The System of Objectsis a tour de forcea 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 Objectsoffers 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 Objectsis 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: Batailles political economy of expenditure and Mausss theory of the gift; Reismans lonely crowd and the technological society of Jacques Ellul; the structuralism of Roland Barthes inThe System of Fashion;Henri Lefebvres work on the social construction of space; and last, but not least, Guy Debords situationist critique of the spectacle.
