sign never finishes. This line is in fact the barrier whose raising would signify the deconstruction of the sign, its resolution, and the dissolution of us constituent elements, Sr and Sd, as such. Lacan’s formulation of the linguistic sign reveals the true meaning of this line 
. It becomes the line (barrier) of repression itself—no longer that which articulates but that which censors—and thus the locus of transgression. This line highlights what the sign denies, that upon which the sign establishes itself negatively, and of which it is only, in its positive institution, the symptom.
However, Lacan’s formula introduces this radically new line in terms of the traditional schema of the sign, maintaining the usual place of the Signified. This Signified is not the Sd-Rft of linguistics. It is the repressed. It still retains a sort of content, and its representation is always that of a substance, though no longer assigned term for term, but only coinciding at certain points with the metaphoric chain of Srs (“anchoring points”—points de capiton). [On “points de capiton” and other matters concerning Lacan, see Anthony Wilden, The Language of the Self (New York: Delta, 1968): “Perhaps language is in fact totally tautologous in the sense that it can only in the end talk about itself, but in any event, Lacan has suggested that there must be some privileged ‘anchoring points,’ points like the buttons on a mattress or the intersections of quilting, where there is a ‘pinning down’ (capitonnage) of meaning, not to an object, but rather by ‘reference back’ to a symbolic function’ (p. 273). For Lacan’s version of the Saussurian formula, see Jacques Lacan, “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious,” in Jacques Ehrmann, ed, Structuralism (New York, 1970).—Trans.]
According to the very different logic of linguistics, it is a question of the partition of two agencies (instances) where the reference is only representative of one. It appears on the contrary that to conceive the sign as censor, as a barrier of exclusion, is not to wish to retain for the repressed its position as signifiable, its position of latent value. Rather it is to conceive it as that which, denied by the sign, in turn denies the sign s form, and can never have any place within it. It is a non-place and non-value in opposition to the sign. Barred (barrée) and deleted (rayée) by the sign, it is a symbolic ambivalence that only re-emerges fully in the total resolution of the sign, in the explosion of the sign and of value. The symbolic is not inscribed anywhere. It is not what comes to be registered beneath the repression barrier (line), the Lacanian Sd. It is rather what tears all Srs and Sds to pieces, since it is what dismantles their pairing off (appareillage) and their simultaneous carving out (découpe) See note 6 above.
20. See Roland Barthes, “Elements of Semiology,” op. cit. [“It will be remembered that any system of signification comprises a plane of expression (E) and a plane of content (C) and that the signification coincides with the relation (R) of the two planes: ERC.”—Trans.]
21. One could say that the referent becomes “symbolic” again, by a curious inversion—not in the radical sense of the term, but in the sense of a “symbolic” gesture, that is, its meager reality. Here the referent is only symbolic,” the principle of reality having passed over into the code.
22. Even exchange value could not exist in its pure state, in its total abstraction. It can only function under the cover of use value, where a simulacrum of totality is restored at the horizon of political economy, and where it resuscitates in the functionality of needs, the phantom of precisely what it abolishes the symbolic (le symbolique) of desire.
9. Requiem for the Media
1. Marshall McLuhan, War and Peace in the Global Village (New York, 1968), p. 5.
2. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Constituents of a Theory of the Media,” The Consciousness Industry (New York: The Seabury Press, 1974), pp. 96–128.
3. This political economy of the sign is structural linguistics (together with semiology, to be sure, and all its derivatives, of which communication theory will be discussed below). It is apparent that within the general ideological framework, structural linguistics is the contemporary master discipline, inspiring anthropology, the human sciences, etc., just as, in its time, did political economy, whose postulates profoundly informed all of psychology, sociology and the “moral and political” sciences.
