Love and the Market

“Do things mean anything?” Considering that an object of consumption is inserted into a universe of signs and signifying practices, Barthes’s question determines the conditions for the existence of that object and its semiotic challenges. Studies on consumption have long favored a semantic approach based on the study of networks of meaning attached to the object, regardless of its consumption environment. Hence, the importance of the phenomenon of semanticization of objects, that is to say, the possibility for objects to become signs (which to Baudrillard is the conditio sine qua non of an object of consumption) and to signify beyond their use-value. The main virtue of a semantics of objects is to make known, for objects of consumption (like all objects) — in addition to their denotative and functional value — a connotative function related to their propensity to signify beyond their strictly utilitarian values. However, this semantic approach, though crucial to studying the role of objects in our consumer society, is not the only possible semiotic field of study for goods. Have not the instrumental and symbolic dimensions traditionally attached to an object in Western culture usually buried other alternatives of consistency and meaning of the object — alternatives which sometimes have tended to resurface, as if by error, in everyday life?