System of Objects New edition

The System of Objects is a tour de force&;a theoretical letter-in-a-bottle tossed into the ocean in 1968, which brilliantly communicates to us all the live ideas of the day.Pressing Freudian and Saussurean categories into the service of a basically Marxist perspective, The System of Objects offers a cultural critique of the commodity in consumer society. Baudrillard classifies the everyday objects of the &;new technical order&; as functional, nonfunctional and metafunctional. He contrasts &;modern&; and &;traditional&; functional objects, subjecting home furnishing and interior design to a celebrated semiological analysis. His treatment of nonfunctional or &;marginal&; objects focuses on antiques and the psychology of collecting, while the metafunctional category extends to the useless, the aberrant and even the &;schizofunctional.&; Finally, Baudrillard deals at length with the implications of credit and advertising for the commodification of everyday life.The System of Objects is a tour de force of the materialist semiotics of the early Baudrillard, who emerges in retrospect as something of a lightning rod for all the live ideas of the day: Bataille&;s political economy of &;expenditure&; and Mauss&;s theory of the gift; Reisman&;s lonely crowd and the &;technological society&; of Jacques Ellul; the structuralism of Roland Barthes in The System of Fashion; Henri Lefebvre&;s work on the social construction of space; and last, but not least, Guy Debord&;s situationist critique of the spectacle.