4. In this case, the expression “consciousness industry” which Enzensberger uses to characterize the existing media is a dangerous metaphor. Unfortunately, it underlies his entire analytic hypothesis, which is to extend the Marxist analysis of the capitalist mode of production to the media, to the point of discovering a structural analogy between the following relations:
• dominant class / dominated class
• producer entrepreneur / consumer
• transmitter broadcaster / receiver
5. In fact, Marxist analysis can be questioned at two very different levels of radicality: either as a system for interpreting the separated order of material production, or else as that of the separated order of production (in general). In the first case, the hypothesis of the non-relevance of the dialectic outside its field of “origin” must be logically pushed further if “dialectical” contradictions between the productive forces and the relations of production largely vanish in the field of language, signs and ideology, perhaps they were never really operative in the field, of material production either, since a certain capitalist development of productive forces has been able to absorb—not all conflict, to be sure—but revolutionary antagonisms at the level of social relations. Wherein lies the validity of these concepts, then, aside from a purely conceptual coherence?
In the second case, the concept of production must be interrogated at its very root (and not in its diverse contents), along with the separated form which it establishes and the representational and rationalizing schema it imposes. Undoubtedly it is here, at the extreme, that the real work needs to be done. [See Baudrillard’s Mirror of Production, translated by Mark Poster (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1975).—Trans.]
6. Enzensberger, ibid., p. 96
7. This genre of reductive determinism may be found in the works of Bourdieu and in the phraseology of the Communist Party. It is theoretically worthless. It turns the mechanism of democratization into a revolutionary value per se. That intellectuals may find mass culture repugnant hardly suffices to make it a revolutionary alternative. Aristocrats used to make sour faces at bourgeois culture, but no one ever said the latter was anything more than a class culture.
8. Most of the above references are to Enzensberger, op. cit., pp. 102–103.
9. French radio-TV headquarters. The ORTF is a highly centralized state-run monopoly.
10. Thus we find authority, the state and other institutions either devoid or full up with revolutionary content, depending on whether they are still in the grip of capital or the people have taken them over. Their form is rarely questioned.
11. Enzensberger, op. cit., pp. 105, 108.
12. Ibid., p. 97.
13. Ibid., p. 107.
14. Ibid., pp. 97–98.
15. It is not a question of “dialogue,” which is only the functional adjustment of two abstract speeches without response, where the “interlocutors” are never mutually present, but only their stylized discourses.
16. The occupation of the ORTF changed nothing in itself even if subversive “contents” were “broadcast.” If only those involved had scuttled the ORTF as such for its entire technical and functional structure reflects the monopolistic use of speech.
17. Roland Barthes S/Z (New York, 1974), p. 4.
18. Multifunctionality evidently changes nothing on this score. Multi-functionality, multidisciplinarity—polyvalence in all its forms—are just the system’s response to its own obsession with centrality and standardization (uni-équivalence). It is the system’s reaction to its own pathology, glossing over the underlying logic.
19. Enzensberger (pp. 118–119) interprets it this way: “The medium is the message” is a bourgeois proposition. It signifies that the bourgeoisie has nothing left to say. Having no further message to transmit, it plays the card of medium for medium’s sake. If the bourgeoisie has nothing left to say, “socialism” would do better to keep quiet.
20. This left-right distinction is just about meaningless from the point of view of the media. We should give credit where credit is due and grant them the honor of having contributed largely to its elimination. The distinction is interconnected with an order characterized by the transcendence of politics, and has nothing to do with what has announced itself in all sorts of forms as the transversality of politics. But let us not mistake ourselves, here the media only help to liquidate this transcendence of politics in order to substitute their own transcendence, abstracted from the mass media form, which is thoroughly integrated and no longer even offers a conflictive structure (left right). Mass media transcendence is thus reductive of the traditional transcendence of politics, but it is even more reductive of the new transversality of politics.
21. This form of so called “disclosure” or “propagation” can be analyzed readily in the fields of science or art. Generalized reproducibility obliterates the processes of work and meaning so as to leave nothing but modelized contents (cf. Raoul Ergmann, “Le miroir en miettes,” Diogene, no. 68, 1969; Baudouin Jurdant, “La vulgarisation scientifique,” Communications, no. 14).
