Ministry of Urban Planning for the Third City

Kapital and Image Production

Capital and the Trace

“The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference. Neither are we here concerned to know how the object satisfies these wants.”

Marx, Das Kapital

“We are bored when we don’t know what we are waiting for.”

Benjamin, The Arcades Project

Wealth addresses itself to an immense accumulation of want, its unit being a single desire. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of desires.
A desire, whatever its concrete existence, haunts an external object, but desire itself remains more real than its object. Firstly, the nature of this object, whether concrete or abstract, makes no difference—desire haunts thirst, hunger, and the longing for meaning alike. Secondly, the object needn’t even be known specifically. Thus, through settling smoke, I mumble, “I guess I just don’t know what I want.” I state implicitly, “I want… something, but damn me if I know what.” I know desire implies an object, but still I only know desire itself as concrete and infer the object from it. The phenomenon of desire, alone, and not its object, necessarily encounters the desiring consciousness.
All the same, though opaque desires may guide choices, consummation of desire relies on concrete objects. As wealth can address desire only insofar as it promises consummation, desire must haunt a concrete object for that object to become a unit of wealth. Wealth, then, inhabits the intersection of desire and the saleable. In particular, produced wealth occasions the desired product of labor—the commodity.
But though the commodity is concrete, desire still issues not from its properties but from some subtler source. This fact is manifest in the everyday experience of disappointment: “Man, that RC-car, it wasn’t so great after all. For one thing, the gun-turret was phoney.” Since the concrete nature of the commodity can betray us, our desires issued from a perceived quality of the commodity and not from its actual (saleable) existence. Indeed, opaque desires, in their confusion, can fasten upon an object but still outlive their own supposed consummation: “I guess that truck wasn’t what I really wanted.” But no sooner has wealth betrayed itself than that same desire haunts some fresh object. If one desire can drive man blindly towards qualitatively different objects, desire does not spring from the quality of the object.
The production of wealth, then, consists not only in the crystallization of labor into commodity, but the proffering of this commodity to desire; only once want alights upon an object, does the object contribute to a society’s wealth.
It may seem paradoxical that wealth characterizes objects later unveiled as worthless, but avoiding this paradox requires uprooting wealth from a basis in subjectivity. We cannot, for instance, define wealth simply as that which actually satisfies a want or desire, since “actually” would privilege a theory of individuals over their self-understandings, without empirical basis. We might try to ground wealth in the individual’s retrospective knowledge of the experience, but then our definition becomes more or less useless to us. After the consummation of a desire, experiences may modify the memory of that consummation; something which truly did satisfy a desire at the time may, months later, lose its color in comparison to a moral turn: “I thought I liked sex but then I was born again… now I realize that my old life was really quite unsatisfying.” Furthermore, something which was neither purchased nor desired, such as the painful knowledge of combat, might afterwards be romanticized. But worst of all, individuals may after consummation change their minds several times, depending on the chance experiences which attended the intervening years. Which of these opinions should be honored as the actual knowledge of wealth? And neither would most of these moments shed light on the essence of wealth, since they involve often not from the productive process but from contingencies in unpredictable lives. Thus, wealth is best grounded in the subjective experience of desire that prompted action, spurred consumption.
Unlike use-value, which becomes “a reality only by use or consumption,” wealth as defined by desire is most real in the subject’s hopes for that consumption.
Desire alone is known, and wealth issues from it.
We began with wealth, only to arrive at desire as its basis—
We’ll begin again, stuttering, with desire today.
“The desires of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, fasten themselves to an immense accumulation of commodities.”
No, that’s not enough. If desire bears no necessary relation to its object, but can be betrayed, then it must fasten to some intermediary and not to the commodity itself—a “hope” for consumption, not the reality. An image of the commodity constituted by word of mouth, a billboard, a commercial—but not the commodity itself, since desire and wealth part ways after actual consumption. If wealth haunts the moment before consummation, then the commodity as desired never becomes a concrete thing but only an image of the thing as production presented it. The promise upon which our desires can alight, produced in tandem with the commodity itself. This promise may be more or less manifest in the commodity itself, as with the plainest foods, or it may require elaborate preparation; in either case the promise issues from the mechanisms of production.
We’ll try again.
“The desires of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, haunt an immense accumulation of images…” “images of consumption”? …“images of commodities”?
A commodity is “an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants,” an object produced for consumption. But only the image of this commodity need encounter desire, before purchase. Moreover, it must not be the image as we imagine it, but the concrete image as presented to us by production, the promise that awakens our imagination and desire. Not my hopes for the commodity, which are difficult to distinguish from my desires themselves, but the advertising that prompted them. Not an image imagined, but an image produced, which we may as easily call the commodity’s “promise.”
