Non-Marked Terms

Definition

"Non-marked terms" are the groups that advanced capitalism holds at the zero term of social significance: not exploited more severely than others, but disqualified in advance as speakers, denied a position from which utterance counts. Baudrillard's list is Blacks, women, youth, and the excluded generally — "all those social groups that fall under the structural bar of repression, of relegation to a place where they lose their meaning." The term is structural-linguistic: in a marked/unmarked opposition the unmarked term is the one that carries no distinguishing feature, the zero degree against which the marked term is defined. Baudrillard's claim is that the feminine, the Black, the young are constituted as that zero, and that this constitution — not economic exploitation — is what their revolts target.

Hence his central statement of the new political logic: "The Black revolt aims at race as a code, at a level much more radical than economic exploitation. The revolt of women aims at the code that makes the feminine a non-marked term. The youth revolt aims at the extremity of a process of racist discrimination in which it has no right to speak" (ch. V, "Contradiction and Subversion," pp. 138–139). Each revolt addresses the code rather than an inequality within it: "This position of revolt is no longer that of the economically exploited." Baudrillard generalizes: "No culture but ours has produced this systematic abstraction in which all the elements of symbolic exchange between the sexes have been liquidated to the profit of a binary functionality" (pp. 135–136) — and the same holds for the Black/White distinction, which "applies not as an afterthought but as a structural element" and whose objectification of the Black "is not that of exploited labor power, but an objectification by the code" (ch. V, "Contradiction and Subversion: The Displacement of the Political"; see whiteness, sexual-difference).

The revolts are therefore transversal and non-dialectical. "The radical subversion is transversal to the extent that it crosses the contradictions connected with the mode of production, and non-dialectical to the extent that there is no dialectical negativity in the relation between a repressed, non-marked term and a marked term. There can only be transgression of the line and deconstruction of the code" (ch. V, "Contradiction and Subversion: The Displacement of the Political"). Youth is the sharpest instance because its non-place "crosses all social categories" — it "occupies the most critical non-place of the code, but not as an age group."

Two consequences organize the concept. First, the proletariat loses its status as the reference of revolt: "The working class is no longer the gold standard of revolts and contradictions. There is no longer a revolutionary subject of reference" (p. 143); an alliance of workers and students "under the pious invocation of a common exploitation is impossible." Second, the code can be occupied without being broken: "one can also aim to simply pass to the other side of the line in order to become the marked term, to change positions without breaking the code: The 'White' Black man, etc." (footnote, ch. V, "Contradiction and Subversion: The Displacement of the Political"). The concept thus carries its own internal limit — accession to the marked position is a career, not a deconstruction, and it leaves the code intact. This is why Baudrillard insists the subversion must be measured against the abolition of the code, and why the material on mutedness (the structural silencing of the unmarked) is the concept's closest ally in the wiki.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: the non-marked terms are held at "the zero term of social significance," their revolts aim at the code rather than at exploitation, and the subversion they carry is "transversal" and "non-dialectical."
• Karl Marx — the source of the class paradigm Baudrillard rejects here: revolt is no longer indexed to the relation to the means of production, and the exploited/exploiter relation is not the same as the marked/non-marked one.
• Claude Lévi-Strauss — the structuralist frame of marked/unmarked oppositions and of the "binary functionality" that Baudrillard says has liquidated the symbolic exchange between the sexes.
• Friedrich Nietzsche — cited for the logic by which a dominated group elevates the sign of its domination into a value ("the workers have elevated into a cardinal value the very sign of their slavery"), the trap the non-marked revolts are said to avoid.
• Shirley Ardener — the wiki's theorist of mutedness, the "non-marked" position in speech: the structural silence that Baudrillard names as the zero term of social significance (see mutedness).
• Luce Irigaray and the feminist critique of the binary code — as the wiki's sexual-difference material frames it. Not yet paged.

Related Concepts

• Mutedness — the linguistic-structural form of the same position: groups whose speech does not count because they are not "marked."
• Sexual Difference — the feminist register of the marked/unmarked binary and of Baudrillard's claim that symbolic exchange between the sexes has been liquidated "to the profit of a binary functionality."
• Whiteness — the marked term of the race code, and the "White Black man" problem of seizing its position without breaking the code.
• Otherness — the wider category through which the wiki tracks the constitution of the excluded.
• Cultural Revolution — the strategic name for a revolt against the code rather than against exploitation.
• Revolution as Finality — the displaced alternative: a revolution deferred to history's end precisely cannot address the code.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Mirror of Production (Baudrillard 1975) — the concept's defining statement: "The Black revolt aims at race as a code, at a level much more radical than economic exploitation. The revolt of women aims at the code that makes the feminine a non-marked term" (ch. V, "Contradiction and Subversion," pp. 138–139); "No culture but ours has produced this systematic abstraction in which all the elements of symbolic exchange between the sexes have been liquidated to the profit of a binary functionality" (pp. 135–136); and "The working class is no longer the gold standard of revolts and contradictions. There is no longer a revolutionary subject of reference" (p. 143).
• 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 "non-marked" a structural position or a list? Baudrillard names Blacks, women, youth and "the excluded," but the unmarked term is formally the zero of any code. Can the concept be generalized, or does it depend on the particular groups the book happens to name?
• Does the concept do justice to the revolts it names? The claim that these revolts target the code is asserted rather than demonstrated. How does it square with the wiki's empirical gender and race material (see gender-and-the-interior, whiteness)?
• The "White Black man" problem. If the marked position can be seized without breaking the code, what distinguishes transgression from assimilation? The wiki's postcolonial-identity and assimilation-and-resistance material may already hold answers.
• What happened to class? Baudrillard's dismissal of the proletariat as "gold standard" is a claim about the structure of revolt, not about exploitation. Does the page's formula leave any way to think a joint politics of the marked and the non-marked?