An Encyclopedia of Discontent
The System of Objects by Jean Baudrillard
I have trouble with a lot of current fiction because there’s nothing I want to read less than descriptions of characters using their smartphones. Nothing is less interesting than reading about a character doing a google search. Translated to the plane of ideas, modern technology just feels symbolically empty. There are no resonances or weight in these objects; they dominate our lives but they’re imaginative dead ends. There’s a reason the Coen brothers exclusively have made period pieces for over a decade.
But people have always existed in their environments and great books of the past are littered with descriptions of characters standing up, sitting down, pushing in chairs, using tools, and so forth. An inversion seems to have taken place. Whereas before objects were incidental to human actions, now people and their infinite complexity are subsumed into the structure of their devices, making the person the incidental element in an otherwise determined system.
One might wonder: how did this inversion happen?
The System of Objects by Jean Baudrillard is a helpful starting point. At 224 pages it’s a slim volume that nevertheless contains a seemingly exhaustive account of modern dysfunction. Published in 1968 and adapted from Baudrillard’s doctoral thesis in sociology, it’s an early foray into critiquing consumption by adapting Marx’s material analysis into semiotics—Roland Barthes served on his dissertation committee—while appealing throughout to psychological concepts like drives, repression, and the lure of irrationality. Some of the psychological material gets a little Freudian for my taste but his ideas nonetheless contain incredible explanatory power and untangle all sorts of ideological contradictions we’re still mired in more than fifty years later.
For context, Baudrillard was born in Reims, France in 1929 and died in 2007. His best known work is probably Simulacra and Simulation, published in 1981. Wikipedia will tell you he’s part of post-structuralism or post-modernism but he’s best understood as a social commentator who could apply rigorous analysis to extremely slippery areas of life that are usually hard to critique in a concrete or meaningful way like cultural trends, the experience of historical events, and shifting political beliefs.
This book is about stuff. Things. Where other philosophers use object to contrast with subject—the world outside versus the self—Baudrillard uses it in a disorientingly commonplace sense. Get a few pages in and you’ll realize you really are reading a treatise about furniture, appliances, gadgets, color schemes, and knick-knacks. All of these things, Baudrillard claims, are being subsumed into functionality, causing a radical realignment of their purpose and our relationship to them.
Baudrillard’s concept of functionality is the crux of the argument so it bears careful explanation. Under the regime of serial production and ever-shrinking living spaces, objects are living ever-shortening lifespans and no longer have identity in themselves. A chair, for instance, surely of worse quality than its forbears, no longer can exist simply as a place to sit. Now it must function as part of the overall scheme of the room—it must fit in with all other objects around it. That is, our objects, once self contained, now are forced into dialogue with each other, useful only insofar as they contribute to the successful use of the space as a whole.
If this sounds stupid—of course a piece of furniture needs to take account of what else is in the room—I get it. But whereas under the previous rules of decoration and taste various rooms had various purposes that would be filled in with objects chosen on the basis of concrete symbolic values, modern open design leaves people with abstracted spaces to be filled in haphazardly. This leads to a problem: all the various objects become contingent, dependent on every other item surrounding it, with all its qualities made good or bad on the basis of how they contribute to the overall effect. Baudrillard writes:
This 'discourse of atmosphere' concerning colors, substance, volume, space, and so on mobilizes all these elements simultaneously in a great systematic reorganization: it is because furniture now comprises movable elements in a decentralized space... The main point, though, is that the color in question, like the wood itself, is always abstract - an object of mental manipulation along with everything else. The entire modern environment is thus transposed onto the level of a sign system, namely ATMOSPHERE, which is no longer produced by the way any particular element is handled, nor by the beauty or ugliness of that element.
There’s one major element of any interior space not mentioned yet: people. If you accept Baudrillard’s claims here, the implications for the residents of such spaces are profound:
The 'atmospheric' interior is designed to permit the same alternation between warmth and non-warmth, between intimacy and distance, to operate not only between the objects that comprise it but also between the human beings who live in it. Friend or relative, family or customer—some relationship is always required, but it is supposed to remain mobile and 'functional'; in other words, the aim is that relating should be possible at every instant, but its subjective aspects should no longer be problematic, and the various relationships should therefore be freely interchangeable. Such is the nature of functional relationships, from which desire is (in theory) absent, having been neutralized for the sake of atmosphere. This, however, is where ambiguity begins.
