Jean Baudrillard's earliest book
"the society of the spectacle and its denunciation were still the focal point of semiological, psychoanalytical and sociological arguments."
Freudian and Saussurean categories
a cultural critique of the commodity in consumer society
contrasts "modern" and 'traditional' functional objects
nonfunctional or "marginal" objects focuses on antiques and the psychology of collecting
metafunctional category extends to the useless, the aberrant and even the "schizofunctional."
materialist semiotics of the early Baudrillard
Bataille's political economy of "expenditure"
Mauss's theory of the gift
"technological society" of Jacques Ellul
Roland Barthes in The System of Fashion
Henri Lefebvre's work on the social construction of space
Guy Debord's situationist critique of the spectacle
clipped from: www.booklounge.com