Ajai Sharma

Sign Value in The Bluest Eye

According to Marxism, capitalist society in its pure form can be divided into two powerful social classes - the working class or proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Marx defined the working class - as those individuals who sell their labor and do not own the means of production. Marx believed that the proletariats were responsible for creating the wealth of a society. For example members of this class physically build buildings, bridges and furniture. The other class, that is, the bourgeoisie owns the means of production and exploit the proletariat. The bourgeoisie may be further subdivided into the very wealthy bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie. The petty bourgeoisie are those who employ labour, but may also work themselves. These may be small proprietors, land-holding peasants, or trade workers. Marx predicted that the petty bourgeoisie would eventually be destroyed by the constant reinvention of the means of production and the result of this would be the forced movement of the vast majority of the petty bourgeoisie to the proletariat. In other words petty bourgeoisie would cease to exist in due course of the development of capitalist society. Slowly only the working class or proletariat and the bourgeoisie would remain. According to Marx the bourgeoisie controls the means of production in a capitalist society. Viewed from the perspective of wealthy capitalist, wealth is generated by changing raw material into finished product and then selling it in the open market. The capitalists do not consider the working class of much significance in the process of production of finished products. The whole argument appears to communicate that selling finished products, that is, a commodity, generate wealth ‘magically’. It is at this stage in the argument that Marx intervenes.
Marx borrows the concept of fetishism from Anthropology to demystify the apparently magical quality of commodity. A commodity appears at first sight simply insignificant and trivial thing. But a close analysis of commodity brings out that it is a very mysterious thing, abounding in metaphysical power and theological niceties. Fetishism in anthropology refers to the primitive belief that godly powers can inhere in inanimate things. Marx borrows this concept to make sense of what he terms commodity fetishism. Marx introduces two new concepts: use value and exchange value to understand the fetishistic quality of a commodity. According to Marx, the commodity remains simple as long as it is tied to its use value. When a piece of wood is turned into a bed through human labour, its use value is obvious and, as product, the bed remains tied to its use in real life situations. However, as soon as the bed emerges as a commodity, it is changed into a thing that is supposed to have mysterious power inhering in it. The relationship between the actual hands of the labourer and the product is severed as soon as the product is made convertible to money as the universal equivalent for exchange. People in a capitalist society thus begin to treat commodities as if exchange value is inhered in the objects themselves, rather than in the amount of real labour expended to produce the object. The mysterious character of the commodity consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men's own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things. What is, in fact, a social relation between people (between capitalists and exploited labourers) instead assumes the fantastic form of a relation between things. This effect is caused by the fact that, in a capitalist society, the real producers of commodities remain largely invisible. We only approach their products through the relations that the act of exchange establishes between the products. We access the products of the proletariat through the exchange of money with those institutions that make profit from the labor of the proletariat. Since we only relate to those products through the exchange of money, we forget the secret hidden under the apparent upward movements in the relative values of commodities; that is labor. "It is... precisely this finished form of the world of commodities—the money form—which conceals the social character of private labour and the social relations between the individual workers, by making those relations appear as relations between material objects, instead of revealing them plainly". (The Capital, 168-69) In capitalist society, paper money becomes "the direct incarnation of all human labor" (The Capital, 187), much as in primitive societies the totem becomes the direct incarnation of godhead. Through this process, "Men are henceforth related to each other in their social process of production in a purely atomistic way; they become alienated because their own relations of production assume a material shape which is independent of their control and their conscious individual action". (The Capital, 187) Although value ultimately accrues because of labour some human puts in final product, people in a capitalist system believe that they are not in control of the market forces that appear to exist independently of any individual person.
Baudrillard finds Marx in its classical form, as detailed above unable to account for many characteristics of present day global economy. Marx intervention in capitalism in the forms of new concepts like fetish, use value, and exchange value do not hold good in explaining global economy. In most of his books he appears to be updating Marx in order to explain present day capitalist societies in general and America in particular. In his The System of Objects, Baudrillard discusses the thesis of consumer society from a neo-Marxist perspective. Baudrillard relies on both Lacanian psychoanalysis and Saussurean structuralism to develop his main theme. He argues that in global economy consumption has become the chief basis of the social order. Consumer objects structure behaviour through a linguistic sign function. Advertising has taken over the moral responsibility for all society and replaced “a puritan morality with a hedonistic morality of pure satisfaction, like a new state of nature at the heart of hypercivilization". (The System of Objects,12-13) The freedoms and liberties we have in this new hypercivilization are completely constrained by the commodity system. Free to be oneself in fact means free to project one's desires onto produced goods. Free to enjoy life means free to regress and be irrational, and thus adopt a certain social organization of production. This is “the ultimate in morality, since the consumer is simultaneously reconciled with himself and with the group. He becomes the perfect social being,". (The System of Objects, 13) Buying commodities is a preconditioned activity which takes place at the intersection of two systems: that of the individual, which is fluid and disconnected, and that of the relations of production, which is codified, continuous and integrated. "This is not interaction but rather the forced integration of the system of needs within the system of products". (The System of Objects, 14) The relationship is similar to the Saussurean system of langue and parole: the object of consumption is a particular articulation (parole) of a set of expressions that preexist the commodity (langue). But this is not a language. "Here we have the tower of Babel: each item speaks its own idiom ... This immense paradigm lacks a true syntax." .