Baudrillard's first book, written before the vocabulary of simulation and hyperreality that later swallowed his name. It is a systematic study of everyday objects in the affluent interior, and its method is set against two rivals it names at the outset: the functional catalogue, which classifies objects by what they do, and the technological account of the object as such. Baudrillard wants neither. He wants the spoken system of objects, the system of meanings objects institute as people live among them, and he tracks that system from the furnished room outward to the definition of consumption itself. The book is built as a descent: from objects arranged objectively (interior design, atmosphere), through objects cathected subjectively (antiques, collecting), through the object's metafunctional delirium (gadgets, robots), to the socio-ideological machine (models and series, credit, advertising) that the whole thing turns out to serve. The argument's destination, stated in the conclusion, is that consumption is not the satisfaction of needs but the systematic manipulation of signs, and that it is therefore without limit, because it is founded on a lack.
What follows reconstructs the move-structure part by part, in Baudrillard's own sequence, preserving the named examples, the cited authorities, and the page locations a researcher needs to footnote from without returning to the book. A short source apparatus at the end reconstructs the secondary works Baudrillard leans on, since those citations travel.
The book opens on a deliberately overgrown image, objects classified as a naturalist would classify species, and the conceit is there to register that their proliferation has outrun our means of naming them.
The System of Objects, p. 3
Could we classify the luxuriant growth of objects as we do a flora or fauna, complete with tropical and glacial species, sudden mutations, and varieties threatened by extinction? . . . everyday objects (we are not concerned here with machines) proliferate, needs multiply, production speeds up the life-span of such objects — yet we lack the vocabulary to name them all. How can we hope to classify a world of objects that changes before our eyes and arrive at an adequate system of description?
Any classification by function would be, he says, "barely less contingent than the order of the letters of the alphabet" (p.4). Two existing approaches are set aside by name, and the wording of each refusal matters because it marks what the book will not do.
The System of Objects, p. 4
The catalogue of the Manufacture d'Armes de Saint-Étienne proposes, if not structures, then at least subdivisions, but it takes into account only objects defined according to function: each object corresponds to an operation, often a tiny or heteroclite operation, but nowhere is any system of meanings even touched upon. At a much higher level, the simultaneously formal, functional and structural analysis which Siegfried Giedion offers us — a kind of epic history of the technical object — notes the changes in social structure associated with technical development, but scarcely addresses such questions as how objects are experienced, what needs other than functional ones they answer . . .
Against both, the real object of study is announced, and then named:
The System of Objects, p. 4
We shall not, therefore, be concerning ourselves with objects as defined by their functions or by the categories into which they might be subdivided for analytic purposes, but instead with the processes whereby people relate to them and with the systems of human behaviour and relationships that result therefrom.
The System of Objects, pp. 4–5
The study of this 'spoken' system of objects — that is, the study of the more or less consistent system of meanings that objects institute — always presupposes a plane distinct from this 'spoken' system, a more strictly structured plane . . . the technological one.
Before he gets to the spoken system he marks off the technological plane, and the move worth recording is that he calls this abstraction the most concrete thing about the object.
The System of Objects, p. 5
The technological plane is an abstraction: in ordinary life we are practically unconscious of the technological reality of objects. Yet this abstraction is profoundly real: it is what governs all radical transformations of our environment. It is even — and I do not mean this in any paradoxical sense — the most concrete aspect of the object, for technological development is synonymous with objective structural evolution.
To give the technological plane its due he quotes Gilbert Simondon on the petrol engine at length. The passage is load-bearing because the contrast it draws, abstract versus concrete, becomes Baudrillard's own term of art for the difference between a part that does one isolated job and a structure in which functions converge.
The System of Objects, pp. 5–6
Modern engines are concrete, whereas earlier ones were abstract. In the older version, each component intervened at a specific stage of the cycle and was then supposed to have no further impact on the others; motor parts were rather like people, each doing their job without ever getting acquainted with their co-workers. . . . for instance, the cylinder head of the internal-combustion heat engine starts to bristle with cooling fins. These were at first simply an extraneous element . . . added to the cylinder . . . for the sole purpose of cooling. In more recent engines, however, these fins have come to play a mechanical role as well by providing a ribbing that serves to inhibit the distortion of the cylinder head under the pressure of gases. . . . Now the two functions are no longer distinguishable; a unique structure has thus evolved, one which is not a compromise but a concomitance, a convergence.
