Jean Baudrillard, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Sign value is what you get when the object severs its relation to any real use and any real person, and begins to function only by its difference from other signs within a code. The clearest way to enter this is through the four logics I distinguished in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972): use value, exchange value, symbolic exchange, and sign value.1
An object can function as instrument, commodity, symbol, or sign — and only in the last mode does it enter the field of consumption proper. The first three logics still maintain some reference outward: to practical need, to equivalence in a market, to the singular relation between persons. Sign value is the fourth, and it operates by difference alone.
The gift makes the contrast sharp. What constitutes the symbolic object — the gift — as value is the act of separation: one divests oneself of the object, throws it toward the other, and in that gesture the relation between two persons is simultaneously established and marked.2 The object is arbitrary and yet absolutely singular, because it is this exchange, this moment, these persons.
It cannot be systematized, cannot be coded, because it depends entirely on the unique relation it mediates.3 The sign object is the precise inversion of this. Instead of abolishing itself in the relation it establishes, it becomes autonomous, opaque, self-referential — and in becoming so, it signifies not a relation but the abolition of relation.4
It is appropriated, withheld, manipulated as coded difference; it refers only to other signs.5 At the level of the code itself, the mutation is total. In what I called the classical era of signification, a signifier still referred to a signified, and the sign retained something like a use value — a differential profit, a lived distinction.6 With the advent of the sign form proper, the signified and the referent are abolished.
The code no longer refers to any subjective or objective reality; it refers to its own logic, becomes its own referent.7 The whole of reality becomes the site of semiurgical manipulation, structural simulation. The homology with the commodity form is exact. Traditional commodities retained a concrete finality — use value was still real, even if already subordinated to exchange value.
With monopolistic capitalism, use value as final reference disappears entirely; needs lose their autonomy and are coded.8 Sign value is the consumption-side counterpart of this mutation: just as production becomes production for production, consumption becomes the manipulation of signs for signs. What circulates in sign value, then, is not meaning and not satisfaction but distinction — the differential position within the code.
The object-become-sign gathers its meaning not in any concrete relation between two people but in its differential relation to other signs.9 And this raises the question I put at the end of Passwords (2000): when everything eventually gives way to artifice, are we still in a world of value, or in its simulation?10 The answer, which the later work draws out, is that sign value is already the threshold of simulation — the point at which value begins to dissolve into its own operational performance, with no referent left to anchor it.
Four logics would be concerned here: 1. A functional logic of use value; 2. An economic logic of exchange value; 3. A logic of symbolic exchange; 4. A logic of sign value.For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, pp. 64–65
What constitutes the object as value in symbolic exchange is that one separates himself from it in order to give it, to throw it at the feet of the other, under the gaze of the other (*ob-jicere*); one divests himself as if of a part of himself.For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, pp. 63–64
The gift is unique, specified by the people exchanging and the unique moment of the exchange. It is arbitrary, and yet absolutely singular.For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, pp. 63–64
Instead of abolishing itself in the relation that it establishes, and thus assuming symbolic value (as in the example of the gift), the object becomes autonomous, intransitive, opaque, and so begins to signify the abolition of the relationship.For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, pp. 63–64
The sign object is neither given nor exchanged: it is appropriated, withheld and manipulated by individual subjects as a sign, that is, as coded difference.For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, pp. 63–64
The goals of prestige and distinction still correspond to a traditional status of the sign, where a signifier refers to a signified, where a formal difference, a distinctive opposition (the cut of clothes, the style of an object) still refers to what we might call the use value of the sign—to a differential profit, to a lived distinction (signified value).Utopia Deferred - Writings from Utopie 1967-1978, pp. 146–147
The sign form describes an entirely other organization: the signified and the referent are abolished to the benefit of a single game of signifiers, a generalized formalization wherein the code no longer refers to any subjective or objective 'reality,' but to its own logic: it becomes its own referent.Utopia Deferred - Writings from Utopie 1967-1978, pp. 146–147
With monopolistic capitalism, the same mutation takes place as in the sphere of the sign. The final reference of products, their use value, completely disappears. Needs lose all autonomy, they are coded.Utopia Deferred - Writings from Utopie 1967-1978, pp. 146–147
The object-become-sign no longer gathers its meaning in the concrete relationship between two people. It assumes its meaning in its differential relation to other signs.For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, pp. 64–65
When everything eventually gives way to artifice, are we still in a world of value, or in its simulation?Passwords, pp. 20–21