摘要
The producers-especially industrial-of artifacts view them as conveying distinct meanings, and they surround them with discourses to support their representation （marketing, packaging, and advertising）. Yet, these superimposed meanings say nothing about what the objects signify for their users. How are the objects manipulated by those who use them？ Only when both the meanings assigned by the manufacturers and those attributed by the users are known is it possible to determine the difference or similarity between the meanings imposed on objects from above and those produced by their users. We, thus, shift from an economic conception of consumption to one which emphasizes the cultural and communicative roles essential for granting material objects their social protagonism, freeing them from subordination to their producers without imprisoning them passively in the network of meanings constructed by consumers. Emphasizing that things have biographies, which can be more or less fully reconstructed and recounted, is useful not only for understanding the role that material objects perform in determining social phenomena independently from the intentions of their producers, but also for demonstrating the mutable character of their social presence. Objects, therefore, should be considered, not as commodities, but as materials for the social construction of reality, as provisional and negotiable meanings. It is precisely the provisional and negotiable nature of objects that makes them ontologically ambiguous things which communicate their own values, points of view, and so on.