22. It should be pointed out that this labor is always accompanied by one of selection and reinterpretation at the level of the membership group (Lazarsfeld’s two-step flow of communication). This accounts for the highly relative impact of media contents, and the many kinds of resistance they provoke. (However we should ask ourselves whether these resistances are not aimed at the abstraction of the medium itself, rather than its contents: Lazarsfeld’s double articulation would lead us to this conclusion, since the second articulation belongs to the network of personal relations, opposed to the generality of media messages.) Still, this “second” reading, where the membership group opposes its own code to the transmitter’s (cf. my discussion of Umberto Eco’s thesis toward the end of this article) certainly doesn’t neutralize or “reduce” the dominant ideological contents of the media in the same way as it does the critical or subversive contents. To the extent that the dominant ideological contents (cultural models, value systems, imposed without alternative or response, bureaucratic contents) are homogeneous with the general form of the mass media (non-reciprocity, irresponsibility), and are integrated with this form in reduplicating it, they are, so to speak, overdetermined, and have greater impact. They “go over” better than subversive contents. But this is not the essence of the problem. It is more important to recognize that the form of transgression never “comes off” more or less well on the media: it is radically denied by the mass media form.
23. Thus, for Walter Benjamin, the reproduced work becomes more and more the work “designed” for reproducibility. In this way, according to him, the work of art graduates from ritual to politics. “Exhibition value” revolutionizes the work of art and its functions. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1968).
24. The Grenelle accords were worked out between Georges Séguy of the CGT and Georges Pompidou during the May ’68 general strike. Although the monetary concessions involved were fairly broad, they missed the point, and were massively rejected by workers.—Trans.
25. Jerry Rubin, Do It (New York: Simon and Schuster), p. 234.
26. See Roman Jakobsen, “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,” in T. A. Sebeok, ed., Style in Language (Cambridge, Mass M.I.T. Press, 1960), pp. 350–377.
27. The two terms are so faintly present to each other that it has proven necessary to create a “contact” category to reconstitute the totality theoretically!
28. Enzensberger, op. cit., pp. 119, 127.
29. Ibid., p. 97.
30. Once again Enzensberger, who analyses and denounces these control circuits, nevertheless links up with idealism: “Naturally [!] such tendencies go against the grain of the structure, and the new productive forces not only permit, but indeed demand [!] their reversal.” (Ibid, p. 108.) Feedback and interaction are the very logic of cybernetics. Underestimating the ability of the system to integrate its own revolutionary innovations is as delusory as underestimating the capacity of capitalism to develop the productive forces.
31. Evoking the possibility of an open free press, Enzensberger points to the Xerox monopoly and their exorbitant rental rates. But if everyone had his own Xerox—or even his own wavelength—the problem would remain. The real monopoly is never that of technical means, but of speech.
32. Enzensberger, op. cit., p. 110.
33. This is why the individual amateur cameraman remains within the separated abstraction of mass communication: through this internal dissociation of the two agencies (instances), the entire code and all of the dominant models sweep in, and seize his activity from behind.
34. Umberto Eco, La Struttura assente (Milan: Bompiani, 1968).
10. Design and Environment or How Political Economy Escalates into Cyberblitz
1. Echoing Galbraith’s “techno-structure.” Neo-capitalist, neo-industrialist, post-industrial many terms can designate this passage from an industrial political economy to a trans-political economy (or meta-political economy).
2. Jeremy J. Schapiro, “One Dimensionality: The Universal Semiotic of Technological Experience,” in Paul Breines, ed, Critical Interruptions (New York: Herder & Herder, 1970).
3. As early as 1902 Bernadetto Croce was writing an “Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic.”
4. But this fundamental operation of form is what is never mentioned, in either case.
5. In his own way, using Marcusian terms, Schapiro (op. cit.) gives a similar analysis, but with more stress on machinery and technology: “The evolution of modern design is an essential component of the process of one-dimensionality (and indeed serves as an index of the latter’s temporal development), since it derives from the machine process the forms for creating a total (totalitarian) environment in which technological experience defines and doses the experiential and aesthetic universe” (p. 161). Totalizing abstraction, undimensional homogeneity, certainly, but the machine or technology are neither the causes of this process nor its original models. Technological mutation and semio-linguistic mutation (passage to the abstraction of the code) are the two concurrent aspects of the same passage to structural-functional rationality.
6. Rather, these are logical guideposts to mark what in fact was a continuous historical process. However, the moment of formal theorization (which the Bauhaus is for the political economy of the sign) always marks a crucial point in the historical process itself.