(The System of Objects, 15) It is "a system of classification, and not a language". (The System of Objects, 16) Needs as such are created by the objects of consumption. "Objects are categories of objects which quite tyrannically induce categories of persons. They undertake the policing of social meanings, and the significations they engender are controlled". (The System of Objects, 16-17)
Objects signify social standing, and in consumer society they replace all other means of hierarchical societal division -- e.g. race, gender, class. People are no longer ranked according to these obsolete mechanisms but by the commodities they own -- a universal code of recognition tells us that the person with the expensive consumer durable is higher on the hierarchy. This does not mean liberation from exploitation. "On the contrary, it appears that the constraint of a single referent only acts to exacerbate the desire for discrimination ... we can observe the unfolding of an always renewed obsession of hierarchy and distinction". (The System of Objects, 20) Consumption is a "systematic act of the manipulation of signs" (The System of Objects 22) that signifies social status through difference. The object itself is not consumed but rather the idea of a relation between objects and the person who consumes them. In his book Consumer Society, Baudrillard claims "the whole discourse on consumption, whether learned or lay, is articulated on the mythological sequence of the fable: a man, 'endowed' with needs which 'direct' him towards objects that 'give' him satisfaction," (Consumer Society ,35). This mythos ignores the nature of consumer society in which "the manufacturers control behavior, as well as direct and model social attitudes and needs ... this is a total dictatorship by the sector of production". (Consumer Society, 38) Baudrillard argues that the system of needs is the product of the system of production. Needs are produced as a force of consumption. In other words, what one calls ‘needs’ only exist in order to increase the pace of consumption. "Needs are nothing but the most advanced form of the rational systematization of productive forces at the individual level, one in which 'consumption' takes up the logical and necessary relay from production". (Consumer Society, 43) "The world of objects and needs would thus be a world of general hysteria. Just as the organs and functions of a body in hysterical conversion become a gigantic paradigm which the symptom replaces and refers to, in consumption objects become a vast paradigm designating another language through which something else speaks". (Consumer Society, 45) Consumption is thus both an ideology and a system of communication (as exchange), and can be seen as "exclusive of pleasure". (Consumer Society, 46) Pleasure is not the goal of consumption but rather a rationalization for consumption. The real goal of consumption is to prop up the system of objects. "Production and Consumption are one and the same grand logical process in the expanded reproduction of the productive forces and of their control. This imperative, which belongs to the system, enters in an inverted form into mentality, ethics, and everyday ideology, and that is its ultimate cunning: in the form of the liberation of needs, of individual fulfillment, of pleasure, and of affluence, etc.". (Consumer Society, 50) The individual consumer is essential to the reproduction of the system. Consumption has become a kind of labor; a bricolage (Levi-Strauss) in which the individual invests his/her private world with meaning through the active manipulation of signs. What is consumed is not the object itself, but the system of objects, the idea of a relation that is actually no longer lived, but abolished, abstracted, consumed by the signifying system itself. In the consumer society, controlled by the code, human relationships with objects have been transformed. “We are living in the period of the objects. These object no longer have meaning because of their usefulness, their utility: not do they acquire meaning any longer from concrete relationship to and /or difference from other objects. This collection, or network of objects, comes to have meaning and logic of its own. The objects are signs (they have sign value rather than use or exchange value), and the consumption of those object-signs constitutes a language that we can seek to understand. Commodities are purchased as an expression and mark of style, prestige, luxury, power, and so on.”(quoted by Doshi, S.L. in Modernity, Postmodernity and Neo Sociological Theories, p.273)
