The Semiotics of Consumption: Interpreting Symbolic Consumer Behavior in Popular Culture and Works of Art

Holbrook, Morris B. and Elizabeth C. Hirschman, The Semiotics of Consumption: Interpreting Symbolic Consumer Behavior in Popular Culture and Works of Art, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1993, 365 pp., $125.00.

This is a book about signs and material goods in various cultures, current and historical. Holbrook and Hirschman's (hereafter H&H) main thrust is to recommend to those professionals studying signs (practicing semioticists) an interpretive rather than the more traditional scientific approach (neopositivistic) to the problems of critical analysis. Hence, it is only secondarily addressed to economists, home economists, marketeers, etc. plying the consumer field. "Esthetic consumption" is the phenomenon H&H study. Essentially they look at cultural happenings and works of art for inferences about consumer behavior, popular art (television series, cartoons, films, etc.) for insights into common cultural symbols, and how consumption behavior in the arts influences an audience's reaction to the art object.

They divide the main text into four chapters (242 pages): I. The role of semiotics in research on consumer esthetics; II. Semiotics and popular culture--myths and myth making are important topics; III. Romanticism and sentimentality in consumer behavior--a literary approach to the joys and sorrows of consumption; and IV. Seven routes to facilitating the semiotic interpretation of consumption symbolism and marketing imagery in works of art. Illustrative semiotic analyses of two television series, Dallas and Dynasty, literary works such as Homer's Odyssey and Joyce's Ulysses, and poetry by Wordsworth, Goethe, and others are used to document their case and comprise the bulk of the text. Additional analyses are found in the eight appendices (78 pages) devoted to five films: Beverly Hills Cop, Tin Men, Gremlins, Two for the Road, and Out of Africa; two plays: Women of Manhattan and Coastal Disturbances; and one novel: A Christmas Carol. Four hundred references to professional articles, works of art, and literature round out the book.

What can semiotics do for us? Hodge and Kress claim that semiotics promises a systematic, comprehensive, and coherent study of the whole of communications (1988, 1). H&H, of course, only look at the material sides of peoples' lives.

Deely traced the study of signs back to Augustine, Poinsot, and Locke (Sebeok 1978), but it was not until late in the last century that a new discipline of signs...