Chapter One Sign-Function And Class Logic

I. Social Function of the Sign-Object

The Empiricist Hypothesis: Needs and Use Value

An analysis of the social logic which regulates the practice [23] (pratique) of objects according to diverse classes or categories [24] cannot help but be at the same time a critical analysis of the ideology of "consumption" that today underlies all practice relative to objects. This double analysis -- that of the distinctive social function of objects and of the political function of the ideology that is attached to it -- must be based upon an absolute precondition: the surpassing of a spontaneous vision of objects in terms of needs and the hypothesis of the priority of their use value.

This hypothesis, which is supported by lived evidence, assigns a functional status to objects, an instrumentality bound up with tech¬nical operations upon the world, and by the same token posits a mediating status for the "natural" anthropological needs of the individual. From this perspective objects are primarily a function of needs and take on their meaning in the economic relation of man to the environment.

This empiricist hypothesis is false. Far from the primary status of the object being a pragmatic one which would subsequently come to overdetermine a social value of the sign, it is the sign exchange value (valeur d'echange signe) which is fundamental -- use value is often no more than a practical guarantee (or even a rationalization pure and simple). Such, in its paradoxical form, is the only correct sociological hypothesis. Below their concrete visibility (évidence),
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needs and functions basically describe only an abstract level, a manifest discourse of objects, in regard to which the largely unconscious social discourse appears fundamental. An accurate theory of objects will not be established upon a theory of needs and their satisfaction, but upon a theory of social prestations [25] and signification.

Symbolic Exchange: the "Kula" and the "Potlatch"

Alluding to primitive societies is undoubtedly dangerous -- it is nonetheless necessary to recall that originally the consumption of goods (alimentary or sumptuary) does not answer to an individual economy of needs but is a social function of prestige and hierarchical distribution. It does not derive primarily from vital necessity or from "natural law," but rather from a cultural constraint. In summary, it is an institution. Goods and objects must necessarily be produced and exchanged (sometimes in the form of violent destruction) in order that the social hierarchy be manifest. Among the Trobriand Islanders (Malinowski) the distinction between economic function and sign function (signification = fonction/signe) is radical: there are two classes of objects upon which two parallel systems are articulated -- the Kula, a system of symbolic exchange founded upon the circulation, the progressive presentation (le don en chaîne) of bracelets, collars, finery, etc. , about which a social system of values and status is organized -- and the Gimwali, the commerce of primary goods.

In our societies this segregation has disappeared (with exceptions: dowries, gifts, etc. ). Yet behind all the superstructures of purchase, market, and private property, there is always the mechanism of social prestation which must be recognized in our choice, our accumulation, our manipulation and our consumption of objects. This mechanism of discrimination and prestige is at the very basis of the system of values and of integration into the hierarchical order of society. The Kula and the Potlatch have disappeared, but not their principle, which we will retain as the basis of a sociological theory of objects -- and this is undoubtedly all the more true to the extent that objects multiply and differentiate themselves. The fundamental conceptual hypothesis for a sociological analysis of "consumption" is not use value, the relation to needs, but symbolic exchange values, [26]
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the value of social prestation, of rivalry and, at the limit, of class discriminants.

Conspicuous Consumption

The echo of this primordial function of objects is found enlarged in the notion of conspicuous waste (ostentatious prodigality, honorific consumption or expenditure) in the analysis of Thorstein Veblen. [27] Veblen shows that even if the primary function of the subservient classes is working and producing, they simultaneously have the function (and when they are kept unemployed, it is their only function) of displaying the standing of the Master. Women, the "people, " servants are thus the exhibitors of status. These categories also consume, but in the name of the Master (vicarious consumption); their indolence and their superfluousness testify to his wealth and grandeur. Thus their function is no more economic than that of the objects in the Kula or the Potlatch, but is one of institution or preservation of a hierarchical order of values. From this perspective Veblen analyzes the condition of women in patriarchal society: just as the slave is not fed in order that he eat, but in order that he work, so one does not dress a woman luxuriously in order that she be beautiful, but in order that her luxury testify to the legitimacy or the social privilege of her master (such is also the case of "culture" which often functions for women as a social attribute: in the leisure classes especially, the culture of women is part of the group patrimony). This notion of vicarious consumption is crucial: it leads us back to the fundamental theorem of consumption, which is that the latter has nothing to do with personal enjoyment (although the woman is pleased to be beautiful), but that rather it is a restrictive social institution that determines behavior before even being considered in the consciousness of the social actors.

Going further, it may lead us to consider consumption, not as it presents itself -- as generalized individual gratification -- but as a social destiny affecting certain groups or social classes rather than others, or as opposed to others. If today, in modern democratic society, there no longer exist categories devoted de jure to prestigious, vicarious consumption, it might be asked whether behind the apparent social generalization of the process there are not classes devoted in fact to these mechanisms of prodigality -- and which in that way re-establish the timeless function of the institution of value and social discrimination which belonged to consumption in preindustrial society under the apparent total availability of individual behaviors.
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According to Veblen, one of the major indications of prestige, apart from wealth and wasteful expenditure (dilapidation), is waste of time, exercised directly or by proxy (vicarious leisure). The world of objects does not escape this rule, this constraint of superfluousness. It is always present in their uselessness, their futility, their super-fluousness, their decorativeness, and their non-functionality, in entire categories of objects (trinkets, gadgets, accessories) or for every object, in all its connotations and metabolism of forms, e. g. , in the game of fashion, etc. In short, objects never exhaust themselves in the function they serve, and in this excess of presence they take on their signification of prestige. They no longer "designate" the world, but rather the being and social rank of their possessor.

The Functional Simulacrum

Today, however, this constraint of leisure, of non-instrumentality as the source of values, collides so markedly everywhere with an antagonistic imperative, that the current status of the everyday object results from the conflict, or rather, compromise, between two opposed moralities: an aristocratic morality of "otium" and a puritan work ethic. In fact, when one makes the object's function into its immanent rationale, one largely forgets to what degree this functional value is itself controlled by a social morality that no more wants the object to be unemployed than the individual. It must dedicate itself to "laboring" to "functioning" and to excusing itself, democratically so to speak, for its previous aristocratic status as a pure sign of prestige. This bygone status, founded upon ostentation and expenditure, is always present, but while clearly imprinted upon the effects of fashion and décor, it is most often doubled -- to a variable degree -- by a functional discourse that can serve as alibi for the function of invidious distinction. Thus objects lead a perpetual game which in fact results from a moral conflict, from a dis¬parity of social imperatives: the functional object pretends to be decorative, it disguises itself with non-utility or with transvestite fashion --the futile and indolent object is charged with a practical reason. [28] At the limit is the gadget: pure gratuitousness under a cover of functionality, pure waste under cover of an ethic of practicality. In any case, all objects, even futile ones, are objects of labor: housekeeping, organizing, tinkering, repairing -- everywhere homo faber is the double of homo otiosus. More generally, we would be dealing with (and this not only in the world of objects) a functional simulacrum
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(make-believe), behind which objects would continue to enact their role of social discriminants. In yet another manner of speaking, objects are caught in the fundamental compromise [29] of having to signify, that is, of having to confer social meaning and prestige in the mode of otium and the game (an aristocratic and archaic mode with which the hedonist ideology of consumption tries to reestablish ties) and of having incidentally to submit to the powerful consensus of the democratic morality of effort, of doing and of merit.

One can imagine a state of society where this would result in two disjointed classes of objects: prestige/use or sign exchange value/use value -- a disjunction bound to a strong hierarchical integration (a primitive society or ritual and caste). Once again, in our societies this most often results in an ambivalence on the level of each object.

It is important to read social obligation, the ethos of "conspicuous" consumption (direct or vicarious) [30] everywhere, beyond the practical evidence of objects and through the apparent spontaneity of behaviors, and so to grasp a permanent dimension of social hierarchy in the context of consumption, and today, in "standing, " a morality which is still imperative.

So, under this paradoxical determination, objects are not the locus of the satisfaction of needs, but of a symbolic labor, of a "production" in both senses of the term: pro-ducers -- they are fabricated, but they are also produced as a proof. They are the locus of consecration of an effort, of an uninterrupted performance, of a stress for achievement, aiming always at providing the continual and tangible proof of social value. They are a sort of secular Bewährung, probation, or prestation, which, under the inverse influences, is the heir of the principles that were the foundation of the Protestant ethic and which, according to Weber, motivated the capitalist spirit of production. The morality of consumption relays that of production, or is entangled with it in the same social logic of salvation.

