Baudrillard for Architects

Francesco Proto

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781317495581
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Marginalized due to the deployment of both a highly specialized jargon and a novel stylistic approach meant to upset established norms and conventions, Baudrillard's thought has suffered from the lack of an accessible, consistent and comprehensive exposition able to make it relevant to diverse contemporary disciplines. As a result, its impact on architecture has always been confined to academia.

By presenting an introductory but in-depth formalization of Baudrillard's interest in architecture and related fields, this book makes intelligible his philosophical premises thus showing, through the prism of architecture, their relevance and persuasiveness today. Key concepts such as the object system, the code, simulation, hyperreality and precession, to name a few, are addressed in the light of the specially reconceptualized key construct of ambience, thus emphasizing how the mutual concerns of architecture, urban studies and cultural studies provide a fertile ground for debate.

Such an approach, which focuses on the contradictions inherent in contemporary society from the vantage point of Baudrillard's original involvement in architectural analysis, philosophy and criticism, is one which students, practitioners and scholars alike from as diverse disciplines as architecture, interior design and urban studies – but also fine art, anthropology, sociology, economics, human geography, social psychology and cultural studies to start with – will benefit from immensely.

CHAPTER 1

The alibi of function

The consumerist agenda

Baudrillard’s critical breakthrough is represented by The System of Objects, a book classifying the ‘luxuriant growth of objects’ witnessed by the spread of new capitalist modes of production and consumption (Baudrillard, 1996: 1). Subdivided into four main leitmotifs (Functional, Non-functional, Dysfunctional and Socio-ideological systems of objects), interior design, and the way architecture, either directly or indirectly, takes part in consumerist agendas, are therefore addressed, alongside furniture, materials and interior layout, as the site where a new form of manipulation is perpetrated. Contemporary housing, the atmosphere generated by artificial textures and substances of new furniture, the flexibility such furniture offers for the combination and recombination of spaces, and the new ways of living this brings about thus emerge as active agents of a novel apperception of society. Apparently ‘innocent’ activities such as sitting on a sofa-bed, overlooking a glass wall separating two rooms or, more simply, watching television, become for Baudrillard ideological rituals dragging the user into pre-established consumerist schemes. The freedom trumpeted by furniture advertisements becomes part of a wider commentary on contemporary living.

In fact, while contemporary furniture and the re-definition of space that it implies might be seen to represent a new freedom in the manipulation of domestic space, for Baudrillard the opposite holds true, and the manipulation implied here is that undergone by the consumers, who find themselves merged into a communication system made up of signs rather than objects. A brief survey of the ideas of Roland Barthes will be constructive in grasping Baudrillard’s argument.

Apparently ‘innocent’ activities such as sitting on a sofa-bed, switching its function from a sofa to a bed or vice versa, overlooking a glass wall separating two rooms or, more simply, watching television, become for Baudrillard ideological rituals dragging the user into pre-established consumerist schemes.

The fashion system

Roland Barthes (1915–1980) was a leading figure responsible for establishing structuralism as a prominent intellectual movement in the mid-twentieth century. A French literary philosopher and semiotician, Barthes anticipated by at least ten years Baudrillard’s interest in how the emergence of advanced capitalism was manifested culturally – specifically how ‘self-proclaimed petit-bourgeois myths’, as Barthes called them, are converted from ‘historical class-culture into a universal nature’ (Guimares, 2015: 4). From amateur wrestling to the language of advertising, from travel guides to the French love of wine, to the media image of Einstein’s brain and/or Paris’ Eiffel Tower, Barthes’ aim was to reveal the processes through which a given culture, or way of thinking, becomes hegemonic.

Barthes referred to semiology, the science of signs, in pursuing this task. He followed Ferdinand de Saussure’s claim that a sign is merely the outcome of an arbitrary relationship between a signifier (a word, picture, utterance) and a signified (a concept or mental image to which the signifier gives rise) – implying that the words we use have no fixed meanings in themselves. De Saussure called this ability of the sign to represent or convey meaning signification. While signs are composed of a denotative meaning (referring directly to the named object) and a connotative meaning (derived from its wider cultural and social implications), Barthes argued that connotative meanings are actually second-order significations. Connotative meanings never convey the direct meaning of signs, but rather what signs stand for.

