Use-Value

Definition

Use-value names the utility dimension of an object — what it does, how long it lasts, whom it serves — as against its value as sign, symbol or fashionable appearance. The concept enters this wiki through Madigan & Munro's correction of the postmodern consumption debate: "It was evident that an important criterion for choosing furnishings and décor was their functionality, variously expressed as suitability for children, ease of keeping clean and the probable life of the item. Use value is a concept which gets neglected in the whole debate about the playfulness of signs and symbols" (pp. 224–225). The claim is a materialist counter to the sign-system analyses of the interior: where Baudrillard reads the object-world as a closed system of signs and the postmodern debate reads consumption as the playful manipulation of symbols, Madigan & Munro find households choosing by durability, cleanability, and fit to children — and for whom "participation in lifestyle shopping, careful co-ordination of style and detailed attention to 'taste' is severely restricted by considerations of cost and utility" (p. 224). Use-value here is not the economist's bare utility but a socially saturated utility: functionality "variously expressed" carries familial ideology (suitability for children), moral standards (ease of keeping clean) and temporal prudence (probable life of the item) — use-value as the working-class home's positive criterion, at once practical and normative.

Key Thinkers

• Ruth Madigan & Moira Munro — the concept's empirical rescuers (1996/2006): use-value named as what "gets neglected in the whole debate about the playfulness of signs and symbols" (p. 225); its three expressions (suitability for children, ease of keeping clean, probable life of the item); the cost restriction on lifestyle shopping (p. 224).
• Jean Baudrillard — the position use-value corrects: the object-world as sign-system in which "sign value" precedes use — "commodities or objects are consumed not so much for their utility or use value, as for their explicit sign value" (via Tang quoting For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, p. 331; see atmospheric-values, consumerism, sign-value) — the frame Madigan & Munro answer from the interview data. His Mirror of Production (1973/1975) radicalizes the same priority against Marx himself: "Far from designating a realm beyond political economy, use value is only the horizon of exchange value" (ch. I, "Critique of Use Value and Labor Power," pp. 22–23), and utility itself is "a socially produced and determined hieroglyphic abstraction" (ch. I, "Marx and the Hieroglyph of Value," n. 31) — use-value as an unexamined form of political economy rather than a realm outside it. See political-economy-of-the-sign, labor-power.
• Pierre Bourdieu — the class-theoretical frame: the practical, necessity-driven relation to goods ("taste of necessity") against the aestheticizing distance of affluence — the theory behind the finding that utility governs where resources are constrained (see habitus, symbolic-capital).

Related Concepts

• consumerism — the debate use-value re-enters: lifestyle shopping, the coordinated display, and the "postmodern aesthetic… just as much about selling" (p. 225); use-value is the consumer-side limit of the lifestyle-shopping thesis.
• manifest-and-latent-functions — the functionalist frame use-value belongs to: the manifest function is precisely what the playfulness-of-signs debate neglects; Lawrence's insufficiency thesis cuts both ways (utility alone can't explain consumption — but neither can signs alone).
• taste — the rival criterion: where taste judges appearance and distinction, use-value judges durability, cleanliness and fit to use; 'good design' is not a condition of 'good taste' (editors' headnote).
• comfort — use-value's bodily content: things selected "for utility and comfort" in competition with "the desire for things which are new and look new" (p. 226).
• novelty — use-value's opponent: "the belief that things should be selected for utility and comfort competing with the desire for things which are new and look new" (p. 226) — the respondent-level version of the planned-obsolescence economy.
• respectability — use-value's moral ally: ease of keeping clean is both a practical and a respectability criterion; utility and moral worth converge in the household standard.
• domestic-interior — the site where use-value governs: the home acquired "gradually," items "expected to last some time" (p. 224).
• Political Economy of the Sign — the framework that rethinks use-value as a code effect: the sign's own "use value" disappears with the form-sign, and utility is "already a socially produced and determined hieroglyphic abstraction" (ch. I).
• Labor Power — the concept's Marxian twin and the book's sharpest target: man "is also metaphysically overdetermined as a producer by the code of political economy" (ch. I, "Man's Double 'Generic' Face," p. 30).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Fatal Strategies (Baudrillard 1983) — use-value's disappearance completed: the absolute commodity whose "value consists… in its inutility"; and "If the morality of things lies in their sacrosanct use-value, then long live the immorality of the atom and of nuclear arms." See absolute-commodity, sign-value.

