Gadget

Definition

Gadget (and its French catch-all machin, translated "gizmo") is Baudrillard's term (The System of Objects, 1968, Part C) for the pseudo-functional object: the manufactured thing whose function is a pretext for an imaginary and limitless functionality. "A gizmo does have an operational value, but whereas the function of a machine is explicit in its name, a gizmo… is always an indeterminate term with… the pejorative connotation of 'the thing without a name'." The gadget is where "the object, at its farthest remove from objective determinants, is completely taken over by the imaginary." Baudrillard calls for "a complete pataphysics of the object… a science of imaginary technical solutions"; the gadget's true referent is "a total simulacrum of an automated nature." The concept belongs with automatism and the functionalist-myth.

Key Claims

Pseudo-functionality. "Too many accessory functions are introduced from the point of view of which the object answers no need other than the need to function" — the "functional superstition according to which for any operation there is – there must be – a corresponding object."
Subjectively functional = obsessional. "So precise is the function proposed, in fact, that it can only be a pretext: such objects are subjectively functional, that is to say, obsessional."
The word gap. "Our civilization has more and more objects and fewer and fewer names for them"; "'gizmo' now cover[s] all those things which… cannot be referred to as machines, and thus assume a mythological character."
The gizmo's real referent is a world-machine. "The important thing is that the world should present the appearance of having already been 'operated on'. The real referent of the gizmo is not a plum stone or the narrow space under the sideboard, but nature in its entirety reinvented in accordance with the technical reality principle."
The gadget is a libidinal instrument. "The gizmo, the ultimate tool, is basically a substitute for the phallus, the operative medium of function par excellence." "Behind every real object there is a dream object."
The ruling phrase: "might always come in useful." "Objects do indeed serve specific purposes at times, [but] they are much more commonly good for everything and nothing, and in that case their true utility lies in the very fact that they 'might always come in useful'."

Key Thinkers

Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: gadget/gizmo as pseudo- and metafunctional object; the "pataphysics of the object."
Lars Spuybroek and the wiki's digital-craft cluster — the contemporary limit-case where the "gizmo" becomes the designed device (see objectile, computational-design).
Donald Norman — the affordance counter-account: objects as legible, functional structures rather than imaginary resolutions.
Clay Odom — "productions" and the designed effect-output, where function is rethought as production (see productions).

Automatism — the technical connotation gadgets degenerate from.
Robot — the gadget's mythic culmination.
Functionalist Myth — the belief in total functionality gadgets embody.
Objecthood — the object-theory question gadgets raise.
Everyday Life — the banality the gadget fills with imaginary function.
Simulation / Hyperreality — the "total simulacrum" of automated nature.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

The System of Objects (Baudrillard 1968) — the concept's defining source (Part C): "Functional Aberration: Gadgets"; "Pseudo-Functionality: Gizmos"; the pataphysics of the object; the world-machine; the libidinal instrumentality.
Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).

Open Questions

Baudrillard's gadget is the ancestor of the critique of consumer electronics and "feature creep." Is the smartphone the perfect gizmo, or a machine whose syntax finally catches up?
The "pataphysics of the object" (via Jarry) suggests an aesthetics as well as a critique. Does the wiki's productions or objectile material develop it?
If every object "has something of the gizmo about it," is the distinction machine/gizmo analytic or rhetorical — and does it survive when the object's function is software?