Notes on The Mirror of Production


 * These innocent little phrases are already theoretical conclusions: the separation of the end from the means is the wildest and most naive postulate about the human race. Man has needs. Does he have needs? Is he pledged to satisfy them? Is he labor power (by which he separates himself as means from himself as his own end)? These prodigious metaphors of the system that dominates us are a fable of political economy retold to generations of revolutionaries infected even in their political radicalism by the conceptual viruses of this same political economy.


 * The definition of products as useful and as responding to needs is the most accomplished, most internalized

expression of abstract economic exchange: it is its subjective closure.


 * In the last instance, this is the basis of political economy. This generic definition must be shattered in unmasking the "dialectic" of quantity and quality, behind which hides the definitive structural institution of the field of value.


 * "While labor which creates exchange values is abstract, universal and homogeneous, labor which produces use values is concrete and special and is made up of an endless variety of kinds of labor according to the way in which and the material to which it is applied." (Marx)


 * The use value of labor power is the moment of its actualization, of man's relation to his useful expenditure of effort. Basically it is an act of (productive) consumption; and in the general process, this moment retains all its uniqueness.


 * [...] the structural articulation of the two terms. Work is really universalized at the base of this "fork," not only as market value but as human value.

(Very similar to D&G's lobster.) All unhappy families are different &c.


 * Failing to conceive of a mode of social wealth other than that founded on labor and production, Marxism no longer furnishes in the long run a real alternative to capitalism.

This reminds me of that long-ass essay that Tim got me looking at.


 * The exchange value of labor power is what makes its use value, the

concrete origin and end of the act of labor, appear as its "generic" alibi. This is the logic of signifiers which produces the "evidence" of the "reality" of the signified and the referent.

This is similar to the PageRank stuff.


 * In other words, the system of political economy does not produce only the individual as labor

power that is sold and exchanged: it produces the very conception of labor power as the fundamental human potential. [...] In a work, 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. [...] Marxist theory, on the other hand, never challenges human capacity of production (energetic, physical, and intellectual), this productive potential of every man in every society "of transforming his environment into ends useful for the individual or the society."


 * Science, technique, progress, history -- in these ideas we have an entire civilization that comprehends itself as producing its own development and takes its dialectical force toward completing humanity in terms of totality and happiness. Nor did Marx invent the concepts of genesis, development, and finality. He changed nothing basic: nothing regarding the idea of man producing himself in his infinite determination, and continually surpassing himself toward his own end.


 * Marcuse: The essential factual content of labor is [...] grounded in [...] an essential excess of human existence beyond every possible situation in which it finds itself and the world.


 * In effect, the sphere of play is defined as the fulfillment of human rationality, the dialectical culmination of man's activity of incessant objectification of nature and control of his exchanges with it. [...]kWith this concept we remain rooted in the problematic of necessity and freedom, a typically bourgeois problematic whose double ideological expression has always been the institution of a reality principle (repression and sublimation, the principle of labor) and its formal overcoming in an ideal transcendence.


 * What man gives of his body in labor is never given or lost or rendered by nature in a reciprocal way. [...] This discharge is thus immediately an investment of value, a putting into value opposed to all symbolic putting into play as in the gift or the discharge.

Ah, but here paragogy could be a bit more exciting!


 * The productive Eros represses all the alternative qualities of meaning and exchange in symbolic discharge toward a process of production, accumulation, and appropriation.

Yeah, so are we going for the opposite...?


 * Perhaps we will be finished with a Marxism that has become more of a specialist in the impasses of capitalism than in the roads to revolution, finished with a psychoanalysis that has become more of a specialist in the impasses of libidinal economy than in the paths of desire.


 * These are the ruses of the dialectic, undoubtedly the limit of all "critique."

Can we create a distributed critique, a multi-lectic?


 * Every critical theory is haunted by this surreptitious religion, this desire bound up with the construction of its object, this negativity subtly haunted by the very form that it negates.

Can we check ourselves on this?


 * we must move to a radically different level [...] This level is that of symbolic exchange and its theory.


