Stuff Theory by Boscagli Maurizia;

Author:Boscagli, Maurizia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-02-11T16:00:00+00:00

the object is that thing through which we construct our mourning: the object represents our own death, but that death is transcended (symbolically) by virtue of the fact that we possess the object; … Objects allow us to apply the work of mourning to ourselves right now, in everyday life, and this in turn allows us to live—to live regressively, no doubt, but at least to live (97).

The object helps us to cope with death once it has lost its anthropomorphic, political, and transcendent functions. Implicit in the image of Baudrillard’s therapeutic object is a vision of stuff as dead matter (albeit magically resurrected by commodity fetishism), an inert surface upon which individual neurosis and anxieties can be inscribed and articulated. Because no transcendence is possible in the tightly organized, highly alienated, and utterly presentist system of signification that is consumption, objects help the individual to control and overcome his or her Angst about finitude.

At the end of The System of Objects, after a quote from Perec’s Les Choses, Baudrillard writes: “there are no more projects, only objects. Not that the project has disappeared, exactly: it is just that its ‘realization’ as a sign embodied in the object is taken as satisfaction enough. The project of consumption is thus the precise form of the project of self-renunciation” (204). The project—of action, of social change, even of a volatile and affective relation of subject and vibrant object—is replaced once again by asceticism. The most Baudrillard can envision of this exchange between subject and object is a mirror function. The subject is capable of staging only an intransitive and claustrophobic relationship with the object. This foolproof system of identification, for the subject and the object alike, denies both any agency and meaning, except the tautology of their perfect identification. As he points out in Society of Consumption, the object is not the mirror, which still maintains a certain transitivity, but la vitrine, the shop window: “there’s no more mirror …, where man faced his image …—but the shop window, geometric place of consumption, where the individual no longer sees his reflection, but gets absorbed in the contemplation of objects.”16

Society of Consumption, where Baudrillard investigates the functioning of specific objects and locales—Le Drugstore, the planned community of Parly, Pop Art, kitsch and gadgets as Baroque emblems of post-industrial society—foregrounds not what materiality allows us to do, that is, our work of mourning, but what it disallows: jouissance. Contemporary abundance has, he claims, sanctioned the end of prodigality, a trait of premodern societies, that involved collective wasting rather than hoarding, using and abstracting materiality into economic or semiotic value. This end of prodigality as destruction of value points to consumer culture’s denial of jouissance and of waste. Pleasure is replaced by “fun culture”, which consists of trying out all the options offered by the system: “Thus the universal curiosity [spurred by advertisements] in cooking, cultural, scientific, religious, sexual matters. ‘Try Jesus!’ says an American slogan” (113). If stuff is hoarded rather than wasted or given as gifts, then jouissance is denied.

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