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By "working through" I mean that where Marx saw commodites as containing surplus value which was "expropriated" (or stolen) by the capitalist, Baudrillard sees them as semiotic signs. Which means that all consumer objects are symbols, have values with which people can communicate. This works on four levels - the functional value (the use of the object); the exchange value (the market price); the symbolic value (such as wedding rings); and the sign value (which occurs within a system so that all objects have a relation to each other - one pair of jeans will be more urban, more niche, than another; one car will be be more powerful, more upper-class, more independence-giving, than another). Thus consumption rather than production is the key determinant in society, the most important signifier of "class".
In this early (1968) work Baudrillard looks at the relations of objects and the manner in which they are consumed, and how this determines the consumer. It's become so commonplace nowadays that self-realisation (becoming the person you want to be) happens through consumption of shopping, holidays, clothes and labels, cars, all the way to household furniture, that the fundamental shift this entails isn't fully appreciated. But Baudrillard documents that shift and saw the full implications of it, and for this reason this book is vitally important. The text is relatively straighforward for Baudrillard (much more than his later works on simulacra, for which he is probably best known thanks to "The Matrix"), and one of the best introductions to his work and ideas - along with the 1970 work, "The Consumer Society", which further develops his analysis.
What is the book about? In a sense it is about the meaning of low tech everyday objects, and thus it is also about the psycho-sociology of our technology. Take mirrors, for example, which were frankly disappearing as an element of interior decoration when Baudrillard wrote his book. Yet for years, mirrors were an important fixture of well-to-do bourgeois interiors; they were opulent, expensive objects which in Baudrillard's words permitted "...the self-indulgent bourgeois
individual to exercise his privilege --reproduce his own image and revel in his possessions". Family portraits and photographs represent diachronic mirrors of the family, and thus played a similar narcissistic role in decoration. Baudrillard analyses clocks, lighting, glass, seating, antiques and the drive to automate and miniaturize gadgets and tools, and always comes up with provocative, sometimes maddening, insights into modern society and one's place in it --and after all what is philosophy
for but to make you think?
There is a brilliant and probably timeless exploration of the passion of collecting and leads up nicely to what the bulk of the book is devoted to: the study of systems of objects (one of the main chapters is aptly titled "The Socio-Ideological System of Objects and Their Consumption"). What do we yearn to express through technology? What is it it that fascinates us about robots? Why is there such a proliferation of automatism, accessory features, inessential features to the point where
an object's dysfunctions are as important as its functions? Baudrillard acknowledges his debt to some of Lewis Mumford's ideas, and deplores with him that too often we try to solve problems by building a machine (perhaps nowadays we would tend to develop software, or in Baudrillard's terms simulate) and thus not only fall wide of the mark but also reveal clear signs of social ineptitude and paralysis. Fashion, consumption, technology are intertwined themes in modern society, feeding off each other and leading to a world that is at once systematized, fragile and baroque, in the sense that the proliferation of forms seems to be more important than mining for substance. It is interesting to compare some of these insights with a more recent book by another French philosopher, Gilles Lipovetsky, on fashion in modern societies ("The empire of the ephemeral", 1987).
The book ends by looking at the role credit and advertising play in the consumption of systems of objects, and thus completes what the book's jacket indicates is "a cultural critique of the commodity in consumer society". Baudrillard is a humanist critic of technology and consumer society and uses psychoanalytical ideas as weapons to grapple with his subject. The book is by turns, infuriating, keen, stimulating but in the end one feels that, curiously, it lacks a certain depth; it plays with
mirrors and is content with catching the light and obtaining the occasional blinding flash; but sometimes that the criticisms seem a little too one-sided or perhaps I simply prefer more constructive criticism. Still, the book is a tour-de-force, and I feel that the translator, James Benedict, did a fine job with a difficult text.
Some of OBJECTS' highlights: a discussion of why the rich and other status seekers acquire old things, a critique of collectors and their motivations ("everything that cannot be invested in human relationships is invested in objects."), and a commendable exegesis of the personalization of cars (since the 1970s this critique could be expanded to houses). In addition the section on credit is juicy: "the credit system is the acme of man's irresponsibility to himself."
Should I credit the translator with handling a difficult text well? I can't say. I don't read French (at least not on Baudrillard's level). However, the reader is left with some of the most pompous and opaque prose. Nothing is stated simply. Example: "In the love relationship the tendency to break the object down into discrete details in accordance with a perverse autoerotic system is slowed by the living unity of the other person." Another: "We may thus trace functional mythologies, born of technics itself, all the way to a sort of fatality in which the world-mastering technology seems to crystallize in the form of an inverse and threatening purpose." Here's a favorite: "Thus freed from practical functions and from the human gestural system, forms become purely relative with respect both to one another and to the space to which they lend 'rhythm.' "
These overwrought and ridiculous passages would be humorous, but they impede the reader's understanding of the text. Various worthwhile statements pepper the book throughout, which could be condensed into a sort of "famous quotes by Baudrillard," perhaps as captions in a book of photographs, a coffee-table book. I recommend this currently nonexistent product. Until its creation, we must be partially satisfied by SYSTEM OF OBJECTS.
Ken Miller
appreciated the essays on Warhol and contemporary art in general, and the interview in which the author clarifies some of his most extreme published statements. (I've only read about half of this book so far)
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