Have we yet departed from the subjective? It might seem that this distinction between the subjective image of the commodity and the produced image of the commodity requires that we step beyond ourselves. After all, we only know this produced image experientially. But, even so, imagination alone couldn’t consider “an object outside us” without that object’s becoming known. If we knew the commodity without learning of it, it couldn’t be an object outside us but would issue from within. We may, then, learn of the object from two mechanisms: society at large, and the mechanisms of its production. But society at large, too, must have known the commodity from these two mechanisms. After enough regression, the mechanisms of production themselves are prime-mover. Ultimately, knowledge of the commodity must begin in direct perceptions of the commodity (if such is possible) or of its image and promise, produced with it. Thus, since the desiring subject knows the commodity’s otherness—this is what makes desire possible— he knows also knows that this knowledge must have arisen from some productive process. In plainer language, consumers know advertising exists and is distinct from their own desires, though it may inspire them. The category of produced image, then, remains well within the subject’s grasp.
We’ll try again. “The desires of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, haunt an immense accumulation of produced images.”
Or, in other words,
The desires of those societies in which capitalism has seasoned, are haunted by an immense production of images, its unit being a single promise.
The commodity demands an exchange, an offering from the fruits of my labor. In this demand, the commodity presents itself as reducible to a common basis as my salary. The commodity, then, introduces itself immediately to me, telling me its name: labor in the abstract.
Unlike use-value, exchange-value requires no revision; the basis of exchange as presented in Capital is imminent in the experiences of labor and consumption, for all classes. Even wealthy heirs know their inheritance as the product of labor; at most they mistake whose labor it was.
Likewise, knowledge of private property is imminent in the experience of both employer and employee. The laborer feels firsthand the force separating him from the means of production—and the manager knows that, unless he observes the laws of capital, this same force will dispose of him.
Finally, the ubiquity of exchange pervades every moment of my existence. Indeed, “wealth… presents itself” as exchangeable commodity.
The laws and forces of capital present themselves to subjective experience: Value, private property, exchange. And because capitalist relations operate impersonally and mechanically, these laws present themselves as impersonal and mechanical—that is, truly as laws, and not merely personal histories.
Thus, the dynamism of capital follows from propositions which are everywhere experienced directly. The manual to this physics of exchange need not be reproduced here.
Desires, defined as momentary phenomena, are not broad categories like “hunger” or “lust,” but are discreet longings experienced in the subjective present.
However, desires as such leave little for mass production, which requires masses of predictable desires. Commodities target only a reliable set of categories across subjects and time to which commodities may address themselves: genera of desire. These genera exist as abstractions manifest in the commodity’s mass-nature. Since the objects draw these categories, the genera of desire distinguish themselves from each other by their objects. A single genus of desire encloses all those moments of longing, across subjects and time, which find their object within a more or less specific set of properties. The genus of desire “hunger” finds its object in a set of concrete properties delimited by the strength of the teeth, jaw, stomach, as well as the sensory capabilities of the tongue. The genus of desire “lust” finds its object in a set of concrete properties delimited by the ability of man to sense (pornography must be visible; prostitutes must exist in reality) as well as the range of lusts of men. The more specific genera of desire “craving for sweets” and “lust for woman” bear relations to more severely delimited sets of properties. On the other extreme, the broad genus of desire “desire for fulfillment” means next to nothing in terms of defined sets of properties.
Although, broad or specific, all these formulations fall under the definition of genera, not all are immediately useful to mass production. Ordinary commodities answer to sets of properties that rest entirely within the realm of commodity-manufacturing. For instance, the genus of desire “hunger” contains nothing inaccessible to the conquest of production. Likewise, the desires for fashion are meaningless outside of commodity-production. For some genus of desire, every permutation of object within the set of properties can become a commodity. We call this type of genus “Finite desire.” Any longing within the finite type is immediately presented with a commodity.
Furthermore, we know that the total range of objects desired in the amalgamation of all finite genera is itself finite. Since the content of each genus relates to a finite set of properties, infinite flexibility could only come from an infinite quantity of non-redundant genera. But if an infinite number of genera existed such that none shared ranges of properties, that would mean that an infinite number of non-redundant ranges of properties were accessible to desire. In other words, to claim that the sum of all finite genera is infinite is to claim that every possible construction of a commodity will meet desire. This is patently false—in my failed artistic career, I certainly created some objects which nobody wanted. Thus, the quantity of non-redundant, finite genera is finite—and, in turn, so is the total range of commodities desired. For the finite genera, potential to absorb production is bounded above.
