The System of Objects (Radical Thinkers)

The System of Objects (Radical Thinkers)

<i>The System of Objects</i> is a tour de force—a theoretical letter-in-a-bottle tossed into the ocean in 1968, which brilliantly communicates to us all the live ideas of the day.<br><br>Pressing Freudian and Saussurean categories into the service of a basically Marxist perspective, <i>The System of Objects </i>offers a cultural critique of the commodity in consumer society. Baudrillard classifies the everyday objects of the &ldquo;new technical order&rdquo; as functional, nonfunctional and metafunctional. He contrasts &ldquo;modern&rdquo; and &ldquo;traditional&rdquo; functional objects, subjecting home furnishing and interior design to a celebrated semiological analysis. His treatment of nonfunctional or &ldquo;marginal&rdquo; objects focuses on antiques and the psychology of collecting, while the metafunctional category extends to the useless, the aberrant and even the &ldquo;schizofunctional.&rdquo; Finally, Baudrillard deals at length with the implications of credit and advertising for the commodification of everyday life.<br><br><i>The System of Objects</i> is a tour de force of the materialist semiotics of the early Baudrillard, who emerges in retrospect as something of a lightning rod for all the live ideas of the day: Bataille&rsquo;s political economy of &ldquo;expenditure&rdquo; and Mauss&rsquo;s theory of the gift; Reisman&rsquo;s lonely crowd and the &ldquo;technological society&rdquo; of Jacques Ellul; the structuralism of Roland Barthes in<i> The System of Fashion;</i> Henri Lefebvre&rsquo;s work on the social construction of space; and last, but not least, Guy Debord&rsquo;s situationist critique of the spectacle.