 * Everything that invokes Nature invokes the domination of Nature.


 * When exploited, labor power is good: it is within Nature and is normal. But, once liberated, it becomes menacing in the form of the proletariat. This contradiction is averted by assimilating the proletariat to a demonic, perverse, destructive Nature.

Similar to the slave rebellion that would be fomented by Socrates.


 * The Law takes its definitive form in capitalist political economy; moreover, it is only the philosophical expression of Scarcity.


 * Even when the situation has clearly drifted enormously far from revolution and the dominant social relations support the very development of productive forces in an endless spiral, this dialectical voluntarism, for which Necessity exists and must be conquered, is not shaken.

Hm...


 * All revolutionary hope is thus bound up in a Promethean myth of productive forces, but this myth is only the space time of political economy.


 * The model produces this double horizon of extent and time: Nature is only its extent and History only its trajectory. [...] This is not a perspective in the Nietzschean sense, which consists in deconstructing the imaginary universality of the solidest conceptual edifices (the subject, rationality, knowledge, history, dialectics) and restoring them to their relativity and symptomality, piercing the truth effect by which every system of interpretation doubles itself in the imaginary: in short, by unmasking ideology -- in the present case, ideology under the materialist and dialectical sign of production. The logos and the pathos of production must be reduced according to this radical perspectivism.


 * [T]he only dialectic here is that of the reproduction of the theory through the formal simulation of its object.


 * Marx: This much, however, is clear, that the middle ages could not live on Catholicism, nor the ancient world on politics. On the contrary, it is the mode in which they gained a livelihood that explains why here politics, and there Catholicism, played the chief part.


 * The exchange-gift, to be exact, operates not according to the evaluation or equivalence of exchanged goods but according to the antagonistic reciprocity of persons. [...] primitive exchange [...]

It seems like we should look for unwittingly neo-primitivist exchanges taking place within contemporary society. (Not a new idea: cf. "Gift or Donation".)


 * Here again is the absurd attempt to make a separate function out of the "social." Primitive "society" does not exist as an instance apart from symbolic exchange; and this exchange never results from an "excess" of production.


 * In fact, there is a certain type of exchange, symbolic exchange, where the relation (not the "social") is tied, and this exchange excludes any surplus: anything that cannot be exchanged or symbolically shared would break the reciprocity and institute power.  Better yet, this exchange excludes all "production."   The exchanged goods are apportioned and limited, often imported from far away according to strict rules.

It is important to keep in mind that (as in D&G), the "primative" societies exist by keeping the Law at bay. Don't we see here a parallel with modern day "pirate" behavior?


 * It is not the socio-cultural realm that limits "potential" production; instead, exchange itself is based on non-production, eventual destruction, and a process of continuous unlimited reciprocity between persons, and inversely on a strict limitation of exchanged goods. It is the exact opposite of our economy based on unlimited production of goods and on the discontinuous abstraction of contractual exchange.


 * As by an excess, they maintain exchange (the symbolic coherence of the group with the gods and nature).

This exchange is very similar to Sloterdjik's "biune" spheres or D&G's bi-univocality.


 * Scarcity only exists in our own linear perspective of the accumulation of goods. Here it suffices that the cycle of gifts and counter-gifts is not interrupted.


 * Concrete, actual, limited validity is that of an analytic concept; its abstract and unlimited validity is that of an ideological concept.

This is how we can "get away with" using Kostas Varnales's Socrates as a "persona" (or whatever the term is from What is Philosophy?)


 * Hence in the materialist interpretation there is only a replacement of "art" by "economics," "the esthetic virus" by "the virus of production and the mode of production." What has been said of the one applies equally to the other. The analysis of the contradictions of Western society has not led to the comprehension of earlier societies (or of the Third World). It has succeeded only in exporting these contradictions to them.

White man as bearer of virus: very Burroughs. Cf. also Faciality.