The moments of desire that remain, after subtracting those grouped into genera, form the trace. Some desires, being too ephemeral and aleatory to group across time and individuals according to object, simply cannot be predicted by commodities. But more importantly, some frequent impulses—and here we can only refer to the impulses that caused the desires, not the desires themselves—resist commodity objects. Since, as we will see, image-promises wed these desires to a commodity object, they will at that moment be classifiable only with the finite genus of other desires with similar commodity objects. However, once the consumer consummates that marriage in purchase, if that same impulse continues to create desires, these desires can no longer hunger for that same commodity—no desire and its object can exist at once, since absence underpins all desire. This impulse, returned, creates desires with different objects from the first, which can therefore not be attached to the same commodity. Another promise may again deceive them, but the cause of the desires had nothing to do with the object attained, so the same cause creates them once again, and now they cannot have the same object as either of the previous experiences that the same impulse engendered. Thus, although a single cause accounts for all these desires, in their deception they cannot cohere into any coherent genus of desire. While the whispered promises of commodities distract them from whatever object actually relates to their cause, they appear to the individual purely as incoherent and cannot be related by the definitions provided here within the subject’s experience. Instead, each is a trace—a trace created by the commodity structure. Lacking any rigorous formulation of this “impulse” or “cause,” we merely posit the existence of the trace as counterpart to finite desire, which may or may not be experienced as coherent non-commodity genera, but which, if nothing else, will always strike individual experience as excluded trace despite all improvements in production.
The dynamism of production, as related to the finite genera, results in three processes: the cheapening of commodities, the proliferation of commodities, and the reduction of time necessary for consumption.
The third of these processes would seem to end in a limit case at zero seconds, that is, the commodity’s total independence from the individual. Generally, though, individuals prefer to involve themselves somewhat in the functioning of their world, so some gesture remains to assure them of their freedom—the button. Besides, without any time for consciousness of satisfaction, the commodity satisfies nothing. The time necessary for pressing a button is generally the limit case for satisfaction of desires. However, the time necessary for purchase should be included, and this, too, will probably not surpass a button in convenience, for the individual’s sake.
The second of these processes, the proliferation of commodities, is limited by the time necessary for consumption. Although consumption can reduce to the limit case of a gesture, this gesture partakes of a definite amount of time. The individual’s waking hours, minus the individual’s working hours, can be subdivided into a finite number of gestures—and this quantity is the limit case for the proliferation of commodities.
The third process, reduction in exchange-value, assumes grave implications after the consideration of the second process’s limit. Unless the second and third processes can proceed forever (involving unbounded amounts of labor in the streamlining and proliferation of commodities), the first implies crises of overproduction. Because the finite genera are bounded by entirely commoditizable sets of properties, total satisfaction of the finite desire is easily achieved, leaving only time and quantity of satisfactions to absorb the fruits of capitalism’s expansion. Since they’re both bounded above for each genus, and the quantity of genera is also bounded, the finite genera alone cannot stay crises of overproduction. If all desires fit into the finite genera, they would all behave as Marx’s use-values, and capitalism would doom itself without complication.
Paradoxically, those desires that resisted the commodity form, the trace alone, offer it salvation. On the one hand, the commodity form won’t conquer them in total satisfaction—if it could, those desires would belong to some finite genera whose sets of possible objects was bounded and the limit case consisted still of mere commodities. This trace manifests itself as unfulfilled longings to the man surrounded only by commodities. If denied whatever non-commodity objects they may seek, these desires still claw into us long after commodities have resolved all the finite genera, and reduced all to gesture and immediate fulfillment. Thus, by promising to fulfill desires it could never fulfill, and which it may, indeed, obstruct, Capitalism can evade crisis.
The trace desires of those societies in which capitalism has seasoned, are haunted by an immense production of images. The unit of this haunting remains the promise. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a promise, which is, in our definition, an object outside us, a produced image that by its properties midwifes fascination and mediates the marriage of desire to commodity.
For finite genera, the promise merely consists in an explication of the commodity’s properties, and the relation of those properties to the desire-genera’s set of possible objects.
But for the trace, either those sets do not exist, or they contain significant negations of the commodity form that could never be satisfied through it. Thus, appeals to these sets cannot carry those mysterious promises offered up to the trace. In these promises, connection to the actual commodity can wither to a mere glyph—just enough to attach an advertisement a product without implicating any aspects of it in the preceding parade of ape brass-bands, flatulence, and hollow irony. The only essential involvement of the commodity is its identifying mark—generally, a brand. The remainder of this promise’s content merely addresses the trace desires themselves. But how can an image address something so elusive as the trace longings?
All promises require three things:
1) The identifying mark of the marketed commodity.
2) Packaging that accords to convention for promises at a given moment, and unrelated incentives to watch that draw the viewer’s attention towards the promise without actually contributing to it.