People's relation to consumption has status value which is hierarchical in nature in a system of symbolic exchange, which is a "social institution that determines behaviour before even being considered in the consciousness of the social actors". (For A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, 31) In this system, consumption determines one's social status. "Through objects, each individual and group searches out his/her place in an order, all the while trying to jostle this order according to a personal trajectory". (For A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, 38) In this sense there is no point in positing the existence of an "empirical object" (For A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, 63) because the object only has meaning as a signifying relation. The concept of need functions ideologically to produce a situation in which the subject is defined by the object and vice-versa. The legitimacy of production rests on the certainty that people will rationalize consumption through the concept of need. "And so it appears that this begging of the question -- this forced rationalization -- simply masks the internal finality of the order of production. To become an end in itself, every system must dispel the question of its real teleology". (For A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, 71) "In other words, there are only needs because the system needs them". (For A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, 82) Consumption as sign-value is both wealth and the lack of it. "The act of consumption is never simply a purchase ... it is also an expenditure ... it is wealth manifested, and a manifest destruction of wealth". (For A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, 112) Economic exchange value is transformed into sign exchange value based on "a monopoly of the code". (For A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign,115) Individual agency is irrelevant in consumer society: "The logic of exchange is primordial. In a way, the individual is nonexistent ... a certain language is prior to the individual. This language is a social form in relation to which there can properly speaking be no individuals, since it is an exchange structure ... Language cannot be explained by postulating an individual need to speak.... Before such questions can even be put, there is, simply, language -- not as an absolute, autonomous system but as a structure of exchange contemporaneous with meaning itself, and on which is articulated the individual intention of speech". (For A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign 75)
According to Baudrillard, the concept of ‘false consciousness’, as manifest in theories of fetishism is problematic. "Marxism eliminates any real chance it has of analyzing the actual process of ideological labor. By refusing to analyze the structures and the mode of ideological production inherent in its own logic, Marxism is condemned ... to expanding the reproduction of ideology, and thus of the capitalist system itself ... The term 'fetishism' almost has a life of its own. Instead of functioning as a metalanguage for the magical thinking of others, it turns against those who use it, and surreptitiously exposes their own magical thinking". (For A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign ,89-90) It is not the passion for objects that drives commodity fetishism, but "the passion for the code ... This is the fundamental articulation of the ideological process: not of the projection of alienated consciousness into various superstructures, but in the generalization at all levels of a structural code". (For A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, 92) Thus ideology "is not a mysterious duping of consciousness: it is a social logic that is substituted for another (and which resolves the latter's contradictions), thus changing the very definition of value". (For A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, 118) It is the magic of the code that forms "the keystone of domination". (For A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, 119)
Under the cover of functionality the political economy of the sign institutes a certain mode of signification in which all the surrounding signs act “as simple elements in a logical calculus and refer to each other within the framework of the system of sign exchange value". (For A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, 191)
Baudrillard believes that the idea of ‘production’ in a Marxian sense must be submitted to a radical critique. For Baudrillard, the critique of consumption "attains its full scope in its extension to that other commodity, labor power". (The Mirror of Production, 25) Labour power is not an essentialist notion of human potential. It is produced as a concept by the political economy. This is a fundamental critique of Marxism in Baudrillard's eyes: "And in this Marxism assists the cunning of capital. It convinces men that they are alienated by the sale of their labor power, thus censoring the much more radical hypothesis that they might be alienated as labour power, as the 'inalienable' power of creating value by their labor". (The Mirror of Production, 31) The Marxist view is thus problematic because it presupposes the capitalist view of human beings as production machines. A truly radical perspective would abandon this ideological construction of production. "And in order to find a realm beyond economic value (which is in fact the only revolutionary perspective), then the mirror of production in which all Western metaphysics is reflected, must be broken". (The Mirror of Production , 47)
Marx argued that the critique of religion was over after Feuerbach and only the critique of political economy could "resolve the problem of religion by bringing out the true contradictions. Today we are exactly at the same point with respect to Marx. For us, the critique of political economy is basically completed. The materialist dialectic has exhausted its content in reproducing its form". (The Mirror of Production 51) This new radicalism entails not the critique of political economy but the critique of the political economy of the sign. This revolution in political economy concerns everyone, no matter what class. With the domination of the code, "Marxism is incapable of theorizing total social practice (including the most radical form of Marxism) except to reflect it in the mirror of the mode of production. It cannot lead to the dimensions of a revolutionary 'politics". (The Mirror of Production, 152)
Two important points emerge from the above discussion: (1) present day capitalism is governed by sign value, and (2) consumption of goods as sign insinuates hierarchy in consumers according to “differential logic of consumption, in which some products have more prestige and sign-value than others, according to current tastes and fashion.”( Baudrillard: A Critical Reader, 02) Baudrillard claims, commodities can not be merely characterized by use value and exchange value, as in Marx’s theory of the commodity, but sign value –the expression and mark of style, prestige, luxury, power and so on—becomes and increasingly important part of the commodity and consumption. “That is, commodities were allegedly bought and displayed as much for their sign value as their use-value, and the phenomenon of sign value become an essential constituent of the commodity and consumption in the consumer society.”( Baudrillard: A Critical Reader, 03)

