Hey all,
So I have not been posting quite as much as I would like to these days because I have been spending all of my time working on my final paper for school.
I would love to say that I had something extra special to post here but I don’t. Instead I will post some exceprts from Baudrillard’s The System of Objects since that is what I spent all day yesterday reading.

‘If connotation and personalization, fashion and automatism, all tend to focus upon those astructural features whose irrational motivations the logic of production seeks to control and systematize, this is perhaps also because man has neither clear will to transcend nor any great prospect of transcending the aformentioned archaic structures or projection; or at least that he has a deep-seated resistance to sacrificing subjective, projective virtualities and their eternal recurrence on the altar of concrete structural development (both technical and social); or again, to put it in the simplest terms, that man has a profound resistance to imposing rationality upon the purely arbitrary goals of his needs. This may well constitute a fatal turn for the modus existendi of the object, as indeed of society as a whole. Once a certain point in technical development has been reached, and hence primary needs have been satisfied, we may well demand a phantasied, allegorical and subconsious edibility of the object as much as, or even more that, an actual functionality.’ Baudrillard, The System of Objects pg.128

‘The objects 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.’ Baudrillard, The System of Objects pg.123

‘Man, for his part, by automating his objects and rendering them multi-functional instead of striving to structure his practices in a fluid and open-ended manner, reveals in a way what part he himself plays in a technical society that of the most beautiful all-purpose object, that of an instrumental model.
In this sense automatism and personalization do not contradict one another in the slightest, Automatism is simply personalization dreamt in terms of the object. It is the most finished, the most sublime form of the inessential – of that marginal differentiation which subtends mans personalized relationship to his objects.’ Baudrillard, The System of Objects pg.112

None of this is reprinted with permission, and as such will most likely get me into trouble. I wanted to just let you know that this stuff is mindblowingly cool to read and came out about 30 years ago. I am relying on his writings as a form of critique for the work that I am doing towards my final show.

here is a link to the book on amazon.com