3) The message to the desire. Because the promise is an image, its whispers to the want must be encoded in sensible elements that signify to consumers the satisfaction of the trace. But these sensible elements, in order to signify satisfaction, must inspire the experience of desire. Some images represent an activity or commodity that piques some desires; in some, the image media represents nothing, but itself attracts some desire. In that case, the elements of the promise itself, being concrete phenomena that attract some desire, are themselves a commodity. Thus, one element of the promise for any commodity is another commodity or its representation, which is also attractive. Alternatively, this representation may concern a non-commodity, un-commoditizable object.
For promises directed at the trace, this third element changes significantly. Only three types of signs can address trace desires. A) Likewise, commodities that had been promised as satisfying, and were purchased long ago, can, in nostalgia, promise satisfaction again despite their betrayal. B) Commodities can only disappoint the trace, by the definition of trace desires; still, commodities that had been promised as satisfying to the trace but weren’t yet discovered to be disappointing (that is, weren’t yet purchased). However, the existence of commodities half-invested with desire but still never purchased manifests a failure of the promise—an inefficiency. Thus, as capitalism progresses, this inefficiency must be lessened in order to satisfy the boundless thirst for surplus value. The only remaining form of this fuel for promises lies in the poor—those who witness a promise to some trace desire, but cannot afford the commodity will therefore not be disappointed. That commodity, then, might become part of a promise for some cheaper commodity targeting the same trace in the same poor consumers. The invocation of the too-expensive, though, is an image of the class-system’s negation. Thus, as capitalism proresses, this element becomes a promise to the proletariat that each commodity will overcome the class system and allow him the trace desires that (he thinks) are denied by it. C) For trace desires whose satisfaction is impossible through the commodity but still is some concrete object, such as a type of life or an action, that actual object can operate as sign in the promise even though it is irreconcilable with the actual commodity. Indeed, seeking consummation of the trace desire through the commodity supplants these objects, usurps their place, blocks them. Thus, images of a trace’s natural objects really are images of the commodity form’s negation.
We have, then, three fuels. Nostalgia, the past—envy, negation of class, the present—negation of the commodity, the future. All three possible engines of the trace promise rely on forgetting. Nostalgia forgets the disappointment of earlier commodities. Envy forgets that all previous commodity purchases failed to deliver the proletarian consumer from his bonds. Negation of/through the commodity forgets the contradiction between the commodity medium and the denied desires seeking expression.
As the stability of capitalism depends on the smooth functioning of trace promises, it also depends on these three repressions of memory. Moreover, because the negative promises self-ironize about just this childish self-delusion, everybody knows that the system requires their forgetfulness, that they are complicit in their own deception.
To fight forgetfulness, then, is the role of the revolutionary. But we cannot fight from the position of either pole of the commodity promise, even though revolutionary consciousness itself originates in those promises.
A critique from the standpoint of the negatory promise can only consolidate consciousness into a cynical, masochistic, and above all cool structure of faithless purchase without disappointment. The phrase overwhelms the content. Consumerism then solidifies into a gesture without hope, a structure of action capable of absorbing any amount of production precisely because its masochism imbues, in all exchange-value, frigid desire.
A critique from the nostalgic promise, likewise, degenerates. Nostalgia, though it may indeed contemn all present commodities, does so in the name of a great mythical past in the same commodity-structure. Though nostalgia might reject consumerism, it can establish only a regime centered on this mythical history of celebrated alienation—it can only establish fascism.
The revolutionary must bring the negative content of those promises out of the form of the promise.
The commodities themselves have already preached their negation; we need only wrest it from their grasp. Capitalism itself has taught us rebellion; we need learn only revolt.
But what enables one to escape forgetfulness, while another succumbs? Not some superman’s will, nor a superior intellect. The answer, simply, almost tautologically, is memory.
Some external stimulus confronts the consumer with a pattern of disappointments just at the moment of a fresh promise. The juxtaposition implodes the promise’s structure.
A father’s sadness, even behind the wheel of the new Jeep, confronts a daughter, and punctures one commodity’s promise, but not all; a boy’s boredom, even while listening to Rage and sporting a Che shirt, punctures one negation’s promise, but not all.
But the words “exchange-value,” “dynamism,” “cataclysm,” “spectacle,” “recuperation,” and the categories found in Marx, Adorno, Benjamin, Debord, once overheard, begin to impose themselves, like all categories, on the sensuous world and the phenomena of capitalism. In the beginning was the word—and when it dwells among us, we see mechanisms of betrayal everywhere were look.
When the phenomena of a promise conjures up the category of the promise, memories of previous betrayals follow closely. In being possessed by the category of the promise, no matter what particular pseudonym it takes, our forgetfulness is shattered forever.
Some chance is involved in the order¬, in which individuals first collide with the necessary phrases. But after conversion, we see nothing in the commodity’s promise though our searching desires—their traces, at least—burn still, and those desires find their expression in the proclamation of the very gospel that freed them. From there—a virus, a flash-fire.
If just a little Word can puncture the entire mechanism of the promise, to which the tentative world of capitalism clings, then the objective truth (whatever that means) of these categories requires little discussion. Even if we reject the modern rationality enabling this treatise, the practical fact of these howls demonstrates the power of the Word, which, true or false, threatens to burn everything to the ground.

