The System of Objects
” …Consumption is not a material practice, nor is it a phenomenology of ‘affluence’… If it has any meaning at all, consumption means an activity consisting of the systematic manipulation of signs…” writes Jean Baudrillard in The System of Objects. (1) “To become an object of consumption, an object must first become a sign… it must become external, in a sense, to a relationship that it now merely signifies… it derives its consistency, and hence its meaning, from an abstract and systematic relationship to all other sign-objects. Only in this context can it be ‘personalized’, can it become part of a series, and so on; only thus can it be consumed, never in its materiality, but in its difference.” In this way, a kind of ‘ecology’ of the consumer society was outlined at the very dawn of the post-industrial age, in 1968 when the book was written. Within this system of objects in Western Europe and North America, models and series; antiques and collecting; advertising and credit; needs and wants; language and semiotics; and Freud and Lacan pay their dues to Baudrillard’s argument. What would a follow up be like today to this very insightful discourse by the late writer (a radical thinker, publishers would label), one wonders. What would we make of the ‘model’ and ‘series’, and what of advertising and ‘media’ in the era of extreme income disparity and equally extreme technologies of information and communication of (supposedly) equalizing effects? “The Transparency of Evil” Baudrillard would have said, title of his other book from 1990.
We in the rest of the world (for example in Turkey) are very much in limbo trying to decipher the sign-objects around us today, because the condition does not belong to a linear trajectory on which we arrived at a kind of consumer society in a fifty year relay. From rural to urban; traditional to modern; to supply and demand and GDP; from conspicuous consumption to poverty and to abject poverty; from secular nation building to Sunni ummah; from Marxism and its variants to authoritarian neoliberalism the long-time oscillations in cognition of the self and the community have created confused and precarious subjects. The system of objects in this part of the world is still subject to ‘crude materialism’ in which the hardware (a materialistic signifier) as the indicator of affluence is infinitely superior to the software, to the information that goes into the objects, from gold jewelry to cars, and to buildings and interiors. To the convenience of the ruling party (AKP for more than twenty years) and the economic elite, the very basic gadgets of techno-materialism are appropriated to conceal exploitation and inequality: ‘… show us your latest model smartphone… would you be able to afford this before we came to power?…’ (2) And this in a long time agrarian society which, for now, suffers some of the highest prices in the world for basic foodstuff, and with a median income lowest in comparison to the developed world.
In such places, economic segregation works in sinister ways as to cover up its cruelty. Inequality is embedded inside the fancy shopping malls, along the highways and on the facade of the high-rises. But in certain other places the savagery of segregation and apartheid is deliberately manifest. Maybe another system should be observed in reverse where ‘object as negative sign’ is studied. Today, nowhere else but in Gaza are these objects more concentrated. From pots and pans and cans and buckets that are on the stretched arms of children in front of soup kitchens; to the entire belongings of a family that can fit in a donkey cart in search of a ‘safe’ place; and to the remains of a tent after a bombing raid, these signs are everywhere. Among the images that can come out of Gaza, of emaciated and maimed children, of their bodies carried in white shrouds on the arms of men, and of the remaining hospitals, just as heartrending are the bare necessities belonging to this proud people resisting a genocidal regime, refusing to give up their land.
Certain other photographs of objects still haunt me after more than forty years since I have seen them in a printed book for the first time in my early twenties. I assume they were made immediately after the Nazi death camps were liberated towards the end of the war (Auschwitz? Treblinka?) rather than after some of the camps were turned into museums and memorials. All black and white photographs of huge piles of objects (thrown in and not stacked, but neatly classified): pyramidal piles of eyeglasses, of shoes, of suitcases. I do not remember if the image of the pile of prostheses (and of human hair) were among these images, or I have seen them somewhere else later. The absence of their owners from the site of annihilation makes one face these images that stand in for the utmost evil that mankind is capable of, just as Claude Lanzmann’s film ‘Shoah’ contemplates the same horror by quietly looking (for hours) at the railroad tracks and the surrounding landscape in Eastern Europe, while the interviews and testimonials are heard. Sometimes, to remember means to silently observe the trees, either in the dark forests in Poland or in the olive groves of Palestine.
Georges Bataille refines the argument on consumption, luxury and the principles of general economy in The Accursed Share. (3) The ‘superabundance of biochemical energy’ ends in its expenditure in the ‘three luxuries of nature’: Eating, death and sexual reproduction. When the surplus energy cannot be used for growth, war and destruction are the inevitable outcome: “… the two world wars organized the greatest orgies of wealth – and of human beings- that history has recorded” Bataille writes. This is where we should stand in understanding the meaning of ‘consumption’, of the future of the humankind and of the planet, and to resist.
June 2025
(1) Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects. Verso, London and NY. , 1996. p. 200
(2) From an encounter of a Turkish minister, and a young farmer yelling ‘You have ruined us’ in protest, in 2021. https://birikimdergisi.com/guncel/10834/cikar-telefonunu-goster-veya-tetiklendim
(3) Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, Zone Books, New York, 1991.