2. Sociological Perspectives

Chapin: The Living-room Ladder

Various authors have tried to integrate objects as elements of a
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social logic. As a general rule, however, they have only a walk-on role in sociological research. For the analysts of "consumption, " objects are one of the preferred themes of the sociological para-literature, the alternative to advertising discourse. Nonetheless there is one systematic attempt to be noted, that of Chapin. [31] He defines status as "the position occupied by an individual or family according to the dominant standards of cultural goods, of net revenues, of material goods and of participation in group activities of the collectivity. " Thus he has four scales. Then it was realized that the four components were in such close relation with the independent measure of the living-room furniture that the latter alone was sufficient for the statistical measurement of class. This "living-room scale" involves twenty-three items, in which the various objects are inventoried and accounted (so also are certain aspects relating to the ensemble: cleanliness, order, maintenance). This first exploration towards sociological goals is thus characterized by the most naive empiricism: the social strata are simply indexed upon a balance-sheet of objects. Now, this procedure is not strictly valid (its conclusions are imprecise in any case) except in a society of relative penury where buying power alone clearly separates the classes. Nor is it really valid except for the extremes. Furthermore, such fixed correlations would be unable to contain either the logic or the dynamic of stratification.

Rhetorical and Syntactic Analysis of the Environment

Having said this, if Chapin's scale were based on a more subtle analysis which inventoried the quality of objects, their material, their form, their stylistic nuance, etc., it could still be of some use, for, not withstanding the objections made against Chapin, it is still not true that today everyone possesses virtually the same things. The study of models and series [32] shows a complex progression of differences and nuances, which means that the same category of objects (armchairs, shelving units, cars, etc.) can still reconstitute all the social disparities. But it is also clear that with the increase in standard of living, discrimination today has passed from possession, pure and simple, to the organization and the social usage (pratique) of objects. Thus a social classification must eventually be founded upon a more subtle semiology of the environment and of everyday practices. An analysis of interiors and of domestic spaces which was founded, not upon the inventory but upon the distribution of objects (centrality-eccentricity; symmetry-asymmetry; hierarchy-
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deviance; promiscuity-distance), upon formal or functional syntagma, in short, an analysis of the syntax of objects, which endeavoured to bring out the organizational constants with reference to the type of habitation and the social category, as well as the coherence or contradictions of the discourse, would be a preparatory level for an interpretation in terms of social logic (on the condition that this "horizontal" topoanalysis was accompanied by a "vertical" semiology that would explore the hierarchical scale of each category of objects from the series to the model through all the significant differences).

The problem then will be on the one hand to make a coherence emerge between the relative position of a given object, or ensemble of objects on the vertical scale, and on the other hand the type of organization of the context in which it is found and the type of practices connected with it. The hypothesis of coherence will not necessarily be justified: there are barbarisms, lapses not only in the formal discourse but in the social discourse of objects. It is not only a question then, of noting them in the structural analysis, but of interpreting them in terms of logic and of social contradictions.

In summary: to what may a sociological analysis in this domain look forward? If it is to bring out a specular [33] or mechanical relation between a given configuration of objects and a given position on the social scale, as Chapin does, it is devoid of interest. It is well known that objects tell a great deal about the social status of their owner, but there we have a vicious circle: in the objects, one identifies a social category which has, in the final analysis, already been described on the basis of these objects (among other criteria). The recurring induction hides a circular deduction. The specific social practice, and thus sociology's true object, cannot be brought out by this operation.

Strategic Analysis of the Practice of Objects

Undoubtedly, in a preliminary phase one can consider objects themselves and their summation as indices of social membership. But it is much more important to consider them, as regards their choice, organization and practice, as the scaffolding for a global structure of the environment, which is simultaneously an active structure of behavior. This structure, then, will no longer be directly bound to a more or less pre-assigned, pre-inventoried status, but analyzed as an [34]
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element of the social tactic of individuals and groups, as the living element of their aspirations, which in a larger structure may then coincide with other aspects of this social practice (professional trajectory, education of children, place of residence, network of relations, etc. ), but which may also be partly contradictory to them. [35]

What is evident in any case is that one can only speak of objects in terms other than themselves, in terms of social logic and strategy. Simultaneously, however, the analysis must be maintained upon a specific terrain, by determining what specific position is occupied by objects with respect to other systems of signs and what specific field of practices they constitute in the general structure of social behavior.

Is the Discourse of Objects Specific?

It seems that the norm of consumption attitudes is simultaneously distinction and conformity. [36] As a general rule it seems that there would be predominance of the membership group over the ideal reference group: one has "conformist" objects, peer objects. [37] But the problem remains posed: what is the specific position of objects (is there one?) with respect to this very general norm of consumption. attitudes (attitudes de consommation)? Is there an iso-functionality, a redundance of various systems of signs and behavior, relative to consumption? Clothes, objects, habitations, recreation, cultural activities? Or relative autonomy? Thus today the sectors of clothing, household appliances, automobiles, and apartments all obey norms of accelerated renewal, but each according to its own rhythm -- their relative obsolescence varying, moreover, depending on the social categories. But it may also be admitted that all other sectors together are opposed to "inhabiting" -- the latter, though integral in the general process, nevertheless constitute a specific function which cannot be assimilated, either brutally or ideally, into the other aspects of consumption and fashion. [38] Reducing all sectors of distinctive signs to a synchronic and univocal relationship with the position on the social scale (or with the trajectory) would undoubtedly liquidate a whole rich field of contrasts, of ambiguities and of disparities. In other words, is the social practice of objects
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specific? Is it through these objects, rather than through one's children, friends, clothing, that one indicates a demand for conformity, for security, or rather, what sort of ambition, and through what category of objects? For at the heart of the objects themselves, from one category to another, one can hypothesize their relative autonomy and that of their practice, in the context of social attitudes. In apartments one often notices that from the point of view of status the configuration of the ensemble is not homogeneous -- rarely are all objects of a single interior on the same wave-length. Do not certain objects connote a social membership, a factual status, while others a presumed status, a level of aspirations? Are there "unrealistic" objects, that is to say those which falsely register a contradiction of the real status, desperately testifying to an inaccessible standing (all else remaining equal, they are analogous to "escapist" behavior or to the utopian behaviors characteristic of critical phases gof acculturation)? Conversely, are there witness-objects that, despite a mobile status, attest a fidelity to the original class and a tenacious acculturation?

The Formal Code and Social Practice

Thus there is never a place for listing an inventory of objects and the social significances (significations) attached to them: a code in such a case would hardly be more valuable than a "clef des songes. " It is certain that objects are the carriers of indexed social significations, of a social and cultural hierarchy -- and this in the very least of their details: form, material, colors, durability, arrangement in space -- in short, it is certain that they constitute a code. But precisely for that reason there is every occasion to think that far from following the injunctions of this code undeviatingly, individuals and groups use it to their advantage, together with its imperative and distinctive repertory of objects, as is the case with any other institutional or moral code. That is to say, they use it in their own way: they play with it, they break its rules, they speak it with their class dialect.

This discourse must then be read in its class grammar, in its class inflections, in the contradictions with its own social situation which the individual or group directs through its discourse of objects. A correct sociological analysis must be exercised in the concrete syntax of object ensembles (equivalent to a story and liable to interpretation in terms of social destiny, just like the story of a dream in terms of unconscious conflicts) and in the lapses, incoherencies and contradictions of this discourse, which is never reconciled with itself (possible only in an ideally stable society -- a near impossibility in our societies). On the contrary, this discourse always expresses in this
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very syntax a neurosis of mobility, of inertia or of social regression. And finally, the object of sociological analysis lies in the ultimately disparate or contradictory relationship of this discourse of objects to other social conducts (professional, economic, cultural). That is to say that it must avoid a "phenomenological" reading (the "pictures" of objects brought back to characteristics or social types), and the merely formal reconstitution of a code of objects, which is never spoken as such in any case (although it hides a strict social logic), but is always restored and manipulated according to a logic peculiar to each social situation.

Thus objects, their syntax, and their rhetoric refer to social objectives and to a social logic. They speak to us not so much of the user and of technical practices, as of social pretension and resignation, of social mobility and inertia, of acculturation and enculturation, of stratification and of social classification. Through objects, each individual and each group searches out his-her place in an order, all the while trying to jostle this order according to a personal trajectory. Through objects a stratified society speaks [39] and, if like the mass media, objects seem to speak to everyone (there are no longer by right any caste objects), it is in order to keep everyone in a certain place. In short, under the rubric of objects, under the seal of private property, it is always a continual social process of value which leads the way. And everywhere and always, objects, in addition to utensils, are the terms and the avowal of the social process of value.

3. The Differential Practice of Objects

For all these reasons, because social stratification, mobility and aspirations are the keys to a sociological investigation of the "world" of objects, we would prefer to focus on the configuration of these latter in the rising, mobile, or "advanceable" classes that have a critical and uncertain status, in the so-called middle classes, the floating hinge of a stratified society, classes on the way to integration or acculturation, that is to say, which escape the destiny of social exclusion of the industrial proletariat or that of rural isolation, without however enjoying the advantage of inheriting an already acquired social situation. What interests us is the practice (and the psychological aspects ratifying it) that objects play in these social categories.