The Loop, the Rupture, and the Wilderness (30-37)

(Theses continuous.)

As the novelty of commodity and spectacle yields to ennui, the urban spaces devoted to the structures of commodity, likewise, lose their color—shrines crumbling after a god’s betrayal. An hour’s walk across the Loop, sightseeing, disappoints everybody except the most rapacious shoppers. Only the sheer size of the landscape impresses: the skyscraper’s strong-arm tactics, brutal and hollow. But even this bland tyranny fades after three blocks.

Only the clashes, the borders, offer relief. The psychogeographical war between the University of Chicago and the South Side—along the front, the urban remains vital. Seek out these boundaries.

The twilights of economic zoning, though more dynamic than the homogeny around them, can’t escape. These conflicts arise from economic (quantitative) discrepancies. Both identities rely on the values of capitalism: to take sides, even with the poor, is to acquiesce to capital’s terms, the fetish of money and income presiding over all “lesser” spheres of life. While these landscapes of class-conflict manifest what often remains invisible, they cannot present escape: merely an honest picture of the prevailing brutality. To celebrate these clashes is to celebrate the darkest traits of capitalism. Find these conflicts, explore them, but never mistake the vitality of war for peace itself.

“I stepped off the six at Randolph, on Michegan, to transfer onto the red-line. As I walked down Randolph, I stopped suddenly. The wall beside me had opened upon an alley, lit by two or three sulfate bulbs. A piece of construction scaffolding framed the entrance—more like a tunnel than an alley, maybe a cavern, somehow, an entrance… About a quarter-mile down, I saw a man in a pool of yellow light, snow moving through his halo, and a cigarette burning beside him. I don’t know what I saw there, something utterly different, a rupture. But I didn’t enter; I hurried to catch up with my friends.”

What created this “rupture”? What I saw was a space of intrusion, conflict—but where was the income-differential, the racial conflict, or the clash of generations? We know half the war, at least. The space around me was just blocks outside the Loop: boring, sterile, functional. But what was the enemy? Something secret, mysterious, alien, and therefore subversive. Neither functional nor commoditized nor spectacular. Nearly unpeopled. The slippery perfection of a dream, of myth: Aeneas or Orpheus at the mouth of Hades. Something sublimely foreign to the universe around it.

Whatever conspiracy of minutia occasioned this rupture, the aberration itself manifested a qualitative escape, determined not by class but negation of the class system. I could inhabit that unreal space as easily as a richer man. Here lies the true promise of escape.

Forests erupt across the wastes of Chernobyl in twenty years. The imprisoned forces liberated spontaneously. Surface fractured by depth. Just so: imperfections and chips in Chicago’s seamless ennui present themselves ex nihilo. Rebellions of the urban against itself. Cancers. Ghosts of a fire never quite extinguished, the thousand grandchildren of 1871, never quite stamped out. Follow their pull, explore, and when you’ve taken in your fill, light another.