Barthes first developed second-order signification in The Fashion System (1967), a book devoted to the critique of fashion examining how linguistic signs could be transformed through the written descriptions of a particular garment. Barthes believed that, as what might be called ‘two-sided entities’ made up of a signifier and a signified, signs can refer to hidden, subtler meanings, and manipulations can occur either by the dissimilar displacement of signs or within the sign itself (Holdcroft, 1991: 66). The combination and permutation of the linguistic signs composing such captions thus re-signify the image in such a way that the original meaning of the picture is overhauled.

Through the categorization of suit lapel widths, and the corresponding descriptions in the captions of photographs in fashion magazines such as Elle and Jardin des Modes, which Barthes studied for the fashion year 1957–8, he discovered not only that ‘the myth of the fashion system exists to speed up consumption’, but also that fashion is a crucial and active agent of social success (Allen, 2003: 47). Consequently, while the so-called second-order signification found in an expression like the article title ‘Prints are winning at the races’ suggests prints are fashionable at social events, it also reveals a subtler signification where the clothes ‘win’ rather than the wearer. Appearance takes precedence over the sense of self.

Yet, Barthes wondered, is it necessary to wear prints or lapels of any kind to look fashionable? Or, rather, is the fashion code stricter than it appears so that either inclusion or exclusion from the fashion system perhaps depends on subtler rules that only a privileged minority is able to grasp? Barthes responds to this question by citing what he called differentiality, a linguistic term first introduced by de Saussure to explain how signification in a system of signs is achieved. The result is an unprecedented overlapping between language as a system of signs and fashion as a linguistic system.

Just as in linguistics the principal requirement of a letter is that it be kept distinct from others with which it might be confused (for example, e from l, f, b, i, k), so the presence of the word ‘full’ in the expression ‘skirts with a full blouse’ rather than ‘oversize blouse’, reveals what is fashionable in a given year, but only provided that the phrase is analysed against the whole corpus of linguistic combinations available. The infinite combinations and permutations of the formula such as ‘skirts with a full blouse’, where ‘full’ can be replaced by all sorts of what Barthes called ‘variants’ (for example ‘cropped’, ‘denim’, ‘see-through’, etc.) not only ‘allows the fashion system to perpetually recreate and regenerate its messages from a simple stock of elements’, but also to enact social exclusion on the basis of the restricted circulation of coding rules and affordability (Allen, 2003: 48). The conclusion is thus reached that ‘to alter a fashion sequence (at least its terminology), i.e. to imagine a bodice buttoning in front rather than behind, means to pass from the fashionable to the unfashionable’ (Barthes in Culler, 1975: 35).

Following the emergence of this fashion system, it is Barthes’ belief that not only is fashion translated and abstracted into a system of signification operating through signs; but also that, through a succession of linguistic operations, signs are able to express meanings that were not originally intended. Defined by Barthes’ as naturalization, this process of installing fictional meanings provides now the model for the communication of fashion (Allen, 2003: 35).

Functionalization and semiotic abstraction

Baudrillard aimed to build on Barthes’ application of semiology to the realm of fashion. Architecture, and the field of contemporary design in general, thus emerge as realms of capitalist commodification, which impose social exclusion not by external factors but more and more involuntarily processed internal drivers. Baudrillard writes:

[Just as] needs, feelings, culture and knowledge – in short, all the properly human faculties – are integrated as commodities into the order of production, and take on material form as productive forces so that they can be sold, so likewise all desire, projects and demands, all passions and all relationships, are now abstracted (or materialized) as signs and objects to be bought and consumed.

(Baudrillard, 2005: 219)

Baudrillard borrows Barthes’ model of denotation and connotation to investigate a consumer society where what might be called the naturalization of ideology reaches previously inconceivable consequences due to the rapid development of the economic system. Among these are:

a.the shift of the analysis from the connotative level (Barthes) to the denotative level of an object;

b.the shift of consumers from passive recipients of consumerist exploitation (Barthes) into active agents of consumerism;

c.the transformation of objects into signs;

d.the emergence of what might be called a code: an arbitrary relationship imposed on objects – and between objects and the consumer – that regulates, through rules and conventions, the combinations and displacement of object-signs within the modern domestic interior.

