The System of Objects

Author: Jean Baudrillard
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788739434
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 245

Book Description
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. 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. Baudrillard classifies the everyday objects of the “new technical order” as functional, nonfunctional and metafunctional. He contrasts “modern” and “traditional” functional objects, subjecting home furnishing and interior design to a celebrated semiological analysis. 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. 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 day: 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.

A Theory of Objects

Author: Martin Abadi
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1441985980
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 392

Book Description
By developing object calculi in which objects are treated as primitives, the authors are able to explain both the semantics of objects and their typing rules, and also demonstrate how to develop all of the most important concepts of object-oriented programming languages: self, dynamic dispatch, classes, inheritance, protected and private methods, prototyping, subtyping, covariance and contravariance, and method specialization. An innovative and important approach to the subject for researchers and graduates.

Simulacra and Simulation

Author: Jean Baudrillard
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472065219
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 174

Book Description
Develops a theory of contemporary culture that relies on displacing economic notions of cultural production with notions of cultural expenditure. This book represents an effort to rethink cultural theory from the perspective of a concept of cultural materialism, one that radically redefines postmodern formulations of the body.

The Jean Baudrillard Reader

Author: Steve Redhead
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231146135
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Book Description
Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) was a controversial social and cultural theorist known for his trenchant analyses of media and technological communication. Belonging to the generation of French thinkers that included Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan, Baudrillard has at times been vilified by his detractors, but the influence of his work on critical thought and pop culture is impossible to deny (many might recognize his name from The Matrix movies, which claimed to be based on the French theorist's ideas). Steve Redhead takes a fresh look at Baudrillard in relation to the intellectual and political climates in which he wrote. Baudrillard sought to produce a theory of modernity, but the modern world of the 1950s was radically different from the reality of the early twenty-first century. Beginning with Baudrillard's initial publications in the 1960s and concluding with his writings on 9/11 and Abu Ghraib, Redhead guides the reader through Baudrillard's difficult texts and unorthodox views on current issues. He also proposes an original theory of Baudrillard's relation to postmodernism, presenting the theorist's work as "non-postmodernist," after Bruno Latour's concept of "non-modernity." Each section of the Reader includes an extract from one of Baudrillard's writings, prefaced by a short bibliographical introduction that places the piece in context and puts the debate surrounding the theorist into sharp perspective. The conflict over Baudrillard's legacy stems largely from the fact that a comprehensive selection of his writings has yet to be translated and collected into one volume. The Jean Baudrillard Reader provides an expansive and much-needed portrait of the critic's resonant work.

The Structure of Objects

Author: Kathrin Koslicki
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191609137
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 539

Book Description
Kathrin Koslicki offers an analysis of ordinary materials objects, those material objects to which we take ourselves to be committed in ordinary, scientifically informed discourse. She focuses particularly on the question of how the parts of such objects are related to the wholes which they compose. Many philosophers today find themselves in the grip of an exceedingly deflationary conception of what it means to be an object. According to this conception, any plurality of objects, no matter how disparate or gerrymandered, itself composes an object, even if the objects in question fail to exhibit interesting similarities, internal unity, cohesion, or causl interaction amongst each other. This commitment to initially counterintuitive objects follows from the belief that no principled set of criteria is available by means of which to distinguish intuitively gerrymandered objects from commonsensical ones; the project of this book is to persuade the reader that systematic principles can be found by means of which composition can be restricted, and hence that we need not embrace this deflationary approach to the question of what it means to be an object. To this end, a more full-blooded neo-Aristotelian account of parthood and composition is developed according to which objects are structured wholes: it is integral to the existence and identity of an object, on this conception, that its parts exhibit a certain manner of arrangement. This structure-based conception of parthood and composition is explored in detail, along with some of its historical precursors as well as some of its contemporary competitors.

Impossible Exchange

Author: Jean Baudrillard
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1789600391
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 161

Book Description
Working his way through the various spheres and systems of everyday life-the political, the juridical, the economical, the aesthetic, the biological, among others-he finds that they are all characterized by the same non-equivalence, and hence the same eccentricity. Literally, they have no meaning outside themselves and cannot be exchanged for anything. Politics is laden with signs and meanings, but seen from the outside it has no meaning. Schemes for genetic experimentation and investigation are becoming infinitely ramified, and the more ramified they become the more the crucial question is left unanswered: who rules over life? Who rules over death? Baudrillard's conclusion is that the true formula of contemporary nihilism lies here: the nihilism of value itself. This is our fate, and from this stem both the happiest and the most baleful consequences. This book might be said to be the exploration, first, of the 'fateful' consequences, and subsequently-by a poetic transference of situation-of the fortunate, happy consequences of impossible exchange.

The Lives in Objects

Author: Jessica Yirush Stern
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469631490
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 269

Book Description
In The Lives in Objects, Jessica Yirush Stern presents a thoroughly researched and engaging study of the deerskin trade in the colonial Southeast, equally attentive to British American and Southeastern Indian cultures of production, distribution, and consumption. Stern upends the long-standing assertion that Native Americans were solely gift givers and the British were modern commercial capitalists. This traditional interpretation casts Native Americans as victims drawn into and made dependent on a transatlantic marketplace. Stern complicates that picture by showing how both the Southeastern Indian and British American actors mixed gift giving and commodity exchange in the deerskin trade, such that Southeastern Indians retained much greater agency as producers and consumers than the standard narrative allows. By tracking the debates about Indian trade regulation, Stern also reveals that the British were often not willing to embrace modern free market values. While she sheds new light on broader issues in native and colonial history, Stern also demonstrates that concepts of labor, commerce, and material culture were inextricably intertwined to present a fresh perspective on trade in the colonial Southeast.

International Handbook of Semiotics

Author: Peter Pericles Trifonas
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9401794049
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 1282

Book Description
This book provides an extensive overview and analysis of current work on semiotics that is being pursued globally in the areas of literature, the visual arts, cultural studies, media, the humanities, natural sciences and social sciences. Semiotics—also known as structuralism—is one of the major theoretical movements of the 20th century and its influence as a way to conduct analyses of cultural products and human practices has been immense. This is a comprehensive volume that brings together many otherwise fragmented academic disciplines and currents, uniting them in the framework of semiotics. Addressing a longstanding need, it provides a global perspective on recent and ongoing semiotic research across a broad range of disciplines. The handbook is intended for all researchers interested in applying semiotics as a critical lens for inquiry across diverse disciplines.

The Singular Objects of Architecture

Author: Jean Baudrillard
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780816639137
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 80

Book Description
A revelatory conversation between two major figures in visual culture.

The Spirit of Terrorism

Author: Jean Baudrillard
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1781680205
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 97

Book Description
Baudrillard sees the power of the terrorists as lying in the symbolism of slaughter—not merely the reality of death, but in a sacrifice that challenges the whole system. Where previously the old revolutionary sought to conduct a struggle between real forces in the context of ideology and politics, the new terrorist mounts a powerful symbolic challenge which, when combined with high-tech resources, constitutes an unprecedented assault on an over-sophisticated and vulnerable West. This new edition is up-dated with the essays “Hypotheses on Terrorism” and “Violence of the Global.”