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:
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