A person was noble or not: nobility was not the ultimate – privileged – term in a series but, rather, a grace that bestowed absolute distinction. The social order was what gave objects their standing. No serial production in the modern sense could be based on it. 2 A limited dissemination of craft techniques did occur here, but there was no dissemination of values: the ‘model’ remained absolute, for it was bound to a transcendent reality. 1 Nor can it be said that a Louis XIII table is the model of which the countless tables and chairs that later imitated it are the serial form.

No single cultural system embraced them both. In the eighteenth century there was simply no relationship between a ‘Louis XV’ table and a peasant’s table: there was an unbridgeable gulf between the two types of object, just as there was between the two corresponding social classes.

Today a farmhouse table has cultural value, but just thirty years ago its sole value arose from the purpose it served. For one thing, there was a far greater homogeneity among all objects in pre-industrial society, because the mode of their production was still everywhere handcraft, because they were far less specialized in function, and because the cultural range of forms was more restricted (there being little reference to earlier or to extraneous traditions) furthermore, there was a much tighter segregation between the class of objects that could lay claim to ‘style’ and the class of locally produced objects that had use value only. All the same, one cannot exactly speak of ‘models’ or ‘series’ in connection with any time before the industrial era. A privileged minority in society has always served as a testing-ground for successive styles whose solutions, methods and artifices were then disseminated by local craftsmen. The status of the modern object is dominated by the MODEL/SERIES distinction.

Baudrillard the system of objects