Artisanal Mode

Definition

The "artisanal mode" (Baudrillard also writes "the slave or feudal-artisanal mode") is his test case for the thesis that historical materialism reconstructs pre-capitalist societies backwards from wage labor, and thereby loses exactly what was exchanged in them. His argument is not that slavery or serfdom were benign but that the categories of alienation and exploitation misdescribe a relation that was also, structurally, one of obligation: "A relation of reciprocity exists between them—not in the modern and psychological sense of a bi-univocal relation of two individualized subjects… but in the sense of an obligation, of a structure of exchange and obligation where the specification of the terms of exchange in autonomous subjects… does not yet exist" (ch. IV, "The Slave," pp. 93–95). Hence his key distinction: "Domination, as distinct from alienation and exploitation, does not involve the objectification of the dominated, but an obligation that always carries an element of reciprocity" (p. 95). Where the master/slave relation is read through the wage relation, that reciprocity disappears and slavery becomes mere expropriation — with the consequence, which Baudrillard draws out, that the "free" laborer's ownership of his labor power can then appear as "absolute progress in the human order."

Freedom therefore appears in the concept as the interiorization of separation: "He is alienated not insofar as he sells his labor power, but insofar as he is an owner, 'disposing' of it as if it were his own goods" (ch. IV, "The Slave"). The artisan is the figure in which this ownership is most complete — "The status of the artisan is defined not only by the ownership of his 'labor power' (as distinct from the slave) but, as distinct from the salaried worker, by the ownership of his 'instruments of production.' He controls his 'means of production' and the process of his 'labor'" (ch. IV, "The Artisan") — and most misleading. Against the romantic image Baudrillard is categorical: "It is even false to say that in artisanal work the artisan is 'master of his labor' and 'product of his labor.' For he is not in the situation of an autonomous individual, in a position of 'control,' that is, of productive exteriority." The image belongs to a schema of liberation that is in fact repressive, "the utopia of a Golden Age of productive labor": "there is no 'labor;' there is only the division of labor and the sale of labor power. The truth of labor is its capitalist definition."

Two consequences follow. First, work is not labor. Reading J.-P. Vernant on the Greek demiurge and the polis, Baudrillard finds a form of activity that is not the artisan's "control" but a symbolic practice: "But this is also true, to a lesser extent, of artisanal work (according to etymology, 'demiurge'), which draws a radical difference between work and labor." Work is not simply production but loss: "Work is a process of destruction as well as of 'production,' and in this way work is symbolic. Death, loss and absence are inscribed in it through this dispossession of the subject, this loss of the subject and the object in the scansion of the exchange" (ch. IV, "The Artisan," p. 100). "The world of production, our world, has eliminated this ambivalence" — and to project production "everywhere else is a theoretically fraudulent operation." Vernant supplies the formula of the artisan mode — "Labor-use value creating product-use value in a direct relation of producer and user" — and Baudrillard immediately notes its limits: it "is still an economic formula," and in "our contemporary ideology of service it functions in the first instance purely and simply as a bonus and excuse, just as use value in general serves as an excuse for exchange value."

Second, the self-management ideal is not an exit. The artisan "'disposes' of himself; he is his own usufruct. This is self-management at the level of the individual producer, but self-management as we know is nothing but the metamorphosis of productive management" (p. 104). Every worker demand that "transcends wage demands even a little" aims at reappropriation of the labor process — "becoming again 'the subject of the labor system'" — and thereby extends the finality of production rather than breaking it. The concept thus completes the book's critique of the labor-power anthropology: the archaic mode is not a stage on the way to wage labor but a different structure of exchange, and its reconstruction "backwards" from wage labor is the operation by which historical materialism naturalizes our own.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: domination "as distinct from alienation and exploitation" carries "an element of reciprocity"; "self-management as we know is nothing but the metamorphosis of productive management"; work is "a process of destruction as well as of 'production,' and in this way work is symbolic."
• Karl Marx — the source of the categories Baudrillard judges anachronistic: the slave reconstructed backwards from wage labor, and the "realm of freedom" beyond the division of labor as a "polyvalent extension of the autonomous status of the individual artisan."
• Claude Lévi-Strauss — the structural theory of exchange-obligation on which Baudrillard's difference between reciprocity and psychological exchange rests ("the symbolic must never be confused with the psychological").
• Jean-Pierre Vernant — the historian whose account of the demiurge, the polis as a community of peers ("the social bond is established beyond the craft… where the citizens can reciprocally love one another") and the absence of a "division of labor" supplies the concept's archaic content. Not yet paged.
• Adam Smith and the Physiocrats, Pierre Rolle, and Proudhon — the neighbouring references: Smith's attack on "the Physiocrats and the exchangists" in the history of the concept of labor; Rolle's Introduction à la sociologie du travail on the artisan as "individual producer"; and Proudhon's "polyvalence" as the industrial revision of the artisan ideal. Not yet paged.

Related Concepts

• Mode of Production — the concept that reconstructs the slave and artisan backwards, and therefore cannot see what is not production in them.
• Labor Power — the "inalienable" power whose ownership defines the free laborer, and whose artisan form Baudrillard shows to be domination interiorized.
• Primitive Societies as Alterity — the adjacent argument for the gift and counter-gift; the artisan mode is its feudal-archaic counterpart.
• Use Value — the "direct relation of producer and user" that Vernant's formula retains, and that Baudrillard reads as an economic formula and, in the ideology of service, an excuse.
• Symbolic Exchange — what the artisan's work still retains and what the world of production has eliminated: loss, expenditure, the inscription of death.
• Determinant Instance — the concept that reserves "the last instance" for an economy the artisan mode does not separate out.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Mirror of Production (Baudrillard 1975) — the concept's defining statement: "Domination, as distinct from alienation and exploitation, does not involve the objectification of the dominated, but an obligation that always carries an element of reciprocity" (ch. IV, "The Slave," p. 95); "Work is a process of destruction as well as of 'production,' and in this way work is symbolic" (ch. IV, "The Artisan," p. 100); and "He 'disposes' of himself; he is his own usufruct. This is self-management at the level of the individual producer, but self-management as we know is nothing but the metamorphosis of productive management" (ch. IV, "The Artisan," p. 104).
• 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 reciprocity thesis a defense of archaic domination? Baudrillard insists the reciprocity is structural, not personal or benign — but the objection that he understates the violence of slavery and serfdom is the standing one. How should the page hold the distinction between domination-with-obligation and alienation-without it?
• Whose golden age? The concept accuses the artisan ideal of nostalgia; does its own appeal to the symbolic work of the artisan import a nostalgia of its own? The wiki's primitivism and the-antique material on the myth of origins is the relevant test.
• Vernant's evidence. The Greek demiurge is a specific historical figure, and Baudrillard reads him for a general thesis about work versus labor. Does the concept need the ancient historian's qualification, and does the wiki have a place to hold it?
• What would a non-productive practice look like now? If self-management is only "productive management," the concept leaves open whether any contemporary practice escapes the finality of production — the question the wiki's praxis and everyday-life pages approach from the other side.