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••• William Merrin •••

in his major work Symbolic Exchange and Death ([1976] 1993b). It is this trajectory,
therefore, that we need to first consider, as the critique of consumption and of polit-
ical economy and its model offered in these texts represents one of Baudrillard’s most
important contributions to cultural theory. It can be seen to comprise five related ele-
ments: (1) the semiological analysis of consumption; (2) the theory of the symbolic;
(3) the critique of political economy; (4) the social logic of consumption as a mode
of social integration and control; and (5) the positioning of the symbolic as an exter-
nal and oppositional force.
Baudrillard’s semiological analysis of consumer society, developed first in The
System of Objects, drew upon Barthes’ semiology which had taken up Saussure’s claim
that his own linguistic theories could be used to study the wider life of signs in soci-
ety (Saussure, 1986). Barthes applied them accordingly to the post-war world of
goods, objects and messages to understand these as signs within a system of mean-
ing generated in their collective, structural inter-relationships and individual, inter-
nal structural relationships, including their second-order cultural connotation, or
‘myth’ (Barthes, 1973a). Following Barthes, Baudrillard sees the system of objects of
consumer society as organized as a semiotic system but his analysis is less systematic
than Barthes’ (in 1973b; 1990), placing more emphasis upon the human relationship
with the object world (Baudrillard, 1996a: 40).
For Baudrillard, consumption is a contemporary phenomenon, its modernity aris-
ing not from its increased volume but from its organization as a system of signs
governed by a code of signification (ibid.: 200). Consumption, therefore, is not a
physical process – the act of buying an object – but rather an idealistic one, in which
it is the idea and the meaning of the object, message, image, or product that is
desired, taken and employed for one’s own benefit. It is ‘an activity consisting of the
systematic manipulation of signs’ (ibid.: 200), of the manipulation and appropriation
of their ‘signified’ (ibid.: 203). If this consumption has come to represent ‘a defining
mode of our industrial civilisation’ (ibid.: 199), then our western societies are
founded on a prior and on-going process of semioticization – on the transformation
of the object and all relations, history, culture, communication, and meaning into an
organized system of signs to be combined and consumed in their difference. Against
the contemporary sign Baudrillard contrasts ‘traditional symbolic objects’, which, as
‘the mediators of a real relationship or a directly experienced situation’ bear the ‘clear
imprint’ of that relationship, remaining ‘living objects’ in being bound to human
activity (ibid.: 200). Signs originate with the end of this symbolic relationship, reduc-
ing it to simple semiotic elements which, combined in the sign, derive their social
meaning now from their ‘abstract and systematic relationship to all other sign
objects’ (ibid.: 200). For Baudrillard, therefore, the defining historical characteristic
of western society is its semiotic elimination and transformation of symbolic rela-
tionships, a process affecting the entire mode of human experience, meaning and
activity as all relations become relations of consumption – relations with and ulti-
mately, between, signs.
One of the strengths of Baudrillard’s work is the number and depth of the exam-
ples employed to illustrate these semiotic processes. In The System of Objects, for
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