Lecture
The contemporary system of relations of commodity production, distribution, exchange, and consumption, and the market that represents it on the surface of phenomena, have changed substantially compared with the model described in the works of representatives of classical and neoclassical economic theory of the century before last and of the last century (and no one needs to be persuaded of this). In particular, these changes have led, first, to the development of market totalitarianism and, second, to the local manipulation of individual segments of market space-time by the largest corporate capitals ("spiders"), which form "fields of dependency" ("webs"). However, this by no means exhausts the changes in the system of market relations. The commodity — this initial category (from the standpoint of Marxist methodology) of the system of capitalist production relations — is simultaneously the result of the reproduction of all the relations of capitalism as a unified system. Under late capitalism, commodity relations and the market that represents their forms are likewise a product of the functioning of the system as a whole. And so, under late capitalism, the market is:
• a form of interaction among producers whose labor is increasingly creative in character;
• a form of commodity relations not only in the world of material products and utilitarian services (services that satisfy the material needs of the individual and society), but also of virtual phenomena;
• a product of manipulative influences by "spiders," who artificially shape demand for one or another phenomenon sold on the market;
• a socioeconomic space largely subordinated (owing to financialization) to the movement of fictitious financial, virtual capital...
The development of the production of knowledge and information, the growing significance of creative activity, and the development of information technology and telecommunications lead not only to progressive tendencies associated with creating the potential for freeing human beings from the power of capital. At the same time, capital develops new means of controlling people and utilizing their abilities in its own interest, for the production of surplus value. To this end it uses modern achievements of technical progress and social technologies to manipulate people in their free time — through advertising (fostering a cult of consumerism), technologies of political manipulation, and the use of mass culture to shape corresponding consciousness and behavioral stereotypes. One of the objectively significant forms of such manipulation is the formation of a market for simulative goods. A simple look at the empirical material — the contemporary market for goods and services — shows that it is becoming, ever more progressively (though it never fully has and never fully will), not merely a total market but a market of simulacra. "The logic of the commodity is spreading, governing today not only labor processes and the production of material goods — it governs the whole of culture, sexuality, human relations, down to individual fantasies and impulses. Everything is caught up in this logic, not only in the sense that all functions and needs are objectified and manipulated under the sign of profit, but in the deeper sense that everything is turned into spectacle, that is, represented, produced, organized into images, into signs, into consumable models" — these lines by Baudrillard, who expressed in his own way the idea of the genesis of the totalitarian market of simulacra, were written forty years ago, but have become especially relevant precisely in recent decades.1
The concept of "simulacrum" has still not won a worthy place in economic theory (whether classical or neoclassical), although social philosophy — indeed the humanities-oriented intellectual world in general — has used it quite broadly for more than a quarter century now. The simulacrum is one of the key concepts of postmodernism, complementing a series of key categories within this methodological paradigm, which denies the significance of any paradigms whatsoever. In direct terms, the simulacrum designates a kind of quasi-reality — a phenomenon that is the result of the deconstruction, decentering, and deterritorialization of reality in the process of certain interpretations of the contexts of something that is itself nothing more than a text (itself deconstructed).2 The key point in this current is deconstruction. This is not only a consequence of other attributes of postmodernism but also its starting premise. At the same time, the term itself remains fundamentally undefined. It is arrived at through an endless process of differentiating everything from everything else, a process that passes through the absolute fragmentation of being and the mutual indifference of its shards, its "noises," and culminates in deconstruction, the triumph of a text emptied of meaning.
1 Baudrillard J. The Consumer Society. Moscow: Respublika, Kulturnaya Revolyutsiya, 2006. P. 239-240.
2 The sociocultural aspects of the problem of the market of simulacra are examined in the article: Bulavka L. A. Post-Soviet Reality: The Imperative of Simulative Existence // Alternativy. 2012. No. 2.
The result of this deconstruction, but now as an objective process, is the world of simulacra. Let us emphasize: the term "simulacrum" is essential, for it captures an orientation toward operating exclusively within a space of artificially created forms that, from the very outset, are aimed at simulation rather than at adequately reflecting reality. Moreover, as Thomas S. Ray, for example, notes, the simulacrum renders a-life and life, a-reality and reality, indistinguishable.1 All of the above is not intellectual exercise but a reflection of the dominant discourse, which presupposes several successive steps in the deconstruction of reality. The first is the rejection of any "grand narratives," when there are no longer any proven theoretical points of reference for a Truth that is always concrete and systemic — there are only fragments of positively perceived reality, out of which any puzzle at all can be assembled. The second is that all these decentered (extra- and a-systemic) phenomena are subjected to deconstruction and turned into mere texts, which can be interpreted almost arbitrarily, giving rise — and this is the third step of deconstruction — to contexts. These, in turn, must also be stripped of authorship, of subjectivity. This is how an artificially created simulation of reality is born. At first glance, this whole philosophical game has nothing to do with the problems of the political economy of the market. But that is only at first glance. In fact this connection exists, and it is a connection of fundamental significance. It stems from the priority, in the contemporary world, given to the development of new aspects of capital's activity associated with the accelerated development of the "perverted" (inverted) sector — spheres such as financial speculation and military production, mass culture and the satiety-inducing hyper-development of utilitarian consumption, and the political and spiritual manipulation of people, among other products of contemporary capital. All of these give rise to a special world of simulative, phantom being that induces delusions (to use an image proposed by J. Derrida2). Each of these spheres is full of "simulacra." Financial speculation on world currency markets and the like simulates real investment in the development of material production or culture. Marketing creates simulacra of goods and needs genuinely useful to human beings. This being is "induced" in people by capital the way an evil sorcerer induces a trance. As a result, people develop "induced" needs — to "have a blast with Fanta," to "pump up a megahit with Pepsi," to get around in a giant Hummer or Rolls-Royce that is extremely impractical amid urban traffic jams, to vote for politicians who have triggered the deepest of crises, to take a sincere interest in which "pop hit" occupies which slot on the "top ten," or even to "write on the hood of a white Mercedes in black caviar: 'Life has worked out!'" (a quote from a speech by a professor and deputy of the State Duma of the Russian Federation from the party that governed Russia in 2008). Of course, the world has not yet fully passed over into a world of simulacra, but the tendency captured by postmodernism is evident: the sphere of "induced" needs and activities, and of those who produce and satisfy them, is growing at a tremendous pace.
