As often noted (for example, Miller, 1987),
this argument is not a million miles away from
much of Bourdieu’s (1984), in which battles to
legitimate particular criteria and hierarchies of
cultural value and taste are central to the exercise
of power, not only in culture but also in economy.
While the complexity of this argument, in parti-
cular Bourdieu’s account of transactions between
different systems for signifying status (e.g. cultural,
social and economic capital), obviously goes way
beyond Veblen, he still pays little attention to the
content of consumption, which is valued not in its
own right but, again, only as a token of status
difference. There are two aspects of Bourdieu’s
work, however, that transform this way of look-
ing at consumption. Firstly, in contrast to Veblen
(as well as Durkheimian-derived analysts such as
Douglas), cultural consumption is treated as part
of the constitutionof class and power difference,
not merely as reflecting or reproducing exist-
ing class structures that are rooted entirely in
economic structures. Secondly, Bourdieu’s notion
of habitus attempts to map out the interface
between structure and agency: instead of actors as
conscious manipulators of signs, or as manipu-
lated by them, habitus addresses the way in which
actors internalize – bodily and through experience- patterns of acting within their objective social
position. In both respects, consumption is treated
as a serious and relatively autonomous aspect of
social reproduction.
A far more extreme version of this line of
thought is to be found in Baudrillard (1970;
1981). For Baudrillard, as for Veblen and much
of Bourdieu, the crucial aspect of consumption is
the object as sign and hence as a marker of social
distinction. In Baudrillard’s (1981) critique of
Veblen (which applies to Bourdieu), ‘function’
itself becomes just another sign rather than an
external reference point, the location of the
object’s authenticity. We might want to signify
functionality through the design of, say, the
kitchen appliances we choose, but this itself is a
mark of a ‘modern style’ (or perhaps of an anti-
consumerist politics): it distinguishes us from
others through our choices within a system of
signs. Ultimately what we are really buying into
in any act of consumption is not the object and its
uses but rather the overall system of representa-
tions and our position in the matrix of differ-
ences it maps out and signals to others. However
what is radical in Baudrillard is that along with
function he discards any objectivity to which the
system of signs might refer, including the struc-
tures of social distinction themselves. The
triumph of the sign through consumer capitalism
is a triumph over all reality: the code dominates
production and generates contemporary material
reality, and it overwhelms all social status.
Hence, it produces a ‘hyperreal’, a domain of
exhaustive experience and meaning that substi-
tutes for what has previously been identified as
‘the social’ and indeed accounts for the ‘death of
the social’ itself (Baudrillard, 1983; 1994).
Baudrillard moves along this route by translat-
ing the notion of social distinction into the lan-
guage of semiotics, discussed above. Baudrillard
takes on the semiotic methodology and takes it
very literally: goods as linguistic terms are com-
pletely detached from their referents, their value
being determined internally to the code. At the
same time, Baudrillard understands this
approach not only as a methodological move but
also as a historical development, what increas-
ingly comes to be thought of as ‘the postmod-
ern’. He himself produces a very grand narrative
of the progressive eclipse first of reference (in
the form of the object’s use value), then of
sociality (exchange value), finally resulting in
the dominance of sign value over social reality,
such as it is. Baudrillard’s own stance can be
interpreted to fit well within older traditions of
mass culture critique (to which he was directly
related through the Marxism of Lefebvre and the
Situationists). His work points to the complete
dominance of a totalistic ‘spectacle’ which can
only be countered through a nihilistic embrace
on the part of ‘the masses’.
In fact, the overall development of consump-
tion studies has been in completely the opposite
direction from Baudrillard, whatever it might
owe him rhetorically or methodologically,
towards an optimistic postmodernism (Hebdige,
1988) which treats the increasing commodity
‘aestheticization of everyday life’ (Featherstone,
1991), fragmentation of identity and apparently
decreasing relevance of older social divisions as
the opportunity to treat consumer culture as a
kind of ironic and hedonistic playground. Bauman
(1990) and Maffesoli (1996), for example,
emphasize the ‘neotribalism’ of a consumer
culture in which densely meaningful goods are
like costumes in which people dress up in order to
enact their current elective, but flexible, social
memberships and allegiances. The very profusion
and motility of signs – which in Baudrillard points
to nihilism – has more generally been taken
to suggest the opening of a space for consumer cre-
ativity (Willis, 1990) or resistance and rebellion
(de Certeau, 1984; Fiske, 1989). Consumption is
an always active process of assimilation, hence
also one that is unpredictable and undetermined.CULTURES OF CONSUMPTION 1553029-ch07.qxd 03-10-02 10:46 AM Page 155