Consumption (Sign Manipulation)

Definition

Consumption, in Baudrillard's founding definition (The System of Objects, 1968, Conclusion), is not a material practice of absorbing goods or satisfying needs but "an activity consisting of the systematic manipulation of signs." "Consumption is not a material practice, nor is it a phenomenology of 'affluence'… It is defined, rather, by the organization of all these things into a signifying fabric: consumption is the virtual totality of all objects and messages ready-constituted as a more or less coherent discourse." The decisive threshold is semiotic: "To become an object of consumption, an object must first become a sign… only thus can it be consumed, never in its materiality, but in its difference." Consumption is thus the behaviour of the system-of-objects and the consumer's sign-value; it is contrasted with use-value and with possession. The concept names a condition of society, not a psychology: "consumption is an active form of relationship (not only to objects, but also to society and to the world), a mode of systematic activity and global response which founds our entire cultural system."

Key Claims

Consumption is sign-work, not need-satisfaction. "Objects and material goods are not in fact the object of consumption – they are the object merely of needs and of the satisfaction of needs."
It converts the relationship to a sign-object. "What is consummated and consumed is never the object but the relationship itself, signified yet absent, simultaneously included and excluded; it is the idea of the relationship that is consumed in the series of objects that displays it."
The commodity form generalizes to all human faculties. "Just as needs, feelings, culture, knowledge – in short, all the properly human faculties – are integrated as commodities into the order of production… so likewise all desires, projects and demands, all passions and all relationships, are now abstracted (or materialized) as signs and as objects to be bought and consumed."
There are no limits to consumption. "If consumption were indeed what it is naively assumed to be, namely a process of absorption or devouring, a saturation point would inevitably be reached… We know very well, however, that nothing of the kind happens: people simply want to consume more and more." It is "a total idealist practice which no longer has anything to do… with the satisfaction of needs or with the reality principle."
It is founded on a lack. "Consumption is irrepressible, in the last reckoning, because it is founded upon a lack"; it arises "from the disappointed demand for totality that underlies the project of life."
The sign-object is the project's self-renunciation. Reading Perec's Les choses: "nothing in it has the slightest symbolic value any longer… everything in Perec's décor is a sign, and purely a sign"; "the object of consumption is thus the precise form of the project's self-renunciation."
Culture and even revolution are consumable as ideas. "The demand for revolution is likewise a living demand, but so long as it is not actualized in practice it will be consumed as the idea of Revolution."

Key Thinkers

Jean Baudrillard — the definition's author: consumption as the systematic manipulation of signs; "founded upon a lack." The Mirror of Production (1973/1975) adds the anti-productivist phase-thesis: consumption is not the passive pole of production but its continuation — "To consume is to start producing again. All that is expended is in fact invested; nothing is ever totally lost" (ch. V, p. 145) — and under monopoly capital it is instituted as "control, as the abolition of the contingency of demand". See form-sign, symbolic-exchange.
Xiaobing Tang — the interior-scale application: interior design "acculturat[ing] us to the system of sign-objects" (see interiorisation, sign-value).
Ellen Lupton & J Abbott Miller — the historical register of consumption as devouring/elimination, which Baudrillard's sign-definition displaces (see process-of-elimination).
Michel de Certeau — the tactical counter-account of consumption as production (see consumerism).

System of Objects — the system within which consumption occurs.
Sign Value — what is consumed: the object's difference.
Consumerism — the social-ideological condition.
Use-Value — the utility consumption displaces.
Possession — the adjacent subjective relation (objects as passion).
Spectacle — the sibling critique of the sign-economy (Debord).
Everyday Life — the register the analysis claims to found.
Symbolic Exchange — consumption's counter-principle: the expenditure that is never "totally lost" is exactly what the value-cycle forbids (Baudrillard 1975).
Form-Sign — the mutation that turns consumption into coded demand: needs and demand become "a mode of simulation."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

The System of Objects (Baudrillard 1968) — the concept's defining source (Conclusion): consumption as systematic sign-manipulation; the conversion of relationship to sign-object; "no limits to consumption"; the Perec reading; "founded upon a lack."
Karl Marx — the "formal logic of the commodity" Baudrillard extends from production to sign-consumption.
The Mirror of Production (Baudrillard 1975) — the anti-productivist counter-thesis: consumption is not the passive destruction of goods but the continuation of production by other means — "To consume is to start producing again. All that is expended is in fact invested; nothing is ever totally lost" (ch. V, "Political Revolution and 'Cultural' Revolution," p. 145) — and under monopoly capital demand is planned rather than met: "In opposition to the competitive system, the monopolistic system institutes consumption as control, as the abolition of the contingency of demand, as planned socialization by the code," while "Demand and need correspond more and more to a mode of simulation" (ch. V, "The Third Phase of Political Economy," pp. 119–128). Baudrillard also denies the producer/consumer separation the term presupposes: "there is no separation between the sphere of producers and the sphere of consumers" (ch. IV, "The Artisan," pp. 96–105). See symbolic-exchange, form-sign.
Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the metaphysical reading of consumption's waste (ch. 1): tax comes "before the very consumption it taxes" (p. 51); production's byproducts counted as production; "It is not so much a matter of thinking the limits to the system of consumption as of thinking the consequences of it having no limits" (p. 53); "the 'discourse of anti-consumption is now part of consumption itself'" (CS, 315); the anguish/solicitation circle — "It is the limit that allows the system to have no limit" (p. 56); and the sign-paradox of consumption itself: everything can be consumed yet nothing is consumed, "because it is only consumed as another's consumption" (p. 57). See doubling, the-real, paradox-of-the-sign.

Open Questions

Baudrillard defines consumption against "needs." Does the wiki's Lefebvrean/de Certeau line (everyday appropriation) offer a third position between need-satisfaction and sign-manipulation (see theory-of-the-everyday, everyday-life)?
If all relationships become sign-objects, is there any non-consumable remainder — and does Baudrillard's own later notion of symbolic exchange supply it?
The "lack" at consumption's base is psychoanalytic. Is consumption a Lacanian structure of desire, a Marxian structure of capital, or an unstable compound of both?
How does this definition compare with the wiki's consumerism page, where consumption is also a built-form and identity affair — is sign-manipulation the general theory those cases instantiate (see consumerism-capitalism-iconic-architecture)?