1 See: Sim S. The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism. L.: Routledge, 2001. P. 66.
2 It is no accident that J. Derrida writes specifically about "all possible forms of haunting, which... organize the forms that dominate today's discourse." And a little further on: "Hegemony always organizes repression and thereby confirms the presence of hauntings" (Derrida J. Specters of Marx, Moscow, 2006. P. 56).
Simulacrum (in economic theory) — a phenomenon whereby economic goods acquire properties that simulate genuine utility, with this simulative utility turning into the defining characteristic of the good. Simulacra in the economy are closely bound up with the dominance of perverted (inverted) economic forms that create a distorted picture of the content hidden behind them. The economic point of producing simulacra lies in overcoming the limits on capital accumulation in the real sector of the economy.
But let us take things in order. Let us begin with the most typical example of commodity-simulacra — a men's suit (let us leave beautiful ladies and their tastes aside), on the lining of which there is a label bearing a famous brand. In this case a suit that is sewn from Chinese fabric at a Chinese (or Russian) garment factory, and whose production cost is at most 50 dollars, acquires — once it receives the appropriate label on its lining and is sold in a brand-name boutique — a price nearly a hundred times higher, say, 5,000 dollars. For a suit "by NN," that is even fairly modest. What is actually being sold here — use value? Even if we assume that the NN suit is sewn with particular care (which is far from always the case: quite often even "brand" suits in Parisian boutiques we specifically visited to check have somewhat crooked stitching), and that the fabric is especially good (which is likewise far from always true), even in that case the real quality of the real product bears no relation to a price of 5,000 dollars: a better-made suit might cost two or three, even five, but not a hundred times more. And people do not buy it at a hundredfold-inflated price because of the quality of the stitching or the durability of the fabric. They buy it because... — because it is a symbolic good, indicating that its owner is rich and successful (or, in the language of Russian simulacra, "cool"). What happens here is precisely the set of transformations we described above in the language of postmodernist methodology. The first step: the use value of the material good (the suit) is deconstructed and turned into a "text" — the suit, as an item of clothing, is transformed into a sign of wealth. Next, this suit-as-text is replaced by a "context" — the company's label — and this label, the third step, only "works" within a particular discourse — when purchased in a boutique and used in the corresponding milieu. It is important to note: whereas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a nobleman's wealth was determined by the number of diamond pendants, the amount of gold embroidery, and the costliness of the fabric of his costume — that is, by the actual value of the clothing — in the market of simulacra it is determined by a sign of "coolness," formed by context (the brand label on the lining) and discourse (the boutique), rather than by the genuine quality and labor-intensiveness of the given suit (the concrete and abstract labor embodied in it). It is another matter that creating the context-"brand" and similar simulacra likewise requires enormous effort.
But the whole question is: what kind of effort, expended by whom, and to what end? This is where the political economy of the market of simulacra (the s-market) begins — a market on which commodity-simulacra (s-commodities) are bought and sold, or what Jean Baudrillard called the political economy of the sign,1 and what Mikhail Voeikov called post-classical political economy. Before turning to an initial systematization of the world of s-goods, let us note: practically any simulacrum in the world of economics is, to a certain degree, also a real good that satisfies a real need. A brand-name suit is, as a rule, somewhat better than a suit sold in a discount clothing store; a Mercedes, in terms of reliability and performance, surpasses most cars that lack so powerful a brand, and so on. In other words, in speaking of the s-market we must always remember that it is no more (but also no less) than a certain modification of the "normal" market. The whole question, however, is one of degree.
1 The authors have in mind here the book "For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign," which Baudrillard published in 1972 (the best-known Russian edition is from 2007). It continues the ideas of his earlier work "The Consumer Society" (1970, Russian translation — 2006). These ideas are then further developed in the book "The Mirror of Production" (1973). In these works J. Baudrillard emphasizes the formation, under late capitalism, of a world of artificially induced satiety, pseudo-activities, and pseudo-values. At the same time this author — let us not deny his genuine merits — actively criticizes these manifestations of "objective postmodernism."
But it is a not-accidental paradox that he does not subject postmodernist methodology itself to systematic critique. As such, Baudrillard himself remains a captive of the very epistemological "simulacra" whose ontological emanations he criticizes. Perhaps a deeper critique of these phenomena is offered by an author more distant from postmodernism — Jameson, who points to the objective rootedness of this postmodernist discourse. From his standpoint, postmodernism is an attempt to theoretically reflect the specific logic of cultural production in the era of late capitalism (see: Jameson F. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. P. 400). A critique of postmodernism is also given in A. Callinicos's work "Against Postmodernism" (see: Callinicos A. Against Postmodernism. A Marxist Critique. L, 1989).
