Movable elements in a decentralised space: reading Baudrillard but thinking of Eno

Hmm, wrong again (apparently). Today I bought this Jean Baudrillard book in a charity shop because - well, partly because - it appeared to have once belonged to Brian Eno. Yeah, a heady mix. 

Possible ownership name here: 

Yes, a very neatly done name in small, gentle pencil. Very Eno, no? So, with there being various sentences underlined throughout the book, the prospect of getting a peek into what Eno thought of Baudrillard's ideas (c. 1968) on consumer objects was alluring. Worth a look, anyhow. So how did that all go? Answer: not great. First, the Eno/pencil annotator has marked up only very sparingly and without writing anything themselves whatsoever. Anyway, first a sentence about how "the bourgeois dining-room" had a "closed structure", while a "functional environment" is "more open, freer" and "destructured, fragmented into its various functions", gets a heavily-pencilled "?" (page 17). Next comes a marked-up passage about the "functional home-dweller" as contructed by modern advertising, with the notion being that "modern man no longer fundamentally needs his objects" as he has instead become an "intelligent technician of communications" among all his modern appliances. Then there's another marked-up passage about how interior design relies on a "discourse of atmosphere" that comprises "movable elements in a decentralised space", typically using a "lighter structure" (eg Scandinavian woods). Hmm, I'm tempted to say that some of this is starting to sound a little ... Eno-esque. Or what about this marked up passage (page 66): 

"... this systematic, homogenous and functional world, with its colours, materials and forms, which at every moment, though it does not actually negate them, does disavow, deny and omit drives, desires, and all the explosive force of the instinctual life"

Is this somehow Music For Airports territory? A kind of manifesto for all things ambient? A suggestion that primal rock-and-roll could be stripped back to something more muted, restrained, designed? As an aesthetic exercise. An art experiment but also a form of commentary on where consumerism and late-capitalism has taken us? Well, no, probably not! After all, that neat little "Brian Eno" on the title page doesn't necessarily mean this tatty Verso paperback was once owned and read by the great man himself. True, I initially thought it did mean this, but now, seeing that Eno's signature is more of an artistic squiggle ... 

 ... I'm more doubtful. (Though I suppose he wouldn't sign this book, just - potentially - write his name in it. Er, is the Eno chase back on!?). No, I'm not going to say that this 1996 copy of Baudrillard's book is an Eno cast-off. I just quite like the idea that it is, including the randomness of this "Eno book" being in a three-for-£1 section of a slightly chaotic charity shop in Elephant and Castle in south London, very much not your Eno-style art/ideas locale. Eno's recent book, What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory, co-authored with the Dutch artist Bette Adriaanse, apparently recommends Baudrillard as part of its "further reading" suggestions so I think I'm allowed to keep my options open. My copy of The System Of Objects might be Eno's old copy, or it might be one that - mysteriously - has "Brian Eno" written on the title page. I like it either way.