Sign Value

Definition

Sign value is the dimension of an object consumed for what it signals rather than what it does — the "explicit sign value" Baudrillard names against use value, and the wiki's term (via Tang) for the political economy of the sign at the scale of rooms, dress and cities. Tang's formulation: "there always exists a 'political economy of the sign' in which commodities or objects are consumed not so much for their utility or use value, as for their explicit sign value. Parallel to the signifying operation of all languages, the sign value of objects enforces a logic of differentiation and establishes, through display and conspicuous consumption, a distinctive hierarchy of taste, status, and identity" (p. 331). Sign value is not a decoration of use but its displacement: needs themselves "have an ideological genesis from above and in the privileged" and are "constructed to provide the alibi or self-evident rationale" for consumption (p. 331). The concept is the interior-scale counterpart of the icon's image-value: where the iconic building signals capital and place-brand, the sign-valued interior signals the occupant's taste, status and identity to "its occupant(s) and to a conceivable public" (p. 332).

The concept is contested on the wiki: Madigan & Munro's interview evidence corrects it from the class side — "Use value is a concept which gets neglected in the whole debate about the playfulness of signs and symbols" (pp. 224–225) — making sign value a position whose universality is an artifact of affluence rather than a general theory of consumption.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's source: For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1981), quoted by Tang for the two positions — signs "at once use value and exchange value," social hierarchies "accounted as profit, as personal satisfaction, and lived as 'need'" (p. 331); and "consumption does not arise from an objective need of the consumer… rather, there is social production, in a system of exchange, of a material of differences, a code of significations and invidious (statuaire) values" (quoted p. 334). Sign exchange is "no less than the central logic of a consumer society's political economy" (p. 331). The Mirror of Production (1973/1975) supplies the concept's genealogy and its terminal form: the "passage from the form-commodity to the form-sign" (ch. V, "The Third Phase of Political Economy," p. 121), in which "The signifier becomes its own referent and the use value of the sign disappears to the benefit of its commutation and exchange value alone" (p. 123). See form-sign, political-economy-of-the-sign.
• Xiaobing Tang — the concept's interior-design applier: Heping's apartment as the sign of success read for oneself; interior design as "a business and generator of sign value" (p. 332); the decoration craze as sign exchange operating on a city.
• Ruth Madigan & Moira Munro — the empirical corrective: utility-constrained households for whom the sign-play thesis is "easily overdrawn" (pp. 224–225; see use-value).
• Pierre Bourdieu — the class-theoretical frame the hierarchy claim presupposes: distinction as misrecognized, euphemized capital (see symbolic-capital).