It is precisely this empirically described degree (regarding the substantive difference between s-goods and "ordinary" ones — see below) that we take as the basis for an initial, surface-level classification of the phenomena of the s-market. The first subset of the market of simulacra consists of "ordinary" goods turned into symbols and thereby acquiring a value substantially exceeding that of their counterparts. One example is a brand-name suit that costs tens of times more than a suit lacking the corresponding label but having similar consumer qualities. The difference in price can, in this case, serve as an indirect quantitative indicator of the degree of simulativeness of a given type of good or an entire market segment. What has been said applies not only to branded goods. Any products can possess similar qualities if they acquire a higher price than their counterparts as a result of acquiring some simulative and/or sign-value quality. These may include all the phenomena belonging to the sphere of so-called "prestige consumption" — from fashionable restaurants and clubs to particular lifestyles. Moreover, this type of market also gives rise to the phenomenon of the "human brand," in which the creators of brands consciously, and the system of relations described above objectively, shape certain individuals as simulacra of a particular lifestyle. As a rule, this is some variant of glamour, in which behind the simulacrum of art (the artist-figure) lies the deliberate shaping of the image of one corporation or another. The result is a human-simulacrum (s-person), giving rise to an epidemic of simulative-imitative behavior. One example of this might be the simulacrum "Madonna." The second subset of s-goods consists of purely sign-based phenomena that have no "ordinary" use value.
The most typical example is the stream of simulacra emanating from the media, and the products of mass culture, which have no genuine cultural value (they do not contribute to the elevation of human qualities) but do have a very high symbolic value, created, again, by specific methods (from "ordinary" advertising to the special mechanisms used to "launch" pop stars). Also among such sign-based s-goods are the numerous artificially constructed sign-symbolic spheres of leisure. Even where such goods and services do possess some genuine use value (for instance, the ability to distract a person from mind-numbing daily work and the narrow confines of everyday existence), on the s-market they are assigned (imputed) an entirely different, symbolic, simulative value.
The third subset consists of virtual s-goods. The most typical example is goods on the markets generated by contemporary trends in the evolution of fictitious capital and its ever-widening detachment from real capital. These are, above all, the simulacra created by the process of financialization in the sphere of virtual fictitious capital (the "filling" of artificially "inflated" financial bubbles — derivatives and other financial derivative instruments), which has become so significant under contemporary "casino capitalism."
Another example of virtual s-goods is the whole set of objects and services of virtual consumption (from vacuous computer games to the habit of mindless, aimless web-surfing). Let us add a few remarks to our surface-level characterization of the markets of simulacra. First, on economists' (including economic theorists') dislike of the category "simulacrum." This dislike is not accidental: the word is semantically not neutral. It carries a certain critical charge with respect to its object. The word "brand" carries a positive charge, associated with something prestigious and significant. The word "simulacrum" carries a negative charge, associated with deception. As soon as you say, "a brand is, to a certain degree, a simulacrum," you immediately create in the buyer's mind the sense that you are fooling them, inducing some kind of delusion in them. If, furthermore, you say that advertising is above all an activity aimed at creating simulacra, you thereby involuntarily admit that its principal goal is a suggestive, manipulative influence on the consumer aimed at deceiving them to a moderate degree (degree is fundamentally important here!). You must agree — it is obvious that such a characterization of key spheres of business (the creation and promotion of brands, marketing and, in particular, advertising, as well as PR and the like) is not only unnecessary for that business but directly harmful to it.
An economist-theorist belonging to the neoclassical current also has methodological and theoretical grounds for not using the terms "simulacrum," "simulative market," and the like. These grounds are well known: having abandoned the study of value as having no practical significance, and having concentrated their research efforts exclusively on studying the movement of prices and phenomena associated with it, and having also declared that any phenomena that can be bought and sold are equally important for the market ("private goods"), neoclassical theory has created the necessary and sufficient conditions for making it impossible to distinguish between goods possessing real use value and value, and commodity-simulacra. It is another matter that the very axioms of neoclassical theory proposed above are more than questionable... Second, the methodology of postmodernism, which gave birth to the concept of the "simulacrum," likewise creates certain preconditions that make it impossible to distinguish real products from simulacrum-products. This is especially easy to demonstrate using art as an example. If, as is customary in postmodernism, we abandon the concepts of the human Subject and of progress (whose criterion is the development of human qualities), as well as epistemological (truth versus falsehood), ethical (good versus evil), and aesthetic (beauty versus ugliness) distinctions, then a pop hit and Hesse's "The Glass Bead Game" become qualitatively indistinguishable, and the criterion of their comparative value becomes market prices — which unequivocally "prove" that Hesse's philosophical masterpiece is nothing compared to a little song about a plush skirt or pink roses and apples on snow. However, the re-actualization of the classics allows us to look at this problem differently.
