We shall examine the assumption that consumption is a meaningful activity.

We do not eat simply to reproduce ourselves physically. In fact, all consumption is cultural. This signifies several things.

• All consumption is cultural because it always involves meaning: in order to ‘have a need’ and act on it, we must be able to interpret experiences and situations.
• Cultural meanings are necessarily shared meanings: individual preferences are formed within cultures – we draw on languages, values, rituals, habits, and so on.
• Consumption is articulated within specific meaningful ways of life: no one eats ‘food’ – they eat apples and biscuits; no one just eats – they eat for lunch and picnic.
• It is through culturally specific forms of consumption that we produce and reproduce cultures, social relations and indeed society. Individuals act out their membership to a group, and reproduce social relations (e.g. through family meals).

The idea that consumption is cultural can take two forms – weak and strong.

• Culture is an addition to consumption. The consumer culture is the product of affluence, rather than of capitalism. Once basic needs are satisfied, the meaningful or cultural aspect of consumption comes to predominate.
• A stronger argument, culture does not ‘influence’ consumption or give forms to basic needs, but rather culture constitutes the needs, objects and practices that make up consumption. Culture represents the fact that all social life is meaningful and that needs and uses can arise only within a particular way of life.

If all consumption is culturally meaningful, then no object can be simply functional. From this point of view, the difference between consumer culture and other modes of provisioning is not a difference between regimes that produce meaningful objects and regimes that produce rational or functional objects. But rather the difference is one between different systems for defining, producing, distributing and organising meaningful needs and good and their relations.

In what ways are needs, things and uses organised or constituted through social meanings? The most influential answer has been semiotics.

Roland Barthes provides a methodology for examining objects in relation to the wider universe of meanings. Take an example, a bottle of Coca-Cola, which can refer to a particular kinds of drink in relation to other items in a drink code, such as other soft drinks, alcohol, hot drinks. So that the word ‘Coca-Cola’ can signify a sweet, black liquid. Yet, this sign can also act as a signifier within another system of signification, in which the world is divided into national cultures and the kinds of values they represent (‘Coca-Cola’ signifies American commercial dominance, whereas ‘Perrier’ mineral water signifies European elite culture and ‘Vinap’ drinks indigenous local cultures).

Borrowing from Judith Williamson, we take another example of how signs are formed: advertisements for perfumes. In the advertisements, a bottle of (smelly) liquid is placed along aside a female model’s face. The connection is made in terms of what the model’s face means: within the conventional codes and constructions of femininity, the model stands for classical, elegant, (white European/French) ideal of female beauty. These meanings are transferred to the bottle of perfume so that the bottle comes to signify (and indeed promise of) this kind of beauty, this style of femininity.

Note that Barthes and Williamson are not concerned with how signification helps to sell things. Rather their interest is in how the selling of things promotes the social hold of ideology. Coca-Cola (magically) seems to possess the values of American cultural imperialism. Perfume (mystically) seems to have the property of femininity. Such significations turn cultural (and arbitrary) categories into seemingly natural elements of the material world. In a sense this aspect of semiotics provides an account of the mechanics of commodity fetishism: how, through signification, relations between people can appear as a relation between things.

However, semiotics does not provide social explanations. It answers the ‘how’ questions of sign system but it does not answer the ‘why’ questions. Why does Coca-Cola (and not jazz and blues) signify American imperialism and perfumes (and not evening stars) femininity? To provide a social explanation, we need to connect the sign system to social structures, like capitalism, patriarchy and racism.

We can point out several limitations of the semiotic approach:

• it does not answer the why questions, only details how associations are made
• semioticians fail to examine the actual social practices – ‘uses of things’
• semiotic accounts can look highly deterministic (this is partly countered by post-structuralism that produces wildly different readings of contradictory and ambiguous structures of meanings)
• semiotics – in structural and post-structural forms - produces descriptions of the social organisation of meaning within the text (bracketing both social agency and historical process) as if they are social facts

The central problem in looking at the ‘meaning of things’ in consumer culture is how to maintain the position that all consumption is cultural (to avoiding naturalising needs and things) without allowing culture to become an abstract idea (autonomous sign systems divorced from social practice and history).

For Barthes, the function of an object is just another meaning and therefore can be analysed in terms of semiotic systems rather than social practices. To take an example, a ‘fur-coat’ can be described as an object to protect from the cold, however, semioticians really know that it serves to distinguish wealthy women from their status competitors. The function of the fur coat (i.e. to protect from the cold) is merely an ‘alibi’, of making something as culturally arbitrary as a status symbol appear to have a natural and rational function (protection), and one that is motivated by reality. Barthes argues that ‘function therefore mythologises’; it is ideological.

Barthes’s final position seems to be that the function of an object can be entirely reduced to ideology. Baudrillard carries this argument further, that we now consume only signs rather than things. Goods make sense not in terms of their functions but rather as ‘sign-values’, which are semiotically linked into systems of meaning: aesthetic, functional, etc. Baudrillard attacks liberals’ conception of consumption (human needs and functional objects). However, both Barthes and Baudrillard ignore social practices, uses.