Determinant Instance

Definition

"Determinant instance" is the Althusserian-Marxist formula for the level of a social formation that determines the others "in the last instance" — in the orthodox version, the economy, which assigns each other instance its place while being itself determined only ultimately. Baudrillard's page for the concept is a critique of that formula as a theological device. In the Preface he already describes the mirror of production as the apparatus by which "the system of political economy comes to be reflected in the imaginary and reproduced there as the determinant instance" (Preface, pp. 19–20). The formula is thus not an analytical finding but the reflexivity of political economy itself: the system appears to itself as the last instance that determines everything else.

The critique has three moves. First, the sophism of recovery: faced with societies in which the economy is not a separable instance, Marxist anthropology does not revise its model but recomposes the infra/superstructure distinction so that kinship or religion can be "infrastructure" when needed. Reading Godelier — "The causality of the economy cannot be presented as the genesis of social superstructures outside the bosom [!] of the economic infrastructure"; "the relations of kinship function both as elements of the infrastructure and as superstructure" — Baudrillard concludes that "the theory results in a perfect sophism of recovery, undoubtedly the masterpiece of a structuralist materialism with 'scientific' pretentions!" (ch. III, "Structural Causality and the Primitives"). The question he puts to Godelier's own formulation is the crux: "Dominant? Determinant? What can this mean if not the remodeling of the infra-superstructure determinist causality into a more flexible causality allowing the retention of economic determinism?" (ch. III, "Structural Causality and the Primitives") — i.e. a schema that can always be re-adjusted to preserve the primacy of the economy, regardless of the object.

Second, the replacement of determination by the code. Once the sign becomes its own referent, the system no longer has an economic base that determines a cultural superstructure. Baudrillard's formula is that the system "comprises neither materialism nor idealism, nor infrastructure nor superstructure. It proceeds according to its form and this form carries along all of them at the same time: production and representation, signs and commodities, language and labor power. It is its own determination in the last instance" (ch. V, "The Third Phase of Political Economy"; see form-sign). The "last instance" is not the economy but the code — and the code is not a hidden cause behind appearances but the very form in which all instances are given at once. This is Baudrillard's point of departure from Althusser and from structuralist Marxism generally.

Third, overdetermination by the code, which extends the earlier Marxist concept of overdetermination inward: "man is not only quantitatively exploited as a productive force by the system of capitalist political economy, but is also metaphysically overdetermined as a producer by the code of political economy" (ch. I, "Man's Double 'Generic' Face," p. 30). The determinant instance does not merely fail to explain the archaic mode; it produces the very subject ("man as producer") that the theory presupposes. The same operation makes the economic an autonomized partial totality — and that autonomization is, for Baudrillard, the ideological operation as such: "Ideology always proceeds by an autonomization of a partial totality; all autonomized partial totalities immediately have an ideological value" (ch. V, "The Economic as Ideology and Simulation Model," pp. 147–149). "There are no economic truths, or better, we have fashioned the truth of the economic as an arbitrary instance." The economic is not the real foundation of the ideological; it is the first of the ideology-effects (see ideology).

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's critic: the "determinant instance" is the system's own mirror-image of itself; the code, not the economy, "is its own determination in the last instance."
• Karl Marx — the source of the base/superstructure schema and of the primacy-of-the-economic thesis, which Baudrillard says cannot be repaired by making the schema more elastic.
• Pierre Bourdieu — cited for the autonomy effect of detached scholarly and cultural fields, the same "myth of rigor, of objectivity, of truth" that the autonomized economic sphere secretes.
• Maurice Godelier — the anthropologist of the "sophism of recovery," whose formulation of economy-as-determinant-in-the-last-instance Baudrillard dismantles in chapter III (with the translator noting the citations are incomplete). Not yet paged.
• Louis Althusser — the theorist of instances, structure in dominance and overdetermination, whose vocabulary Baudrillard inhabits while rejecting its economic anchor. Not yet paged; see structuralism-vs-poststructuralism.

Related Concepts

• Mirror of Production — the figure of the determinant instance: the system reproducing itself "in the imaginary" as the level that determines all others.
• Historical Materialism Critique — the argument in which the critique of the determinant instance is the decisive step.
• Ideology — the autonomization of a partial totality; the economic is the paradigm case.
• Structuralism — the frame that produces the doctrine of instances, and whose method Baudrillard judges complicit with the economy's primacy.
• Representation — the second unanalyzed form of political economy beside production, and the other half of the "mirror" that presents the system to itself.
• Mode of Production — the concept whose elasticity (kinship as infrastructure, religion as relation of production) constitutes the sophism.
• Form-Sign — the form which, being neither base nor superstructure, "is its own determination in the last instance."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Mirror of Production (Baudrillard 1975) — the concept's critique: "The discourse of production and the discourse of representation are the mirror by which the system of political economy comes to be reflected in the imaginary and reproduced there as the determinant instance" (Preface, pp. 19–20); "man is not only quantitatively exploited as a productive force by the system of capitalist political economy, but is also metaphysically overdetermined as a producer by the code of political economy" (ch. I, "Man's Double 'Generic' Face," p. 30); "It comprises neither materialism nor idealism, nor infrastructure nor superstructure. … It is its own determination in the last instance" (ch. V, "The Third Phase of Political Economy"); and "Ideology always proceeds by an autonomization of a partial totality" (ch. V, "The Economic as Ideology and Simulation Model," pp. 147–149).
• 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

• What replaces determination? Baudrillard says the code "is its own determination in the last instance" — which is either a rejection of the causal question or a re-description of it. Does the page need to say what the code determines, and how, or is the formula deliberately tautological?
• Is the "sophism" fair to Godelier? The critique reads Godelier's adjustments as bad faith ("he merely enjoys hide-and-seek"). Are there readings in which kinship-as-infrastructure is a genuine discovery rather than orthodoxy-maintenance? The wiki has no author page for Godelier.
• Whose concept of overdetermination? Baudrillard uses the term both for the code's production of the subject and, implicitly, for Althusser's own concept. Where exactly do the two senses diverge — and does the page need a separate treatment of overdetermination?
• Does the economic still have any explanatory role? If "there are no economic truths," what is left of the wiki's own economic analyses (class, housing, capitalism)? The concept risks becoming a licence for dismissing economic explanation altogether.