Now we’re cooking with gas. Without underrating numerous other material and cultural shifts of the last half century, Baudrillard is pointing us toward one cause of the blandification of life these days. Even broaching this sort of complaint sets off alarm bells in my head that make me worry I sound like a crank or a reactionary but it’s true! Everything is so dull and boring! I think of going with a friend to their parent’s house to watch a football game and how we all arranged ourselves on the couch and then just sat there. No one getting up except for snacks and beer. No spontaneity or surprising hijinx. Just watching the game, three hours of sitting and staring. Now these could be just boring people but I think it’s due in part to our integration into the system of objects. In the purely functional environment, even people have their part to play.
I’ve felt this acutely during the last two years of staying home. I have wasted so much time wondering why I can’t get anything done, why it’s so hard to get myself to sit and write these newsletters when I really enjoy writing them. I spend a great deal of my days feeling like an automaton, led around by my programming as I drift from one time waster to another. A strong work ethic has certainly never been a core virtue of mine but I constantly feel my environment imposing itself on me, diluting my intentions and sapping my will. My couch faces my tv and therefore my Nintendo—sitting on the former makes picking up the latter almost inevitable. I have been subsumed into the function of my apartment’s layout. This effect is even worse on my computer, where I flit from one tab to another, opening and closing, opening and closing, waiting for an ebb in the distraction that never comes. Tabbed browsing was a mistake!
After establishing the framework of the functional object, Baudrillard moves on to non-functional objects. This section covers items that “run counter to the requirements of functional calculation, and answer to other kinds of demands such as witness, memory, nostalgia, or escapism.” These include unique, baroque, folkloric, exotic, and antique objects. This is where Baudrillard’s synthesis of Freud and Barthes gets really interesting. By exploring objects that satisfy something in us other than the need for function and efficiency, he is able to articulate some of what has all but disappeared in modern life.
Non-functional objects answer our yearning for something grounding. They speak to systems, times, people outside our own. They are complete in themselves. Rather than being absorbed into their surroundings, they absorb us into their mystique:
Man is not ‘at home’ amid pure functionality—he requires something like that lustre of the wood of the True Cross which could make a church truly holy, some kind of talisman—a shard of absolute reality ensconced, enshrined at the heart of ordinary reality in order to justify it. Such is the role of the antique object.
I’ve had this experience in a degraded form. When we moved into our current apartment we brought along the various Ikea furniture we owned and a couch bought cheap from a former roommate but we needed a dining room table. The one we bought crucially gave us a place to eat but it was also the nicest piece of furniture we owned. It changed the apartment, completing it and charging it with a certain power, a sense of place and home. Of course, the table was hardly antique or baroque and is quite functionally integrated into our layout. Baudrillard’s ideas have staying power even as the basic conditions he describes recede further from reach.
I could go on venting my personal frustrations and expand it out from the layouts of our homes to the hostile yet efficient design that governs American cities (parks, one of the least functional parts of a city, are not coincidentally also its most rejuvenating and oldest). The argument speaks powerfully to me, someone who has lived the majority of my life under the post-September 11 security state and finds myself daydreaming about living totally off the grid, free from surveillance and the deadening drumbeat of the nostalgia-industrial entertainment complex. But it’s more interesting to note that Baudrillard’s critique spans enormous ideological chasms. In addition to a leftist like myself, it also has an appeal for weird Ross Douthat types on the right who sit around lamenting that America has descended into decadence and unearned ease of living.
That type of thinking is cranky and reactionary and hilariously out of touch considering the appalling wealth inequality, chronic overwork, and dearth of social services in the U.S., but Douthat and his ilk get away with it because there is that kernel of truth there that’s hard to shake. Yes, he’s wrong on every material count but when when I find I can’t sit comfortably in a straightbacked chair because all my furniture is so slouchy I find myself agreeing that maybe we have all just gone soft.