Mobility and Social Inertia

It is known that an essential problem in these mobile strata is the disparity between intentional mobility (aspirations) and real mobility (objective chances of social promotion). It is known also that these
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aspirations are not free, that they are a function of social inheritance and acquired position. [40] Past a certain threshold of mobility they do not even exist: there is absolute resignation. As a general rule they are relatively unrealistic: much more is hoped than it is possible to attain -- and relatively realistic: the ambitious imagination is not given free rein (except in pathological cases). This complex psychological image itself rests upon the social actors' implicit interpretation of the objective sociological data. Industrial societies offer chances of mobility to the middle classes, but relative chances; in all but exceptional cases, the trajectory is short, social inertia is strong, and regression is always possible. Under these conditions it seems that:

-- the motivation to ascend the social scale translates the interiorization of the norms and general schemes of a society of growth;

-- but excessive aspirations in relation to real possibilities translate the disequilibrium, the profound contradiction of a society in which the "democratic" ideology of social progress often comes to compensate and overdetermine the relative inertia of social mechanisms. In other words, individuals hope because they "know" they can hope -- they do not hope too much because they "know" that in fact this society opposes unconquerable barriers to free ascent -- they hope however a little too much because they also live by a diffuse ideology of mobility and growth. Thus the level of their aspirations results exactly from a compromise between a realism nourished on facts and an unrealism sustained by an ambient ideology -- a compromise which in turn reflects the internal contradiction of global society.

Now this compromise which the social actors realize in their future projects and in those respecting their children is first expressed in their objects.

Domestic Order and Public Verdict

Here we must raise a possible objection, which is that private property would create a special jurisdiction for objects which would absolutely distinguish the conduct relative to these private objects from all other conduct regulated by social constraints. "Private" and "social" are not mutually exclusive except in the everyday imagination, and if objects are apparently part of the domestic order, still we have seen that their meaning is only clarified by their relationship to the social constraint of conformity and mobility. More profoundly, the jurisdiction of the system of social values is immanent
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in the domestic order. The private relationship hides a profound recognition and acceptance of the public verdict. At bottom individuals know themselves (if they do not feel themselves), to be judged by their objects, to be judged according to their objects, and each at bottom submits to this judgment, though it be by disavowal. Here it is a question of more than the imperative of conformity issuing from a limited group, or that of upward mobility issuing from global society: it is a question of an order in which each group or individual can only come to locate itself in the very movement which makes it exist socially. In the "private," in the "domestic" sphere (and so also in the environment of objects) in which the individual lives as a refuge zone, as an autonomous field of needs and satisfactions, below or beyond social constraints, the individual nevertheless always continues to evince or to claim a legitimacy and to assure it by signs. In the least of behaviors, through the least of objects, he or she translates the immanence of a jurisdiction which in appearance is rejected.

Ambiguous Rhetoric -- Triumph and Resignation

Now, for the categories that interest us, this verdict is never positive: their progress on the social scale is always relative and often ludicrous. Above all, legitimacy, that is to say, the possibility of establishing their acquired situation as an intrinsic value, escapes them. It is this thwarted legitimacy (with respect to cultural, political, and professional life) which makes the middle classes invest in the private universe, in private property and the accumulation of objects with a dedication all the more fierce, autonomizing it all by default in trying to celebrate a victory, a true social recognition which escapes them.

That is what gives objects in this "milieu" a fundamentally ambiguous status: behind their triumph as signs of social promotion they secretly proclaim (or avow) social defeat. Their proliferation, their "stylization," their organization is anchored there in a rhetoric which, in the terms of P. Bourdieu, is quite fittingly a "rhetoric of despair."

The way in which objects present themselves to vision and wish to forestall the objections of value, the way in which they submit to the latent jurisdiction of social hierarchies, all the while repudiating them -- this whole discourse of objects, which constitutes the lived drama of private property -- also represents asocialpassion and feeds social emotionalism (le pathétique). Let us not forget that, mutatis mutandis the exhibition of the harvest, piled in heaps in their gardens by the Trobriand Islanders is always a provocation, a
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competition, a challenge. But it is also a rite, destined to evince an order of values, a rule of the game, in order to be integrated by it. In the Potlatch, it is the insolent destruction of objects and wealth which is "the proof." In the private consumption and property which we know, and which are apparently established upon the individual order, this antagonistic social aspect of prestation seems to be exorcised, resolved. But such is not the case at all; it may even be that the processes of a society of "consumption" powerfully reactivate this function of objects as "displays of antagonism" (exposants antagoniques). In any case, something of these primitive practices still haunts contemporary objects and always makes their presence vehement, powerfully expressive, never neutral.

Stylistic Modalities

On the level of objects this "rhetoric of despair" is indicated by various stylistic modalities. They all derive from a logic (and an aesthetic) of simulation, a simulation of the bourgeois models of domestic organization. On the other hand, it must be pointed out that the reference models are not the contemporary upper classes insofar as these classes are part of a greater fiction. The reference model of the "mobile" classes is the traditional bourgeois order as it has been recognized since the Empire and Restoration, and which is itself an adaptation of earlier aristocratic models.

This "petty bourgeois" rhetorical order is governed by two essential modes: on the one hand, saturation and redundance; on the other, symmetry and hierarchy. Obviously there are numerous overlappings (thus symmetry is also redundancy, but it includes centrality). Nonetheless the two modes are quite distinct, the one (saturation-redundancy) expressing the inorganic, the other (symmetry-hierarchy) expressing the organic structure of this order. Let us point out that these modes of organization are not bound in essence to the bourgeois or the petty bourgeois order: they derive also from a more general anthropological or aesthetic analysis. But here they only interest us in a social definition, as the specific rhetoric of a given social category.

With respect to saturation, one knows that the bourgeois house is closed upon itself and full like an egg. Inheritance and accumulation are the signs of "status" and of ease. Along the same line, the petty bourgeois interior is indicated by congestion. True, it often lacks space but this shortage of space in turn gives rise to a compensating reaction: the less space one has, the more one accumulates (a little like the criterion of quantitative memory which is active in radio games in the absence of any "noble" cultural motivations).
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Sometimes, on the other hand, it is certain rooms, certain corners of the house that are "full." What would have to be understood, then, is rather the various aspects of a play upon the full and the empty, a logistic which makes certain places into reserves, hoardings, or storehouses -- formerly the attic and the cellar had an analogous role. A house or a room can thus be analyzed topographically, according to whether it displays stockpiling pure and simple, or aggregates of objects, residual and partial syntagma or syntactic conceptions of the ensemble. To reiterate, this method is uninteresting if it is not taken up again in a social logic: in the gamut from accumulation, despite penury, to planned architecture, each class has its modes of organization.

The Tactic of the Pot and Its Saucer

Here we consider redundancy, the whole baroque and theatrical covering of domestic property. The table is covered with a table cloth which itself is protected by a plastic table cloth. Drapes and double drapes are at the windows. We have carpets, slipcovers, coasters, wainscoting, lampshades. Each trinket sits on a doily, each flower in its pot, and each pot in its saucer. Everything is protected and surrounded. Even in the garden each cluster is encircled with wire- netting, each path is outlined by bricks, mosaics or flagstones. This could be analyzed as an anxious compulsion to sequestration, as an obsessional symbolism: the obsession of the cottage owner and small capitalist is not merely to possess, but to underline what he possesses two or three times. There, as other places, the unconscious speaks in the redundancy of signs, in their connotations and their overworking (surcharge).

But something else speaks there as well and it is important to draw other conclusions:

(1)The overworking of signs of possession, which here act as demonstration, can be analyzed as not only the intention to possess, but to show how wel1 [41] one possesses. Now this demonstration, this over- determination. "of style" is always relative to the group: it not only has the psychological function of reassuring the owner of his possession, but also the sociological function of affiliating him with the whole class of individuals who possess in the same way. Thus the very signs of privacy act as signs of social adherence. Through this or that symbolic behavior (comportement), it is still the cultural imperative of class which speaks (this of course has nothing to do with political class consciousness).
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(2) On that basis it is interesting to refer the simultaneously anxious and triumphant character of the conduct of possession to the specific position of the middle class(es) on the social trajectory. How is it to be defined? It is a class which has gone far enough to interiorize the models of social success, but not far enough to avoid simultaneously interiorizing the defeat. It is distinguished from the proletariat by the connotation of what it possesses, by the over-valuing of its relative position, by excess. But at the same time it is distinguished from the upper classes by default, by emphasizing the limits of what it has attained and by the implicit consciousness that this is all it will ever be able to attain. Hence the double movement of triumph and resignation in this dark line, encircling all its objects as if to frame them and to ennoble them, the ensemble of which is a laborious challenge to inaccessible forms of possession. In a stratified society the middle class has been subjected to a compromise; this compromise is its true social class destiny and it is this sociologically definable compromise that is reflected in the simultaneously resigned and victorious ritual with which it surrounds its objects.

The "Taste" for the Bygone (l'Ancien) [42]

One can thus do a whole psychology or even psychoanalysis of bygone objects (obsession with authenticity, mystique of the past, of origins, "symbolic" density and other more or less conscious lived aspects). But what concerns us is the distinctive social function, which is indissociable on all levels from the lived psychological "substance" of the bygone.

The bygone object derives from the cultural baroque. Its "aesthetic" value is always a derived value: in it the stigmata of industrial production and primary functions are eliminated. For all these reasons the taste for the bygone is characterized by the desire to transcend the dimension of economic success, to consecrate a social success or a privileged position in a redundant, culturalized, symbolic sign. The bygone is, among other things, social success that seeks a legitimacy, a heredity, a "noble" sanction.