The ambience – a field of analysis that keeps Baudrillard busy for almost five years, emerges as a whole new world of undercover allusions and unexpected meanings. Buried under layer upon layer of apparently innocent everyday activities, these allusions and meanings become all the more forceful in Baudrillard’s analysis of interior design.

Interior design, and the way in which it restructures and redefines space, becomes for Baudrillard not just the site where a newly available range of domestic furniture, alongside a whole plethora of functional and convenient features, allows materials and colours to emerge as more than just a by-product of the fashion system, but also as the consequence of a broader process of what might be considered re-signification of the meanings originally informing a family’s routine. Ideology is thus found not in the public domain, where Barthes had previously located it, but rather where we are most vulnerable and prone to receiving messages embedded within the consumerist discourse: our home. This has the obvious consequence that ideology, once inextricably linked to our own areas of intimacy, can operate in ways indistinguishable from the means through which it is conveyed.

Ideology unexpectedly resurfaces where we are most vulnerable, and therefore most prone to receiving messages embedded within the consumerist discourse: our home.

The innovative shift in The System of Objects from connotation to denotation is ingenious because, rather than questioning the ability of objects to satisfy desires and expectations at the level promoted by advertising, it interrogates them at the functional level, i.e. the level where the objects’ purchase is justified. Essential basic needs, like providing seating in the case of a chair, or dividing space in the case of glass partition walls, are therefore brought to the point where the reflection of the greater social environment within the domestic sphere seems the only purpose of contemporary furniture. The code becomes key to illustrate the tendency of commodities to both designate and classify consumers in their craving to upgrade their social status at the same time as such social status is re-affirmed.

If the discourse of advertising can so effectively sway consumers, Baudrillard argues, this cannot solely be due to the persuasiveness of advertisements. Rather, it can be attributed to an ingredient in the contemporary production of furniture that provides the generic background from which advertisements secure their hold over people’s imaginations, while also preventing the idea of the modern ambience being rejected as somehow alien to the consumer’s cultural values and habits. This ingredient – functionality – is addressed by Baudrillard as a metamorphosis of the previous, traditional domestic order into a system of flexible functional components. Semiotics, as a theory of signs and signification, provides for Baudrillard both an ideological field of analysis and a conceptual frame to understand how objects amalgamate into the contemporary domestic ambience.

Baudrillard argues that there used to be a time when the role of objects was primarily to signify rather than to function. Thus, the symbolic structure of the traditional domestic ambience reflected the rituals and traditions of the socio-political order, arranged according to prescriptive and unchanging rules based on, and extracted from, ‘tradition and authority, and whose heart is the complex affective relationship that binds all the family members together […] Thanks to this symbolization, the family is always present to itself’ (Baudrillard, 2005: 14).

This change in the domestic ambience is not just attributable to ‘pieces of furniture’ confronting or jostling one another; but more importantly to the ability of furniture ‘to personify human relationships, to fill the space that they share between them, and to be inhabited by a soul’ (Baudrillard, 2005: 13–14). Hence, the fixed and immovable meanings with which these objects were endowed: if mirrors and family portraits symbolized a particular sense of introspection and enclosure, the clock crowning the marble mantelpiece symbolized both the hierarchical structure of the family and the permanence of time. Linked to one meaning and one meaning only, every object of the traditional domestic interior can thus be understood as theatrical and ceremonial, thus occupying a specific place within the domestic interior exactly as family members occupy a specific position in their corresponding family tree.

The domestic ambience

Baudrillard develops his concern with objects at a moment in French history coinciding with a shift to the so-called advanced capitalist mode of production, which determines a more virulent spread of commodities linked to advertising discourses. Purchased and possessed, objects are thus organized by Baudrillard into a ‘system’ where it is crucial to appreciate both the ‘language’ of the objects and what that language conveys. Independently of the connotative meaning attributed to objects by advertisements, they become ‘cultural’ in as much as the user is emancipated from ‘the function of the object only’ yet ‘not from the object itself’ (Ba...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series editor’s preface
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1 The alibi of function
• CHAPTER 2 Semiotic disarticulations
• CHAPTER 3 Profusion and display
• CHAPTER 4 The metro area
• CHAPTER 5 Reality as-if
• CHAPTER 6 The global imaginary
• Conclusion: The Nine Billion Names of Baudrillard
• Appendix: Keywords
• Bibliography
• Further reading
• Index