analyses of consumption as an aspect of cultural
reproduction. Firstly, the various schools of
semiotics, drawing on the model of structural
linguistics, provided a methodology for treating
all objects as signs within a social circula-
tion of meaning, and ones capable of bearing
significations that were irreducible to the
functionality of, or instrumental orientation
towards, goods. The exemplary analysis is still
Barthes’ Mythologies(1986), which involved a
virtuoso reading of mundane objects and events
(French wine, landscapes or wrestling matches)
in relation to ideological structures of meaning.
Objects both bore and reproduced deep structural
ways of seeing the world. Objects and their rep-
resentation (for example in advertising) are able
to take on second-order meanings – connotations- which arefundamentally ideological and there-
fore mystify the consumer’s identity and position
within social relations. In a famous example, a
pasta product can come to signify nationality (Ital-
ianness) within a system of ethnic significations
that have no proper grounding in the materiality or
use of the object (Barthes, 1977). This approach
has had huge influence in cultural studies of con-
sumption,becoming one of its two most conven-
tional methodologies (the other being
ethnography) (Cook, 1992; Dyer, 1982; Leiss et
al., 1986; Myers,1999; Williamson, 1978). Con-
sumer culture can be read as a complex text and
site of ideological work. Later developments of
this approach – roughly poststructuralist – have
emphasized the fluidity, ambivalence and unpre-
dictability of these structures of meaning and of
the values given to objects within them, hence
foregrounding both creativity and contestation
(for example, de Certeau, 1984; Fiske, 1989) in
the way consumers deploy consumption acts and
objects.
Secondly, in the tradition of material culture
studies within anthropology, function is only one
aspect of the meaning of goods (and indeed one
that is only really analytically separated out by
western observers). Goods and their uses reflect,
communicate and are instrumental in reproduc-
ing cosmologies. As Mary Douglas writes:
‘Forget that commodities are good for eating,
clothing and shelter; forget their usefulness and
try instead the idea that commodities are good
for thinking; treat them as a nonverbal medium
for the human creative faculty’ (Douglas and
Isherwood, 1979). In Douglas’ work, consump-
tion goods and rituals make up a social informa-
tion system through which schemes of social
classification are deployed and controlled.
Douglas is particularly concerned to demonstrate
that consumption systems are, in effect, complete
‘cosmologies’, they order an entire moral
universe: ‘The choice between pounding and
grinding [coffee] is ... a choice between two dif-
ferent views of the human condition’ (1979: 74).
Such a perspective also makes perfect sense to
any author working within a framework of
objectification derived from Marx or Simmel
(see, above all, Miller, 1987). Objectification
suggests that the relation of need between the
individual and the object world is an essentially
dialectical one of constant mutual transformation
through praxis. Modern consumer culture is one
aspect of the monumental development of pro-
ductive, transformative forces under capitalism,
which is simultaneously a world-historical trans-
formation and development of human need, or –
to use Simmel’s terminology – a massive develop-
ment of objective culture, which subjective
culture struggles hard to assimilate.
Finally, we might point to the tradition of
cultural studies, in many respects a development
of both semiotics and of the anthropological
notion of culture as the meaningful patterning of
a whole way of life. However, cultural studies has
always had a populist and spectacular dimension –
exemplified in studies of subculture and popular
expressive forms – that regards consumer goods
as sites for the articulation of contradiction and
opposition: for example, the punk’s transfor-
mation of black bin-liners into enactments of
working-class, urban nihilism. Cultural studies
emerged from a heavily structuralist phase
(emphasizing ideological determination of
meaning), as well as a fixation on the specta-
cular and oppositional (rather than on mundane
or conformist) consumption. However, over the
past 15 years, it has increasingly recognized that
all consumption involves creative symbolic
labour. Willis (1990), for example, focuses on
how people make sense of – and therefore make
differentsense of – objects in the act of assimilat-
ing them. Consumption is therefore always an
active cultural process; at the same time, it is
clear that capitalism has delivered into the hands
of ordinary people a massive cultural resource
for the making of meaning, a huge site of
‘common culture’.Status, identity and meaningIf consumption is always cultural, what – if any-
thing – has changed in the contemporary social
landscape? In what sense might consumption
and commercial culture have become moreCULTURES OF CONSUMPTION 1533029-ch07.qxd 03-10-02 10:46 AM Page 153