A political-economic view of the nature of the s-market presupposes, as a first step, an examination of the possibility and necessity of its mass development. First of all, let us note that the progress of technology and capital has created conditions under which such a market has become both possible and necessary. The material precondition for the formation of markets of simulacra was a twofold technological process. First, the development of technology, the rise in productivity, and the growth of the creative component of labor to a level at which the mass production of commodity-simulacra oriented toward broad segments of society became possible. Only in the second half of the twentieth century did the mass production of branded goods, aimed at the sharply enlarged so-called middle and upper-middle class, and of mass-culture phenomena, aimed at the broadest strata of young people in both the "First" and the "Third" worlds, become possible. Only a few decades ago did technological progress and rising productivity lead to a substantial increase in the number of people at least partially engaged in creative activity, and therefore capable of creating the preconditions for turning goods and services into simulacra. The emergence of tens of millions of workers in advertising and PR agencies, marketers, and image-makers required material preconditions that humanity created relatively recently, and only for some (smaller) part of itself. Another component of this process was the search for pseudo-alternatives to mass production in the spheres of so-called "individualized" production, oriented toward an ostensibly special, individual consumer.1
This tendency, rational in principle, also acquired its own simulative coloring when, again on a mass scale (there is the paradox!), an s-individualized service sector began to develop, and millions of stylists and image-makers began mass-producing simulacra of individuality for millions of representatives of the upper-middle class. Second, among the circle of technological preconditions for the mass development of s-markets is, undoubtedly, the development and widespread diffusion of computer technology and the Internet environment, which created the necessary preconditions for the development of s-markets of a third kind (markets of virtual simulacra) — and it is precisely these that are growing fastest under contemporary conditions. Thus, the creation of commodity-simulacra for hundreds of millions (and, in the case of mass culture, billions) of consumers required different preconditions than the creation of goods within the "ordinary" consumer society of the middle and second third of the twentieth century (which produced real use values on a mass scale). And these preconditions took shape at the end of the twentieth century. As for the necessity of the genesis of markets of simulacra on such a mass scale, it is connected with the specific contradictions of the process of capital accumulation characteristic of the second half of the last century and the beginning of the present one — with the fact that the progress of capital accumulation in the real sector of the economy runs up against its own limits. These limits — the impossibility of infinite investment in real production (the production of the goods and services necessary for the progress of the productive forces, and above all of the human being) at a non-declining rate of profit — were first reached by the developed countries on the eve of the Great Depression. It was then that capital, for the first time on such a significant scale, encountered the fact that further progress in real production would lead to a falling rate of profit and general stagnation. A way out was then found through various changes in the "rules of the game" — through a transition, in one case, to a socially constrained and regulated capitalist system, and in another, to fascism. In the first case, the limits of overaccumulation were overcome by withdrawing from a third to a half of the economy from the power of the market and redistributing a third to a half of the profit obtained by capital in favor of society. In the second case (German, Italian, Spanish, and similar fascisms), the "way out" was found by supplementing, and at the same time masking, capitalist exploitation with total control by the ruling elite through the subordination of the entire population to the apparatus of the corporate state. In the limiting case, unification into a corporate state set "its own" people against all others, using it as an instrument of external expansion (though external expansion was not shunned in the first case either: the tens of millions killed in the course of colonial wars in Africa and East Asia during the second third of the twentieth century are proof of that). However, both variants had become exhausted by the 1970s. And the potential for the extensive expansion of the capital of the "core" of the world capitalist system through globalization could not be realized without the creation of adequate global instruments of socioeconomic domination and subordination. And then capital took the path of forming simulative goods, aided by the fact that the preceding growth in labor productivity in the real sector had created sufficient preconditions for this. The limits of the mass-production system, which had likewise exhausted the potential of its progressive development by the end of the twentieth century, also pushed capital down this path. Thus the limits of the accumulation of global corporate capital created the necessity of producing simulative goods, that is, of supply in simulative markets.
1 Not a few researchers of postindustrial society took the bait of this — the supposedly unfolding process of individualization coming to replace the era of mass production. In Russia this thesis was developed, in particular, by V. Inozemtsev (see: Inozemtsev V.L. The Split Civilization: The Present Preconditions and Possible Consequences of the Post-Economic Revolution. Moscow: Academia-Nauka, 1999. P. 57).
Similar impulses toward generating a market of simulacra also arose on the side of demand, where the "consumer society" ran up against the limits of expanding the volume and range of possible utilitarian goods and services of the real sector. A market agent belonging to one income group or another is limited in his utilitarian consumption: a middle-class family will not buy three refrigerators and four economy-class cars, and the number of inexpensive dresses and suits such a family needs is likewise relatively limited, as, generally, is its need for real utilitarian goods. The overwhelming majority of members of this class cannot go beyond the bounds of their income group. Moreover, as a result of the transition to the neoliberal model of development, late capitalism (and it is precisely this subject we are examining) has generated a tendency toward the shrinking of the middle class. A way beyond these limits was found along the path we have already noted — the formation of a new class of needs, simulative or s-needs. The latter proved exceedingly opportune, since they made it possible to form new markets based on goods whose cost of production turned out to be relatively low compared with their price. In a similar way, s-needs began to be formed for the "upper middle" class, for the bourgeoisie, and for the nomenklatura of global capital, where their own systems of artificial signs of belonging to one stratum of the "elite" or another took shape. What proved most significant from an economic point of view was the formation of demand, on the part of capital, for simulative means of development — above all, various simulacra of money and other resources for investment — a consequence of the limits on capital's expansion becoming more acute owing to overaccumulation. Moreover, a specific s-elite also took shape (and was, in large measure, semi-spontaneously formed by corporate capital) — a body of people presented in the role of a quasi-elite drawn from the upper strata of mass culture, professional sport, and professionals from finance, advertising, and similar businesses — that is, the top layer of those spheres where simulacra of various kinds are created, advertised, and sold. This is precisely a quasi-"elite": it possesses no real economic or political power and is, on the whole, a function of media, financial, and other corporations. It is compelled to lead an ostentatiously luxurious lifestyle, simulating its own chosen-ness and displaying, above all, the consumption of precisely simulative goods — conspicuously expensive brands and the like. In this way, the possibility and the necessity of forming simulative production that satisfies simulative needs — and hence s-supply, responding to the s-demand that has taken shape — are joined together in a single process. The genesis of this new reality also determines the basic substantive features of the s-market.
