The Mirror of Production

by Jean Baudrillard, Mark Poster (Translator)

Are the concepts of labor and of production adaptable to a developing industrial society? What is the meaning of "pre-industrial organization"? In attempting to answer these questions, Jean Baudrillard examines the lessons of Marxism, which has created a productivist model and a fetishism of labor. He argues that we must break the mirror of production, which "reflects all of Western metaphysics," and free the Marxist logic from the restrictive context of political economy whence it was born.

Genres: Philosophy, Sociology, Theory, Politics, Economics, Nonfiction, Political Science

167 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1973

About the author

Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher and poet, with interest in cultural studies. He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, as well as his formulation of concepts such as hyperreality. Baudrillard wrote about diverse subjects, including consumerism, critique of economy, social history, aesthetics, Western foreign policy, and popular culture. Among his most well-known works are Seduction (1978), Simulacra and Simulation (1981), America (1986), and The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991). His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism. Nevertheless, Baudrillard had also opposed post-structuralism, and had distanced himself from postmodernism.

Reviews

[thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

baudrillard before he got silly.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rolled my eyes at basically every "gotcha" in this book, and while Baudrillard has valid critiques of "Marxism" these apply much more to a particular practice/manifestation/limited understanding of Marxism than anything else (other people, like Deleuze/Guattari, Derrida, and fucking MARXISTS had more interesting and helpful things to say about these issues). Also funny that he critiques Marxism for being Eurocentric when he literally does not cite any non-Eurpoean Marxists in this book, or when his analysis of captialism is brutally Eurocenteic itself. But hey it's at least polemical and doesn't pull punches!

[pattrice]

Just reread this quickly, for something I'm writing, and glad I did, or I would have missed this parenthetical remark:

(Why must man's vocation always be to distinguish himself from animals? Humanism is an idée fixe which also comes from the political economy...)

A few pages earlier, he locates the roots of our species consciousness in the notion of production that "hallucinates man's predestination for the objective transformation of the world.... through this scheme of production, this mirror of production, the human species comes to consciousness in the imaginary.

[Gary Bruff · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are whole libraries of books dedicated to why Marx was wrong (or right), but few are based on a deep anthropological insight the way this little tome is. Baudrillard problematizes a notion close to the heart of Marxism and Marxist analysis: the question of labor. He calls into question the implicit assumptions held by Marx and his followers that once Communism takes hold of the economy, labor will become emancipated, meaning that people will no longer need to labor at all. In effect, once capitalism goes, labor goes with it and people are then free to do as they choose. This is the hidden Utopian side to Marx's 'scientific' socialism, and as the 20th century made clear, there are no royal roads to Utopia. If production is to continue into Socialism, some coercive or ideological apparatus will need to fill the vacuum left by capitalism.

Baudrillard also looks at the Marxist anthropology of Goldelier, arguing that the application of terms from Western economics, terms such as work or labor or means of production, can not possibly carry any significance in a pre-modern economic formation, where labor and life have no real separation or independent existence.

The book also treats in some detail the progressive, ironically Victorian slant of Marx's conception of the historical unfolding of economic progress. Capitalism:Communism::Feudalism:Capitalism. Just as capitalism was a revolution of progressive change over the Middle Ages, so Communism will be a quantum leap forward once again. But by what criteria? Can a facile four part analogy really sustain a telic motion of absolute human progress?

Some pages are also dedicated to the even greater accidental affinity with Judeo-Christianity: an idea that the world of nature is here to be dominated and harnessed to the needs of man. The argument is put here nicely that the destructive impulse of capitalism is carried over by communism unreflectively. Needs cannot be conquered until nature is subjugated. A similar argument is made in Dialectic of Enlightenment by Horkheimer/Adorno.

[Prerna Munshi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Baudrillard attempts a radical (?) deconstruction of Marxism. He is suspicious of the revolutionary quotient in that Philosophy for it sells the same ideologies of political economy but ‘in the reverse side’.

Man, as conceptualised by Marxism (which forms the basis of the Western thought too), is a producing animal with an intrinsic potential of labour. Labour and nature are thus both reduced to values laid for actualisation. The alienated man constantly employs means to actualise nature and produces. In a way, man becomes naturalised and Nature humanised. Baudrillard finds this thought very problematic for it undermines the logic of signification.

This relentlessly totalising rationale of production which aims at a finality, at a foreclosure doesn’t offer a standpoint to view primitive societies where exchange (devoid of value) ‘plays’. There is no place of such play, wastage, discharge, sacrifice in the totalising machine of Production for it institutes scarcity in its linear dimension.

Further, Baudrillard believes that the dichotomisation of labour into concrete and abstract and that of value into its use and exchange , form other bad binaries. The concept of labour founds the world as objective and man as historical ( through its dialectic potential) which according to B, is largely flawed and undermines the practises in ahistorical societies.

