Fluent Essays

Academic level:  Undergraduate (1st and 2nd year) Word count: 1200 words excluding reference list Course name: Critical perspective on society Citation style:  APA Number of sources: 1 Project Title/Topic: Essay Paper details/Instructions: Select one topic from the following list and you should reference author from In the shadow of the silent majorities. (use one or two quotes) Topics: 1.Democracy cannot work if we all live in fantasyland/video land or Disney world. Discuss  2.Technology has reduced our world to such an extent that space and time have lost an everyday meaning. Discuss 3.Justice may at times be found only outside the law. Discuss 4.The past is one of violence. How to overcome this is the challenge of the future. Discuss Combine some ideas from the book In the shadow of the silent majorities with your own opinion to finish essay. Thanks so much for your help. IN THE SHADOW OF THE SILENT MAJORITIES ••• OR THE END OF THE SOCIAL AND OTHER ESSAYS FOREIGN AGENTS SERIES Jim Fleming and Sylvere Lotringer, Series Editors IN THE SHADOW OF THE SILENT MAJORmES Jean Baudrillard ONTHEUNE Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari DRIFTWORKS Jean-Francois Lyotard POPULAR DEFENSE AND ECOLOGICAL STRUGGLES Paul Virilio SIMULATIONS Jean Baudri liard THE SOCIAL FACTORY Toni Negri and Mario Tronti PURE WAR Paul Virilio JEAN BAUDRILLARD IN THE SHADOW OF THE SILENT MAJORITIES ••• OR THE END OF THE SOCIAL AND OTHER ESSAYS Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and John Johnston Semiotext(e), Inc. 522 Philosophy Hall Columbia University New York City, New York 10027 ©1983, Jean Baudrillard and Semiotext(e) We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the New York State Council on the Arts. All right reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Contents In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities 1 ... Or, The End of the Social 65 The Implosion of Meaning in the Media 95 Ou r Theater of Cruelty 113 The whole chaotic constellation of the social revolves around that spongy referent, that opa- que but equally translucent reality, that nothing- ness: the masses. A statistical crystal ball, the masses are swirling with currents and flows, in the image of matter and the natural elements. So at least they are represented to us. They can be mesmerized, the social envelops them, like static electricity; but most of the time, precisely, they form an earth *, that is, they absorb all the *Translators Note: Throughout the text la masse, fa ire masse imply a condensation of terms which allows Baudrillard to make a number of central puns and allusions. For not only does la masse directly refer to the physical and philosophical sense of substance or mat- ter, it can just as easily mean the majority (as in the mass of workers) or even the electrical usage of an earth; hence faire masse can simultaneously ~ean to form a mass, to form an earth or to form a majority. 1 Jean Baudrillard electricity of the social and political and neu- tralise it forever. They are neither good conduc- tors of the political, nor good conductors of the social, nor good conductors of meaning in general. Everything flows through them, every- thing magnetises them, but diffuses throughout them without leaving a trace. And, ultimately, the appeal to the masses has always .gone unanswered. They do not radiate; on the con- trary, they absorb all radiation from the outlying constellations of State, History, Culture, Mean- ing. They are inertia, the strength of inertia, the strength of the neutral. In this seme, the mass is characteristic of our modernity, as a highly implosive phenomenon, ir- reducible for any traditional theory and practice, even perhaps for any theory and practice at all. According to their imaginary representa- tion, the masses drift somewhere between passiv ity and wild spontaneity, but always as a poten- tial energy, a reservoir of the social and of social energy; today a mute referent, tomorrow, when they speak up and cease to be the silent majority, a protagonist of history - now, in fact, the masses have no history to write, neither 2 In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities past nor future, they have no virtual energies to release, nor any desire to fulfill: their strength is actual, in the present, and sufficient unto itself. It consists in their silence, in their capacity to ab- sorb and neutralise, already superior to any power acting upon them. It is a specific inertial strength, whose effectivity differs from that of all those schemas of production, radiation and ex- pansion according to which our imaginary func- tions, even in its wish to destroy those same schemas. An unacceptable and unintelligible figure of implosion (is this still a process?) - stumbling block to all our systems of meaning, against which they summon all their resistance, and screening, with a renewed outbreak of signi- fication, with a blaze of signifiers, the central col- lapse of meaning. The social void is scattered with interstitial objects and crystalline clusters which spin around and coalesce in a cerebral chiaroscuro. So is the mass, an in vacuo aggregation of in- dividual particles, refuse of the social and of media impulses: an opaque nebula whose 3 Jean Baudrillard growing density absorbs all the surrounding energy and light