This subheading strongly recalls the title of a book by Jean Baudrillard.1 However, the authors of these lines propose below a theoretical hypothesis substantially different from that of the well-known French postmodernist, one that explains the phenomenon of the s-market. J. Baudrillard is right in his characterization of the advancing postmodern era (for Western Europe, the symbol of its genesis was the defeats of the Paris May and the Prague Spring of 1968) as bearing a progressively developing hyperreality that leads to the replacement of real content and meaning by simulacra and signs. However, the authors of these lines do not share the key idea of the French scholar that the world of simulacra of his time grew out of the symbolic exchange of pre-bourgeois societies, and that Marx was wrong in characterizing capitalism as a sphere of the real material production of real goods.
1 This refers to the above-mentioned book by this author, "For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign."
In our view, a cruel joke was played on Baudrillard, as on his fellow travelers in the guild of left postmodernism (Deleuze, Foucault), by the fact that they... sincerely regarded the world of simulacra in which they lived as being almost the only... real world. He failed to notice (failed to understand? did not know?) the difference between perverted (inverted) form and actual content (let us recall: a perverted form arises when, in Marx's words, "what appears to be is what actually is," when, in fact, the surface of social life is filled with perverted phenomena that distort the true content of real processes). As a result, Baudrillard did not capture the dialectic of the progressive development of simulacra as perverted forms of the involution of material production under late capitalism. Meanwhile, under late capitalism it appears that simulacra are coming to replace material production. And this appearance is real, but it is the reality of a perverted form, not of content.
Hence, the emphasis on simulacra is proof not of Marx's errors but of the correctness of his methodology, which always maintained that Marxist theory must develop critically as practice changes. This is why only a Marxist, historical-dialectical view of capitalism makes it possible to show how, why, and to what extent, at a certain stage of its development, capitalism — based on real material production — is transformed into a system of producing and consuming simulacra that lie "on the other side" of that production. Let us examine these complex connections in more detail. The authors of these lines proceed from the hypothesis that the commodity-simulacrum is a perverted form of the commodity as the initial and universal form of the capitalist world, or of the so-called "market economy." Theoretically, this connection should look as follows: if the s-commodity is a perverted form, then it must possess the appearance of some use value and exchange value, but beneath this appearance there must lie some essence distinct from it. If we succeed in substantively unpacking these propositions, then the authors' hypothesis will be proven (at least within the bounds of the Marxist paradigm).
The use value of an s-good must consist in the usefulness of this good for the consumer. But wherein lies this usefulness? In satisfying some need that promotes the development of production, of human qualities? — No, in that case we would be dealing with an "ordinary" commodity. Its usefulness consists in satisfying a simulative need — that is, in this case, an artificially created need, induced like a spell. If, on the other hand, the need is "natural," not "induced," then the good that satisfies it is an ordinary commodity, not a simulacrum — such is the definition of the simulacrum, the basic "rules of the game." A question therefore arises: how (by whom?) is this "induced," artificial need created, and precisely wherein does its artificiality lie? We have already answered the latter question above, and the answer will be somewhat tautological: a need is artificial to the extent that it is unconnected with the development of the human being and of humanity's productive forces. The answer to the first question is more complex. In the abstract it can be formulated as follows: s-needs are created by special conditions of life and/or by the deliberate activity of certain subjects aimed at forming them. Concretely, this answer requires uncovering the conditions and the activity that create s-needs. Let us begin at the end, since in this case finding the answer is simpler, and it will help clarify the beginning. Examples of activity aimed at forming artificial needs for simulative goods (simulacra) are well known: above all, marketing activity and, first and foremost, the advertising of goods and services that are, by and large, useless (let us recall: we are not talking about advertising in general, but about the advertising of s-goods, of simulacra). If you are persuaded that in order for everything to be "Coca-Cola!" for you (read: OK!, great!), you need to drink a weak solution of phosphoric acid, saturated with carbon dioxide and colored with burnt sugar or its substitutes, then you are being foisted with an artificial need for a beverage that is, if not harmful, then at least of little use. And this is an example of deliberate activity aimed at creating an "induced" need. It is precisely "induced" (the word is borrowed from the vocabulary of today's fashionable fantasy genre, in which sorcerers and mages "induce" all sorts of delusions upon unsuspecting inhabitants), and this is a typical distinguishing feature of a perverted form. In this particular case, however, we are dealing with simulacra of the first kind — a certain "addition" of a simulative component to a product that is, in some sense, useful (after all, Coca-Cola can quench thirst, even though it is healthier to do so with kvass or simply plain water). The same holds true in the case of selling, at a fabulously high price, a suit bearing a brand label: an object that is useful in principle acquires a simulative component. In this case the use value of the s-good is not its ability to quench thirst or to cover the body, but the fact that you are doing so with the aid of a branded good. The prestige of the brand, created by the marketing and other activities of corporate capital aimed at forming a "field of dependency" (recall the beginning of this section, where we spoke of the preconditions for the formation of the market of simulacra), is, in the examples given, precisely the use value of the s-good. Simulacra in their purest form are produced, strictly speaking, when capital creates a need for a good (service) that in itself has no use value at all (does not satisfy any real need — neither for the benefit nor even for the harm of the consumer), and this use value exists only in representation, as a kind of sign (ideally, symbolically). Most of the entertainment-oriented virtual products, the "works" of mass culture and mass media, and the simulacra of the financial markets, among others, belong to this category.