Search the city’s placid surface for weakness, flaw, thin-ice or kindling, and stomp through. For all its fireproofing, the Second City can tremble, tentative as its father, at the memory of flame.

Commodity, Cataclysm, and the Sign of Desire (1-29)

I want: I want something. Even when, through settling smoke, I moan, “I guess I just don’t know what I want,” I state implicitly, “I want… something, but damn me if I know what.”

Desire implies an object of desire, even when obscure. Want exists by absence of fulfillment, and by its promise. In short, desire is rooted in its object, and in its separation from its object. The object of desire exists as such only by its significance to desire. Tautology of desire and object.

The analogy in linguistics: a signified, being “neither an act of consciousness, nor a real thing,” exists only “within the signifying process, in a quasi-tautological way” (Barthes 43). The signified is the expression of the signifier—the signifier, that which expresses the sign. But the signifier and sign must remain distinct. Thus, existence of the sign rests on the dependence and non-identity of signifier and signified. This paradoxical duality of the sign belongs also to want and wanted.

As an experiment, treat desire as the signifier. Desire would signify its object, the signified. But the signified itself exists by deeper motivations: I want her, why? Affection, self-confirmation, ostentation, orgasm—and why these? A deeper reason. Always the signified signifies in an endless regression of sign. Escape the problem, name it all “fulfillment”—you want the orgasm because it’ll be fulfilling. But fulfillment exists only in dual relation to desire—“fulfillment” merely aggregates the entire regression of signs. I want fulfillment; I want her, to get fulfillment; I want her, for orgasm, for fulfillment. Equivalent statements.

Now, consider the object as signifier—inferior sign of desire’s regression. “She represents fulfillment” is equivalent to “I desire her,” and follows more intuitively than “Desire signifies her.” Thus, the object becomes the signifier, and fulfillment—a negative statement of desire—the signified. The elusiveness of desire follows from the complexity buried in “fulfillment.” If she was fulfillment, I would be happy, having her. But she merely signifies fulfillment, and the relation of sign depends on non-identity. I will, having her, not have fulfillment—which, anyway, is nothing but an endless regression of significance. From the frustrated tautology of the sign arises the absurdity of life. The Blues is a genre of longing, a song of the sign. Whether this frustrated longing belongs only to the modern individual, or whether it underlies the human condition, doesn’t concern these theses.

Related to the commodity, desire is use-value. Even when such use devolves into “direct, one-sided gratification—merely in the sense of possessing, of having,” the object’s use-value corresponds to that want, though the commodity itself lack functional utility (Marx 87). Even if, after use, the consumer is disenchanted, this rupture of the use-sign cannot retroactively undo the use-value that existed at purchase. Thus, use-value does not, as Marx posited, “become a reality only by use or consumption” (303), because, at that moment, experience will often efface the object’s promise. Rather, use-value becomes a reality by anticipation of that consumptive moment. In this structure of anticipation, use-value matches want.

In Capital, Marx refuses to comment on “the nature of such wants” (303). Elsewhere, though, he laments that “my desire is the inaccessible possession of another” in estranged society (100), that “every person speculates on creating a new need [want, use-value] in another, ...to seduce him into a new mode of gratification [fulfillment] and therefore economic ruin” (93). Beyond Marx, consider the practical: what is advertising today? Marketing has already dropped the pretense of informing consumers. Without apology, it now “speculates on creating a new need” (100).

Although brute, animal desires require no manufacture, this independence also accounts for their flaw. They exist beyond society, but for that reason they can’t grow infinitely with society’s beckon, can’t absorb the dynamic productivity of capitalism. Only manmade desires expand at man’s command. Thus, the unending postponement of overproduction depends on wedding use-value to wealth—the synthesis of desire. At every precarious moment, capital endures through signification, “the act [of binding] signifier and the signified, [producing] the sign” (Barthes 48).

The commodity, “a mere congelation of homogeneous human labour,” forms a word (Marx 305). Baudrillard’s “analogy with linguistic phenomena” leads him to break the commodity-word into “technemes” (Baudrillard 5). But what size of object forms a techneme? Subdividing the commodity into technemes, Baudrillard stopped too soon, leaving undiscovered the techneme’s irreducible unit, substance: exchange-value. Finally, technemes are merely crystallizations of labour—their combination forms a qualitative form. The function, Baudrillard may as well call use-value. Beyond Baudrillard’s formulation: exchange-value technemes, arranged into commodity, signify use-value. The arrangement of technemes into commodities, and the signification of those commodities—by this process alone can capitalism postpone contradiction.

