Political Economy of the Sign

Definition

The political economy of the sign is the name Baudrillard gives his own program in The Mirror of Production: the extension of the critique of political economy from the commodity to the sign, and the extension of the law of value to signification itself. The program is announced at the point where the Marxist critique is declared exhausted. "Following the same revolutionary movement as Marx did, we must move to a radically different level that, beyond its critique, permits the definitive resolution of political economy. This level is that of symbolic exchange and its theory. And just as Marx thought it necessary to clear the path to the critique of political economy with a critique of the philosophy of law, the preliminary to this radical change of terrain is the critique of the metaphysic of the signifier and the code, in all its current ideological extent. For lack of a better term, we call this the critique of the political economy of the sign" (ch. I, "The Critique of Political Economy Is Basically Completed", p. 50).

The object of that critique is a mutation in the system itself, not a change of topic. "This mutation concerns the passage from the form-commodity to the form-sign, from the abstraction of the exchange of material products under the law of general equivalence to the operationalization of all exchanges under the law of the code" (ch. V, "The Third Phase of Political Economy", p. 121) — a passage in which "it is not a matter of a simple 'commercial prostitution' of all values" (same section). In the form-sign, "the signifier becomes its own referent and the use value of the sign disappears to the benefit of its commutation and exchange value alone. The sign no longer designates anything at all" (same section, p. 123). What the critique of the sign faces is thus not meaning but code: "the super-ideology of the sign and the general operationalization of the signifier—everywhere sanctioned today by the new master disciplines of structural linguistics, semiology, information theory, and cybernetics—has replaced good old political economy as the theoretical basis of the system" (same section).

The thesis about the shift of the center of gravity follows from this. Monopoly is a monopoly of the code: "the monopolistic stage signifies less the monopoly of the means of production (which is never total) than the monopoly of the code" (ch. V, "The Third Phase of Political Economy", pp. 121–123); and contradiction migrates out of production: "it is no longer in the sphere of productive exploitation, but in the 'demobilized,' the repressively 'desublimated' sphere, in relation to production, that the contradictions today emerge" (ch. V, "Contradiction and Subversion: The Displacement of the Political", pp. 129–130). Hence the claim that "the capitalist system, tied to profit and to exploitation, is only the inaugural modality, the infantile phase of the system of political economy" (same section).

The phrase has a second, interior-scale life in the wiki. Tang applies it to domestic objects: "there always exists a 'political economy of the sign' in which commodities or objects are consumed not so much for their utility or use value, as for their explicit sign value" (Tang, p. 331) — i.e., the same law of value operating at the scale of rooms and dress (see sign-value, interiorisation).

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the program's author: the critique of "the metaphysic of the signifier and the code"; the form-commodity to form-sign mutation; the monopoly of the code (1973/1975).
• Xiaobing Tang — the phrase's interior-design applier: consumption of objects for "explicit sign value"; the apartment as a sign system read by its owner (1998/2006).
• Karl Marx — the precursor whose completed critique defines the level that must be surpassed; the political economy of the sign is its "preliminary."
• Julia Kristeva (not yet paged) — the contested ally: her Marxian "labor of the sign" is refused — "the 'labor of the sign,' 'productive inter-textual space,' etc., are thus ambiguous metaphors" (ch. I, "Marx and the Hieroglyph of Value").
• Ferdinand de Saussure and the semiological tradition (not yet paged) — the signifier/signified/referent apparatus the book uses against itself, to show the signifier's autonomization (see semiotics).

Related Concepts

• sign-value — the consumer-scale form of the same economy of the sign; the wiki's existing statement of it draws on Tang.
• form-sign — the historical form whose law the political economy of the sign theorizes.
• use-value — the term whose disappearance in the sign ("the use value of the sign disappears") repeats the commodity's history.
• semiotics — the discipline whose concepts the book turns against the code.
• value-without-referential — the terminal state of the signifier that is its own referent.
• symbolic-exchange — the alternative opposed to the code, not a repaired form of value.
• ideology — the super-ideology of the sign replacing political economy as the system's theoretical basis.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Mirror of Production (Baudrillard 1975) — where the program is named and grounded: the call, after the completed critique of political economy, for "the critique of the metaphysic of the signifier and the code… we call this the critique of the political economy of the sign" (ch. I, p. 50); the passage "from the form-commodity to the form-sign… under the law of the code" (ch. V, p. 121); and the displacement of contradiction from the sphere of productive exploitation (ch. V, pp. 129–130).
• Decorating Culture (Tang 1998/2006) — the phrase applied at interior scale: "there always exists a 'political economy of the sign' in which commodities or objects are consumed not so much for their utility or use value, as for their explicit sign value" (p. 331).
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book read "in its own terms": symbolic exchange as the limit, not the negation, of economic value (p. 81); 'The Art Auction' as the political economy's "crucible" where sumptuary value — "value, deployed beyond exchange value and founded on the latter's destruction" (PE, 112–13) — shows what the sign-economy presupposes and displaces; and the judgement on Genosko's semiological apparatus (Jakobson, Benveniste, Hjelmslev, Saussure, Peirce) as too preliminary against "the one simple paradox of the sign repeated throughout all of Baudrillard's work" (p. 14). See paradox-of-the-sign, medium-of-exchange.

Open Questions

• Is the political economy of the sign a continuation of Marx's critique by other means or its replacement? Baudrillard insists the law of value is extended, and simultaneously that the sign escapes value altogether — the two claims pull apart.
• If the form-sign "applies to the whole social process and it is largely unconscious," what evidence could confirm the third-phase periodisation? The objection that commodities still dominate quantitatively is dismissed as irrelevant.
• Does Tang's interior-scale use of the phrase commit the same move Baudrillard performs at the macro scale — reading all consumption as sign consumption, against the utility evidence Madigan & Munro offer (see use-value)?
• What exactly is "the metaphysic of the signifier"? The book names it rather than defines it; the nearest gloss is the autonomization of the signifier in structural linguistics and semiology.