 * The fact that the slave is not separated from the master in the manner of the free laborer implies that the master is not separated from the slave in the manner of the free proprietor (or employer). Neither the one nor the other has the respective status of the individual and individual liberty neither confronts one another as such -- which is the definition of alienation. A relation of reciprocity exists between them [...] in the sense of an obligation, of a structure of exchange and obligation where the specification of the terms of exchange in autonomous subjects, where the partition (as we know it), does not yet exist.

Interesting to compare this with Thoreau's understanding of "slave". Also keep in mind that Sacher-Masoch talks about Severin becoming a "slave" via a particular form of contract.


 * For finally what is it that allows me to dispose of myself if not "privation" (the right of the privatized individual who is isolated from others)?

This understanding of Alientation would work with Sloterdjik's "fall"


 * Domination, as distinct from alienation and exploitation, does not involve the objectification of the dominated, but an obligation that always carries an element of reciprocity.


 * [...] the process of production develops in the framework of an integrated community (the corporation) [...]

A fragment, but it gives an interesting idea about the historical specificity of "production".


 * Language is not produced by certain people and consumed by others; everyone is at the same time a producer and a consumer. In fact, there are neither producers nor consumers and what is established is not the general equivalence of individuals vis-à-vis language, but an immediate reciprocity of exchange through language.

Beautiful example of "peer production" or "prosumer" behavior.


 * Just as there is no separation between the sphere of producers and the sphere of consumers, so there is no true separation between labor power and the product, between the position of the subject and of the object. The artisan lives his work as a relation of symbolic exchange, abolishing the definition of himself as "laborer" and the object as "product of his labor."

Clear enough. "I am the bone of my sword"


 * (Praxis, a noble activity, is always one of use, as distinct from poesis which designates fabrication. Only the former, which plays and acts, but does not produce, is noble.)

Interesting.


 * We have seen how the reinterpretation of slavery in terms of the expropriation of labor power led to considering its reappropriation by the "free" laborer as absolute progress in the human order. This relegates servitude to an absolute barbarism, fortunately overcome thanks to the development of productive forces. This ideology of freedom remains the weak point of our Western rationality, including Marxism.

Hm, what about "Free as in Freedom" in this context?


 * Proudhon had envisaged "the polyvalence by which the worker, accomplishing the whole cycle of production, would become once again the master of the complete process."

Baudrillard is deeply skeptical of this sort of "wholism".


 * our reality principle, which is the principle of separation

And yet he has a critical view of separation? Or maybe not...?


 * Historical materialism [...] is incapable of thinking the process of ideology, of culture, of language, of the symbolic in general. It misses the point not only with regard to primitive societies, but it also fails to account for the radicality of the separation in our societies, and therefore the radicality of the subversion that grows there.


 * And what authorizes the "science of history" to claim this disjunction of a history to come, of an objective finality that robs earlier societies of the determinations in which they live, of their magic, of their difference, of the meaning that they attribute to themselves, in order to clarify them in the infrastructural truth of the mode of production to which we alone have the key?

Yeah, and if paragogy tries to be "a communism" then it will likely fall into that way of thinking.


 * In fact, this break of which Marxism avails itself is equivalent, as in all "science," to the

establishment of a principle of rationality that is only the rationalization of its own process.

Hence thinking at odds with 'received' views...


 * Something in the capitalist sphere has changed radically, something Marxist analysis can no longer respond to. Hence, in order to survive it must be revolutionized, something which certainly has not been done since Marx.

Hm... critique taking into account all "productions".


 * This manipulation, that plays on the faculty of producing meaning and difference, is more radical than that which plays on labor power.

So considering the age of Code and symbolic exchange we need a very different sort of critique.


 * 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.

"She kidnapped herself, man!"


 * Productive forces as a referent ("objective" substance of the production process) and thus also as a revolutionary referent (motor of the contradictions of the mode of production) lose their specific impact, and the dialectic no longer operates between productive forces and relations of production, just as the "dialectic" no longer operates between the substance of signs and the signs themselves.

This is the "dystopia" for Marxism. Things have become unglued. However, for paragogy, "unproductive" conversations can be analysed, we can look at things like TPB as a "cultural commons"...