Signification in speech occurs through the “dialectical process which unites” language and speech: “there is no language without speech, and no speech outside language” (Barthes 15). The internalization of sign-systems “is the outcome of a collective training” by previously-witnessed usage (50). Usage after this training, according to preextant rules, forms the “collective training” for subsequent usage (50). Here, though, language “is not subject to any premeditation… autonomous” (14). Signs of desire dispense with the dialectical autonomy of language. The dynamism of production motivates—must motivate, to exist—the signification of use-value. No longer the “unmotivated” dialectics of language (50).

“A collective training,” too, constructs use-value (50). But a consumer must sensuously internalize the usage. An consumer’s usage of the signs—purchase—hardly influences the language of desire, since a negligible number of consumers witness this usage. The real usage must issue not from a collective but must impact a collective. The signification of desire manifests most saliently in advertising.

Usage must achieve “the association of [signs] and representation” (50). Here, the productive process provides signs; but representation must always be fulfillment. Since fulfillment itself only exists as in the sign-duality of desire, it exists only as signified. No advertisement could promise fulfillment without a sign of fulfillment—either the linguistic sign itself, or a preexisting sign of desire, such as sex, affection, or domestic cleanliness. The language of desire inherited by the commercial must provide this sign. Commodity-signification fuses the commodity-signifier to fulfillment—but transitively, through an intermediary signifier.

But as the signification process commands larger proportions of the consumer’s time—which it must, to keep pace with production—it isolates the consumer from the usage of the real. Society’s established language of desire, too, exists only by collective training, and commodity-signification must compete with this “real” usage for consumer attention. Thus, in appropriating “real” signs, this “false” usage also eliminates the real.

Finally, as the “false” tends towards a final conquest of consumer attention—driven by the imperatives of production—it exhausts the supply of “real” signs to liquidate. Luckily, it might turn on itself, devour its own signs—the commodity signifies fulfillment no longer through sex, rebellion, domestic cleanliness, but through lingerie, VW bugs, and aprons. Already, a contradiction emerges: new desires depend on the absence of fulfillment. These earlier commodities must have failed in their promise—rending the use-value, the significance, from the sign. Signification encounters a shortage of virgin signs, and only consumer forgetfulness grants signification a pardon. And luckily, the signification process encodes more than the commodities themselves.

Besides welding the commodity to fulfillment, signification processes, since consumable, attach fulfillment to their own consumption, and create a use-value of spectacle. Thus, commercials find an entry into fulfillment through each other, and finally through themselves, having liquidated all other signs of desire. Simulation without referent. The hyperreal.

In the desire for spectacle—signification’s shadow—endures the image of capital’s contradiction. Signification must compete with the real for attention, yet its purpose remains bound to real commodities. The time demanded by signification must ultimately encroach upon the time necessary for consumption. Furthermore, so long some fuel for signification remains, the spectacle cannot avoid binding itself to desire. The use-values of consumption must compete with this by-product, this semiotic waste of spectacle’s use-value. We consume the stage itself, ignoring the troupe of toasters pirouetting upon it.

To resolve this contradiction, capital must direct its productive capacities into signification. By producing signs for their own sake, no longer anchored in “real” commodities, capital can absorb its ever-increasing production. The sorcery of capital summoned commodity-signification, but now the magic has turned on its master. Once production motivated the language of desire; now signification itself motivates capital. “The falcon cannot hear the falconer...”

Signification, now the main course, weds itself to earlier significations, promising fulfillment by invoking earlier signifiers. But if, on consumption, we immediately discover the promise empty, this commodity/image ceases to signify. If it continued to signify—that is, if it sated our desire—we would cease new consumption, and merely watch Superbowl ads again, again, again. But since each spectacle wears out, ceases to signify fulfillment—and must—the old spectacle can no longer provide fuel for future signification. Only unconsumed spectacles still signify, except when disappointed memory yields to nostalgia. Otherwise, unable to invoke either the deflowered promises of yesterday, or tomorrow’s yet-unconstituted desires, spectacles must refer to the present, to themselves.