The novel introduces the theme of sign value and social hierarchy based on consumption of sign right from the very beginning. What is important to note is that the concept of sign value and inherent hierarchy implicit in consuming those signs govern the behaviour even of children and adults try their best to teach such behaviour to the uninitiated. Claudia and Frieda stand outside their house while their “next-door friend” (The Bluest Eye, 6), Rosemary Villanucci “sits a 1939 Buick eating bread and butter”. (The Bluest Eye, 06) Rosemary Villanucci, though still a mere child, is fully conversant with sign value of 1939 Buick and the prestige attached to owning it. She wants to communicate to Frieda and Claudia that in the milieu governed by sign value, they occupy a lower position to her simply because they do not own something equivalent to 1939 Buick in sign value. In order to communicate the exclusive ownership of 1939 Buick, “she rolls down the window” (The Bluest Eye, 06) of the car, instead of opening the door of the car, to communicate non-verbally to Frieda and Claudia that they cannot come in it. Claudia and Frieda receive the message loud and clear. They respond also non-verbally with hard stare in order “to poke the arrogance out of her eyes and smash the pride of ownership that curls her chewing mouth. (The Bluest Eye, 06)
Another important thing that comes to have sign value is a doll that is given as present to a girl child. Dolls, especially ‘Raggedy Ann’ dolls have different sign values for adults. There is a sharp division between an adult and a girl child on the perception of a doll. For adults doll has a specific sign value that is derived from overall experience of an adult. This sign value collides with the use value that Claudia wants to assign the doll that is given to her as gift on Christmas. In this clash of values, sign value appears very hollow, superficial and insignificant. Whenever there is an occasion to gift something to a girl child, the adults invariably choose “the big, the special, the loving gift” (The Bluest Eye, 13) that was “always a big, blue-eyed Baby Doll.” (The Bluest Eye, 13) Claudia is presented such a doll under the impression that the doll represents her “fondest wish.” (The Bluest Eye, 13) Claudia is simply bemused by the doll “and the way it looked.” (The Bluest Eye, 13) By reading picture books, Claudia learns that she is supposed to pretend to be its mother, ”rock it, fabricate storied situation around it, even sleep with it”. (The Bluest Eye, 13) But the problem with Claudia is she “had no interest in babies and the concept of motherhood.” (The Bluest Eye, 13) She is interested in persons of her age and size, and fails to “generate any enthusiasm at the prospect of being a mother” (The Bluest Eye, 13) just because motherhood is associated with old age in the imagination of Claudia. In reality, Claudia is revolted by doll’s “moronic eyes, the pancake face, and orangeworms hair.”(The Bluest Eye, 13) Claudia finds the gifted doll very uncomfortable and “patently aggressive sleeping companion” (The Bluest Eye, 13) because the hard limbs of the dolls pinch her flesh whenever she accidentally moves over to the doll in her sleep. Since Claudia has not yet imbibed the sign value of blue eyes and white skin, she fails to understand why adults find the dolls so irresistible a gift for young girls. In her childlike desire to understand the desirability of such dolls, she decides to dismember it ”to see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped” (The Bluest Eye, 13) her, only her. She decides to locate doll’s beauty. She tries by braking off doll’s tiny fingers, bending its “flat feet” (The Bluest Eye, 14), loosening its hair, twisting its “head around”. (The Bluest Eye, 14) All the time it produced “a sound they said was the sweet and plaintive cry ‘mama’, but appeared to … (her) like the bleat of a dying lamb, or, more precisely …icebox door opening on rusty hinges in July.” (The Bluest Eye, 14) Finally, she locates the source of doll’s plaintive in “the disk with six holes”. (The Bluest Eye, 14) Claudia finds no inherent beauty in it. “Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs- all the world had agreed that a blue eyed, yellow haired, pink skinned doll was what every girl child treasured.” (The Bluest Eye, 14)
When Pecola comes to stay with the family of Claudia, she is offered milk “in a blue and while Shirley Temple cup.” (The Bluest Eye, 13) Pecola loves the “silhouette of Shirley Temple’s dimpled face” (The Bluest Eye, 13) on the cup and hence takes a lot of time to drink milk out of this cup. Pecola is so fascinated by the figure of Shirley Temple that she drinks such large quantity of milk from the cup that Claudia’s mother finds it difficult to keep the supply of milk. Frieda, the sister of Claudia and Pecola have “a loving conversation about how cute Shirley Temple was.”(The Bluest Eye, 12-13) Claudia does not share their admiration for Shirley Temple. She had nothing but hostility “for all the Shirley Temples of the World.”(The Bluest Eye, 13)