In this case the use value of the s-good likewise consists in the ability to satisfy an s-need artificially created by the purposeful activity of corporate capital aimed at forming a field of dependency. In both cases, the use value of Coca-Cola or of a pop song, as s-goods, is created not at the factory that produces and bottles the beverage, nor in the studio where the music video is produced, but in the process of the marketing and other activities of corporate capital aimed at the artificial formation of s-needs, when a person wants to drink precisely Coca-Cola, and not kvass or mineral water, and to listen precisely to pop music, and not to real music. Let us reiterate: from the standpoint of neoclassical economic theory and postmodernist philosophy, all of the above is meaningless, since within their "discourses" the criterion of the usefulness of a private good is simply whether or not money is paid for it on the market; within this "discourse," pop music is a work of art no less than classical music...
But within the "grand narrative" called "Marxist political economy," such a distinction does exist, and it matters to everyone who believes that production ought at last to serve the development of human qualities and of the productive forces of social humanity, rather than serving whatever happens to yield a profit. Therefore, within the framework of our theory we can identify a specific use value of the simulacrum, which, on the surface of phenomena, consists in the ability of these phenomena to satisfy simulative needs. But this, let us repeat, is a perverted form. Before we begin to examine its content, let us emphasize that s-needs are formed under contemporary late capitalism not only by the purposeful activity of this or that particular corporate capital, but also by the objectively developing way of life created by the totality of the market (market fundamentalism), which turns into an inescapable rule of life everything that is created by corporate capital, penetrating into every pore of human life, including personal values and interpersonal relations (Western postmodernists, in this connection, write with particular enthusiasm about sex first of all), and the spheres of culture and morality.
Thus a system of the objective formation of s-needs takes shape — not merely as a product of the deliberate activity of particular subjects (individual corporations), but also as part of the way of life objectively formed and reproduced by the total hegemony of capital. Unlike the perverted forms described above, the content of the use value of s-goods, formed by the activity of imposing s-needs on society and by the general objective atmosphere of such imposition, consists not in the fact that needs — however senseless and artificial — of (1) needs (2) of people are being satisfied. The real usefulness of the s-goods produced by corporate capital, the content of their use value, lies in the fact that these goods make it possible to lift the constraints imposed by the overaccumulated capital of the real sector and to obtain an average, or even higher-than-average, rate of profit under conditions in which the objective limits of the real sector no longer permit this. The most vivid example of this is the endless production of s-goods (derivatives and the like) on the financial markets on the eve of the global crisis that began in 2008. A somewhat less vivid, but no less significant, example is the production of a simulative need for an endlessly renewed array of useless mass-cultural phenomena and virtual "toys"... Indirect confirmation of the thesis about the special content of the use value of the s-good (its ability [partially] to lift the constraints of capital overaccumulation), fundamentally distinct from the perverted form of its use value (its ability to satisfy artificially created needs), can be found by modeling a situation in which society abandons the contemporary capitalist form of organization. In such a world, products and services that make it possible to develop human qualities and the productive forces would be in demand no less than under capitalism, whereas s-goods would lose their use value. The exchange value of the s-good — the proportion in which the s-good is exchanged for another good — holds no fewer mysteries.
If the exchange is for money (and the s-good itself can in some cases be [quasi-]money), then we are faced with what at first glance seems to be a problem free of difficulties — the price of a simulacrum. From the standpoint of neoclassical theory there is indeed nothing here to distinguish this good from any other. First, one could argue that the equilibrium price of a simulacrum is set at the point where supply equals demand (the only exception might be information goods, but we have written about those elsewhere). Second, in the case of, say, a good produced by a well-known company, one can even estimate the value of its brand. To do this, the value of the company's tangible assets is subtracted from its market capitalization, yielding the value of its intangible assets, among which brand value is generally considered to be almost the most important. From the standpoint of classical political economy, however, there are quite a few subtleties here. Above all, the case of the s-good most vividly reveals a more general problem: the ability of large corporate capitals to exert, within certain limits (set by the strength of the "field of dependency" generated by the given corporation and by the presence of comparable fields of a certain strength among competitors), a local, deliberate influence on market parameters, in particular on price.
The price of an s-good is in most cases not simply a price in an oligopolistic market — it is a price largely and deliberately shaped by corporate capital. As we have already noted, however, this property of price is not unique to simulacra; it is common to all goods produced and sold by corporate capital in today's market of "spiders" and "webs." It is simply most clearly manifested in the case of the s-good. A far greater difficulty is presented by the purely Marxist question: if the price of an s-good, like that of any other, is the [monetary] form of value, then what constitutes its value? And is the price of an s-good not a perverted form? Since, from the standpoint of Marxist theory, the substance of value is abstract social labor embodied in a commodity, the question inevitably arises with the simulacrum-commodity: what labor is embodied in its value, if the s-good has value at all? Based on the characteristics of the simulacrum-commodity given above, we may suppose that the substance of its value cannot be the labor spent producing its material carrier. Thus, in the case of Coca-Cola, the high price of this good is determined not by the cost of producing a solution of phosphoric acid but by the existence of a particular brand. In the case of a talentless pop song, the labor spent writing it creates no value whatsoever, for on its own, without promotion, it is not a useful good at all: no one will sing it or listen to it (whereas if, as for instance with the songs of Vysotsky, the whole country sings them despite a ban, then we are dealing not with a simulacrum but with a work of art — i.e., we step outside the scope of this text). We may suppose that the labor underlying the value of an s-good is the entire set of activities involved in creating the simulacrum as such. In the case of a brand, this is the labor of developing it, registering it, promoting it, and so on, excluding the labor that genuinely creates value — the "finishing" (for example, the artistic design) of the "ordinary" good that serves as the brand's "carrier." In order to separate the object of our analysis from "ordinary" labor, let us call this activity the creation of a simulative shell (s-shell). So, a name has been given. But the problem is far from solved. And on the way to solving it, no few difficulties await us.