7. Similarly, there is something immediately Kafkaesque in the reduction of man to his (bureaucratic) function.
8. Jacques Carelman, Catalogue a objets introuvables. [English version: Catalog of Fantastic Things (New York: Ballantine Books). In fact these things (like a double-headed hammer which will work in both directions, or for either left-or right-handed carpenters) might be found in joke stores —“gimmick” might be an accurate translation.—Trans.]
9. This review which originally had the name “Esthétique Industrielle” has changed title several times since its first publication in 1952 and is presently called Design Industry.—Trans.
10. The Platonic and Kantian heritage of functionalism is striking: morality, aesthetics and truth are confused in the same ideal. The functional is the synthesis of pure reason and practical reason. Or again: the functional is the beautiful plus the useful. Utility itself is simultaneously that which is moral and that which is true. Stir up the whole thing, and we have the Platonic holy trinity.
11. In any case, something else radically escapes any calculus of function: ambivalence, which acts such that any positive function is in the same movement denied and decomposed, annulled according to a logic of desire for which a unilateral finality never exists. This level is beyond even functional complexity. Were one to have achieved a perfect computation of even contradictory functions, this ambivalence would forever remain insoluble, irreducible.
12. It is known that the egg is one of the ideal tendencies of design—a formal stereotype, as “kitsch” as any other. This means that the finality of the system is quite simply tautological. But the completed stage of development of function is tautology—the perfect redundancy of the “signified” succumbing to the vicious circle of the “signifier”—an egg.
13. “Social” design will be redone with human contents, or alternatively the game, playfulness, the “free” combinatory, etc. will be reintroduced. But make no mistake it is still the “game” which is taken into account, the game as a particular function, a liberal-modernist variant of the same code.
14. Paradoxically (and undoubtedly symptomatically) the British Ministry of the Environment presides over almost all sectors, except the media.
15. An internationally founded project “for a post-technological society” inaugurated by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
11. Concerning the Fulfillment of Desire in Exchange Value
1. The Veblen effect (I am buying this because it is more expensive) is a significant limiting case in which the economic (quantitative) is converted into sign-difference. Here one can conceptualize the emergence of “need” starting from the pure outbidding of exchange value (cf. also the art auction as the locale of transition between spheres of value). In the case of signs, the Veblen effect becomes the absolute rule: fashion knows only pure and ascending differentiation.
2. The film The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner is a very fine example, from a social and political point of view, of this ubiquitous counter-economy. The hero is an adolescent in a rehabilitation center who deliberately renounces a decisive victory in a running contest in order to avoid spreading any of the glory to his institutional oppressors. By losing, he preserves his own truth here, failure merges with class revolt. Admittedly, in this story, the failure is explicitly deliberate, but it is not difficult to see how “accidental” lapses and physical slips may acquire virtually the same meaning of denial and resistance. In his own way, the 400 meter runner mentioned above calls into question the exchange value system—whose forms are not limited to dominating the salaried worker and the consumer. By running to win, athletes reactivate the competitive value system, they work to reproduce it in “exchange” for the satisfactions of personal prestige. Exploitation is as intense here as at the level of selling one’s labor power. It is this bogus exchange mechanism that failure unconsciously causes to break down In this sense, every “psychological dysfunction” vis-à-vis “normality” (which is only the law of the capitalist milieu) is open to a political reading. Today politics has no particular sphere unto itself, nor any definition. It is time to discover the latent forms, the displacements and condensations—briefly, the “work” (as in “dream-work”) of politics.
3. The ideology of sports is a mixture of this implicit “law” and the law of the stronger.
4. A competitor, a runner for example, who won straightaway, every time—such a case would be a serious exception to the law of exchange, something like incest or sacrilege, and, in the extreme, the collectivity would have to suppress it. Another example of the same sort of thing would be the complete collection, to which not a thing remained to be added: this would be a kind of death.
5. The unilateral gift is the inverse of the exchange gift. The latter is the basis of reciprocity, whereas the former founds superiority. Only the privileged, like the feudal lord, can allow themselves to receive without returning, without providing a counter-gift, because their rank protects them against challenge and loss of prestige.