The System of Objects 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.
Pressing Freudian and Saussurean categories into the service of a
basically Marxist perspective, The System of Objects offers a cultural
critique of the commodity in consumer society. Baudrillard classifies
the everyday objects of the "new technical order" as functional,
nonfunctional and metafunctional. He contrasts "modern" and
"traditional" functional objects, subjecting home furnishing and
interior design to a celebrated semiological analysis. His treatment of
nonfunctional 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.
The System of Objects 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's political
economy of "expenditure" and Mauss's theory of the gift; Reisman's
lonely crowd and the "technological society" of Jacques Ellul; the
structuralism of Roland Barthes in The System of Fashion; Henri
Lefebvre's work on the social construction of space; and last, but not
least, Guy Debord's situationist critique of the spectacle.