Simondon's lesson is that technology gives "a rigorous account of objects in which functional antagonisms are dialectically resolved into larger structures," so that we are "in effect at the level of a language here" (p.7). By analogy with linguistics Baudrillard proposes a name for the simple elements on which this evolution rests, "those simple technical elements — different from real objects — upon whose interplay technological evolution is founded might well be dubbed 'technemes'" (p.7). A science of technemes could be rigorous, he grants, but only in a few fields, "ranging from laboratory research to the massive technological products of the aeronautics, astronautics, shipbuilding" industries, "precisely the areas where technical pressures maximize structural constraints, where the collective and impersonal nature of the product reduces the effects of fashion to a minimum" (p.7). Everyday objects are ruled by fashion, and so the hinge of the whole book is stated as a confessed inadequacy:
The System of Objects, p. 7
So, if we want to account for the system of everyday objects, a structural technological analysis is clearly inadequate.
He keeps the technological model as the ground that "direct experience of objects is continually emerging" from, but turns to study the disturbance, "the way the rationality of objects comes to grips with the irrationality of needs, and the way this contradiction gives rise to a system of meanings that seeks to resolve it" (p.8). The figure he reaches for is Plato on astronomy, that one should proceed "by means of problems, and leave the starry heavens alone" (pp.7–8); objects are in "perpetual flight from technical structure towards their secondary meanings, from the technological system towards a cultural system" (p.8).
The reconstruction begins from the bourgeois interior read as an organism, and the function Baudrillard assigns its furniture is not use but personification.
The System of Objects, p. 16
All this constitutes an organism whose structure is the patriarchal relationship founded on tradition and authority, and whose heart is the complex affective relationship that binds all the family members together. . . . the primary function of furniture and objects here is to personify human relationships, to fill the space that they share between them, and to be inhabited by a soul.
The System of Objects, p. 16
In their anthropomorphism the objects that furnish it become household gods, spatial incarnations of the emotional bonds and the permanence of the family group.
The caesura between inside and outside makes the traditional space "a closed transcendence" (p.16). The modern set of furniture breaks this up, and Baudrillard insists the change is real but partial, reaching for Marx to mark the limit.
The System of Objects, p. 17
The modern set of furniture, serially produced, is thus apparently destructured yet not restructured, nothing having replaced the expressive power of the old symbolic order.
The System of Objects, p. 18
So far as the serial object is concerned, in the absence of any restructuring of space, this 'functional' development is merely an emancipation, not (to go back to the old Marxian distinction) a liberation proper, for it implies liberation from the function of the object only, not from the object itself.
The Marxian parallel is run out in a footnote, which is where the analogy between the freed object and the freed labourer is actually stated:
The System of Objects, p. 18 n.3
Similarly, the bourgeois and industrial revolution gradually freed the individual from his involvement with religion, morality and family. He thus acceded to a freedom in law as an individual, but also to an actual freedom as labour-power — that is, the freedom to sell himself as labour-power. This parallel has nothing coincidental about it, for there is a profound correlation here: both the serially produced 'functional' object and the social individual are liberated in their 'functional' objectification, not in their singularity or in their totality as object or person.
What is freed is function, not the object; the deeper freedom is spatial: "In a way space is the object's true freedom, whereas its function is merely its formal freedom" (p.18).
Model interiors are read off the glossy magazines Maison Française and Mobilier et Décoration, organized around the opposition between components and seating, governed respectively by interior design (syntagmatic calculation) and atmosphere (p.20). Baudrillard reproduces the furniture-advertising copy verbatim, and it belongs in the record because the new vocabulary of the infinitely combinable unit is the evidence:
The System of Objects, p. 20
tecma: Extensible and interlocking components. Can be transformed or enlarged. Harmonious — they create a perfectly matching set of furniture. Functional — they answer all the needs of modern living.