rays, to collapse finally under its own weight. A black hole which engulfs the social. This is, therefore, exactly the reverse of a sociological understanding. Sociology can only depict the expansion of the social and its vicissitudes. It survives only on the positive and definitive hypothesis of the social. The reab- sorption, the implosion of the social escapes it. The hypothesis of the death of the social is also that of its own death. The term mass is not a concept. ~t is a leitmotif of political demagogy, a soft, sticky, lumpenanalytical notion. A good sociology would attempt to surpass it with more subtle categories: socio-professional ones, categories of class, cultural status, etc. Wrong: it is by prowling around these soft and acritical no- tions (like mana once was) that one can go further than intelligent critical sociology. Besides, it will be noticed retrospectively that the concepts class, social relations, power, status, institution - and social itself - all those too explicit concepts which are the glory of the legitimate sciences, have also 4 In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities only ever been muddled notions themselves, but notions upon which agreement has never- theless been reached for mysterious ends: those of preserving a certain code of analysis. To want to specify the term mass is a mistake - it is to provide meaning for that which has none. One says: the mass of workers. But the mass is never that of the workers, nor of any other social subject or object. The peasant masses of old were not in fact masses: only those form a mass who are freed from their symbolic bondage, released (only to be caught in infinite networks) and destined to be no more than the innumerable end points of precisely those same theoretical models which do not succeed in in- tegrating them and which finally only produce them as statistical refuse. The mass is without at- tribute, predicate, quality, reference. This is its difinition, or its radical lack of definition. It has no sociological reality. It has nothing to do with any real population, body or specific social aggregate. Any attempt to qualify it only seeks to transfer it back to sociology and rescue it from 5 Jean Baudrillard this indistinctness which is not even that of equivalence (the unlimited sum of equivalent in- dividuals: 1 + 1 + 1 - such is the sociological definition), but that of the neutral, that is to say neither one nor the other (ne-uter). There is no longer any polarity between the one and the other in the mass. This is what causes that vacuum and inwardly collapsing effect in all those systems which survive on the separation and distinction of poles (two, or many in more complex systems). This is what makes the cir- culation of meaning within the mass impossible: it is instantaneously dispersed, like atoms in a void. This is also what makes it impossible for the mass to be alienated, since neither the one nor the other exist there any longer. A speechless mass for every hollow spokes- man without a past. Admirable conjunction, be- tween those who have nothing to say, and the masses, who do not speak. Ominous emptines.s of all discourse. No hysteria or potential fascism, but simulation by precipitation of every lost referential. Black box of every referential, of every uncaptured meaning, of impossible his- tory, of untraceable systems of representation, the mass is what remains when the social has been 6 I n the Shadow of the Si lent Majorities completely removed. Regarding the impossibility of making meaning circulate among the masses, the best ex- ample is God. The masses have hardly retained anything but the image of him, never the Idea. They have never been affected by the Idea of God, which has remained a matter for the clergy, nor by anguish over sin and personal salvation. What they have retained is the enchantment of saints and martyrs; the last judgment; the Dance of Death; sorcery; the ceremony and spectacle of the Church; the immanence of ritual - the con- trast to the transcendence of the Idea. They were and have remained pagans, in their way, never haunted by the Supreme Authority, but surviv- ing on the small change of images, superstition and the devil. Degraded practices with regard to the spiritual wager of faith? Indeed. It is their par- ticular way, through the banality of rituals and profane simulacra, of refusing the categorical im- perative of morality and faith, the sublime im- perative of meaning, which they have always re- 7 Jean Baudrillard jected. It isnt that they have not been able to at- tain the higher enlightenment of religion: they have ignored it. They dont refuse to die for a faith, for a cause, for an idol. What they refuse is trans<;endence; the uncertainty, the difference, the waiting, the asceticism which constitute the sublime exaction of religion. For the masses, the Kingdom of God has always been already here on earth, in the pagan immanence of images, in the spectacle of it presented by the Church. Fan- tastic distortion of the religious prin£:iple. The masses have absorbed religion by their sorcerous and spectacular manner of practising it. All the great schemas of reason have suf- fered the same fate. They have only traced their trajectory, they have only followed the thread of their history along the thin edge of the social stratum