Given that I have decided to see publicly used objects like clothing and automobiles as texts, I will, in the vein of Fredric Jameson, assume that to wear or use such an object is not only a socially symbolic act but also warrants, as a priority, a political interpretation. Thus in this essay I will forego the use of most other interpretive codes, like the psychoanalytic, the historic, or the stylistic, all of which could be used to derive a meaning from such objects. I will, however, continue to use aspects of structuralism.

I've come full circle. As a child all I did was watch television, interrupted only by the occasional war game in the park next to the freeway that ran through my suburban neighborhood in Portland, Oregon. My favorite programs were war movies. But I liked to watch The Brady Bunch, too: I needed moral indoctrination into suburban culture, I needed to know how to act, but I never quite got it right, I never quite learned to fit in. Thus, sitting on an expensive white couch, hoping for another war movie but getting only the Flintstones, I was an incongruity: dressed in battle fatigues, pants held up by a pistol belt.

The kind of cultural objects I'm talking about are not works of art, like Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel, nor less common, genre items, like "The Romans in Films" or "The Face of Garbo." No.

In the poor neighborhoods of Brooklyn, teenagers wear baseball hats. In affluent Greenwich, Conn., Wall Street bankers wear them like a crown as they play golf on the weekends. The hats likewise cover the heads of the many other people who stand between the opposite poles of the socioeconomic spectrum that puts poor Bedford-Stuyvesant teenagers on one end and Cos Cob bankers on the other. The hats are everywhere. The hats themselves differ little from Darien to Queens: Many of them are inscribed on the front with the names of college basketball teams: Rutgers, Kentucky, Syracuse. Other hats display the logos of professional baseball teams. As such, the hats are media: They contain an overt message, an advertisement. To wear one is more than a mere fashion statement, more than the function of keeping the sun from the eyes: It is to participate in the media culture. I'm in Riverside, Conn., near Greenwich, watching television as I sit on the platform of the Metro-North Station, waiting for the train to arrive. A teenager, also waiting for a train to Manhattan, is wearing a dirtied white baseball cap with the bill pulled down tight, conservatively pointing forward. It says UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA. The name of the team doesn't matter; it could be Princeton or University of Washington. The color of the hat, though still unimportant, matters slightly more than the team name it displays: It is white, the color of the teenager's skin. Race matters.

I'm back in front of an old reality, one I know well: the television news. It tells me that several white high school students from Southwestern Connecticut have just been arrested on civil rights charges because they encoded a racial epithet against African-Americans into their high school yearbook. The television shows the police escorting the arrested teenagers to the courthouse or jail: They are wearing baseball caps, white or off white, cropped close against their foreheads, bills pointing straight: An orthodox image.

Recent trends have exalted dogs to the realm of fashion. More and more they are found on the covers and in the pages of fashion magazines, joining the models particularly on urban shoots. Such trends have a glossy allure that leads people to imitation: To put it simplistically, they buy the clothes, and the dog, to be like the beautiful people in the photograph. But why does the choice of dog vary so much and so obviously along class lines? Why, in the Flatiron District, are the fashion dogs Afghans and the like, while in the Southside, they are pit bulls trained to attack? And why, too, in the working-class neighborhoods of Queens, have pit bulls, especially ones trained to be hostile and aggressive, come into fashion? Because pit bulls are dogs of war.

I'm inside my health club on Madison Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, watching television, not only the four hanging from the ceiling at the far end of the gym floor but also the big one all around me, which contains the gym-goers and their T-shirts. Taken together, the shirts read like a list of the most prestigious universities in the country: Harvard, Boston College, Virginia, Cornell, Yale. They are ideological advertisements of a sort, visual signs in the media culture of the gym. Meantime, on the four television sets against the far wall, various sporting events are being broadcast. Reality is being played out all around me. Status, it seems, is measured by the prestige of the university name emblazoned on the T- shirt. Presumably, the rule is that you can wear a T-shirt only with the name of the school you attended. But that's not terribly important. What is important is that the wearing of the T-shirt marks you as a member of a class, a class that is increasingly defined as much by image, knowledge and technological acumen as by assets or property. In this context, the T-shirt communicates a message: power. An ideological certificate for dominant status. Both inside the world of the gym and outside in the world of the economy.

Later that same day I'm riding the subway underneath Metropolitan Avenue in Brooklyn, again watching television: Visual signs, messages all around me.

1. Stuart Hall, Encoding/decoding, in Media Studies, p. 133.

Saussure's Sign