The Absolute Commodity

Definition

The absolute commodity is Baudrillard's name, in Fatal Strategies (1983, "The Absolute Commodity"), for the mode in which the work of art — and any object — should answer the challenge of the commodity: not by critical denial, but by outbidding the commodity's fetishized abstraction until it becomes "more commodity than commodity," an object whose value lies in its very inutility. Baudrillard takes the idea from Baudelaire (via Agamben's Stances): "he conceived of commodities in which use-value and exchange-value would abolish each other mutually, whose value consists, therefore, in its inutility and whose use is its own intangibility, and which is no longer commodity: the transformation of the work of art into absolute commodity is therefore the most radical abolition of commodity." The strategy is the book's general one applied to aesthetics: "No dialectic between the two; synthesis is a soft solution, dialectics a nostalgic one. The only radical and modern answer: potentiate what is new, original, unexpected in the commodity—for example, its formal indifference to utility and value, the preeminence given to circulation." The work of art "should adopt all the qualities of shock, strangeness, surprise, disquietude, liquidity, even autodestruction." Baudrillard explicitly prefers this to Benjamin's "desperately political" melancholy: Baudelaire "better grasped… what would be the only real response, aesthetic and metaphysical, ironical and joyous, to the challenge" of the commodity. The concept extends the wiki's sign value to its limit (the point where the sign eclipses both use and exchange value) and offers an alternative to the use value nostalgia. See supremacy-of-the-object, sign-value, use-value, reversibility.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: "more commodity than commodity"; "the only radical and modern answer: potentiate what is new, original, unexpected in the commodity" (1983). The 1973/1975 pre-version of the figure is the form-sign: "The sign no longer designates anything at all" (ch. V, p. 123), the sign referring back only to other signs — the absolute commodity's value without referent, theorized as political economy's third phase. See form-sign, value-without-referential.
• Baudelaire (Charles Baudelaire, not yet paged) — the source: the absolute commodity, the "shock," the fetishist of makeup and ornament.
• Walter Benjamin — the rejected alternative: aura-loss read as a "desperately political determination."
• Karl Marx — the commodity's "inexplicable, enchanting foreignness" that Marxist dogma "crushed."
• Giorgio Agamben (not yet paged) — the Stances passage Baudrillard quotes at length.

Related Concepts

• Supremacy of the Object — the absolute commodity is the object's aesthetic limit.
• Sign Value — the commodity form pushed past exchange value.
• Use Value — what the absolute commodity "abolishes mutually" with exchange value.
• Reversibility — the logic of outbidding the commodity to its limit.
• The Absolute Commodity — the art-work's answer to the commodity (the concept's site).
• Form-Sign — the absolute commodity's structural condition: the sign as its own referent, with the use value of the sign disappeared into its commutation.
• Value Without Referential — the trajectory the 1975 third phase opens: the sign that designates nothing and "refer[s] back only to other signs."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Fatal Strategies (Baudrillard 1983) — the defining source: "The Absolute Commodity," quoting Agamben's Baudelaire; the critique of Benjamin; "potentiate what is new, original, unexpected in the commodity."

• The System of Objects (Baudrillard 1968) — the earlier sign-value/commodity analysis.

• Decorating Culture (Tang 1998/2006) — the commodity's interiorisation at room scale.

• Benjamin for Architects (Elliott 2011) — the Benjamin route Baudrillard rejects.

• The Mirror of Production (Baudrillard 1975) — the form-sign as the absolute commodity's precondition: the sign that has absorbed use value and reference into its own commutation — "The signifier becomes its own referent and the use value of the sign disappears to the benefit of its commutation and exchange value alone. The sign no longer designates anything at all" (ch. V, "The Third Phase of Political Economy," p. 123) — reaching "its true structural limit which is to refer back only to other signs" (same passage). This is the third-phase statement of the wiki's value without referential that Fatal Strategies will name the absolute commodity. See form-sign, value-without-referential.

• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).

Open Questions

• Is the "absolute commodity" a strategy for art, or an aestheticization of submission to the commodity? Baudrillard's answer is that it is the only non-derisory response — the wiki should test whether that is a distinction with a difference.
• Does the concept's preference for Baudelaire over Benjamin tell us anything the wiki's architecture/image-economy materials need? (See simulation-hyperreality, the-image-economy.)
• The absolute commodity is defined by its inutility — is this a cousin of the wiki's uselessness/play/material cultures (the useless garden, decoration)?