Related Concepts

• Use-Value — the concept's twin and target: sign value is defined against the utility Madigan & Munro rescue from the debate.
• System of Objects — the system within which sign value operates: objects as sign language rather than utilities.
• Conspicuous Consumption — sign value's display-practice: consumption establishing "a distinctive hierarchy of taste, status, and identity" (p. 331).
• Interiorisation — sign value's deepest reach: interior design "interiorizing the political economy of the sign" in the private sphere (p. 332).
• Semiotics — the theoretical frame: sign value operating "parallel to the signifying operation of all languages" (p. 331).
• Consumerism — the social condition sign value names: consumption as practiced ideology.
• Spectacle — sign value's screen: the spectacle as "an illusion of differentiation that colorfully decorates the stark reality of commodity exchange based on the principle of equivalence" (pp. 331–332).
• Symbolic Capital — Bourdieu's misrecognized counterpart: distinction passed off as personal worth rather than position.
• Fashion — the tempo of sign value: differentiation provided "so essential to modern society" (Sparke, quoted p. 332).
• Taste — the hierarchy's judging instrument: taste, status and identity as one differential order.
• Form-Sign — the third phase of political economy that names sign value's regime: "The signifier becomes its own referent and the use value of the sign disappears" (ch. V, p. 123).
• Political Economy of the Sign — the program named in the same book: general equivalence extended from the commodity to the sign.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Fatal Strategies (Baudrillard 1983) — sign-value pushed to its limit: the absolute commodity in which use-value and exchange-value "abolish each other mutually"; "the debauchery of signs… is much more powerful than reality"; and money "distributed as pure simulacrum." See absolute-commodity, reversibility.
• Decorating Culture (Tang 1998/2006) — the concept's interior-scale statement: the political economy of the sign quoted and applied (pp. 330–332); the brand-name progressions as sign value's worked example; the four-star-hotel apartment as sign value staged for its owner alone.
• The System of Objects (Baudrillard 1968) — the full book behind the extract: the object as sign ("no longer any value of their own, but merely a universal value as signs"); marginal-difference and personalization as the production of differential sign-value; the model/series hierarchy as the status ladder; and the concluding definition of consumption as "an activity consisting of the systematic manipulation of signs."
• Structures of Atmosphere (Baudrillard 1968/2006) — the system's first book, extract version: the interior's "atmospheric values" as calculated sign-values; the closure "No object can escape this logic, just as no product can escape the formal logic of the commodity" (p. 42).
• Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard 1981/1994) — sign value's terminal radicalization: in "Value's Last Tango" value becomes "dissociated from its contents and begin[s] to function alone, according to its very form" — "Terror of value without equivalence," the "diplomas without work" that "circulate… a bit like floating capital or Eurodollars." And in "Absolute Advertising" the sign reaches "degree zero of meaning," the absorption of all determinate languages into advertising's "simplified equivalence of all the formerly distinctive signs." Where the 1968 book still held sign value within a Marxian frame, the 1981 book dissolves the referential that made use and sign value a pair. See value-without-referential, simulation-hyperreality.
• 'House Beautiful' (Madigan & Munro 1996/2006) — the corrective: "Use value is a concept which gets neglected in the whole debate about the playfulness of signs and symbols" (p. 225); differentiation "also about creating 'needs' and amplifying social divisions" (p. 225).
• Social, Spatial and Temporal Factors (Lawrence 1987/2006) — the latent-function frame: possessions' manifest functions under-account for consumption "in the sense used by Veblen" (p. 184).
• Politicizing the interior (Teston 2018) — the everyday signalling system: commodity consumption "emits a signal representing our chosen identity."
• Home: Territory and Identity (Wise 2000/2006) — the concept's affective boundary-case: "Our possessions signal identity but their presence in the context of history and memory constitute home as an articulation of effect" (editors' headnote, p. 391) — the signalling function granted ("possessions signal identity"), then displaced: what they constitute is not the signal but the history-and-memory-laden effect; "what is most important for the milieu is the effect of the object rather than the object itself" (p. 393). The register gives sign value its limit: the signal may be read (Tang's Heping), but the home is made where the object articulates with biography rather than with the code — and the portability clause ("rid oneself of all one's possessions… recreate a similar home, with a similar feel," p. 393) marks the difference between an object's sign-value (which dies with the object) and its milieu-effect (which can be recreated). Where Tang's sign value is a hierarchy of taste, status and identity, Wise's effect is an affect-economy: identity as "a process of identification, of articulation of affect" (p. 394) — the interior's signalling subordinated to the territory's expression. See home, system-of-objects, interiority.
• The Mirror of Production (Baudrillard 1975) — sign value's genealogy and terminal form: the "passage from the form-commodity to the form-sign, from the abstraction of the exchange of material products under the law of general equivalence to the operationalization of all exchanges under the law of the code" (ch. V, "The Third Phase of Political Economy," p. 121); "The signifier becomes its own referent and the use value of the sign disappears to the benefit of its commutation and exchange value alone. The sign no longer designates anything at all" (p. 123). Where the For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign material gives the concept its interior-scale application, this book names the program and supplies the periodization — the monopoly stage as "less the monopoly of the means of production (which is never total) than the monopoly of the code" (pp. 121–123) — together with its decisive class caveat: "The form-sign applies to the whole social process and it is largely unconscious. One must not confuse it with the conscious psychology of prestige and differentiation" (p. 121). See form-sign, political-economy-of-the-sign.
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the auction reading (ch. 2): value arising from money "spent, sacrificed, eaten up according to a logic of difference and challenge" (PE, 112–13) rather than the "economic logic of equivalence"; the so-called "aesthetic value" of the work "nothing but the price willing to be paid for it" (p. 92, Butler's gloss on PE, 116–17); and the medium of exchange — money or the painting — as "the true aristocrat of exchange," of which "perhaps another name… is the real itself" (p. 87). See medium-of-exchange, symbolic-exchange, political-economy-of-the-sign.

Open Questions

• Sign value's class distribution. If Madigan & Munro are right that use value "gets neglected in the whole debate" (p. 225), is sign value the affluent consumer's position generalized — and does Tang's Heping (a profit-making entrepreneur upgrading brands) represent the sign-consciousness class that theory mistakes for the whole? See use-value, respectability.
• The equivalence problem. The spectacle "colorfully decorates the stark reality of commodity exchange based on the principle of equivalence" (pp. 331–332): sign value differentiates what exchange equalizes — but does the wiki's symbolic-capital material (misrecognized as it is) give sign value a genuinely distinct economy, or only the misrecognition of economic value?
• Self-addressed sign value. Heping's display "for his consumption alone" (p. 330) — sign value read by its owner rather than its audience: a transient scene of the first private-home generation, or a structural stage (the consumer consuming his own success)? See conspicuous-consumption.
• Needs' genesis "from above." Needs "constructed" with "an ideological genesis from above and in the privileged" (p. 331) — how does this square with the wiki's de Certeau/Zepf line that consumers produce and desire actively? Is the alibi thesis the strong-manipulation pole the consumerism page holds in tension?