The System of Objects Quotes

“Everywhere today, in fact, the ideology of competition gives way to a 'philosophy' of self-fulfillment. In a more integrated society individuals no longer compete for the possession of goods, they actualize themselves in consumption.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects

“The whole gestural system of work was also obscene, in sharp contrast to the miniaturized and abstract gestural system of control to which it has now been reduced. The world of the objects of old seems like a theatre of cruelty and instinctual drives in comparison with the formal neutrality and prophylactic 'whiteness' of our perfect functional objects. Thus the handle of the flatiron gradually diminishes as it undergoes 'contouring' - the term is typical in its superficiality and abstractness; increasingly it suggests the very absence of gesture, and carried to its logical extreme this handle will no longer be manual - merely manipulable. At that point, the perfecting of the form will have relegated man to a pure contemplation of his power. ”
― Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects

“Indeed, just as possession depends on the discontinuity of the series (real or virtual), and on the choice of a privileged term within it, so sexual perversion is founded on the inability, to apprehend the other qua, object of desire in his, or her unique totality, as a person, to grasp the other in any, but a discontinuous way: the other is transformed into the paradigm of various eroticized parts of the body, a single one of which becomes the focus of objectification. A particular woman is no longer a woman, but merely a sex, breasts, belly, thighs, voice, and face – and preferably just one of them. She thus becomes a constituent 'object' in a series whose different terms are gazetted by desire, and whose real referent is by no means the loved person but, rather, the subject himself, collecting and eroticizing himself, and turning the relationship of love into a discourse directed towards him alone.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects

“But the object cannot be allowed to escape from ephemerality or from fashion.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects

“There is no reason to assume that the unceasing forward march of techne will not eventually achieve a mimesis which replaces a natural world with an intelligible artificial one. If the simulacrum is so well designed that it becomes an effective organizer of reality, then surely it is man, not the simulacrum, who is turned into an abstraction.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects

“There was a time when moral norms demanded that the individual adapt to society at large, but from the standpoint of an age of consumption - or a would-be age of consumption - such requirements belong to the outmoded ideology of the age of production; nowadays it is society as a whole which must adapt to the individual. What is more, society does not merely estimate the individual's needs and adapt to this or that particular need; rather, it is at pains to adapt to the individual himself, personally.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects

“The anxiety that attaches to periodic payments is very specific. It eventually sets in train a parallel process which weighs down on us day after day even though we never become conscious of the objective relationship involved. It haunts the human project, not immediate practice. An object that is mortgaged escapes us in time, and has in fact escaped us from the outset. It flees us, and its flight echoes that of the serial object ever vainly striving towards the model. This dual movement of things away from our grasp is what creates the latent fragility and ever-imminent disappointments of the world of objects that surrounds us.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects

“In a civilization where synchronism and diachronism strive to establish systematic and exclusive control over reality, a third dimension, that of anachronism, nevertheless emerges (and this as much at the level of objects as at the level of behaviours and social structures). This regressive dimension, though it attests to a relative setback for the system, nevertheless finds a place within that system and even, paradoxically, enables the system to function.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects