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relegating the signified and the referent to an obscure horizon of their science. What they have
been able to do is to show that signifiers have become abstracted from the subject (the signified)
and from the social world of objects (the referent). While they claim this situation is natural and
inevitable, Baudrillard argues that the essence of political economy is precisely this separation;
the increasing autonomization of the signifier not simply in the realm of language but in all
aspects of social exchange. Marx foresaw that capitalism would corrupt all values, moral, cultural,
sexual, etc., by the force of the exchange value of the commodity. Baudrillard asserts that the
strategy of the capitalist system is to generate this abstract structure of signification of which the
commodity is merely one example. What happens in political economy is this: "the signified and
the referent are now abolished to the sole profit of the play of signifiers, of a generalized
formalization where the code no longer refers back to any subjective or objective `reality,' but to
its own logic. The signifier becomes its own referent and the use value of the sign disappears to
the profit only of its commutation and exchange value. The sign no longer designates anything at
all. It approaches in its truth its structural limit which is to refer back only to other signs. All
reality then becomes the place of a semilogical manipulation, of a structural simulation. And
whereas the traditional sign... is the object of a conscious investment, of a rational calculation of
signifieds, here it is the code that becomes the instance of absolute reference." Here we are
beyond the stable bourgeois world of the nineteenth century where the consumer carefully
weighed his money against the value of the
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commodity, carefully estimated his need against his resources. This stable, comfortable, knowable
world where words clearly referred to things, where ideas represented reality, where values
corresponded to needs, where commodities had unquestioned value, was the world of Marx and
his thought. There could simply not be articulated a "revolution" in underarm deodorants, the
incorporation (imaginary or real) of personal qualities through the purchase of commodities, or a
"clean bomb." Baudrillard's critique of the sign allows him to render the situation of advanced
capitalism with much more concreteness than traditional Marxism. Whole realms of contemporary
protest (Blacks, Women, Youth, etc.) and critique (consumption, sex, language, the media, etc.)
can be seen better in relation to the repressiveness of the code than in relation to the mode of
production. The dramatic tension in the system comes from its difficulty in reproducing the code,
while production itself becomes merely an ideological support of the system. (It delivers the
goods.)
In Le systém des objets, Baudrillard analyzed consumption through a critique of the sign. The
prejudice in favor of production as the active moment and consumption as passive originated with
the political economy but was confirmed by Marx. This productivist ideology produces an absence
in social theory: it cannot account for the articulated complexity of a symbolic exchange in
consumption. Baudrillard asserts that consumption is as "active" an exchange as production. In
consumption there is an active appropriation of signs, not the simple destruction of an object.
What is consumed is not
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simply a material object that satisfies an all too rational need, but a symbolic meaning in which
the consumer places himself in a communication structure where an exchange occurs which is

political economy of its imaginary universality. But, from the time of Marx, it lost this advantage
when taken as a principle of explication.
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It thus cancelled its "difference" by universalizing itself, regressing to the dominant form of the
code (universality) and to the strategy of political economy. It is not tautological that the concept
of history is historical, that the concept of dialectic is dialectical, and that the concept of
production is itself produced (that is, it is to be judged by a kind of self-analysis). Rather, this
simply indicates the explosive, mortal, present form of critical concepts. As soon as they are
constituted as universal they cease to be analytical and the religion of meaning begins. They
become canonical and enter the general system's mode of theoretical representation. Not
accidentally, at this moment they also take on their scientific cast (as in the scientific canonization
of concepts from Engels to Althusser). They set themselves up as expressing an "objective
reality." They become signs: signifiers of a "real" signified. And although at the best of times
these concepts have been practiced as concepts without taking themselves for reality, they have
nonetheless subsequently fallen into the imaginary of the sign, or the sphere of truth. They are no
longer in the sphere of interpretation but enter that of repressive simulation.
From this point on they only evoke themselves in an indefinite metonymic process which goes as
follows: man is historical; history is dialectical; the dialectic is the process of (material)
production; production is the very movement of human existence; history is the history of modes
of production, etc. This scientific and universalist discourse (code) immediately becomes
imperialistic. All possible societies are called on to respond. That is, consult Marxist thought to see
if societies "without history" are something other than "pre"-historical, other than a chrysalis or
larva. The dialectic of the
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world of production is not yet well developed, but nothing is lost by waiting -- the Marxist egg is
ready to hatch. Moreover, the psychoanalytic egg is in a similar condition. What we have said
about the Marxist concepts holds for the unconscious, repression, Oedipal complex, etc., as well.
Yet here, it is even better: the Bororos 34 are closer to primitive processes than we are.
This constitutes a most astonishing theoretical aberration -- and a most reactionary one. There is
neither a mode of production nor production in primitive societies. There is no dialectic and no
unconscious in primitive societies. These concepts analyze only our own societies, which are ruled
by political economy. Hence they have only a kind of boomerang value. If psychoanalysis speaks
of the unconscious in primitive societies, we should ask about what represses psychoanalysis or
about the repression that has produced psychoanalysis itself. When Marxism speaks of the mode
of production in primitive societies, we ask to what extent this concept fails to account even for
our own historical societies (the reason it is exported). And where all our ideologues seek to
finalize and rationalize primitive societies according to their own concepts -- to encode the
primitives -- we ask what obsession makes them see this finality, this rationality, and this code
blowing up in their faces. Instead of exporting Marxism and psychoanalysis (not to mention
bourgeois ideology, although at this level there is no difference), we bring all the force and
questioning of primitive societies to bear on Marxism and psychoanalysis. Perhaps then we will
break this fascination,
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