The System of Objects by Jean Baudrillard

Author:Jean Baudrillard
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Verso Books

The Transformations of Technology

We may thus trace functional mythologies, born of technics itself, all the way to a sort of fatality in which the world-mastering technology seems to crystallize in the form of an inverse and threatening purpose. At this point it behoves us to do two things. In the first place, we must reframe the problem of the fragility of objects, and of their defection; for although in the first instance objects present themselves to us as reassuring, as factors of equilibrium, albeit of a neurotic kind, they are also in the end a factor of continual disillusionment. Secondly, we must challenge our society’s implicit assumption that a rationality of ends and means governs the sphere of production and the technological project itself.

The object’s dysfunctionality, its counter-purpose, is governed by two parallel sets of determinants: a socio-economic system of production and a psychological system of projection. It is the reciprocal involvement of these two systems, their collusion, that we need to define.

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). The myth of a happy convergence of technology, production and consumption masks all political and economic counter-purposes. How indeed could a system of techniques and objects conceivably progress harmoniously while the system of relations between the people who produced it continued to stagnate or regress? The fact is that humans and their techniques, needs and objects are structurally interlocked come what may. The indivisibility, within any single cultural sphere, of individual and social structures and of technical and functional modalities must surely be deemed axiomatic. Our technological civilization is no exception to the rule: techniques and objects therein suffer the same servitudes as human beings – and the process of material organization, hence of objective technical progress, is subject to exactly the same blocks, deviations and regressions as the concrete process of the socialization of human relationships, hence of objective social progress.

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.13 They are the bulwark which tends to halt genuine technical development. On their account, while appearing to manifest all the metamorphic powers of a prodigious health, objects that are already saturated wear themselves out completely through convulsive formal variation and changes whose impact is strictly visual.

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