Take the improvement in domestic technological apparatuses for example like the washing machine, an incredible improvement from having to wash things by hand, or the dish washer for the same reason, are just two examples of a change in the logic of household objects. This change is not always in the service of more egalitarian spaces for all people however. It would logically follow then that a change in the cultural logic of the relationship between men and women (of course, we must be weary of this analysis from the get-go because of its heteronormative foundation-in this podcast I will attempt to be faithful to the idea or author that is the focus of that video by not heavily focusing on the limitations present, but by simply understanding them in their own way) would be followed by a change in the “style of furniture” (15). Moreover, each room is expected to perform its function, in much the same way that women are expected to exist in the service of men in the home. The codification of space in the home allows for a single locus of power to attain a degree of authority that would be impossible if these spaces were not stagnant. The enforcement of patriarchal authority derives from the “unifunctionality, immovability, imposing presence, and hierarchal labelling” of “each room” (13). The first observation Baudrillard makes is that the interior of the bourgeois home is first and foremost “patriarchal” (13). This text begins with a meditation on the structuration of objects and spaces in the “bourgeois” home.

To this point he writes that the “description of the system of objects cannot be divorced from a critique of that system’s practical ideology” (9). The thesis of this text may seem somewhat out of place for those that have only been indoctrinated to Baudrillard’s later work, but in many ways Baudrillard’s dissertation explores many of the same phenomena that he has become notorious for in his late work like “The symbolic,” “Neo-Imperialism”, and his questioning of “authenticity.” These ideas orbit around his theorization of the system of objects, our orientation towards objects, and the systemic logic of objects which is to say that a comprehensive study of the objects that we surround ourselves with may give us a peak into our ontological condition as passive consumers. In 1968, Jean Baudrillard completed his dissertation translated into English as The System of Objects.

Baudrillard the system of objects