Medium of Exchange

Definition

The medium of exchange is Butler's figure (in Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real, 1999) for the paradoxical status of whatever stands between the parties of an exchange — money in the art auction, the painting, the hostage in terrorism — and which turns out to be simultaneously the most exchanged thing and the one thing that can never itself be exchanged or grasped. Analyzing Baudrillard's 'The Art Auction: Sign Exchange and Sumptuary Value' (in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign), Butler argues that the auction reveals exchange before use value or exchange value: bids that take the place of a first exchange that never existed and defer a last exchange that must never arrive. In this structure, "the real aristocratic parity, the one thing that is truly equal to itself alone, is the very medium of exchange itself: money or the painting. It is the single object which, in its difference from itself, in only ever being able to be grasped in a comparative form, everything wants to imitate or resemble. The medium of exchange – apparently the most low, the most lacking in value – is the true aristocrat of exchange. And perhaps another name for this medium of exchange – at once the lowest and the highest, infinitely compared and incomparable, the limit to the system of simulation and what the system endlessly displaces – is the real itself" (Butler 1999, p. 87). The same structure governs the terrorist's hostage ("The hostage is himself obscene. He is obscene because he no longer represents anything," FS, 42–3) and Borges's coin in 'The Zahir' (Butler n. 6, p. 118): the medium of exchange as the inexchangeable that grounds every exchange.

Key Thinkers

• Rex Butler — the figure's analyst: the medium of exchange as the second chapter's key term (after waste, before the masses), "the one thing that is truly equal to itself alone" (p. 87); the auction's "aristocratic parity" (PE, 116–17) as its home case.
• Jean Baudrillard — the source analyses: the art auction's "sumptuary value" ('PE', 111–19), where money "spent, sacrificed, eaten up according to a logic of difference and challenge" takes on value (PE, 112–13); the hostage as failed medium ('FS', 42–3).
• Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille (referenced, no pages) — the gift and potlatch lineage behind the sumptuary (via Butler's reading of Consumer Society and Symbolic Exchange and Death).

Related Concepts

• symbolic-exchange — the medium's ground: symbolic exchange as the limit of economic value, not its negation (Butler, p. 81).
• the-real — the medium's other name: "perhaps another name for this medium of exchange… is the real itself" (p. 87).
• sign-value — what the medium displaces: sign value as the comparative form the medium endlessly takes.
• the-hostage — the political figure of the failed medium: the hostage at once most exchanged and inexchangeable.
• political-economy-of-the-sign — the book within which the medium's home analysis ('The Art Auction') sits.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999)

Open Questions

• Butler's medium of exchange is money, painting, hostage — never a building. Can the architectural commission (the building as the medium between client, capital and city) be read through the figure, or does the building's durability disqualify it?
• The figure collapses the distinction between the lowest (money) and the highest (the real) — does this support or undermine the wiki's sign-value analyses of brand-name interiors?