Baudrillard, Jean : The System of Objects

Published for the first time in English, this is Jean Baudrillard's earliest book, written in 1968, at a time when (as the author would put it later), The society of the spectacle and its denunciation were still the focal point of semiological, psychoanalytical and sociological arguments . Pressing Freudian and Saussurean categories into the service of a basically Marxist perspective, this book offers a cultural critique of the commodity in consumer society. Baudrillard classifies the everyday objects of the new technical order as functional, non-functional and metafunctional. He contrasts modern and traditional functional objects, subjecting home furnishing and interior design to a celebrated semiological analysis. His treatment of non-functional or marginal objects focuses on antiques and the psychology of collecting, while the metafunctional category extends to the useless, the aberrant and even the schizofunctional . Finally, Baudrillard deals at length with the implications of credit and advertising for the commodification of everyday life. This book is an in-depth study of the materialist semiotics of the early Baudrillard, who emerges in retrospect as something of a lightning rod for the live ideas of the day: Bataille's political economy of expenditure and Mauss's theory of the gift; Reisman's lonely crowd and the technological society of Jacques Ellul; the struturalism of Roland Barthes in The System of Fashion ; Henri Lefebvre's work on the social construction of space; and Guy Debord's situationist critique of the spectacle.