Value Without Reference? Saussure and the Limits of Baudrillard’s Structural Revolution
The Death of Reference. AI image Objective To critically examine the section “The End of Production. The Structural Revolution of Value” in Baudrillard’s Symbolic Exchange and Death , showing that: Baudrillard overstates the presence of a referential dimension in Ferdinand de Saussure. He transforms Saussure’s economic analogy into a structural equivalence, ignoring its methodological limits. Saussure’s theory already articulates a system of value that is internal, relational, and non-referential. Introduction In Symbolic Exchange and Death , Jean Baudrillard describes a decisive shift: value, once tied to production and meaning, has become autonomous. What characterizes the present, he argues, is the collapse of reference—“referential value is annihilated”—and the rise of a system in which signs circulate only in relation to one another. This diagnosis is framed as a break with a prior configuration, one that he associates with both political economy and t...