bearing meaning (and in particular of the stratum bearing social meaning), and on the whole they have only penetrated into the masses at the cost of their misappropriation, of their radical distortion. So it was with Historical Reason,. Political Reason, Cultural Reason, Revolutionary Reason - so even with the very Reason of the Social, the most interesting since this seems inherent to the masses, and appears to 8 In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities have produced them throughout its evolution. Are the masses the mirror of the social? No, they dont reflect the social, nor are they reflected in the social - it is the mirror of the social which shatters to pieces on them. Even this image is not right, since it still evokes the idea of a hard substance, of an opaque resistance. Rather, the masses function as a gigantic black hole which inexorably inflects, bends and distorts all energy and light radiation approaching it: an implosive sphere, in which the curvature of spaces accelerates, in which all dimensions curve back on themselves and in- volve to the point of annihilation, leaving in their stead only a sphere of potential engulfment. The Abyss of Meaning So it is with information. Whatever its political, pedagogical, cultural content, the plan is always to get some meaning across, to keep the masses within reason; an im- perative to produce meaning that takes the form of the constantly repeated imperative to moralise 9 Jean Baudrillard information: to better inform, to better socialise, to raise the cultural level of the masses, etc. Nonsense: the masses scandalously resist this im- perative of rational communication. They are given meaning: they want spectacle. No effort has been able to convert them to the seriousness of the content, nor even to the seriousness of the code. Messages are given to them, they only want some sign, they idolise the play of signs and stereotypes, they idolise any content so long as it resolves itself into a spectacular sequence. What they reject is the dialectic of meaning. Nor is anything served by alleging that they are mystified. This is always a hypocritical hypoth- esis which protects the intellectual complaisance of the producers of meaning: the masses spon- taneously aspire to the natural light of reason. This in order to evade the reverse hypothesis, namely that it is in complete freedom. that the masses oppose their refusal of meaning and their will to spectacle to the ultimatum of meaning. They distrust, as with death, this transparency and thispolitical will. They scent the simplifying terror which is behind the ideal hegemony of meaning, and they react in their own way, by reducing all articulate discourse to a single irra- 10 In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities tional and baseless dimension, where signs lose their meaning and peter out in fascination: the spectacular. Once again, it is not a question of mystifica- tion: it is a question of their own exigencies, of an explicit and positive counter-strategy - the task of absorbing and annihilating culture, know- ledge, power, the social. An immemorial task, but one which assumes its full scope today. A deep antagonism which forces the inversion of received scenarios: it is no longer meaning which would be the ideal line of force in our societies, that which eludes it being only waste intended for reabsorption some time or other - on the con- trary, it is meaning which is only an ambiguous and inconsequential accident, an effect due to ideal convergence of a perspective space at any given moment (History, Power, etc.) and which, moreover, has only ever really concerned a tiny fraction and superficial layer of our societies. And this is true of individuals also: we are only episodic conductors of meaning, for in the main, and profoundly, we form a mass, living most of the time in panic or haphazardly, above and beyond any meaning. Now, with this inverse hypothesis, every- 11 Jean Baudrillard thing changes. Take one example from a thousand concern- ing this contempt for meaning, the folklore of silent passivities. On the night of Klaus Croissants extradi- tion, the TV transmitted a football match in which France played to qualify for the world cup. Some hundreds of people demonstrated outside la Sante, a few barristers ran to and fro in the night; twenty million people spent their evening glued to the screen. An explosion of popular joy when France won. Consternation and indigna- tion of the illuminati over this scandalous indif- ference. La Monde: 9 pm. At that time the Ger- man barrister had already been taken out of la Sante. A few minutes later, Rocheteau scored the first goal. Melodrama of indignation. 