It will thus be characteristic of the privileged classes for whom it is important to transmute their economic status into inherited grace. But it is quite as characteristic of the salaried middle strata who also
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wish to consecrate their relative status as an absolute promotion (in relation to the lower classes) via the purchase of rustic furniture (mass-produced, but so what?). It will also be characteristic of the marginal sectors -- intellectual and artistic -- where a taste for the bygone will instead translate the refusal (or ashamed affiliation) of economic status and of the social dimension, a will to situate themselves outside all classes and in order to do so, a digging about in the stockpile of signs which are emblematic of a past prior to industrial production. [43]

Thus there would be no interest in noting a certain class with Haute Epoque, another with Industrial Rustic, yet another with authentic 18th-century peasant furniture, in order to build up a social stratification in terms of taste. This would still only reflect cultural constraints and laws of the market. The important thing is to see the specific social postulate expressed by the taste for the bygone at each level. From which social class is one being demarcated? What social position is being sanctioned? What class or class model is being aspired to? Beyond descriptive relations which simply expose a social level and a type of object or behaviors (conduites), one must perceive a cultural logic of mobility. [44]

Varnish and Lacquer

Other aspects come to confirm this cultural class compromise at the level of environment. There is a triumph of conditioning, of envelopment by an all-powerful puritan morality, of ritual hygiene; the triumph of varnish, polish, veneer, plating, wax, encaustic, lacquer, glaze, glass, plastic. It is a whole ethic of protection, care and cleanliness which converges with the disciplinary ritual of framing that we have already discussed (concentric circles and property: shutters, drapes, double drapes, wainscoting, plinths, wallpaper, table cloths, doilies, bedspreads, blotters). It is of the same order as the symmetrical arrangements, where things are duplicated in order to be reflected: yet another redundancy. An
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object does not exist literally unless it is thus repeated in itself, and if one can read the fundamental equation of property in this specular redundancy: A is A. The economic principle is sanctioned by symbolic appropriation (mirrors and looking-glasses): it is the formal logic of the "(petty) bourgeois" [45] environment. Of course this formal ordering has ideological value: as a Euclidean and Aristotelian logic, it tends to conjure social development into an order, to abolish its contradiction in a tautological ritual.

Symmetry (together with hygiene and morality) is the "spontaneous" middle class representation of culture. The game with asymmetry only consecrates this representation.

The Moral Fanaticism of Housekeeping

In this perspective, polish and varnish (like framing and symmetry) are the exaltation of a "trivial" cultural mode which is not that of beauty and ornamentation but the moral one of cleanliness and correction. The objects here are entirely equivalent to children in whom one must first instill good manners, who must be "civilized" by submitting them to the formal imperatives of politeness. Now, that is a class compromise: an obsession with the impeccable, a fanatic housekeeping, corresponds to the demand to surpass the strict necessity of use towards an appearance -- an imperative of cultural promotion. But given the very strong work and merit ethos, this appearance cannot have an allure of gratuitousness or of pure prodigality. It will thus be the object of a continual doing, of a laborious domestic ritual, of a daily domestic sacrifice. The varnished object is satisfying for a vast socio-cultural category because it appears as the synthesis of a conspicuous morality, summarizing the two imperatives of the prestation of prestige (sign exchange value) and of the prestation of merit (productivity and use value), inconsistently on the formal level but according to a closely knit social logic.

This cultural status of the object enters into direct contradiction with its practical status. The housekeeping consciousness deactivates this contradiction in every way: "The varnished object is more beautiful; it lasts longer," and at the limit of the paradox: "The waxed, plasticized object stands up better; it requires less effort," when this solicitude is precisely that of effort, having the effect of making objects fragile and complicating their manipulation. In fact, housekeeping has only secondarily a practical objective (keeping objects ready for use): it is a manipulation of another order -- symbolic
[p. 46]
-- that sometimes totally eclipses practical use (silverware that has to be regularly polished without ever appearing on the table). If the immense work of housewives (children and objects) never appears in the national accounts, it is undoubtedly because these accounts are too abstract to take into consideration anything other than formal social revenue production. But it is also because, in its profound intention, this labor does not emerge from an economic calculus but from a symbolic and statutory calculus dictated by the relative social class configurations. [46]

On the other hand, beyond the ethic of accomplishment that has just been analyzed, there is a true pathos in this fiercely dedicated solicitude: unlike the concrete use one has for objects and which is always defined (by their function), this solicitude is unlimited -- it nourishes and devours itself according to the processes of an unhappy consciousness. In its perfectionist formalism it mimics art for art's sake precisely because it is neither true labor nor culture. It is a rhetoric, an outbidding of the signs of civilization, cut off from their cultural finality. It is the rhetoric of domestic salvation and not a rational domestic economy. Triumphant and suffering, unchangeable in its dogma and its ritual, alienated in its meaning, it is the veritable culture of everydayness.

The Prestige of the "Natural"

The logic of cultural differentiation is going to impose negation at a privileged level, the disavowal of these values of polish and varnish, of care in favor of the values of "frankness" (franchise), and of the "natural": the raw, matte, savage and neglected. This "frankness" of the object sanctioned by taste has nothing "natural" about it. On the contrary, it is deduced from lower-class devotion to the artificial, to the baroque affectation of decorum, to the moral values of the veiled, the clothed, the cared for, the preened, to the moral values of effort. Here "preparation" is a cultural fault. Propriety (repressive conditioning) and manners in the matter of objects, which in another age were the cultural signs of the bourgeoisie, are stigmatized as the distinctive marks of the petty bourgeois classes who have outfitted themselves with them. The essential function of the values of "sincerity," "authenticity," "starkness," -- inner walls of bare concrete, unfinished timbers -- is thus a function of discrimination (distinction), and their definition is first social.

Here again one is rationalizing, but less in terms of immediate practicality ("it is more practical," "that washes better") than in
[p. 47]
terms of secondary functions ("direct contact," "warmer atmosphere"), and especially in terms of functional aesthetics ("abolition of decor," "truth of the object," "promotion of form," etc.). One allows it to be understood that, according to a continuous progress, objects would obey an internal aesthetic logic which would ultimately lead them to appear in their "truth," in the harmonious synthesis of their function and their form. This is the fundamental theory of design. [47] Now the hypothesis of a progressive advancement from model to model toward an ideal state of the environment -- a hypothesis which secretly rests upon the representation of technological progress -- implies a whole ideology, for it masks the social function of formal innovation, which is a function of cultural discrimination. Formal innovation materialized in objects does not have an ideal world of objects as its goal but rather, a social ideal, that of the privileged classes, which is the perpetual reassertion of their cultural privilege.

Formal Innovation and Social Discrimination

The priority of this social function of discrimination over the "aesthetic" function is visible in fashion, where at any moment the most aesthetically aberrant and arbitrary forms may be reactivated simply for the purpose of providing distinctive signs for a material which is always new.

So, theparadigmatic oppositions --varnished-matte, enveloped-stark, polished-rough -- are not only the instruments of a semiological analysis of the world of objects, but are also social discriminants, characteristics which are not only formally distinct but socially distinctive. Of course their contextual value is relative, because the bareness of a wall may sometimes indicate poverty, unrefined misery, and other times evince a "savage" luxury.

To explain it another way, that which, at the level of a rational logic of models, is given as "universal," as completed beauty, as absolute truth of form and function, has at bottom no truth other than the relative and ephemeral one of its position in the social logic it imposes. This "universal" is still nothing more than a particular sign, an exhibitor of class. The effect of "beauty," of "naturalness," of "functionality" (in the ideal sense of functionalism) is registered in this class relationship and cannot be dissociated from it.

At a later stage, aesthetic privilege is no longer attached to varnish or rawness but to the liberty of freely combining all the terms: the lacquered coffer close beside the rough wood or smooth marble
[p. 48]
together with naked concrete. [48] At this avant-garde level, the exclusiveness, which pledged the petty bourgeois to artificial luster and the cultivated to "natural" starkness, is apparently lifted, so that here everything is salvaged, all combinations are possible. But once again, that which at the level of form appears to be a surpassing towards a universal position, takes on its true value in an inverse social signification: the universal term (synthesis of difference) once again becomes an effective factor of discrimination because only a few elect will be able to accede to this stage of the aesthetic combinatory. The others find themselves relegated to the moral manipulation of domestic objects. With respect to objects and their calculus (as other places), the universal once again is the title of nobility held by a specific category.

The aesthetic calculus is always submerged in social logic. In order to avoid taking this ideological process into account, designers exhaust themselves in popularizing audacious, "rational" "functional" forms, being all the while surprised that these forms do not spontaneously seduce the mass public. Yet behind their pious litany (educating public taste), these "popular" creators direct their unconscious strategy: beautiful, stylized, modern objects are subtly created (despite all reversed good faith) in order not to be understood by the majority -- at least not straight away. Their social function is first to be distinctive signs, to be objects which will distinguish those who distinguish them. Others will not even see them. [49]
[p. 49]

The Flux and Reflux of Distinctive Signs

This contradiction between rational economic logic and cultural class logic affects another essential aspect of objects: their status in time, their cycle of erosion and renewal.

