Consider the following passage from *The Mirror of Production*, which deconstructs Marx's "use-value."
"In the distinction between exchange value and use value, Marxism shows its strength but also its weakness. The presupposition of use value--the hypothesis of a concrete value beyond the abstraction of exchange value, a human purpose of the commodity in the moment of its direct relation of utility for a subject--is only the effect of the system of exchange value, a concept produced and developed by it" (22-3).
The use value of a cup is "drink-from-possibility." Marx wants to extricate this use value from the price determining play of supply and demand by assuming that the "drink-from-possibility" of the cup is constant. But we come to understand that the "drink-from-possibility" of a cup gets determined by the cultural play of signs within a system that, as Baudrillard showed in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, also includes the signplay of the political economy. "Drink-from-possibility" will not remain constant. Use-value is not a constant. Baudrillard corrected Marx on this point.
No way exists within the model of production to strip away the fetishization of an object, dispelling exchange value and revealing use-value. In an alternative, fatal strategy, Consumptive Writing maximizes its own fetishization.
What Marx wanted to regard as use value would be better termed consumption value. But there is no room for this term in the model of production Marx was working within. The model of production inherited and enforced by Enlightenment thought depends on the belief in a constant Nature which imposes constant restraints. Baudrillard: "For a long time, even in myth, production has been thought of in the mode of human reproduction. Marx himself spoke of labor as the father and the earth as the mother of produced wealth. This is false. In productive labor man does not make children with Nature. Labor is an objective transformation based on carving out and technically abstracting the subject and the object" (55) Marx hoped to overcome the restraints by "denaturalizing" (understanding to be socially determined and mutable) certain ideological concepts, and thereby unchaining the productive power of Labor.
Marx's dependence on the model of production altogether made him complicit with the Natural order he wished to deconstruct. But Marx's desire for a totalizing model which would protect use-value from critique reinvoked Nature. For Baudrillard, "Everything that speaks in terms of totality (and-or "alienation") under the sign of a Nature or a recovered essence [use-value, Labor] speaks in terms of repression and separation" (55-6). For Baudrillard, freedom from repression would require the denaturalization of labor, which cannot occur within the model of production.
Stepping outside of the model of production, like stepping outside of the metaphor of vision and subjectivity (eye am writing this), constitutes a rejection of the totalizing project of Enlightenment: A difficult thing to lose and a difficult thing to have lost. A very hard thing to get rid of. In this conundrum, a hermenueticist might find the question which brings this project into being: Can we relinquish the enlightenment? Or must we answer its call?
The rejection of the totalizing model of production, then, in favor of a model of consumption, would, seen by the eye (from the perspective) of a productivist, constitute a radical political act. But that model must be escaped (Can it?). The question of this project is: What would it feel like to think and act out our lives according to a model of consumption rather than production?
page twenty-two to twenty-three *the mirror of production* jean baudrillard
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Concerns to be Addressed.
