The System of Objects is a tour de force-a theoretical letter-in-a-bottle tossed into the ocean in 1968, which brilliantly communicates to us all the live ideas of the day-offering a cultural critique of the commodity in consumer society. Weaving Freudian and semiotic analysis with Marxism, Baudrillard seeks to analyse the immense proliferation of objects in modern society-from the clutter of a bourgeois home to the system of adverts and commercials all around us. In doing so, Baudrillard opened up new avenues for materialist analysis. n