Value Without Referential

Definition

Value without referential is Baudrillard's account, in "Value's Last Tango" (Simulacra and Simulation, 1981/1994), of what happens to value when it detaches from its contents and circulates alone. The occasion is the university's panic at awarding diplomas "without a 'real'-work counterpart, without an equivalence in knowledge." Baudrillard names the deeper condition: "This panic is not that of political subversion, it is that of seeing value become dissociated from its contents and begin to function alone, according to its very form." The result is "Terror of value without equivalence": "The values of the university (diplomas, etc.) will proliferate and continue to circulate, a bit like floating capital or Eurodollars, they will spiral without referential criteria, completely devalorized in the end, but that is unimportant: their circulation alone is enough to create a social horizon of value." The concept generalizes the deterrence logic into economics: as "floating capital" needs no real referent of production, so signs of value need no real work. "Because there is an end to value and to work, there is none to the simulacrum of value and of work." Baudrillard adds a political reading: "Once again, we were the promoters of the advanced form, of the pure form of value: diplomas without work"; "the strike no longer means anything" because the institution has already lost its referential. The concept is the political-economic register of simulation-hyperreality and the theoretical hinge between Baudrillard's earlier sign value and the later analysis of financialized value — directly relevant to the wiki's financialisation-of-architecture and symbolic-capital clusters. See sign-value, the-spiraling-cadaver, financialisation-of-architecture.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: value "function[ing] alone, according to its very form"; the floating-capital analogy of the diploma (1981/1994).
• Karl Marx — the political economy whose use/exchange value relation the concept exceeds.
• Pierre Bourdieu — the adjacent theory of value detached from labour (cultural capital).
• Pedro Levi Bismarck — the wiki's architectural-financialisation register in which value is reproduced without building.

Related Concepts

• Sign Value — the object-scale form of value detached from use.
• Use Value — the referent the concept loses.
• Simulation / Hyperreality — the general condition.
• The Spiraling Cadaver — the institution whose value has no referential.
• Financialisation of Architecture — the built register of floating value.
• Symbolic Capital — the coefficient of recognizability that circulates like value.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard 1981/1994) — the defining source ("Value's Last Tango"): "seeing value become dissociated from its contents and begin to function alone, according to its very form"; "Terror of value without equivalence"; "diplomas without work"; "because there is an end to value and to work, there is none to the simulacrum of value and of work."
• The System of Objects (Baudrillard 1968) — the prehistory: the political economy of the sign and the model/series system.
• 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 "value without referential" a critique or an affirmation? Baudrillard declines the reformist panic and even calls it "not important"; is the concept wistful, neutral, or secretly celebratory?
• The analogy to Eurodollars (floating fiat) is 1981 vintage; has the subsequent financialization of everything confirmed the thesis, or did the 2008 crisis reassert the referent's return?
• The wiki's symbolic-capital and sign-value pages both presuppose a referential (recognition, use). Does this concept dissolve them, or complete them?