These terms refer to the virtual or unreal nature of contemporary culture in an age of mass communication and mass consumption.
Jean Baudrillard's philosophy centers on the twin concepts of 'hyperreality' and 'simulation'. Jean Baudrillard was also a Professor of Philosophy of Culture and Media Criticism at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, where he taught an Intensive Summer Seminar. His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and post-structuralism. Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. 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 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. 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. He contrasts “modern” and “traditional” functional objects, subjecting home furnishing and interior design to a celebrated semiological analysis.
Baudrillard classifies the everyday objects of the “new technical order” as functional, nonfunctional and metafunctional. 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. 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.
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