But a viewer consumes the spectacle in seeing it, and in consumption, the commodity loses its use. Thus, at once, signification constructs and devours its own appeal. It must found its use on uselessness. The apotheosis of image, then emerges—the final formula for Spectacle—self-parody. The commercial that chuckles with hip detachment, “Yeah, I know my product could never live up to this promise—and seriously, how dumb do you have to be to believe that purchasing an object can give you a slice of ‘hip’? The funny thing is, most of America falls for it—they think they can be as hip as this ad, just if they buy a certain razor. But not you and I, we’re smarter than them. You and I know how utterly empty this commercial is. That’s why we shave with Gilette.” Although this is a parody of self-ironic commercials, it would also make an extremely effective commercial. That’s because the content of parody and self-parody are identical. So the plausibility of this joke demonstrates self-parody’s present ubiquity.

Irony is appearance of discrepancy; self-irony entails discrepancy between self and self. What attitude could better embody the self-contradictions of capital?

Spectacles explicitly promising nothing but their own sound and fury, signifying nothing and celebrating their vacancy—selling their own statement of their own worthlessness. We consume an ornate, self-conscious nothing, and love it for its worthlessness. This is the irony we love—the only thing we still have. Use-value born from uselessness—negation of all but exchange. The signified vanishes into the sign—this is the origin of Baudrillard’s seduction, hyperreal. The pretense of use, of the sign, of desire, of the real, vanish under the weight of ouroboric spectacle and irony.

How long, before the years of disenchantment outweigh the hour’s sign? Before irony begins to signify the sadness and longing it denies? “The center cannot hold…” How long before things fall apart?

Thus far we’ve treated “fuel” as signs of fulfillment. But another kind of fuel: signs of betrayal, estrangement, and disillusionment. In negating these signs, a purely negative sign of desire emerges. Already, in considering “sex” and other animal wants as fuel for signification, we’ve encountered the negation. Signification—the artifice of desire—denies precisely these animal urges it invokes. The animal, then, represents the negation of artifice, and signification invokes its own negation when promising the animal through the commodity. An ad might promise a world without ads, a world where life is authentic and real, a world “you can best access through this commodity/this spectacle!” This is the negation of frustrated-desire—but the most powerful negative lies outside the spheres of leasure.

Signification, though it can dominate all of consumptive time, cannot invade the workday. Thus, signs of fulfillment in employment itself will always provide fuel—but these signs of fulfillment arise not from the productive activity itself, since it is estranging, but form the fantasy negation of production. Spectacle-commodities, then, might always found themselves on a promised negation of, or escape from, estrangement. This revolutionary deposit of signs will exist as long as capitalism exists. Thus capitalism stays revolution by consuming revolutionary consciousness itself.

Though signification might consume this consciousness, it cannot liquidate it. Here lies its appeal, and also its threat. Spectacle now binds an anti-revolutionary commodity (signification itself) to a revolutionary force. But here the signifier-signified duality almost collapses: the signifier and the signified exist on the same plane of reality, and oppose each other.

Another fuel follows, from the negation and parody of this revolution-commodity sign. Just as that sign promised escape from estrangement through its commodity, so the second-order signification promises escape from the first-order’s cooptation and betrayal—through another commodity instead.

But the second-order negation negates itself, and we arrive again at the self-parody, self-irony—now with revolutionary content. But whereas the first merely celebrated uselessness, this irony attempts to laud cynicism, fatalism, and estrangement. The former depended on its own non-signification; but the latter’s subject (estrangement) is the indestructible sign itself, is itself revolutionary discontent. Finally, this signification becomes a mirror of revolutionary consciousness itself, incompatible with irony, negating itself into oblivion. Leisure-time is Capital’s beauty-rest, but now it dreams only of self-escape, its imminent end.

Even while the consumptive self-irony implodes under its own cynicism, a bitter, revolutionary negation emerges—the final, unstable recourse of signification. But in the proliferation of last-ditch negations, death-spasms, which infuse the spectacle-commodity with a fragile vitality, spectacle itself summons the revolutionary consciousness of its undoing. True, the rebellious commodities sell well, but they necessarily disappoint, frustrating the consumer’s escape again and again. Each failed rebellion only sharpens our longing for the parousia of authentic life, each advertisement a messianic gospel of communism. What was once the libido of capitalism sours into Thanatos. Until, finally, a spark…

The “recuperations” dreaded by the Situationists — decoy-revolutions selling commodities — revolt against Capital as fiercely any “détournement.” Culture jamming, ideological campaigns, and revolutionary theory (like this), just echo and externalize Capital’s dreams of suicide. No need to flatter ourselves. We’re just projections of the system’s own death-drive, its own fantasy of escape.