The diverse categories of objects have a variable longevity: residence, furniture, electrical appliances, TV, linens, clothing, gadgets, wear out at different rates. But two distinct variables play upon the whole span of objects in calculating their lifetime and durability: one is their real rate of wearing out, registered in their technical structure and their material; the other, the value they take on as patrimony or inversely, the accelerated obsolescence due to fashion. What is important for us here is this second value and its relation to the respective situation of groups in a stratified and mobile industrial society. How does a given group distinguish itself by a more or less strong adhesion to the ephemeral or to the durable? What are the various responses of different groups on the social scale to fashion's demands for accelerated renewal of objects?

In effect fashion does not reflect a natural need of change: the pleasure of changing clothes, objects, cars, comes to sanction the constraints of another order psychologically, constraints of social differentiation and prestige. The effects of fashion only appear in socially mobile societies (and beyond a certain threshold of available money). Ascending or descending social status must be registered in the continual flux and reflux of distinctive signs. A given class is not lastingly assigned to a given category of objects (or to a given style of clothing): on the contrary, all classes are assigned to change, all assume the necessity of fashion as a value, just as they participate (more or less) in the universal imperative of social mobility. In other words, since objects play the role of exhibitors of social status, and since this status has become potentially mobile, the objects will always simultaneously give evidence not only of an acquired situation this they have always done), but also of the potential mobility of this social status as such objects are registered in the distinctive cycle of fashion.

One might think that on account of their material presence, objects first have the function of enduring, of registering social status "in solidity." [50] This was the case in traditional society, where hereditary décor was evidence of social accomplishment and, at the limit, of the social eternity of an acquired situation. Then the description and social semantics of the environment could be relatively simple. And in a sense it is always thus: at whatever social level one is situated, there is always the tendency to perpetuate an
[p. 50]
acquired situation in objects (and children). The objects with which one surrounds oneself first constitute a balance sheet, a testament (eventually resigned) to social destiny. On the other hand, they often appear to be symbolically framed and fixed on the wall, such as was once the case with school diplomas. A position and a destiny, thus the contrary of social mobility -- this is what objects first present. Chosen, bought and arranged, they are part of the completed fulfillment, not of ascending performance. They encircle with their ascriptive dimension. Even when (only too frequently) they outbid social success, even when they seem to take an option on the future, still, it is never through his objects that social man accomplishes himself or is mobile. He falls back upon them, and objects often translate, at the very most, his frustrated social aspirations.

This function of the inertia of objects that results in a durable, sometimes hereditary status, is combatted today by that of having to signify social change. As one is elevated on the social scale, objects multiply, diversify and are renewed. Their accelerated traffic (circulation) in the name of fashion quickly comes to signify and to present a social mobility that does not really exist. This is already the meaning of certain mechanisms of substitution: unable to change the apartment, one changes the car. It is even clearer that the accelerated renewal of objects often compensates a disappointed aspiration to cultural and social progress. This is what makes the "reading" of objects complex: sometimes their mobility reflects the rising standing of a given social category by signifying it positively; sometimes, on the contrary, it comes to compensate the social inertia of a certain group or individual whose disappointed and thwarted desire for mobility comes to register itself in the artificial mobility of decor.

Here the whole ideology of fashion is in question. The formal logic of fashion imposes an increased mobility on all the distinctive social signs. Does this formal mobility of signs correspond to a real mobility in social structures (professional, political, cultural)? Certainly not. Fashion -- and more broadly, consumption, which is inseparable from fashion -- masks a profound social inertia. It itself is a factor of social inertia, insofar as the demand for real social mobility frolics and loses itself in fashion, in the sudden and often cyclical changes of objects, clothes and ideas. And to the illusion of change is added the illusion of democracy (which is similar but under another aspect). The constraint of the transitoriness of fashion is claimed to eliminate the possibility of inheriting distinctive signs; it is reputed to return the whole world to a position of equal opportunities at each instant of
[p. 51]
the cycle. In the face of the demands of fashion all objects can be recalled: this would suffice to create the equality of all in the face of objects. Now, this is quite obviously false: fashion, like mass culture, speaks to all in order to better return each one to his place. It is one of those institutions that best restores cultural inequality and social discrimination, establishing it under the pretense of abolishing it. It wishes to be beyond social logic, a kind of second nature: in fact, it is entirely governed by the social strategy of class. "Modern" transitoriness of objects (and other signs) is in fact the luxury of heirs. [51]

The Luxury of the Ephemeral

Here we will go a little outside the domain of objects, towards architecture, to illustrate what has just been said about fashion and social class distinction. Architecture is in fact a domain where the opposition ephemeral-durable is very evident to the imagination.

For a certain architectural avant-garde, the truth of the dwelling of the future is in ephemeral construction, in detachable, variable and mobile structures. A mobile society ought to have a mobile dwelling. And it is undoubtedly true that this is inscribed in the economic and social demands of modernity. It is true that the social deficit represented today (and increasingly in the future) by hard and durable lot construction is colossal: it contradicts the economic rationality and that of social exchanges, and the irreversible tendency toward more social mobility, flexibility of infrastructures, etc. [52] But if for all these reasons ephemeral architecture must one day be the collective solution, for the moment it is the monopoly of a privileged fraction whose cultural and economic standing permits it to question the myth of durability.

It is because generations of the bourgeoisie were able to enjoy the fixed secular decor of property that their heirs today can give
[p. 52]
themselves the luxury of renouncing uncut stone and exalting the ephemeral: this fashion belongs to them. By contrast, consider all the generations of lower classes whose chances in the past of acceding to cultural models and at the same time to durable property were null. To what would one wish them to aspire if not also to live the bourgeois model and to establish a derisory dynasty in turn, for themselves and their children, in the concrete of apartments or the rough-hewn stone of suburban houses? How can one today require that these "advanceable" classes not deify real estate and that they first accept the ideal character of these mobile structures? They are dedicated to desiring that which lasts and this desire only translates their cultural class destiny.

Reciprocally, the cult of the ephemeral is ideologically connoted by the privilege of the avant-garde: according to the eternal logic of cultural distinction, a privileged fraction savors the instantaneous and mobile character of architectural structures at the moment when others just gain access to the square between their walls. Only the privileged classes have the right to the reality (actualité) of models. The others will have the right to them when these models have already changed.

So if the ephemeral represents the truth of modernity in the logic of forms, if it represents the "formula of the future" for a harmonious and rational society, its meaning in the present cultural system is quite different. If, in its logical foundation, culture acts upon two terms: ephemeral-durable, neither of which can be autonomized (architecture will always be a game moving from one to the other) -- in the cultural class system, on the contrary, this relation breaks out in two distinctive poles, one of which, the ephemeral, is autonomized as a superior cultural mode referring the other (the durable) to its obsolescence and to the aspirations of a naive majority. [53]

4. A Logic of Segregation

Those are only some elements of a logical analysis of social mechanisms that are articulated upon the distinctive function of objects (and of their practice). We base ourselves upon the tactical cultural elements of the middle class, opposing them to those of a privileged stratum. This is obviously an undue simplification, and a more penetrating analysis ought to tend towards establishing a more differentiated hierarchical classification, a more subtle stratification of the social pyramid.
[p. 53]

However, all efforts in this direction, in the direction of a logical analysis in terms of stratification, risk making us forget a fundamental truth, which is that the sociological analysis cannot be merely a logical analysis, but is also an ideological, or political, analysis. In other words, the distinguishing function (distinctive) of objects (as well as of other systems of signs relevant to consumption) is fundamentally registered within (or flows into) a discriminating function: thus the logical analysis (in tactical terms of stratification) must also open onto a political analysis (in terms of class strategy)

Before generalizing these conclusions at the level of consumption, we wish to show how, at a simpler level -- that of the very practice of the object -- these differences are far from punctuating a progressive social hierarchy, and result instead in a radical discrimination, in a de facto segregation that consecrates certain "classes" to certain signs and practices, and not others, guiding them in this vocation and destiny according to a whole social systematic. Then in consumption, in that dimension of generalized sign exchange, we will have a basis for seeing the locus of an intense political manipulation.

Objective Practice and Ritual Practice -- The TV Object

We will take television for an example, but from a particular viewpoint, that of the TV object. On an early level, the studies of television in fact deliver some truths respecting the various correlations between rates of possession and amount of listening, on the one hand, and, on the other, socio-professional categories, income and levels of education.

