The Role of Nostalgia in Jean Baudrillard’s ‘System of Objects’

This chapter explores the role of nostalgia in Jean Baudrillard’s first book System of Objects. It investigates a cultural phenomenon Baudrillard repeatedly cited but never investigated more closely than in his dissertation. In System of Objects Baudrillard appears as a shrewd observer of a new wave of nostalgia sweeping the Western world after World War II. The French theoretician connects nostalgia to the context of the consumer society of postwar capitalism. With his interpretation of nostalgia, Baudrillard’s semiological methodology, which had a profound determining effect on the object of his investigation, becomes the focus of interest. The French sociologist and philosopher analyses nostalgia as a response to and a way to cope with the consequences of the alienation of modernity – an attitude he is highly critical of. The chapter concludes by placing Baudrillard’s concept of nostalgia within a wider consumer-sociological and historical-philosophical context for the purposes of critical discussion.