ABSTRACT
My analysis of the focus group in the previous chapter entailed a discussion of the commodity sign. Marketers, I said, employ sign value to sell goods. The prominence of the commodity sign is a frequently theorized feature of “late capitalism,” beginning with Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord’s demonstration that commodities have come to be defined not principally by their uses, but by their significations.1 Because marketing is potentially implicated in this theory, I pause to specify exactly where marketing does and does not stand relative to the theory of a “system of objects,” in Baudrillard’s expression, and what its actual contribution is to the society-wide semiosis of objects. Other than in monolithic terms, this accounting has not yet been undertaken. Doing so will suggest an alternate reading to the “political economy of the sign.”