On a more involved level, the studies incline toward the mode of listening (family, collective, individual, mixed) and the quality of attention (fascinated, curious, diffuse, passive, selective, distracted, etc.), always in relation to broadly defined social categories. All these studies deal with the relation of the user to the televised message, to the TV discourse, that is, to the images as mass medium. They largely omit the dimension of the object itself, of the television set. Now it is obvious that before being the vehicle of images, a transmitter addressing a receiver, the TV is first a "set" sold by a manufacturer to an individual. It is an object, bought and possessed. Undoubtedly its status is never just that, at any level of the social scale, but this primary status secretly induces a great number of ambiguous cultural behaviors in image reception. In other words, the demand is divided between that of an object (producer of images) and that of images (vehicles of meaning). These two exigencies are logically incompatible, although practice inextricably confuses
[p. 54]
them. According to whether the TV is there as a TV object or as a means of communication, the TV discourse will itself be received as an object or as meaning. The object (sign) status is opposed to the objective (rational and practical) status. This distinction revives that of sign exchange value and use value. The whole social logic of culture is registered in this radical divergence. And it is the social theory of the sign-object that we wish to dwell on here, in the perspective of consumption.

The evidence according to which the television is bought for the purpose of cultural edification or for the simple pleasure of images (that is, as a function of a deliberated personal objective) is undoubtedly increasingly deceptive as one descends the social scale. More profoundly than interest or pleasure, which often merely ratify the social constraint, the index of conformity and prestige (and the term "index" must retain all its value as a moral injunction) is active, imposing the acquisition of the TV (like that of the refrigerator, car, or washing machine). As in John Stuart Mill, the possession of such and such an object is in itself a social service: as a certificate of citizenship the TV is a token of recognition, of integration, of social legitimacy. At this level of almost unconscious response it is the object that is in question, not its objective function -- and it no longer has an objective function, but a proof function. It is a social exhibitor and is given value as such: it is exposed and overexposed. This can be seen in middle (and lower) class interiors, where the TV is enthroned on a sort of pedestal, focusing attention on it as an object.

One will be less astonished by the "passivity" experienced by the average TV viewer with respect to the content of TV messages if one considers that implicitly all his social activity is concentrated upon the effort of economic accumulation and especially upon the effort of performance, upon the symbolic payment, as of a toll, constituted by the acquisition of the object itself. It is because according to a naive evaluation, the purchase is considered as a satisfaction, and thus as a passive procedure, that a cultural "activity" is subsequently required of the user. This may be valid for the educated upper classes, but the contrary is true at a lower level: all the activity is invested in the appropriation of the object as sign and token on the one hand, as capital on the other -- the use itself is then logically transformed into passive satisfaction, real usufruct, profit and benefit, and reward (récompense) for a completed social duty. Because the object has value conferred upon it as a token, it can only occasion a magical economy (cf. Mauss and the value of symbolic exchange). Because
[p. 55]
the object is considered as capital, it can only occasion a quantitative profitability (rentabilité); in neither case can it give rise to an autonomous cultural activity, which derives from another system of values.

Because it is a token, the appropriation of the object is not prolonged by a rational practice, but logically, by its continual demonstration according to a quasi-religious process of ostentation. Because it is capital, the object must be able to produce revenue. In our modern industrial societies the object is rarely a pure fetish; [54] in general, the technical imperative of functionality is imposed. It is necessary to witness objects that are operating, or which serve some purpose. This does not so much resemble an objective rationale as a supplementary mana: if it does not work, the object loses its prestige potential. Once again use value is fundamentally an alibi for sign exchange value. The thing must serve a purpose: revenue production is a moral imperative, not an economic function. Also, it is logically in these same social categories where the TV object is sanctified as such apart from its function as communication, that one indulges in systematic, non-selective viewing. The TV is watched every evening, the disparate and successive programs are followed from beginning to end. Lacking a rational economy of the object, one deliberately submits to an irrational and formal economic norm: the absolute amount of use in hours. The apparent passivity of long hours of viewing thus in fact hides a laborious patience. Lacking qualitative selection, it is expressed by quantitative devotion (as in game shows relying on rote memorization and chance). [55] But this norm is not admitted as such: to do so would be to confront autonomous, superior cultural activities (that is, those that are not made subservient to that latent imperative of revenue production) and to be disqualified in advance. It will thus be preferable to present it as pleasure, interest, "free" distraction; spontaneous decision. But this alleged pleasure is a challenge to the profound objection -- that of cultural inferiority -- which undoubtedly will never be formulated (save clandestinely in ritual recriminations: "They bore us with this stuff" or, "They always show the same things"
[p. 56]
-- simulacra indicating the superior cultural processes of judgment, selection, etc., by default).

"It must necessarily serve a purpose": thus for certain social categories this translates the uselessness of this object with respect to superior cultural ends. As concerns pleasure, it is the ritual rationalization of a procedure that does not wish to admit to itself that, through this object, it first obeys a social injunction of conformist ritual prestation. In summary, the quantification of viewing, linked to its "passivity," refers to a socio-economic imperative of revenue production, to the object as capital. But perhaps this "capitalization" still only comes to reinforce a more profound social constraint -- that of symbolic prestation, of legitimation, of social credence, of mana -- which attaches itself to the object as fetish.

All this outlines a cultural class configuration -- that of a class where the autonomous and rational ends of a culture freely exercised by the mediation of an object are not even suspected, and yet are contradictorily internalized. It is that of a resigned and accultured class whose demand for culture, following a relative social promotion, is conjured in objects and their worship or at least in a cultural compromise governed by the economic and magical constraints of the collectivity. It is the face and very definition of consumption.

Other indices come to be associated with those of the volume and mode of listening, according to the same class determination. Consider the physical situation of the TV object in the house. At the lower level, the most frequent configuration has the set isolated in a corner on a pedestal (table, TV stand, shelf), possibly covered by a dust cover and topped by a knick-knack, outside viewing hours; the room, which was hardly conceived traditionally for this use (radio still did not disturb any aspect of its arrangement), is redistributed more or less as a field of vision: the TV logically condemns high, massive furniture, hanging lamps, etc. But most of the time at this level the TV constitutes an eccentric pole opposing the traditional centrality of the room. At an intermediate level, the set is lowered (at the same time as the furniture) to the height of armchair vision. It is on a low table or built into a cabinet console. It is no longer a pole, and reception no longer demands a posture of collective devotion: the room is less centered and so the set is less eccentric. At the limit, in very modern interiors of high standing, there is an integration into other furnishings or into the wall, a total eclipse of the object as furniture. The TV object ceases to be the object of a rite
[p. 57]
(simultaneously the room is ventilated by independent spaces, luminous sources are concealed, etc.).

There are other significant aspects: ambient lighting -- according to whether one recreates the fascinating vision of cinema in the darkness or whether the light is merely veiled or normal. Also, there is the dimension of behavior; whether there is free movement, or no one moving at all. All these scales of indices can be correlated with that principal one of volume and selectivity of use, to outline a coherent structure for each level of the social scale. But (and for us this is the important point), the process of inquiry and the empirical correlations, however subtle they may be, will never give us the image of a stratified society. The studies will describe to us transitively that whole differential gamut from one category to the next, from sanctified ostentation to selective use, from domestic rite to autonomous cultural exercise, without ever marking the theoretical discrimination that opposes the ritual practices centered on the object to the rational practices centered on function and meaning. Only a theory of culture can account for this theoretical bifurcation on which an antagonistic social strategy is established. Empirical studies only make, and can only make, apparent a logic of stratification (distinction-inclusion-transition by plateaus -- a continuous ascent); theoretical analysis makes a class logic emerge (distinction-exclusion). There are those for whom TV is an object, there are those for whom it is a cultural exercise: on this radical opposition a cultural class privilege is established that is registered in an essential social privilege.

It is obvious that neither one of these two antagonistic cultural classes exists in its pure state: but the cultural class strategy does exist in the pure state. [56] The social reality (subject to empirical investigation) makes hierarchical dosages appear, respective statuses for each social "category." But the social logic (subject to a theoretical analysis of the cultural system) makes two opposed terms appear, not the two "poles" of an evolution, but the two exclusive terms of an opposition; and these are not only the two distinct terms of a formal opposition, but the two distinctive-exclusive terms of a social opposition.

The Democratic Alibi: The "Universe" of Consumption

Of course, this cultural class logic is never manifest: on the contrary, consumption presents itself as a democratic social
[p. 58]
function; in that way it can act as a class institution. It presents itself as a function of human needs, and thus as a universal empirical function. Objects, goods, services, all this "responds" to the universal motivations of the social and individual anthropos. On this basis one could even argue (the leitmotiv of the ideologues of consumption) that its function is to correct the social inequalities of a stratified society: confronting the hierarchy of power and social origin, there would be a democracy of leisure, of the expressway and the refrigerator.

The cultural class logic in bourgeois society is always rooted in the democratic alibi of universals. Religion was a universal. The humanist ideals of liberty and equality were universals. Today the universal takes on the absolute evidence of concreteness: today the universal is human needs, and all the cultural and material goods that respond. It is the universal of consumption.

This ambiguity of consumption -- that it seems to act as a factor of democratization in a society calling itself stratified, and this to function better as a class institution -- finds its most vivid illustration in the Reader's Digest Selection survey of "the consumers' Europe :" [57] "221,750,000 consumers (Common Market and Great Britain)." Out of this gigantic economic tableau, which includes essential, directly comparable statistics with respect to lifestyles, habits of consumption, opinions, attitudes and goods possessed by the inhabitants of seven countries, Piatier draws a certain number of perspectives: "Thanks to complementary statistical reductions it was possible to systematically isolate the responses of group A (upper groupings) and to compare them to the ensemble of other groups."

