The System of Objects
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he System o Objects • Jean Baudrillard Translated by James Benedict VERSO London • New York The System of Objects First published by Verso 1996 This edition © Verso 1996 Paperback edition reprinted 1997,1999, 2002 Translation © James Benedict 1996 First published as Le système des objets © Editions Gallimard 1968 All rights reserved Published with the financial assistance of the French Ministry of Culture The right of James Benedict to be identified as the translator of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F OEG USA: 180 Varick Street, New York NY 10014-4606 Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN 1-^85984-943-1 ISBN 1-85984-068-X (pbk) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Baudrillard, Jean. [Système des objets. English] The system of objects / Jean Baudrillard ; translated by James Benedict. p. cm. ISBN 1-85984-943-1. — ISBN 1-85984-068-X (pbk.) 1. Values—Psychological aspects. 2. Object (Philosophy) 3. Technology and civilization. 4. Consumption (Economics) I. Title. BF778.B313 1996 306.4'6—dc20 96-6183 CIP Typeset by Keystroke, Jacaranda Lodge, Wolverhampton Printed and bound in Great Britain by the Bath Press Contents Translator's Acknowledgements ix Introduction 1 A. The Functional System, or Objective Discourse 13 I Structures of Interior Design 15 The Traditional Environment 15 The Modern Object Liberated in Its Function 17 The Model Interior 19 Modular Components 19 Walls and Daylight 21 Lighting 21 Mirrors and Portraits 22 Clocks and Time 24 Towards a Sociology of Interior Design? 24 Man the Interior Designer 26 II Structures of Atmosphere 30 Atmospheric Values: Colour 30 Traditional Colour 30 'Natural9 Colour 31 'Functional' Colour 34 Hot and Cold 36 Atmospheric Values: Materials 37 Natural Wood/Cultural Wood 37 The Logic of Atmosphere 39 A Model Material: Glass 41 CONTENTS 4^The Man of Relationship and Atmosphere 43 Seats 44 Cultural Connotation and Censorship 46 Atmospheric Values: Gestural Systems and Forms 47 The Traditional Gestural System: Effort 48 The Functional Gestural System: Control 49 A New Operational Field 50 Miniaturization 51 Stylization, Manipulability, Envelopment 52 The End of the Symbolic Dimension 54 The Abstractness of Power 55 The Functionalist Myth 57 Functional Form: The Lighter 58 Formal Connotation: Tail Fins 59 Form as Camouflage 61 III Conclusion: Naturalness and Functionality . 63 Addendum: The Domestic World and the Car 65 B. The Non-Functional System, or Subjective Discourse 71 I Marginal Objects: Antiques 73 Atmospheric Value: Historicalness 73 Symbolic Value: The Myth of the Origin 74 'Authenticity' 76 The Neo-Cultural Syndrome: Restoration 77 Synchronism, Diachronism, Anachronism 80 Reverse Projection: The Technical Object and Primitive Man 82 The Market in Antiques 83 Cultural Neo-lmperialism 84 Il A Marginal System: Collecting 85 The Object Abstracted from Its Function 85 The Object as Passion 87 The Finest of Domestic Animals 89 CONTENTS A Serial Game From Quantity to Quality: The Unique Object Objects and Habits: Wrist-Watches Objects and Time: A Controlled Cycle The Sequestered Object: Jealousy The Object Destructured: Perversion From Serial Motivation to Real Motivation A Discourse Addressed to Oneself C. The Metafunctional and Dysfunctional System Gadgets and Robots Technical Connotation: Automatism 'Functional' Transcendence Functional Aberration: Gadgets Pseudo-Functionality: Gizmos Metafunctionality: Robots The Transformations of Technology Technics and the Unconscious System D. The Socio-ldeological System of Objects and Their Consumption I Models and Series The Pre-lndustrial Object and the Industrial Model The Personalized' Object Choice Marginal Difference The Ideal Nature of Models From the Model to the Series The Technical Deficit of the Serial Object The 'Style' Deficit of the Serial Object Class Differences The Present as Privilege vii CONTENTS A Misadventure of the Person 152 The Ideology of Models 153 II Credit 156 Rights and Duties of the Consumer-Citizen 156 The Precedence of Consumption: A New Ethic 158 The Obligation to Buy 160 The Miracle of Buying 161 The Ambiguity of the Domestic Object 162 III Advertising 164 Discourse on Objects and Discourse-As-Object 164 Advertising in the Indicative and in the Imperative 165 The Logic of Father Christmas 166 Society as Maternal Agency: Airborne's Armchair 168 The Festival of Buying Power 172 Gratification/Rep'ression: A Two-Sided Agency 174 The Presumption of Collectivity 178 Pax Washing Powder 178 Promotional Contests 180 GARAP 181 A New Humanism? 182 Serial Conditioning 182 Freedom by Default 184 A New Language? 187 Structure and Demarcation: Brands 187 A Universal Code: Status 193 Conclusion: Towards a Definition of 'Consumption' 197 viii Translator's Acknowledgements For her unstinting help with this translation, I must yet again offer my heartfelt gratitude to M.N. Many many thanks as well to Malcolm Imrie and Jane Hindle, my editors at Verso. INTRODUCTION 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 threat ened by extinction? Our urban civilization is witness to an ever-accelerating procession of generations of products, appliances and gadgets by comparison with which mankind appears to be a remarkably stable species. This pullulation of objects is no odder, when we come to think about it, than that to be observed in countless natural species. Species which man has successfully inventoried. And in the period when he began to do this systematically he was also able to draw up, in the Encyclopédie, an exhaustive catalogue of the practical and technical objects that surrounded him. Since then, however, that balance has been lost: 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? There are almost as many criteria of classification as there are objects themselves: the size of the object; its degree of functionality (i.e. the object's relationship to its own objective function); the gestures associated with it (are they rich or impov erished? traditional or not?); its form; its duration; the time of day at which it 3 THE SYSTEM OF OBJECTS appears (more or less intermittent presence, and how conscious one is of it); the material that it transforms (obvious in the case of a coffee grinder, less so in those of a mirror, a radio, or a car - though every object transforms something); the degree of exclusiveness or sociability attendant upon its use (is it for private, family, public or general use?); and so on. Indeed all such means of categoriza tion may seem - when they are applied to an ensemble, such as the set of objects, that is undergoing continual mutation and expansion - barely less contingent than the order of the letters of the alphabet. The catalogue of the Manufacture d'Armes de Saint-Etienne 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 hétéroclite operation, but nowhere is any system of meanings even touched upon.1 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 object2 - 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, what mental structures are interwoven with - and contradict - their functional structures, or what cultural, infracultural or transcultural system underpins their directly experienced everydayness. These are the questions we shall be asking here. We shall not, therefore, be concerning ourselves with objects as defined by their functions or by the categories into which they might be sub divided 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 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 1. The catalogue itself, however - its actual existence - is rich in meaning: its exhaustive nomenclatural aims have the resounding cultural implication that access to objects may be obtained only via the pages of a catalogue which may be leafed through 'for the pleasure of if, as one might a great manual, a book of tales, a menu.... 2. Mechanization Takes Command (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948). 4 INTRODUCTION a plane distinct from this 'spoken' system, a more strictly structured plane, a structural plane transcending even the functional account of objects. This plane is the technological one. 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. In the strictest sense, what happens to the object in the technological sphere is essential, whereas what happens to it in the psychological or sociological sphere of needs and practices is inessential. The discourse of psychology or sociology continually refers us to the object as apprehended at a more consistent level, a level unrelated to any individual or collective discourse, namely the supposed level of technological language.