To be a consumer entails learning a specific set of cultural symbols and values. Modern consumerism depends upon a set of symbol becoming knowable and comprehensible to potential consumers.

To analyse this, it is necessary to explore how consumption have been conceptualised.

Traditionally, consumption has been see as either a material process, rooted in human biological needs, or as an ideal practice, rooted in symbols, signs, codes. Consumption is embedded within systems of signs and symbols, of making and maintaining distinctions, always establishing boundaries between groups.

Bourdieu analyses how various consumer goods, ways of presenting food and eating meals, home furnishings and interior decoration are used by socio-economic classes to mark themselves off, to differentiate their distinctive way of living.

His argument has two parts, describing two types of capital: economic and cultural.

• First part examines the way in which individuals invest in cultural (or intellectual) capital in order to obtain a position in the social hierarchy;
• Second part looks at how tastes and preferences depend on membership of social classes.

Business, entrepreneurial, management, commercial and financial groups emphasise economic capital. Such groups emulate aristocratic lifestyles; their way of life is flashy and lavish. The bourgeois class seeks to accumulate economic capital to preserve its power over society.

The education system generates another structure of capital, one which is based upon being able to talk and write about culture, to create new cultural products (e.g. academic texts, paintings, music). The longer an individual attends educational institutions, the more the individual acquires cultural capital. Like economic capital, individuals seek to accumulate capital so as to deny others access to power.

High cultural capital favours cultivated and abstract pleasures rather than immediate and direct pleasures of the body. It rejects overt display of wealth and consumption in favour of subtle, inconspicuous form of display and consumption.

High cultural capital is relatively rare, and this rarity needs to be protected. If the group’s exclusive objects, qualifications and cultural practices begin to become accessible to other groups then they will have to be changed to retain their distinctiveness.

Consumption can be see as a set of social and cultural practices that serve as a way of establishing differences between social groups, not merely as a way of expressing differences. Lifestyle is an outcome of both economic and cultural capitals.

The middle class aims at respectability and picking up cues from higher class about how and what to consume. The working class is more interested in trying to pursue direct and immediate pleasures.

Bourdieu emphasises that positions in social structure do not produce political unified groups and practices (cp. Marx). They may do, but if and when this occurs it a result of separate activity (e.g. political mobilisation).

The role of education in establishing the link between social status and consumption is important. The capacity to make aesthetic judgement is learnt, acquired, developed and cultivated in educational settings. Education becomes the transmission of culture. The wealthy send their children to acquire aesthetic knowledge. Petite bourgeois class send its children to become teachers.

Importantly, intellectuals and artists, whose tastes and definitions of what matters in culture differ from those of the industrial class, struggle to define and identify cultural capital. Further, both classes struggle to prioritise its own capital in the hierarchy of social hierarchy.

All consumption is always in part the consumption of symbolic signs. Consumption is a matter of cultural signs and the relations between signs. In order to become an object of consumption, it has to become a sign. It is the relation between signs that enables difference to be established. It is difference from others that is one of the main ‘uses’ of consumption. People seek to establish that they have more ‘tastes’ than others.

These signs, or symbols, do not express an already pre-existing set of meanings for a person or a group/class. The meanings are generated within the system of signs/symbols that engage the attention of a consumer. The consumer is always actively creating a sense of identity. Consumption is an active process involving the symbolic construction of sense of both collective and individual identity.

For Baudrillard, we become that which what we buy makes us. The sphere of the symbolic has become primary in modern capitalism; the ‘image’ is more important than the satisfaction of material needs. In other words, ‘I shop therefore I am’.

Consumption is a total idealist practice. This means that it is ideas that are being consumed, not objects. Because it is an idealist practice there can be no final physical satisfaction. We are fated to continue to desire consumer goods and consumer experiences.