"It seems that for the Common Market and Great Britain one can speak of a civilization of A's, or to employ a more picturesque expression, of a civilization of white collars; these latter (and this is one of the most interesting results of the Selection study) appear to represent a homogeneous group crossing all borders."

"Thus according to this hypothesis, the inhabitants of the seven countries would have a common model of consumption: in the process of development of consumption, group A could constitute a sort of directing schema towards which the rest of the population would gravitate as its revenues increased."

The indices of the ensemble that divide group A (upper groupings, liberal professions, heads of industry and commerce) from group non-A are: luxury equipment (dishwasher, tape recorder, camera, etc.), luxury foods, comfortable living quarters and automobile,
[p. 59]
toiletries for women, basic household equipment (television, refrigerator, washing machine, etc.), cleaning products, everyday food, male toiletries and intellectual curiosity (voyages abroad, speaking a foreign language)!

So here it is a question of formalizing social realities (which are already deliberately simplified and reduced to formal indices of consumption) into an artificial scheme of stratification (A's and non-A's). The political, social, economic (structures of production and the market) and cultural -- all these aspects are volatilized. At the individual-massified level only the quantifiable remains, the statistical balance sheet of goods of consumption taken as the absolute indicators of social essence. [58] Thus an elite is revealed that is not a bearer of values nor of power, but of objects, of a panoply of deluxe gadgets in which the "idea" of Europe is registered materially beyond ideologies. The European ideal thus defined will permit the systematic orientation and sanctioning of the confused aspirations of consuming masses: to be European will consist in passing from the trinity of television, refrigerator and washing machine to the sublime trinity of sports car, stereo system and country house.

Now in fact behind this group of A's, this directing schema of the European ideal, rests a European reality, which is the more or less forced solidarity of the industrial and technical Western European bourgeoisies in global competition. But this common strategy, this political International is hidden here by an International of standing. This very real solidarity disguises itself in the formal solidarity of the consuming masses (so much the more formal in that its indices, the goods of consumption, are more "concrete"). The Europe of trusts adopts the mask of the Europe of cubic inch displacement, the living room and ice cream.

The A's and the Non-A's

In fact this schema of international stratification aims above all towards a political operation of national integration appropriate to each of the countries concerned, under the symbol of "Europe" -- and this not only by means of the bias of consumption but also by that of stratification. In fact, one could have schematized it into a complex model, but here the statistical craftiness is to schematize it into a simple and striking binary model: the group of A's and the Others, the non-A's. Thus, the old bogey of the duel between antagonistic classes is conjured away in a statistical dichotomy: there are still two terms, but they are no longer in conflict -- they change into the two poles of a social dynamic. The effect (and objective) of
[p. 60]
this tactical division is to neutralize the extremes and hence any contradiction that might result on the social level: there is a model-level (directing schema) and -- all the others. These latter, mixed in together by the statistics, no longer appear except as a population, an immense and virtual middle class that is already morally accultured to the displays of the privileged classes. No longer is there a radical distortion between the company president and ordinary salaried employees, because the latter, while statistically lost in the middle classes, see themselves with a "middle" standing and as having been promised that of the upper classes. From top to bottom of the scale, no one is inexorably cut off by distance. There are no more extremes, no more tension: the formal frontier between the A's and the non-A's is there only to better prime the aspiration toward the higher level and the illusion of a general regrouping to take place sooner or later in the paradise of A. For "Europe," it is clearly understood, can only be democratic.

The two groups are in formal opposition and virtual homogeneity: this stratification, simplified to the extreme, is the coronation of a statistically based integrating sociology. The whole logic of social contradiction is volatilized. This binary schema is a magic schema of integration: the arbitrary division of distinctive signs on the same scale allows the suggestion of an international model of distinction (the A's), all the while preserving an international model of democracy; the idea of Europe -- which is in fact quite simply that of the virtual homogenization of all social categories under the beneficent constellation of objects.

There is a double mystification. On the one hand, there is the illusion of a "dynamic" of consumption, of an ascending spiral of satisfactions and distinctions toward a paradoxical summit where all would enjoy the same prestigious standing. This false dynamic is in fact entirely permeated by the inertia of a social system that is immutable in its discrimination of real powers. On the other hand, there is an illusion of a "democracy" of consumption. On the balance sheet of objects, one can formally gather together widely separated social categories: the real discrimination is made at the level of selective practices (choice, taste, etc.) and above all, of more or less strong adherence to the very values of consumption. This last point requires commentary. [59]

The study clarifies the disparities appearing between A and non-A in certain sectors: equipment, luxury food, and intellectual curiosity(!). In other sectors the authors note (triumphantly) the weak
[p. 61]
disparity between lifestyles of A's and non-A's, marked in such indices as regular food, basic equipment and toiletries. The disparity is weakest in the richest countries: Germany, Great Britain and the Netherlands. In Great Britain the average consumption of male toiletries for non-A's is even superior to that of A's! The criterion of "goods consumed" is thus not decisive : the fundamental inequality is elsewhere. Even if the inequality escapes the study, and is made more subtle, [60] one must search beyond figures, statistics and the study itself, for what it does not wish to express, for what it wishes to hide. Its secret is that consumption, with its false social appearance, veils the true political strategy, and is thus one of the essential elements of this strategy.

A Slave Morality

A whole new conception of class strategy is organized around the possession of cultural and material goods. One only pretends to universalize the criteria and values of consumption in order to better assign the "irresponsible" classes (without the power of decision) to consumption and thus to preserve the exclusive access of the directing classes to their powers. The formal frontier traced by the statisticians between A's and non-A's is quite fundamentally a social barrier, but it does not separate those who enjoy a higher standing from those who will enjoy it later. It distinguishes those who are in addition privileged consumers, those for whom the prestige of consumption is in a way the usufruct of their fundamental privilege (cultural and political), from those who are consecrated to consumption, triumphantly resigning themselves to it as the very sign of their social relegation, those for whom consumption, the very profusion of goods and objects, marks the limit of their social chances, those for whom the demands for culture, social responsibility, and personal accomplishment are resolved into needs and absolved in the objects that satisfy them. In this perspective, which is not legible at the level of the apparent mechanisms, consumption and the values of consumption are defined as the very criterion of a new discrimination: adherence to these values acts as a new morality for the use of slaves.

One must wonder whether social salvation by consumption, whether prodigality and sumptuous expenditure (formerly the appendage of chiefs and notables) is not today conceded to the lower and middle classes. For this selective criterion has long ago given way as the foundation of power to the criteria of production,
[p. 62]
responsibility, and economic and political decision.

It must be asked whether certain classes are not consecrated to finding their salvation in objects, consecrated to a social destiny of consumption and thus assigned to a slave morality (enjoyment, immorality, irresponsibility) as opposed to a master morality (responsibility and power). Such are the heirs of the servile, subaltern classes, or of courtesans dedicated to paraphernalia.

In this sense it is absurd to speak of a consumer society as if consumption were a system of universal values appropriate to all men because of being founded upon the satisfaction of individual needs, when really it is an institution and a morality, and in this way an element of the strategy of power in any society, past or future.

Here sociology is most of the time both a dupe and an accomplice: it takes the ideology of consumption for consumption itself. Pretending to believe that objects and consumption (as formerly moral principles or religion) have the same meaning from top to bottom of the social scale, it accredits the universal myth of status and on this basis goes on sociologizing, pondering, stratifying and correlating things at statistics' whim.

Now what must be read and what one must know how to read in upper class superiority, in electric household equipment or in luxury food, is precisely not its advance on the scale of material benefits, but rather its absolute privilege, bound up in the fact that its preeminence is precisely not established in signs of prestige and abundance, but elsewhere, in the real spheres of decision, direction and political and economic power, in the manipulation of signs and of men. And this relegates the Others, the lower and middle classes, to phantasms of the promised land.

Chapter One: Sign-Function and Class Logic

Note from page [29]: 1. Appeared in Communications, No. 13 (1969).

Note from page [29]: 2. "Pratique, " with certain exceptions that should be clear to the reader and are often indicated by pratique in parentheses, has generally been translated "practice. " This distinguishes it from "praxis, " a term regularly used in Système des objects (Paris: Gallimard, 1968) but apparently later abandoned. Nevertheless, pratique does retain overtones of praxis and is not the same as usage in the simple utilitarian sense. Rather, it refers to a sort of operative mode, one of the various stances, or practical attitudes that may be reflected in one's use of objects. That there are various pratiques that may be focused simultaneously upon a single object should be made amply clear in the sections later in this chapter concerning the TV-object (see especially Ritual and Rational Practices). -- Translator's note.

