The System of Objects

Author: Jean Baudrillard
Translator(s)/ Edito: James Benedict
Publisher: Navayana
Year: 2008
Language: English
Pages: 224
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8189059122

Description

This work ranks as one of the most important books of poststructuralist cultural criticism. Pressing Freudian and Saussurean categories into the service of a basically Marxist perspective, Baudrillard offers a cultural critique of the commodity in consumer society. Here is how:

To take an example: the most essential and structural aspects of a coffee mill, and hence the most concretely objective thing about it, are the electric motor, the electricity furnished by the power company, and the laws governing the production and transformation of energy what is already less objective because it depends on a particular person's need, is the mill's actual coffee-grinding function; and what is not objective in the slightest, and hence inessential, is whether it is green and rectangular or pink and trapezoid.. Indeed, the characteristic of the industrial object which distinguishes it from the craft object is that in the former the inessential is no longer left to the whims of individual demand and manufacture, but instead picked up and systematized by the production process, which today defines its aims by reference to what is inessential (ad by reference to the universal combinatorial system of fashion).

Contents

Translator;s Acknowledgements
Introduction

PART A
The Functional System, or Objective Discourse

PART B
The Non-Functional System, or Subjective Discourse

PART C
The Metafunctional and Dysfunctional System: Gadgets and Robots

PART D
The Socio-Ideological System of Objects and Their Consumption

CONCLUSION:
Towards a Definition of Consumption.