These conservative gripes momentarily seem to gain the upper hand in the third section of the book, The Metafunctional and Dysfunctional System: Gadgets and Robots. Drawing a line that’s familiar now between analog tools and modern technology, Baudrillard describes the way that people invest tech with all manner of psychological baggage:
Because the automated object ‘works by itself,’ its resemblance to the autonomous human being is unmistakable, and the fascination thus created carries the day. We are in the presence of a new anthropomorphism. Formerly the image of man was clearly imprinted in the morphology and the manner of use of tools, of furniture, or of the house itself. In the perfected technical object this compliance has been destroyed, but it has been replaced by a symbolism of superstructural rather than primary functions: it is no longer his gestures, his energy, his needs and the image of his body that man projects into automated objects, but instead the autonomy of his consciousness, his power of control, his own individual nature, his personhood.
If we take the possibility of this sort of projection seriously (and I believe we should), technology will ultimately be saturated with far more than simple thinking and speaking. It will carry all of humanity’s ugly, irrational, and animalistic tendencies. It will, crucially, carry the sexual energy of the libido that Freudians see animating human endeavor. Technology thus holds a threat to neuter mankind, the sexual impulse passed off to automated servants along with other labor and functionality. This would be a bizarre and disturbing outcome that today has been relegated to a weird hobbyhorse for, again, the religious right who harp on about declining birthrates and the desexualization of younger generations. Lest you think I’m letting my imagination go to weird places, Baudrillard says it pretty directly:
Humanity has its whole future wagered on the simultaneous harnessing of natural external forces and of the internal pressure of the libido, both of which it experiences as threatening and fateful. The unconscious economy of the system of objects is a mechanism of projection and domestication (or control) of the libido which brings an efficient principle to bear. The domination of nature and the production of goods are in effect a parallel benefit thereof. Unfortunately, however, this admirable economy carries a dual risk for the human order: first there is the danger that sexuality might be in some sense conjured away and foreclosed in the technical realm, secondly the danger that this technical realm might in turn be disturbed in its development by the conflicted energy by which it has been invested. All the preconditions are thus assembled for the emergence of an insoluble contradiction, a permanent defection: the fact is that the system of objects as it operates today embodies an ever-present potential for consent to this sort of regression - the lure of an end to sexuality, its definitive absorption in the recurrence and continual forward flight of the technical order.
But again, part of what’s so exciting about Baudrillard’s thinking is the reminder that we don’t have to cede these ideas to the right and that there are extremely justified reasons to be skeptical of technology from the left. Those two block quotes are separated by a number of pages in which Baudrillard goes all in attacking technology for its central role in production and the capitalist economy of profit, waste, consumption, ephemerality, and obsolescence. I’m sorry for all these blockquotes but I can’t stop.
Technological society thrives on a tenacious myth, the myth of uninterrupted technical progress accompanied by a continuing moral 'backwardness' of man relative thereto. These two claims are mutually supportive: moral 'stagnation' transfigures technical progress and turns it into the only certain value, and hence the ultimate authority of our society; by the same token, the system of production is absolved of all responsibility. A supposed moral contradiction serves to conceal the true contradiction, which is the fact, precisely, that the present production system, while working for real technological progress, at the same time opposes it (along with any restructuring of social relationships to which it might lead).
There is a cancer of the object: the proliferation of astructural elements that underpins the object's triumphalism is a kind of cancer. It is upon such astructural elements (automatism, accessory features, inessential differences) that the entire social network of fashion and controlled consumption is founded. They are the bulwark which tends to halt genuine technical development.
There is in fact a fundamental antagonism between the verticality of technology and the horizontality of profit - between the continual self-transcendence of technical invention and the closedness of a system of recurrent objects and forms beholden to the goals of production.
It is difficult to assess the total cost to society as a whole of thus referring real conflicts and needs to the technical sphere, itself in thrall to fashion and forced consumption. But that cost is certainly colossal.
The thing to emphasize here is that we can have it both ways. Technology has, on one level, reordered the world and dropped a veil of symbolic emptiness over our heads. But, on another, that veil is a veil of the self—an overlay of the all-too-human crowding out the natural and authentic on behalf of the forces of capital. The system of objects is a monolith that the right and the left approach bearing their pet grievances but the system is a totalizing force. It swallows both without the slightest hesitation.
Technology is inescapable, and characters in books are going to keep having smartphones no matter how much I hate it. Among its myriad observations and potential applications, maybe Baudrillard can help us figure out how to make these totems stand for something.