• The System of Objects (Baudrillard 1968) — the book that theorizes use value's displacement: the object's "two functions – to be put to use and to be possessed"; "functional… in no way qualifies what is adapted to a goal, merely what is adapted to an order or system"; the sign-consumption that supersedes utility; and the serial object's "technical deficit" against the model's use value.

• 'House Beautiful': Style and Consumption in the Home (Madigan & Munro 1996/2006) — the concept's founding source: "It was evident that an important criterion for choosing furnishings and décor was their functionality, variously expressed as suitability for children, ease of keeping clean and the probable life of the item. Use value is a concept which gets neglected in the whole debate about the playfulness of signs and symbols" (pp. 224–225); cost and utility restricting lifestyle shopping (p. 224); "the belief that things should be selected for utility and comfort competing with the desire for things which are new and look new" (p. 226).

• Decorating Culture (Tang 1998/2006) — the frame positioned, now with the source text: "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); signs "at once use value and exchange value," social hierarchies "accounted as profit, as personal satisfaction, and lived as 'need'" (p. 331); and needs "never a natural experience or objective perception" but constructed as alibi (p. 331) — the strong version of the sign-position whose class blindness Madigan & Munro's interview data corrects (see sign-value, consummative-mobilization).

• The Mirror of Production (Baudrillard 1975) — the concept's critique at the level of the form: "Far from designating a realm beyond political economy, use value is only the horizon of exchange value" (ch. I, "Critique of Use Value and Labor Power," pp. 22–23), so that the Marxist appeal to utility repeats rather than exits political economy. The book's footnote on Marx's "social hieroglyph" extends the point from the product to utility itself: "Utility (including labor's) is already a socially produced and determined hieroglyphic abstraction" (ch. I, "Marx and the Hieroglyph of Value," n. 31). The use value of labor power is likewise a code effect: man "is not only quantitatively exploited as a productive force by the system of capitalist political economy, but is also metaphysically overdetermined as a producer by the code of political economy" (ch. I, "Man's Double 'Generic' Face," p. 30). See political-economy-of-the-sign, labor-power, sign-value.

• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the functional paradox restated as the system's internal limit: "function must have the commutability or exchangeability of the sign or it is not function at all" (p. 33), so that true use — unconscious, outside the order of signs — is what the system's very perfection excludes; and, via 'Sign Function and Class Logic' on Chapin's sociometrics, the undecidability left once the code is known: apparent fidelity to function could always be feigned, so that "distinction and conformity" (PE, 36) can no longer be told apart (pp. 127–29). See paradox-of-the-sign, the-real, system-of-objects, techneme.

• source-notes/baudrillard-1994-simulacra-and-simulation

Open Questions

• Is use-value the absence of the sign-function or a sign-function of its own? Madigan & Munro's respondents say things should "look new" as well as work (p. 226) — does utility itself carry symbolic meaning (cleanliness as respectability, durability as honesty), dissolving the use/sign dichotomy the essay relies on? See manifest-and-latent-functions, respectability.
• Does the neglect of use-value in the "playfulness of signs" debate (Baudrillard's system; the postmodern celebration) reproduce the affluent consumer's position as the general theory of consumption — the very class-blindness Madigan & Munro's modest-income sample exposes? See consumerism, taste.
• How does use-value relate to Lawrence's insufficiency thesis ("by themselves, manifest functions do not fully account for the prevailing pattern of domestic consumption," p. 184)? Madigan & Munro supply the inverse correction: latent-function theory alone cannot explain what utility-constrained households actually choose. Is a two-sided account — consumption beyond need, consumption constrained by need — the synthesis both halves require? See manifest-and-latent-functions.