Items related to The System of Objects
Synopsis
The System of Objects 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's how: To take an example: the most 'essential' and structural aspects of a coffee mill, and hence the most concretely objective things 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 (and by reference to the universal combinatorial system of fashion.
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