So, B basically identifies the lapse in the epistemology of historical materialism, the Western thought that ‘critiques’ itself against its own backdrop, this universalisation that the Western thought seeks and reclaims time and again. He attempts to denature such Oedipal structures.

There’s more to the text but Iike his previous two that I have read, I found him very repetitive , abstruse and even contradictory . His regular counter intuitive approach is not always instrumental to a good critiquing. In a hyper realist, hyper capitalist world (that doesn’t quite behave as it did in the times of Marx) where structures co-opt with each other to form more gruesome and invisible networks, can we rely on B who doesn’t seem to offer anything besides a very terrifying description of these?

[Noah Coates · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although Baudrillard discusses some excellent points on the deficiencies of Marxism ( such as its inability to formulate revolutionary ideas and its inability to categorise modern-consumerist society), he fails to present in a coherent, succinct and convincing fashion - perhaps typical of post-modern thought. I find the work to be lacking any clear explanation of why and how exchange-value has developed into a code and why and how modern consumerist society differs from the industrial era ( perhaps I will find it in another work of his). I have no quarrels with Baudrillard about the premise of his argument but I am disappointed in its underwhelming presentation. Nonetheless, he does include some very insightful comments on the meta-narrative of Marxism which super-imposes the idea of "production" onto other forms of society. To quote: "To articulate magic and labor in one "interior and indivisible unity" only seals their disjunction. It ultimately disqualifies primitive symbolic practices as irrational in opposition to rational labor".

[Grace · Rating 1 out of 5]

As a critique of a certain kind of evolutionist, determinist Marxism (a kind perhaps more common than Marxists would like to admit), it has some merit. However, Baudrillard's own conception of history is totalizing in its own ways (as well as being idealist and sometimes ridiculous), and I don't see much good in his political economy of the sign or in his notion of the code.

[Reed Landry · Rating 4 out of 5]

difficult - someday i’ll have to come back to this. there are really valuable ideas in here that get lost in the haze of French philosophizing, maybe if this wasn’t the first Baudrillard i’ve read i’d understand it better. but when those ideas shine though they shine bright.

given the fact that after a ~3 month break from trying to read this i understood it way better (having read other things in the meantime) it is clear both that understanding the full meaning of this book requires an already high level of knowledge in several areas, but also that i almost certainly have not fully grasped its main points.

also it seems like the older baudrillard got the more he went off the rails, and i can see why

[Desenchantee · Rating 4 out of 5]

A critique of Marxism & materialism. Baudrillard proves that analyzing societies (especially archaic cultures) under the "mirror of production" leads to a reductionist worldview, incapable of seeing beyond the surface.

Contrary to his later works, Baudrillard is very precise and thorough in his argumentation, allowing for a understandable read.

[Jim · Rating 2 out of 5]

Admittedly too theoretical, and not at all the kind of theory I am interested in to boot. I am wondering if Baudrillard's object-as-signifier idea, well-explained in "The System of Objects", didn't need so much overanalysis. Maybe?

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not Baudrillard's best, he labours the same point over and over again and his critiques either flew over my head completely (verbose) or seemed a bit flat. However some useful points which felt worth it for reading Simulacra and Simulation.

[Quinn Monette · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most cogent Baudrillard I've read. A good jumping off point to his other works, which I've found a bit impenetrable. Brilliant take on productivism, and perhaps the best critique of anthropology I've encountered. I can see why Ward Churchill recommended this one.

[lalala Manel · Rating 4 out of 5]

GENIO DO MARKETING

[44mrtn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tengo q repasarlo cuando relea a Marx, la critica es excelente (aunque no tan interesante como la de foucalt) aunque tengo dudas sobre su concepcion de valor de uso y si su “utilidad” aplica a la concepcion marxista. Una excelente destruccion del idealismo implicito en la materialidad marxista y sus asquerosos resquicios hegelianos en cada esquina

[efenibot · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5

[Robin Card · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mirrors of Production is the first full-critique I've read on Marxian philosophy.

Weighing in at a mere 173 pages, what should be an afternoon or one day read has taken me four days to get through. Baudrillard, typical of mid-twentieth postmodernist authors, uses inordinately long sentences, and an enormous amount of circumlocution to postulate concepts that could be conveyed far more effectively in a matter of words rather than pages.

“The capitalist law of value is to be abolished in the name of a de-alienated hyperproductivity (sic), a productive hyperspace.". As I am not a native French speaker, it is not possible for me to determine if the prose is stylistically typical of the author or the translator. Obfusucating postmodernist language aside, the central proposition and thesis of the work holds strong. Baudrillard discards the central positions of Marxist economic theory: the nature of labour, wage and production effectively without fully rejecting modern interpretations of socialist theory.

Marxist economic theory is a relic of its time: it has not aged well, and as Baudrillard brilliantly points out, many of the positions of the Marxist theory have become self-defeating.

All-in-all a book worth reading for any scholar of arguably the most influential economic theory of all time.