The novel, read along the lines of sign value, moves irresistibly in the direction of assigning sign value not only to consumables like 1939 Buick or a doll given as a gift or Shirley Temple cup, but also to features of a human being. The important common features the doll and Shirley Temple cup and a Buick share is their desirability and a sense of pride in those who possess them and a consequent sense of envy in those who do not have/ possess them. Generally who do not have/ possess them are supposed to be lower to those who have/ possess them. People are getting   vicarious sense of pride by aligning themselves to those who possess them and or by simply admiring them. For instance, Claudia in encouraged to love dolls and Shirley Temple cup. Slowly the novel assigns such human features as blue eyes a sign value
The transfer of sign value from consumables/consumable durables to human takes final shape, when a rich white girl named Maureen Peal seeks admission in the school where Claudia, Frieda and Pecola study. Soon Maureen Peal hogs all attention and becomes the epitome of all that is desirable.
“She enchanted the entire school. When teachers called on her, they smiled encouragingly. Black boys didn’t trip her in the halls: while boys didn’t stone her, white girls didn’t suck their teeth when she was assigned to be their work partners: black girls stepped aside when she wanted to use the sink in the girls toilet, and their eyes genuflected under sliding lids. She never had to search for anybody to eat with in the cafeteria—they flocked to the table of her choice, where she opened fastidious lunches, shaming our jelly-stained bread and egg-salad sandwiches cut into four dainty squares, pink-frosted cupcakes, stick of celery and carrots, proud, dark apples. She even brought and liked white milk.”(The Bluest Eye, 47-48)
Claudia is bewildered by the importance that lies in being Maureen Peal. Claudia again fails to comprehend the secret of high sign value that Maureen Peal carries. Again she confuses sign value with use value. In the world of use value Maureen Peal stands at no higher pedestal than Claudia, Frieda, and Pecola. Claudia knows that Maureen Peal is not a doll that can be destroyed in the process of dismembering it to understand the secret of its appeal to all and sundry. However Claudia might try, the mystery of appeal is beyond her grasp. But Claudia has become intelligent in one important sphere. She now realizes that the mystery of appeal does not lie in Buick, doll, Shirley Temple cup or Maureen Peal. Such things and persons are not essentially appealing. Hence their destruction cannot have any effect in changing the world. The problem of appeal lies in those persons who assign them high sign value. Therefore it is not easy to assign them   use value and see them exclusively in the light of use value. She bemoans; “Dolls we could destroy, but we could not destroy the honey voices of parents and aunts, the obedience in the eyes of our teachers when they encountered the Maureen Peals of the world. What was the secret? What did we lack? Why was it important? And so what? Guileless and with vanity, we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness.”(The Bluest Eye 57)
The sign value reaches its most destructive apotheosis in the incident where Pecola decides to approach Soaphead, the spiritualist to seek his help in getting blue eyes. Pecola being pregnant after the rape by her own biological father cannot go to school. She misunderstands it as a rejection of her ugliness. In the sphere of beauty, blue eyes carry highest sign value. The whole dialogue between Pecola and Soaphead is worth quoting
“I can’t go to school no more. And I thought maybe you could help me.”
“Help you how? Tell me. Don’t be frightened.”
“My eyes.”
“What about your eyes?”
“I want them blue”
“Here was an ugly little girl asking for beauty A surge of love and understanding swept through him,….A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes.”(The Bluest Eye, 138)
In her desperate search of high sign value Pecola fails to understand that the world will not look any different with blue eyes, nor would she be any nearer to beautiful. Instead incongruent blue eyes on her black skin would render her grotesque into the bargain.

Notes

Le Système des objets (Paris: Gallimard, 1968); trans. as "The System of Objects" by Jacques Mourrain, in Mark Poster, ed., Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings (Stanford: 1988)

La Société de consommation: ses mythes, ses structures (Paris: Gallimard, 1970); trans. as "Consumer Society," in Mark Poster, ed., Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings (Stanford: 1988)

Works Cited

Baudrillard, Jean. For A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign . Trans. Charles Levin. St. Louis: Telos, 1972, 1981

Doshi, S.L. Modernity, Postmodernity and Neo-Sociological Theories. New Delhi: Rawat Publications, 2003

Kellner, Douglas, Baudrillard: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Limited, 1994

Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. London: Vintage, 1999