Codes, Control, Consumption
Here is a useful quote from Jean Baudrillard’s Le Système des objets:
“Objects are categories of objects which tyrannically induce categories of persons. They undertake the policing of social meanings, and the significations they engender are controlled. Their proliferation, simultaneously arbitrary and coherent, is the best vehicle for a social order, equally arbitrary and coherent, to materialize itself under the sign of affluence.”
We do not consume the usefulness of an object but its meaning, its social signification. Furthermore because these objects signify social categories, they in turn categorize (or socialize) their owners according to a social logic that is “arbitrary and coherent”. The information I receive about a person from their possessions tells me about that person’s social standing: status, gender, social mobility, wealth; it is a vague shorthand revealing how they fit into the social order of consumption. Commodities are often markers of social aspiration to remind ourselves and others.
Question: how are objects and social categories “arbitrary and coherent”? In the sense that Saussure said language was arbitrary and coherent? Arbitrary because there is no natural (as opposed to conventional) reason say a Rolex watch should signify wealth, status and success or upward mobility. These meanings are constructed from elements such as the price of the watch, its design, its marketing in the media. Coherent because these objects are embedded in a code: these meanings can be read, they are intelligible. Baudrillard gives the most complex and persuasive argument for the “manipulationist” school of the semiotics of objects. Social meanings are “policed” and “controlled” so that in the process a certain social order (capitalist) is reproduced through the control of the code and the object’s sign-value or signification.
The word “tyrannically” illustrates how Baudrillard views these categories of objects (and consumption in general) as social control. Baudrillard, writing this book from a Marxist perspective, views the logic of this order of commodity-signs as a triumph of capitalism in its struggle to impose a cultural and symbolic order compatible with capitalism and the mass production of commodities.
These objects and their meanings are imposed from above through advertising, marketing, design, market research and more i.e. the code. They are regulative agents in the economic and cultural domain. A quote related to the one above:
“In the field of connotations the object takes on the value of a sign. In this way a washing machine serves as a piece of equipment and plays as an element of comfort, or, of prestige, etc. It is the field of play that is specifically the field of consumption. Here all sorts of objects can be substituted for the washing machine as the signifying element. In the logic of signs, as in the logic of symbols, objects are no longer tied to a function or to a defined need. This is precisely because objects respond to something different, either to a social logic, or to a logic of desire, where they serve as a fluid and unconscious field of signification.”
Social logic is an interesting term here. It is a system composed of paradigmatic and syntagmatic elements that punctuate social relationships. For example we need to think about the rules governing commodities and their exchange. Exchange here not only denotes economic exchange but exchange as communication so that commodities can signify status, hierarchy and social aspirations. Thus we never communicate individual information with commodities but group information. Commodities communicate social standing as difference to ourselves and to others; it is by communicating social meanings to others and their recognition of that meaning that we see our own meanings.
Commodities materialize immaterial classifications like status and social standing and stem their inevitable drift. Because the use of commodities is no longer tied to defined needs their ability to signify connotations becomes infinite and connects to a logic of desire. Historically capitalist production outstripped the range of human needs and recognized the necessity for an ever expanding mode of consumption if consumption was to keep pace with production. The logic of desire opens up a more flexible system which follows not the fulfillment of individual need but the competition and rivalry of conspicuous consumption. Consumers under the logic of desire play with commodity connotations in a social field composed of competition and difference. However Baudrillard suggests that the logic of the commodity-sign is increasingly displacing all the other social logics. It is the “semiological reduction” that is reducing the symbolic. Baudrillard has a very specific definition of the symbolic; it is the object as it is exchanged in ritual or traditional contexts. For example a wedding ring is a good current example. This object must be this specific object and no other. In anthropological literature it is the objects and context of the potlatch and the kula. The symbolic use of objects and consumption is strictly opposed to the commodity-sign which is abstract and interchangeable. A Rolex or a BMW or an Armani suit can signify success or status. Any commodity sign will do in capitalist exchange as long as it follows semiotic codes,
“an object specified by its trademark, charged with differential connotations of status, prestige and fashion. This is the object of consumption. This object does not assume meaning either in a symbolic relation with the subject (the Object of ritual, gift, potlatch) or an operational relation to the world (object -as-implement): it finds meaning with other objects, in difference, according to a hierarchical code of significations.”
Baudrillard argues that the meaning of these signs and codes of consumption are imposed primarily by advertising, marketing and the media, therefore he goes on to develop a theory of media. In these schema the organization of the structure of commodity-signs originate from the external agencies of advertising and the media. Along these lines any political tactic based on a redemption of consumption such as “green” or earth-friendly consumption or “simple living” is destined to be co-opted because it merely mirrors the social logic of the capitalist system; it puts into play another social code that produces signification and categories whatever the intended economic or ecological goals. The system of objects merely recuperates the alternative modes of consumption into the dominant form leaving one with the illusion of choice when it is really all consumption of signs. Alternative modes of consumption that seek to provide a way out of capitalism end up producing commodities as signs, consumption as the production of social control.
Great post. I am just starting to write a paper on governmentality of sustainable food consumption (taking a bit more Foucauldian perspective) but Baudrillard is of key importance. What do you think, to what extent has semiotics been absorbed into discourse analysis?
Hello Michal. Thanks for your comment.
Your paper sounds intriguing. I would add food is one of the most heavily encoded aspects of consumer culture.
I am not sure what you mean by semiotics being absorbed by discourse analysis. If I remember correctly Foucault always denied any relation to structuralism or semiotics. I think when Baudrillard uses the term “code” in his work on consumption it seems to be very close to the notion of discourse. I would add that semiotics proper via Saussure seems to be more concerned with “langue” and texts and Foucault’s “discourse” encompasses all sorts of institutional and discursive practices. Maybe it’s more of an overlapping than absorption. I know this answer does not do justice to your thoughtful question.