Symbolic Exchange

Definition

Symbolic exchange is Baudrillard's older concept (from Symbolic Exchange and Death, 1976), and in Fatal Strategies (1983) it supplies the anthropological ground of reversibility and the principle of Evil. The symbolic is "a functioning principle that is sovereignly external and antagonistic to our economic 'reality principle.'" Its key mechanism is the counter-gift: "the symbolic embodies the fatal strategy of achieving liberation through 'the deepening of negative conditions.' In other words, the sociocybernetic code can successfully absorb everything except a homeopathic dose of its own logic of exclusion." The symbolic "haunts the diminished contemporary world… The social law would have us believe that time is linear, and that gifts are unilateral. However, a more profound law invites the cyclical and the reversible to reenter the frame from which they had been rudely excluded." The gift — inseparable from the counter-gift and, following Marcel Mauss's The Gift and Georges Bataille's accursed share, an obligation to reciprocate rather than a unilateral transfer — is thus the anthropological form of reversibility: the "counter-gift" is "sovereignly external and antagonistic to our economic 'reality principle'," and it cannot be assimilated by the commodity system without damage. In Fatal Strategies the symbolic appears chiefly through Bataille's accursed share and Lévi-Strauss's excess of the signifier: "It is precisely the superfluous, the excessive that is essential… The social is a luxury." Where exchange is lost, the object becomes inexchangeable — the hostage, the corpse, the fetish ("only exchange protects us from destiny"). The concept is the wiki's bridge between Baudrillard's early anthropological theory and the fatal strategies of 1983. See reversibility, destiny, principle-of-evil, the-hostage, use-value.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: "a functioning principle that is sovereignly external and antagonistic to our economic 'reality principle'"; "the sociocybernetic code can successfully absorb everything except a homeopathic dose of its own logic of exclusion" (1976; developed 1983). Earliest of all, The Mirror of Production (1973/1975) gives the concept its anthropological statement — the exchange-gift operating "not according to the evaluation or equivalence of exchanged goods but according to the antagonistic reciprocity of persons" (ch. III, "Surplus and Anti-Production") — and its polemical thesis, that "The real rupture is not between 'abstract' labor and 'concrete' labor, but between symbolic exchange and work (production, economics)" (ch. I, "Marx and the Hieroglyph of Value," p. 42). See mirror-of-production.
• Marcel Mauss (not yet paged) — the gift/counter-gift and the Kula circulation as the anthropological model.
• Georges Bataille (not yet paged) — expenditure and the accursed share: "the superfluous, the excessive that is essential."
• Claude Lévi-Strauss — the symbolic order and "the excess of the signifier."
• Karl Marx — the economy of equivalence and scarcity that the symbolic exceeds.

Related Concepts

• Reversibility — the symbolic is reversibility in anthropological form.
• Destiny — "only exchange protects us from destiny"; the inexchangeable is the fatal.
• Principle of Evil — the accursed share as the principle's economic form.
• The Hostage — the inexchangeable object ("torn from the circuit of exchange").
• Use Value / Sign Value — the economic terms the symbolic suspends.
• The gift/counter-gift (Mauss) — the concept's core mechanism.
• The Mirror of Production — the book that supplies the concept's original anthropological statement: exchange-gift "according to the antagonistic reciprocity of persons" against the economy of equivalence, with the symbolic named as the alternative to the sphere of value.
• Anti-Production — the primitive economy's festive side named in the same book: exchange that "excludes all 'production,'" where "production appears nowhere as an end or a means" (ch. III, "Surplus and Anti-Production").

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Fatal Strategies (Baudrillard 1983) — the defining development: the counter-gift, the accursed share, the inexchangeable, "The social is a luxury," "only exchange protects us from destiny."
• Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard 1981/1994) — the adjacent symbolic residue in the "remainder" and the challenge.
• The System of Objects (Baudrillard 1968) — the earlier possession/marginal-object register.
• The Mirror of Production (Baudrillard 1975) — the concept's earliest Baudrillard elaboration, before the 1976 and 1983 notes: symbolic exchange as the anthropological given that political economy presupposes and represses — "Symbolic circulation is primordial" (ch. III, "Surplus and Anti-Production," pp. 76–77); its mechanism the limitation of exchanged goods ("are apportioned and limited, often imported from far away according to strict rules. Why? Because, given over to individual or group production, they would risk being proliferated and thereby break the fragile mechanism of reciprocity"); and its irreducibility to the sphere of value — "The real rupture is not between 'abstract' labor and 'concrete' labor, but between symbolic exchange and work (production, economics)" (ch. I, "Marx and the Hieroglyph of Value," p. 42). See mirror-of-production, anti-production.
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the limit-reading (ch. 2): symbolic exchange "is not simply the negation of economic value but rather its limit" (p. 81) — "the objects involved in reciprocal exchange… annihilate themselves in this continual exchange without assuming any value of their own" (PE, 125); the art auction as the "crucible" (PE, 112) where value arises from the risk that there is no bid after ours, each bid standing in for and deferring the impossible first/last exchange; "the sumptuary doubles exchange" (p. 88). See medium-of-exchange, sign-value, paradox-of-the-sign.

Open Questions

• The symbolic is Baudrillard's most contested concept (it underwrites the "fatal strategy" but is never given a precise formalization). The wiki should keep it connected to Mauss and Bataille.
• Is symbolic exchange a real anthropological universal or a philosophical construct built against political economy? The page should not overclaim.
• How does the symbolic relate to the gift/counter-gift materials of Mauss and Bataille? The gift lineage should be built out here rather than on a separate page.