Thanks for your interest. Its too long, so I’ll reply them each separately.
Baudrillard’s implication is the former; for clarity:
“The goal of the economy is not the maximization of production for the individual, but the maximization of production linked in with the value system of the society’ (Parsons). Needs are directed not so much towards objects as towards values, and their satisfaction initially has the sense of signing up to those values. The fundamental, unconscious, automatic choice of the consumer is to accept the style of life of a particular society (it is, therefore, no longer a choice(!) and the theory of the autonomy and sovereignty of the consumer is refuted).”[The Consumer Society]
It is no longer labour per se, but Values that are now exchanged.
“Beyond stacking, which is the most rudimentary yet cogent form of abundance, objects are organized in packages or collections. Almost all the shops selling clothing or household appliances offer a range of differentiated objects, evoking, echoing and offsetting one another. The antique dealer’s window provides the aristocratic, luxury version of these sets of objects, which evoke not so much a superabundance of substance as a gamut of select and complementary objects presented for the consumer to choose among, but presented also to create in him a psychological chain reaction, as he peruses them, inventories them and grasps them as a total category. Few objects today are offered alone, without a context of objects which `speaks’ them. And this changes the consumer’s relation to the object: he no longer relates to a particular object in its specific utility, but to a set of objects in its total signification. Washing machine, refrigerator and dishwasher taken together have a different meaning from the one each has individually as an appliance. The shop-window, the advertisement, the manufacturer and the brand name, which here plays a crucial role, impose a coherent, collective vision, as though they were an almost indissociable totality, a series. This is, then, no longer a sequence of mere objects, but a chain of signifiers, in so far as all of these signify one another reciprocally as part of a more complex super-object, drawing the consumer into a series of more complex motivations. It is evident that objects are never offered for consumption in absolute disorder. They may, in certain cases, imitate disorder the better to seduce, but they are always arranged to mark out directive paths, to orientate the purchasing impulse towards networks of objects in order to captivate that impulse and bring it, in keeping with its own logic, to the highest degree of commitment, to the limits of its economic potential. Clothing, machines and toiletries thus constitute object pathways, which establish inertial constraints in the consumer: he will move logically from one object to another. He will be caught up in a calculus of objects, and this is something quite different from the frenzy of buying and acquisitiveness to which the simple profusion of commodities gives rise.”[The Consumer Society]
"One of the strongest proofs that the principle and finality of consumption is not enjoyment or pleasure is that that is now something which is forced upon us, something institutionalized, not as a right or a pleasure, but as the duty of the citizen.
The puritan regarded himself, his own person, as a business to be made to prosper for the greater glory of God. Hispersonal' qualities, his
character’, which he spent his life producing, were for him a capital to be invested opportunely, to be managed without speculation or waste. Conversely, but in the same way, consumerist man [I’hommeconsommateur] regards enjoyment as an obligation; he sees himself as an enjoyment and satisfaction business. He sees it as his duty to be happy, loving, adulating/adulated, charming/charmed, participative, euphoric and dynamic. This is the principle of maximizing existence by multiplying contacts and relationships, by intense use of signs and objects, by systematic exploitation of all the potentialities of enjoyment.There is no question for the consumer, for the modern citizen, of evading this enforced happiness and enjoyment, which is the equivalent in the new ethics of the traditional imperative to labour and produce. Modern man spends less and less of his life in production within work and more and more of it in the production and continual innovation of his own needs and well-being. He must constantly see to it that all his potentialities, all his consumer capacities are mobilized. If he forgets to do so, he will be gently and insistently reminded that he has no right not to be happy. It is not, then, true that he is passive. He is engaged in – has to engage in – continual activity. If not, he would run the risk of being content with what he has and becoming asocial.
You have to try everything, for consumerist man is haunted by the fear of
missing' something, some form of enjoyment or other. You never know whether a particular encounter, a particular experience (Christmas in the Canaries, eel in whisky, the Prado, LSD, Japanese-style love-making) will not elicit some
sensation’. It is no longer desire, or eventaste', or a specific inclination that are at stake, but a generalized curiosity, driven by a vague sense of unease -- it is the
fun morality’ or the imperative to enjoy oneself, to exploit to the full one’s potential for thrills, pleasure or gratification.Consumption is social labour. The consumer is required and mobilized as worker at this level too (perhaps as much today as he is at the level of
production'). The ideological force of the notion of happiness does not originate in a natural propensity on the part of each individual to realize that happiness for himself. It derives, socio-historically, from the fact that the myth of happiness is the one which, in modern societies, takes up and comes to embody the myth of Equality. All the political and sociological virulence with which that myth has been charged since the industrial revolution and the revolutions of the nineteenth century has been transferred to Happiness. The fact that Happiness initially has that signification and that ideological function has important consequences for its content: to be the vehicle of the egalitarian myth. Happiness has to be measurable. It has to be a well-being measurable in terms of objects and signs; it has to be
comfort’, as Tocqueville put it, already noting this trend of democratic societies towards ever more well-being as a reduction of the impact of social misfortune and an equalization of all destinies. Happiness as total or inner enjoyment – that happiness independent of the signs which could manifest it to others and to those around us, the happiness which has no need of evidence – is therefore excluded from the outset from the consumer ideal in which happiness is, first and foremost, the demand for equality (or distinction, of course) and must, accordingly, always signify withregard' to visible criteria. In this sense, Happiness is even further removed from any collective
feast’ or exaltation since, fuelled by an egalitarian exigency, it is based on individualistic principles, fortified by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen which explicitly recognize the right to Happiness of everyone (of each individual)." [The Consumer Society]
In sum, what I call Performance Ontology of HM, when values become detached and what is being produced is the subject-who-values as per codes, signs, valences reinforced by the system through this production of the code-consuming subject:
[quote=“Baudrillard”]
“So far as production is concerned, it is no longer the Earth that produces, or labour that creates wealth (the famous betrothal of Earth and Labour): rather, it is Capital that makes the Earth and Labour produce. Work is no longer an action, it is an operation. Communication is operational or it is nothing. Information is operational or it is nothing.” [The Transparency of Evil]