 * The Third Phase of Political Economy

In any case this is where B. seems to really explain things. And in the next section, the consequences:


 * The schema of value (exchange and use) and of general equivalence is no longer limited to the area of "production": it has permeated the spheres of language, of sexuality, etc. The form has not changed (hence one can speak of a political economy of the sign, of a political economy of the body, without metaphor).


 * Surplus value, profit, exploitation -- all these "objective realities" of capital have no doubt worked to mask the immense social domestication, the immense controlled sublimation of the process of production, appearing only as the tactical side of the process.

Be the machine that you are in the world.


 * After forced industrialization and direct exploitation come prolonged education, studies subsidized for twenty-five years, endless personal development, and recycling: everything is apparently destined to multiply and differentiate social productivity.

Exactly - the fetishization of "learning" that we see recently. It seems so debauched and decadent, though, typically. It is not coordinated or easy to work with. B. says as much in the following sentences.


 * For the system no longer needs universal productivity; it requires only that everyone play the game. [...] Excluded from the game, their revolt henceforth aims at the rules of the game.


 * This revolt can remain ambiguous if it is experienced as anomie and as defeat, if it occupies by default the marginal position assigned to it by the system or if it is institutionalized as marginal. But it is enough that it radically adopts this forced exteriority to the system in order to call the system into question, no longer as functioning in the interior but from the exterior, as a fundamental structure of the society, as a code, as a culture, as an interiorized social space.

Heh, "occupies".


 * If its revolt has repercussions everywhere, it is because this non-place crosses all social categories. In the economy, in politics, in science and in culture, today it is irresponsibility that is crucial. It is a revolt of those who have been pushed aside, who have never been able to speak or have their voices heard.

Youth revolt, or revolt on behalf of youth.


 * The insurrectional practice of the past few years has given new voice to the spoken word and eclipses traditional contradictions.

E.g. YouTube?


 * The radical subversion is transversal to the extent that it crosses the contradictions connected with the mode of production, and non-dialectical to the extent that there is no dialectical negativity in the relation between a repressed, non-marked term and a marked term. There can only be transgression of the line and deconstruction of the code.

This reminds me of... Deleuze's "Nietzsche"?


 * Not the open revolt of a few, but the immense, latent defection, the endemic, masked resistance of a silent majority, but one nostalgic for the spoken word and for violence. Something in all men profoundly rejoices in seeing a car burn. (In this sense, youth is only the exponential category of a latent process in the entire social expanse, without exception for age or "objective" condition.) On the other hand, the new left commits suicide if it pretends to have statistical significance, to become a mass "political" force. Here it is irremediably lost at the level of representation and of traditional political contradiction (the same holds true for the American counter-culture).

Again a good summary.


 * Against the materialist postulate according to which the mode of production and the reproduction of social relations are subordinated to relations of material production, one can ask if it is not the production of social relations that determines the mode of material reproduction (the development of productive forces and relations of production).

Even in the mode where social relations are invaded by a certain degree of abstraction.


 * Species, race, sex, age, language, culture, signs of either an anthropological or cultural type -- all these criteria are criteria of difference, of signification and of code.

Explaining what is meant by signification and separation.


 * What is produced is no longer symbolically exchanged and what is not symbolically exchanged (the commodity) feeds a social relation of power and exploitation.

So we can contrast for example the recording industry and the free culture movement, with Piracy as an effort to restore symbolic exchange.


 * It is this fatality of symbolic disintegration under the sign of economic rationality that capitalism cannot escape. One can also say, with Cardan, that its fundamental contradiction is no longer between the development of productive forces and relations of production, but in the impossibility of having people "participate." However, the term "participation" has a connotation that is much too contractual and rationalist to express the nature of the symbolic. Let us say that the system is structurally incapable of liberating human potentials except as productive forces, that is, according to an operational finality that leaves no room for the reversion of the loss, the gift, the sacrifice and hence for the possibility of symbolic exchange.

