Mirror of Production

Definition

The mirror of production is Baudrillard's title-figure for the relation between Marxism and political economy. Political economy is not only a system of exploitation but a form — production, labor, value, representation — and that form is reflexive: it is the surface on which man, and "the human species," recognizes itself as producer. "At the level of all political economy there is something of what Lacan describes in the mirror stage: through this scheme of production, this mirror of production, the human species comes to consciousness [la prise de conscience] in the imaginary" (Preface, p. 18). The mirror is not a distortion that a better theory could correct; it is the form of the reflection itself, "the identity that man dons with his own eyes when he can think of himself only as something to produce, to transform, or bring about as value" (Preface, pp. 17–18).

Two structural features follow. First, the mirror has two unanalyzed forms, not one: "These are the two great unanalyzed forms of the imaginary of political economy that imposed their limits on him. 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). Marx is said to have subjected the contents of political economy to a radical critique — exchange value, surplus value, private property — while leaving its forms intact: "Marx made a radical critique of political economy, but still in the form of political economy" (ch. I, "The Critique of Political Economy Is Basically Completed"). Hence the Marxist concept of production "reemerges, idealized, behind the critique of the capitalist mode of production" (Preface, p. 17).

Second, the mirror is a universalizing device. What is reflected in it is not merely our economy but history and humanity as such: "It is only in the mirror of production and history, under the double principle of indefinite accumulation (production) and dialectical continuity (history), only by the arbitrariness of the code, that our Western culture can reflect itself in the universal as the privileged moment of truth (science) or of revolution (historical materialism)" (ch. V, "A Euclidean Geometry of History?", p. 116). The figure therefore connects the critique of Marxism to the critique of the sign: the exchange of signifieds hides "the 'labor' of the signifier" (Preface, pp. 17–18), and representation is the second face of the same mirror.

Against the mirror Baudrillard sets symbolic exchange and an imperative: "In order to find a realm beyond economic value (which is in fact the only revolutionary perspective), then the mirror of production in which all Western metaphysics is reflected, must be broken" (ch. I, "Marx and the Hieroglyph of Value", p. 42). The mirror also operates at the scale of the individual producer: "The free worker finds his identity in the mirror of his labor power" (ch. IV, "The Slave") — the wage relation as self-recognition through the very thing sold.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — author of the figure: production as the imaginary in which the species comes to consciousness; the two unanalyzed forms (production and representation); the demand to break the mirror (1973/1975).
• Karl Marx — the thinker whose critique is said to remain "in the form of political economy" while destroying its contents; the mirror's most powerful inmate rather than its breaker.
• Jacques Lacan (not yet paged) — the mirror stage, which supplies the figure's mechanism of imaginary self-recognition; the Preface invokes it by analogy, not by psychoanalytic argument.
• Louis Althusser and Maurice Godelier (not yet paged) — the structuralist Marxists whose "determinant instance" is named as the thing the mirror reproduces (see determinant-instance).
• Mark Poster — the translator, who reads the figure as Baudrillard's charge that Marxism is "too conservative, too rooted in the assumptions of political economy," and objects elsewhere that Baudrillard's own la parole implies "an ontology of centered presence."

Related Concepts

• historical-materialism-critique — the mirror's target: the argument that historical materialism universalizes its concepts and becomes ideological.
• political-economy-of-the-sign — the terrain announced once the mirror is broken: the critique of the metaphysic of the signifier and the code.
• representation — the second unanalyzed form; with production, the mirror's double face.
• productivism — the mirror's practical face: production as value-form re-emerging in revolutionary discourse.
• mirror-stage — the Lacanian operation the figure borrows; the imaginary identification with an image.
• mirror — the vault's other, literal sense of the term (the interior's reflexive surface), which this figure uses only by analogy.
• use-value — the term that shows the mirror's closure: "use value is only the horizon of exchange value."
• determinant-instance — what the reflected image is said to reproduce.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Mirror of Production (Baudrillard 1975) — the figure's origin and the book's title-argument: production as the mirror in which "the human species comes to consciousness in the imaginary" (Preface, p. 18); the two unanalyzed forms of the imaginary of political economy (Preface, pp. 19–20); the Western culture that "can reflect itself in the universal" only in the mirror of production and history (ch. V, p. 116); and the closing demand that "the mirror of production in which all Western metaphysics is reflected, must be broken" (ch. I, p. 42).
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book as one of the systems Baudrillard reads internally: Marxism criticized not against "some external real which they exclude" but on its own criteria — "implicitly agreeing with them that there is no outside… even in their own terms, they fail, cannot be completed, are unable finally to explain themselves" (p. 17); the Bataille lineage (expenditure, restricted vs. general economy) alongside Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari and Derrida (p. 4); and the poetic "speech" excluded by productivism (MP, 163–7) as the book's figure for the real (pp. 46, 120). See internal-and-external-readings, double-strategy, the-real.

Open Questions

• Is "the imaginary" here Lacan's register (the ego constituted in an image) or a looser name for illusion? The Preface uses the term technically and then not again; the wiki's mirror-stage page states the strict version.
• If Marxism reproduces a form rather than a content, what would a critique of the form look like that does not itself become a new science of production? Baudrillard's answer — symbolic exchange — is asserted rather than derived (see symbolic-exchange).
• Poster's objection, attributed to him and not to Baudrillard: if the concepts of historical materialism have no validity outside the society that produced them, on what ground does the critique claim they "miss" primitive societies? This is the universalism-vs-relativism problem.
• Does the mirror figure claim that production has no referent outside the code, or only that every representation of production passes through the code? The two readings support very different politics.