The simulative shell of a commodity is that part of the usefulness of the simulacrum-commodity which is properly simulative in character, as distinct from the usefulness of its material carrier (which may constitute a real good).
First, from the standpoint of Marxist theory, the labor involved in creating the s-shell is unproductive and therefore cannot create value. Second, the costs of creating this shell by no means always yield a result. Unlike with an ordinary good, the question of the additional income derived from the s-shell is settled not so much by cost and quality as by the strength of corporate pressure on the market. But if neither the labor of creating the "material body" of the s-good nor the labor of creating its s-shell creates value, then the only legitimate conclusion is that the s-good has... no value at all. This conclusion corresponds to the earlier thesis about the perverted form of the use-value of the s-good, which creates the appearance that this is a good satisfying a need — an artificially created but nonetheless genuinely existing need of the market agent expressing demand — while concealing, as its actual content, the real usefulness of the s-good, which consists in its ability to [partially] remove the constraints of capital overaccumulation.
In the case of the price of the s-good, the authors have done their best to substantiate the conclusion that it is a perverted form, one that creates the appearance of a high value for this phenomenon while concealing its actual content — the purposeful shaping, through non-market means, of a special simulative environment through deliberate influence on the individual, society, and the economy (i.e., artificial by the criteria of commodity production). The substance of the price of an s-good is not value — the reified abstract social labor of an isolated producer — but rather manipulative influence on the consumer and producer, deliberately shaped by an agent and objectively taking form under conditions of market totalitarianism. This is a kind of "social hypnosis," compelling individuals and/or firms to spend ever more effort earning money in order to satisfy ever more new needs for things they do not actually need, so as to contribute to the [partial] removal of the constraints of overaccumulation,
which loom, like the grim reaper, behind the backs of today's corporate capitals. On this basis we venture to assert that markets for simulacra are characterized by non-productive and non-commodity substantive relations in the deliberate shaping of the foundations of prices for s-goods. Both neoclassical economic theory and postmodernism have fully captured the first side of this state of affairs, atypical for capitalism. Economics, in this instance, might seem entitled to declare victory: the most modern markets are moving away from the labor substance of values and prices. Postmodernism, too, might rejoice: Marxist political-economic analysis confirms the conclusions Baudrillard reached forty years ago, when (in particular, in his book "The Mirror of Production") he already emphasized the fundamentally non-productive substance of commodity-simulacra, concluding on this basis that political economy as a whole was largely illegitimate. It is no accident that this French scholar linked the markets of simulacra to the problems of symbolic exchange, where death — on the fear of which the whole of economics and politics is built — remains almost the last bastion of reality. All these emphases on the non-productive nature of the simulative market world are, we repeat, entirely legitimate. At the same time, however, both the neoclassicists and most postmodernists, remaining captive to a "market-centric" worldview, fail to "notice" that in the case of simulacrum-commodities satisfying simulative needs, the market itself becomes... a simulation of commodity relations. In this market, simulacra are bought and sold whose use-value and exchange-value (price) are perverted forms of non-commodity content. Moreover, in s-markets the social economic relations themselves and the forms of their functioning, the institutions (the "rules of the game"), only have the appearance of more or less free competitive market interaction. Their actual basis is the competitive interplay of manipulative influences of corporate capitals, which conjure phantoms of artificial needs satisfied by simulative goods.
Creative activity and simulative goods:
Here, however, there is a crucially important "nuance." In many cases s-goods are the product not only of manipulative influences but also of a highly specific creative activity aimed at the purposeful shaping of a simulative good that satisfies a simulative need. One of the most frequently noted aspects of this process is the endless pursuit by contemporary capital of artificial novelty (as a means of creating and capturing new market segments), but this by no means exhausts the problem. The problem, rather, is that, on the one hand, any creative activity is the creation of a universal cultural wealth, infinite in its (again, in terms of cultural substance) value. An artist creates a painting or a film which (setting aside for the moment private intellectual property) belongs to humanity and to history, and from the moment of its creation becomes part of a world of culture infinite in time and space, in which it satisfies the cultural need — the principal need of a developing human being, the need for co-creativity — of an unlimited circle of people. On the other hand, in the case of the activity of a "creative" working on commission for a firm creating yet another simulacrum (let us take, as a pure example, advertising for good X, a good manifestly unnecessary for the development of human qualities and productive forces), we encounter an entirely different situation. Here the creative worker, from beginning to end, deliberately creates a phenomenon that is extra- (if not anti-) cultural.