Note from page [29]: 3. Baudrillard seems to use "cattgorie" for "classe" (especially catégorie sociale-classe sociale) more often than would be usual in English. We have, however, used category quite strictly as a translation of catégorie because the latter has become a common term in structuralist writing. We cite from Piaget, Le Structuralisme (PUF), pp. 24; 25: "Il s'agit de l'invention des `categories' (MacLane, Eilenberg, etc. ), c'est-à. dire dune classe d'fltments y compris les fonctions qu'ils comportent, donc accompagnee de morphismes. " A rough translation: "It involves the invention of `categories' (MacLane, Eilenberg, etc.), that is to say, a class of elements including the functions they bear with them, thus a class accompanied by morphisms. " -- Trans.

Note from page 30: 4. "Prestation" is rare in English or French. Baudrillard develops and uses it so extensively that it almost becomes a term. The sense is most succinctly expressed when he refers to "the mechanism of social prestation...a mechanism of discrimination and prestige. " The word indicates a feeling of obligation to an irrational code of social behavior. -- Trans.

Note from page 30: 5. It will later be made clear (cf. For a General Theory) that symbolic exchange is radically separate from all values. -- Trans.

Note from page 31: 6. Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class (Mentor, 1953).

Note from page 32: 7. Thus, in the centrally heated country villa, the peasant bed-warming pan disguises its anachronistic "folklore" character: it is said to be "useful in winter all the same. "

Note from page 33: 8. It is a contradiction in every logic, for the two systems of value are incompatible. Only the "functionalist" industrial aesthetic can imagine a harmonious reconciliation of function and form, because it is unaware of the social contradictions of its employment (exercise). Cf. below, Luxury and the Ephemeral.

Note from page 33: 9. Here it is not a question of individual vanity that wishes to possess more beautiful objects than others: the latter derives from psychological living, from the conscious relation of rivalry. The social goal of ostentation and all the social mechanism of value are largely unconscious, and are exercised by the subjects without their own knowledge. The conscious games of prestige and rivalry are only the refraction of these finalities and constraints in consciousness.

Note from page 34: 10. F. Stuart Chapin, Contemporary American Institutions (New York: Harper, 1935), Ch. XIX: A Measurement of Social Status. Cf. also Dennis Chapman, The Home and Social Status (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955).

Note from page 34: 11. Cf. Jean Baudrillard, Le Système des objects.

Note from page 35: 13. "Spéculaire"; cf. note about Lacan below in "Toward a Political Economy of the Sign. " -- Trans.

Note from page 35: 12. For certain categories the differential scale is relatively impoverished (electric household gadgets, TV, etc.). For others (seats, wall units), the hierarchical paradigm of models and series will be rich.

Note from page 36: 14. Thus at every social level, giving education to children is an essential tactical element: but on certain levels this form of fulfillment conflicts with fulfillment through the possession of objects.

Note from page 36: 15. This is also the paradox of fashion: everyone outfits himself in distinctive signs that end up belonging to everyone. Riesman evaluates the paradox in successive types of civilizations: the other-directed, which is conformist, succeeds the inner-directed, which endeavors to distinguish itself.

Note from page 36: 16. Cf. on this point George Katona, The Powerful Consumer (New York: McGraw Hill, 1960), and the notion of inconspicuous consumption.

Note from page 36: 17. See below, Luxury and the Ephemeral.

Note from page 38: 18. Undoubtedly even a class society, as we will see later.

Note from page 39: 19. Thus the proportion of workers who want their children to complete higher education is much lower than that of individuals belonging to the privileged classes.

Note from page 42: 20. Cf. Sartre's café waiter whose oversignificant actions are intended not so much to do something as to show how well it is done

Note from page 43: 21. "Bygone" is used as a translation of "l'Ancien" because there are major objections to the obvious choices of antique, old, prior, etc. It refers to an article that is sanctified because of belonging to another era, yet which exists in the present. Antique is close, but would exclude the pseudo-antique, the bourgeois kitsch of Louis XV or XVI bedsteads actually produced in Plattsburg (or Paris, for that matter). The simultaneous incarnation of petty bourgeois cravings for both old and new in the same object is too juicy to be missed. Baudrillard himself refers to it (note below). -- Trans.

Note from page 44: 22. Alternatively, in a whole panoply of fashionably "deviant" objects -- monstrous, astonishing, bizarre, vicious -- such as flourish today in the shop windows on the Left Bank. There is an entire hell of "unique" objects (or objects with limited distribution) in their usefulness or eccentricity, an entire hell of the luxury object that at heart dreams of the Faubourg St. Honoré. That is to say that its forced originality must be interpreted as the challenge of the marginal intellectual classes to all "legitimate" spheres privileged by industrial society.

Note from page 44: 23. The only ones to remain refractory -- provisionally -- to the baroque of the bygone are the peasants, whose aspirations pass toward the functional modern serial object via the rejection of signs of the past, and the workers because they still escape cultural mobility and have no worthwhile status to defend or to legitimize. On the `bygone,' cf. Système des objets.

Note from page 45: 24. It is a tendency that, in its principles of "discreteness" (objects are individual, distinct unities in their form and function) and redundancy, is opposed to the modern principles of the environment: fluidity, polyvalence, combinatory and mobile integration of elements.

Note from page 46: 25. The employment of domestic personnel for this purpose (maid, cleaning woman, housekeeper, etc.) is an essential social criterion. To have a maid is to leave the middle class.

Note from page 47: 26. Cf. below, Design and Environment. --Trans.

Note from page 48: 27. The mixture that today is in fashion everywhere, in advertising, decoration, clothing, testifies to the same "liberty": Mondrian-like geometricism coexists peacefully with the psychedelic version of art nouveau.

Note from page 48: 28. The same analysis can be made with respect to furniture (no longer according to the material, but to the function). The last word in functional furniture is the mobile element, which, stacked with a few cushions, can turn into a bed, seats, wall units, bookshelves, or anything at all (a pure object) at the whim of its owner. It is the Arch-furnishing, the totally polyvalent manifestation of an audacious, incontestably "rational" analytic formula. And this formula paradoxically revives those of the Middle Ages or of poor peasant living, where the same element -- the trunk -- would also serve as table, bench, cupboard, etc. The meaning, however, is evidently reversed; far from being a solution to poverty, the contemporary mobile element is the synthesis of all these differentiated functions and of all luxurious distinctions. It is the culmination of simplicity and upon the (bad) faith of this apparent simplicity its designers make of it the "popular" and economical solution of the future! The prices, which are always realistic, unpityingly translate the social logic: these simple forms are a costly refinement. Here again formal innovation is justified in terms of severity, economy, "structure," sometimes even in terms of penury and urgency: "If necessary, your bed can be turned into a dresser," etc. Why bother? It is only a game, and one that only plays upon necessity: fashion is pre-eminent here. Technical -- real -- innovation does not have at heart the goal of genuine economy, but the game of social distinction.

Note from page 49: 29. "...fonction de durer...`en dur.'" -Trans.

Note from page 51: 30. Fashion embodies a compromise between the need to innovate and the other need to change nothing in the fundamental order. It is this that characterizes "modern" societies. Thus it results in a game of change. In this game, the new and the old are functionally equivalent. If one adheres to lived psychology, one would see there two inverse tendencies: the need to change and the nostalgic need for old things. In fact, the function of the new look and of the old fashion is the alteration: at all levels, it is the result of a logical constraint of the system -- old and new are not relative to contradictory needs: they are the "cyclical" paradigm of fashion. "Modern" is the new and the old, which no longer have temporal value. For the same reason, "modern" has nothing to do with actual practicality, with a real change, with a structural innovation. New and old, neologism and archaism are homogeneous in the game of changes.

Note from page 51: 31. Nevertheless, one would have to take into account the latent, psycho- collective functions of the "hard" and the solid -- powerful functions of integration that also are included in the social budget.

Note from page 52: 32. Of course, there is also a question of price: the most audacious and thus the most ephemeral fashion is also the most costly in all domains. But the price only comes to sanction a logical process of discrimination.

Note from page 55: 33. This pure prestige value of the object as such, a magical prestation independent of its function, emerges in the limiting cases (which we gratuitously burden with the label "prelogical mentality", although it is quite simply a question of social logic), where, for example, a broken TV set, vacuum cleaner or watch, or a car out of gas are still prestige elements in the African bush.

Note from page 55: 34. This "economic fetishism" or the fetishism of revenue production in fact realizes a compromise between the impossibility -- socially defined -- of being autonomously culturally defined, and the injunction of an industrial (capitalist) society with a very strong economic imperative.

Note from page 57: 35. Just as neither the bourgeoisie nor the proletariat has ever been alone, confronted by the other, nor have they ever existed in the pure state in real society. This does not hinder class logic and strategy from being defined, and from acting concretely according to this antagonistic model.

Note from page 58: 36. André Piatier, "Structures and Perspectives of European Consumption" (Paris, 1967), published by Reader's Digest Selection.

Note from page 59: 37. A much more suspect procedure than Chapin's scale of the living room, cited above .

Note from page 60: 38. Regarding "practices" as marks of social destiny, see above.

Note from page 61: 39. Thus the fact of acquiring a certain model a month or a day before others can constitute a radical privilege.