The System of Objects, p. 20
monopoly: Every monopoly ensemble is your personality's best friend. . . . Four-sided components can be put together in an infinite variety of ways — an infinite variety of genuine furniture adapted to your own particular tastes, size requirements and needs.
The lesson Baudrillard draws is the conversion of value:
The System of Objects, p. 21
These examples reveal how the functional object is being transcended by a new kind of practical organization. Symbolic values, and along with them use values, are being supplanted by organizational values. . . . The value this relationship takes on is no longer of an instinctive or a psychological but, rather, of a tactical kind. What such objects embody is no longer the secret of a unique relationship but, rather, differences, and moves in a game.
A sequence of symptomatic disappearances follows. Walls open and light sources are concealed (pp.21–22). The mirror vanishes, and with it the family portrait; the mirror had been "an opulent object which affords the self-indulgent bourgeois individual the opportunity to exercise his privilege — to reproduce his own image and revel in his possessions" (p.22), and eliminating it "frees space of the converging squint which gave bourgeois décor — much like bourgeois consciousness in general — such a cross-eyed view of itself" (p.23). The clock vanishes too, and Baudrillard gives the formula that organizes the section, then its image:
The System of Objects, p. 24
The clock is to time as the mirror is to space. . . . The clock is a mechanical heart that reassures us about our own heart.
What has died is Stimmung, and what replaces it is calculation:
The System of Objects, p. 24
It is the whole world of Stimmung that has disappeared, the world of 'natural' harmony between movements of the emotions and the presence of things . . . Today, value resides neither in appropriation nor in intimacy but in information, in inventiveness, in control, in a continual openness to objective messages — in short, in the syntagmatic calculation which is, strictly speaking, the foundation of the discourse of the modern home-dweller.
The new type is named "man the interior designer," and the point is that he does not consume his objects, he governs them:
The System of Objects, p. 26
'man the interior designer' is neither an owner nor a mere user — rather, he is an active engineer of atmosphere.
The System of Objects, p. 27
Instead of consuming objects, he dominates, controls and orders them. He discovers himself in the manipulation and tactical equilibration of a system.
Beneath the design vocabulary Baudrillard runs a psychoanalytic register he will not drop for the rest of the book. The traditional order is oral, founded on Nature as substance: "In creating or manufacturing objects, man makes himself, through the imposition of a form (i.e. through culture), into the transubstantiator of nature" (p.28). The modern order is at once phallic and faecal:
The System of Objects, p. 29
the modern order of production, calculation and functionality must be viewed as a phallic order linked to the enterprise . . . but it is at the same time a faecal order founded on an abstraction or quintessence meant to inform a homogeneous material world, on the measuring off and division of material reality, on a great anal aggressiveness sublimated into play, discourse, ordering, classifying and placement.
Hence the closing portrait of the type:
The System of Objects, p. 29
if hypochondria is an obsession with the circulation of substances and the functioning of the primary organs, we might well describe modern man, the cybernetician, as a mental hypochondriac, as someone obsessed with the perfect circulation of messages.
Atmosphere is the cultural counterpart of design, and the section is a catalogue of how each sensible quality is stripped of its own value and reduced to a tactical sign.
Three stages. Traditional colour is bound to form and to fixed meaning, and the bourgeois interior negates it: "black, white, grey — whatever registers zero on the colour scale — is correspondingly paradigmatic of dignity, repression, and moral standing" (p.31). 'Natural' colour arrives through painting and then the bright plastics of leisure, but the loud colour reads as obscenity and retreats into pastels. The nature it invokes is not nature:
The System of Objects, p. 34
It is not 'real' nature which suddenly transfigures the atmosphere of daily life, but holidays — that simulacrum of nature, the reverse side of everyday routine, thriving not on nature but on the Idea of Nature.
'Functional' colour is the third stage, where colours "obey no principle but that of their own interaction" (p.35) and the real terms become hot and cold rather than red and green. Baudrillard quotes a practical decorating guide on the point, "Red here constitutes a sort of upward movement . . . to which is opposed a downward movement in the blues of hangings, settees and chairs" (p.35). 'Functional' warmth follows the same logic to its end, becoming "a warmth characterized, precisely, by the absence of any source" (p.37).
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