From the standpoint of the creative component of this "creative worker's" activity, he is indistinguishable from any other creator. From the standpoint of market effect, if he is distinguishable from another creator at all, it is only in that he receives a far larger fee. The difference is "hidden" solely in a subtle matter — the cultural-semantic content of the creative work. It is precisely here that the substitution occurs which virtually every author sensitive to culture (Baudrillard among them) could not fail to notice — the substitution of cultural content-meanings by market seductions-simulacra. This distinction is of fundamental importance. Indeed, if today's market makes use of the labor of a creative worker who creates cultural values, then goods whose substance is universal social labor are thereby drawn into market circulation. This labor does not create the value of commodities, but it does create genuine social wealth, real use-values. And this wealth can and does receive a certain valuation under conditions of the market's total dominance. Creative labor and its product have a price, for which there are grounds connected with labor. But when a creative worker is used to create a simulative good and/or a simulative need, a fundamentally different situation arises. Here the labor of the "creative" (the authors have deliberately replaced the term "creator" in this instance with the term "creative," borrowed from the advertising business) does not create universal cultural wealth. And therefore the latter cannot be regarded as the substance — however indirect — of the price of the s-good. And this is what distinguishes the labor of the "creative" from the activity of a creator who produces a cultural value (a work of art, a new scientific product, and so on). At the basis of the price of the latter lies universal labor that has received an [indirect] market valuation. In the former case, however, the creative's labor does not create cultural wealth, and therefore at the basis of the price of the simulacrum-commodity lie the manipulative influences on the consumer (the client), described above, exerted by corporate capital. The "linking" of advertising rates to various costs, carried out by advertising firms, is nothing more than a part of this same manipulation...
An analysis of the market of simulacra as a special kind of commodity relation characteristic of late capitalism would remain incomplete if we did not turn to the problem of new aspects of the fetishization of social relations, which "double" an already fetishized reality of the commodity world. As a result, the fetishism inherent in commodity production in general takes on a new quality, reaching its apogee: the fetish becomes not even the commodity as pseudo-subject, but its sign. The same applies to money, which doubles its detachment from the gold standard — electronic money as the sign of a paper substitute for gold. And even those who have nothing to do with postmodernist methodology and dislike postmodernist art are forced to live in this world. In culture these delusions are even more significant. They erase the boundary between being and its reflection, turning reality into an embodiment of television images (what was not shown on TV does not exist), erasing the boundary between culture and anti-culture, turning everything into the collapse of "anything-and-everything." This phenomenon of "doubled fetishism" is far from simple, although the examples cited above are plain for all to see. Let us remind the reader that Marx, in concluding his analysis of commodity relations in Chapter 1 of Volume I of "Capital," was not by chance turning to a discussion of commodity fetishism, showing that the world whose form is the market is filled with phantoms. Its inhabitants imagine that the economy is a movement of things (commodities, money) rather than relations among people. They imagine, accordingly, that economists should study only what can be counted, and specifically counted in monetary form, expressing the value of commodities. It seems to them (to us?) that a person's worth is measured by how much he is worth: by how much his real estate and the shares he owns can be valued, by his talent and his kidneys (one of which can be sold for a decent sum if you are young and healthy)... A millionaire who parasitizes on raw-material resources is "cool," while a rural teacher earning $300 a month is a "loser."
The world of the market turns money and commodities into fetishes. And this semblance of real social relations rules the world of the market. It rules us — its agents (at least insofar as we live by the rules this world imposes on us). The market of simulacra doubles this fetishization. If in the "ordinary" market fetishism is created by the value-form of the being of products and labor, then in the market of simulacra the sign of the fetish (of the commodity, of money) appears. It is this sign that becomes the simulacrum. As a result, in the markets of s-goods, humankind is subordinated no longer to money and commodities but to artificially created signs simulating the notion that behind them (these signs-simulacra) lies hidden value. Let us trace this chain once more. Fetishization of the "first level": it seems to us that the economy is the market, which is a movement of commodities and money rather than relations among people concerning a special kind of production — commodity production. It seems to us that a person is worth exactly as much as he is represented by commodities and money. This is fetishization, a delusion, a semblance — but it is (we repeat) an objective semblance. Under market conditions people are indeed valued by money rather than by moral, aesthetic, intellectual, or other such qualities.
Superimposed on this, under conditions of the market of simulacra, is a "second-level" fetishization. The fetish ruling the world and the people in it becomes a symbol, a sign of a commodity and/or of money, simulating the idea that it itself is the content — the real value, the wealth. A brand simulates (not 100 percent, but to a certain degree, as we mentioned above) that it is the most important thing in the commodity (which, in turn, is the most important thing about its owner), that it — the brand — is precisely the value craved by the consumer (the apotheosis of this fetishization is the placing of "labels" in the most conspicuous places on prestigious clothing, or the symbolic communion with simulative goods such as a prestigious fitness center, spa, or nightclub). A security of an investment fund simulates the idea that it is the most efficient way of placing money, the most profitable investment — that is, the "most capitalist" of capital (and this is a doubling of the fetishization created by capital itself, which creates the appearance that the pursuit of maximum profit is the most progressive path of development). These doublings of fetishes demand a "doubling" of critique as well: to the "old" slogans "The world is not a commodity!" and "People, not profit!" one might today add "Values, not simulacra." A person who today wants to step outside this world of fetishes and delusions must understand that the genuine values ensuring the progress of human qualities and the resolution of social and environmental problems are not the labels of a "gone mad" system that simulate genuine goods, nor even the monetary and commodity fetishes hidden behind these simulacra, but the real deeds and actions of a socially responsible human being... In concluding our discussion of the simulative market, let us note: without understanding the nature of economic simulacra, simulative goods, and the simulative market, it will be difficult to make sense of the evolution that money undergoes under conditions of late capitalism. Money not only becomes derivative of the relations of commodity production and of a market
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Часть 1 Chapter 2. The Market of Simulacra
Часть 2 Thesaurus for Chapter 2 of the Appendix - Chapter 2.
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