Perhaps. Certainly places like P2PU emphasize "participation" (which really amounts to a flow of text into and through the site). However, there are other online cultures which have less to do with this sort of system. (We can imagine my "What's new, Pussycat?" website idea as a sort of limit point of the "economy" of text, which in some sense depersonalizes everything.)


 * the system created the illusion of a symbolic participation (the illusion that something that is taken and won is also redistributed, given, and sacrificed). In fact, this entire symbolic simulation is uncovered as leading to superprofits and super-power. In spite of all its good will (at least among those capitalist who are aware of the necessity of tempering the logic of the system in order to avoid an explosion in the near future), it cannot make consumption a true consummation, a festival, a waste. To consume is to start producing again. All that is expended is in fact invested; nothing is ever totally lost.

I dunno, I mean, I think things like 4Chan are pretty close to being a total waste.


 * And this also means that each individual, each consumer, is locked into the profitable manipulation of goods and signs for his own interest. He can no longer really waste his time in leisure. Inexorably, he reproduces, at his own level, the whole system of political economy: the logic of appropriation, the impossibility of waste, of the gift, of loss, the inexorability of the law of value.

And the contemporary obsession with "education" and "learning" seems to play (sic) into this!


 * [T]hose who have power [...] would like to have participation, but participation is revealed each time as being only a better tactic for the wider reproduction of the system.

Critical of things like P2PU...


 * The more autonomy is given to everyone, the more decision-making is concentrated at the summit.

Pithy.


 * Because it is a system of production, it can only reproduce itself. It can no longer achieve any symbolic integration (the reversibility of the process of accumulation in festivals and waste, the reversibility of the process of production in destruction, the reversibility of the process of power in exchange and death).


 * The scholarly and cultural systems are permitted to have formal autonomy (which is theorized as transcendence and is presented as a democratic and universal truth -- equality of instruction and culture for each -- while class structure is reversed for the order of production).


 * all autonomized partial totalities immediately have an ideological value

Reminds me of "temporary autonomous zones"


 * The place of the fundamental contradiction -- the place of politics today -- is the line of separation between the partial fields.

Interesting from a "para" perspective.


 * A revolution that aims at the totality of life and social relations will be made also and primarily against the autonomization of the economic, of which the last ("revolutionary" and materialist) avatar is the autonomization of the mode of production under the form of a determinant instance.

So the autonomousness is the first thing to go!


 * Marxism is incapable of theorizing total social practice (including the most radical form of Marxism) except to reflect it in the mirror of the mode of production. It cannot lead to the dimensions of a revolutionary "politics."

Instead Baudrillardism would look at the mirror of code.


 * The deep logic of this decline forces us to return beyond Stalin, beyond Lenin, etc., back to the crucial point of the thought of Marx himself, back to the original event, which is always conceived as irrevocably revolutionary, of the dialectical conjuncture of his theory and the objective social practice of a class called the proletariat. We have so lived in the providential shadow of this event that the idea that this fusion was not necessary, nor necessarily the best, has never truly been formulated.

reminds me of my question about the historical coincidence of MIT-OCW and Creative Commons starting.


 * The cursed poet, non-official art, and utopian writings in general, by giving a current and immediate content to man's liberation, should be the very speech of communism, its direct prophecy. They are only its bad conscience precisely because in them something of man is immediately realized, because they object without pity to the "political" dimension of the revolution, which is merely the dimension of its final postponement.


 * utopia, for its part, would have nothing to do with the concept of alienation. It regards every man and every society as already totally there, at each social moment, in its symbolic exigency.


 * What an absurdity it is to pretend that men are "other," to try to convince them that their deepest desire is to become "themselves" again! Each man is totally there at each instant.

zen and psych.-an.


 * There is no possible or impossible. The utopia is here in all the energies that are raised against political economy. But this utopian violence does not accumulate; it is lost. It does not try to accumulate itself as does economic value in order to abolish death. It does not grasp for power. To enclose the "exploited" within the single historical possibility of taking power has been the worst diversion the revolution has ever taken.

ephemeral nature - a sort of slurry or glow but not necessarily a womb or crucible