1 Not a single query about the mystery of this indif- ference. One same reason is always invoked: the manipulation of the masses by power, their mystification by football. In any case, this indif- ference ought not to be, hence it has nothing to 12 In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities tell us. In other words, the silent majority is even stripped of its indifference, it has no right even that this be recognised and imputed to it, even this apathy must have been imposed on it by power. What contempt behind this interpretation! Mystif·ied, the masses are not allowed their own behavior. Occasionally, they are conceded a revolutionary spontaneity by which they glimpse the rationality of their own desire, that yes, but God protect us from their silence and their iner- tia. It is exactly this indifference, however, that demands to be analysed in its positive brutality, instead of being dismissed as white magic, or as a magic alienation which always turns the multi- tudes away from their revolutionary vocation. Moreover, how does it succeed in turning them away? Can one ask questions about the strange fact that, after several revolutions and a century or two of political apprenticeship, in spite of the newspapers, the trade unions, the par- ties, the intellectuals and all the energy put into educating and mobilising the people, there are still (and it will be exactly the same in ten or twen- ty years) a thousand persons who stand up and twenty million who remain passive - and not 13 Jean Baudrillard only passive, but who, in all good faith and with glee and without even asking themselves why, frankly prefer a football match to a human and political drama? It is curious that this proven fact has never succeeded in making political analysis shift ground, but on the contrary reinforces it in its vision of an omnipotent, manipulatory power, and a mass prostrate in an unintelligible coma. Now none of this is true, and both the above are a deception: power manipulates nothing, the masses are neither mislead nor mystified. Power is only too happy to make foot- ball bear a facile responsibility, even to take upon itself the diabolical responsibility for stupefying the masses. This comforts it in its illusion of being power, and leads away from the much more dangerous fact that this indifference of the masses is their true, their only practice, that there is no other ideal of them to imagine, nothing in this to deplore, but everything to analyse as the brute fact of a collective retaliation and of a refusal to participate in the recommended ideals, however enlightened. 14 In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities What is at stake in the masses lies elsewhere. We might as well take note and recognise that any hope of revolution, the whole promise of the social and of social change has only been able to function up till now thanks to this dodging of the issue, this fantastic denial. We might as well begin again, as Freud did in the psychic order,2 from this remainder, from this blind sediment, from this waste or refuse of meaning, from this un analysed and perhaps unanaly.sable fact (there is a good reason why such a Copernican Revolu- tion has never been undertaken in the political universe: it is the whole political order that is in danger of paying the price). Rise and Fall of the Political The political and the social seem inseparable to us, twin constellations, since at least the French Revolution, under the sign (determinant or not) of the economic. But for us today, this un- doubtedly is only true of their simultaneous decline. 15 Jean Baudrillard When the political emerged during the Renaissance from the religious and ecclesiastic spheres, to win reknown with Machiavelli, it was at first only a pure game of signs, a pure strategy which was not burdened with any social or his- torical truth, but, on the contrary, played on the absence of truth (as did later the worldly strategy of the Jesuits on the absence of God). To begin with, the political space belonged to the same order as that of Renaissance mechanical theatre, or of perspective space in painting, which were invented at the same time. Its form was that of a game, not of a system of representa- tion - semiurgy and strategy, not ideology - its function was one of virtuosity, not of truth (hence the game, subtle and a corollary to this, of Balthazar Gracian in Homme de Cour). The cynicism and immorality of Machiavellian poli- tics lay there: not as the vulgar understanding has it in the unscrupulous usage of means, but in the offhand disregard for ends. Now, as Nietzsche well knew, it is in this disregard for a social, psychological, historical truth, in this exercise of simulacra as such, that the maximum of political energy is found, where the political is a game and is not yet given a reason. 16 In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities It is since the eighteenth century, and par- ticularly since the Revolution, that the political has taken a decisive turn. It took upon itself a social· reference, the social invested it. At the same time, it entered into representation, its per- formance became dominated by representative mechanisms (theatre pursued a parallel fate: it became a representative theatre - likewise for perspective space: machinery at the start, it became the place where a truth of space and of representation was inscribed). The political scene became that of the evocation of a fundamental signified: the people, the will of the people, etc. It no longer worked on signs alone, but on mean- ing; henceforth summoned to best signify the real it expressed, summoned to become transparent, to moralise itself and to respond to the social ideal of good representation. For a long time, never- theless, a balance carne into play between the proper sphere of the political and the forces reflected in it: the social, the historical, the economic. Undoubtedly this balance corres- ponds to the golden age of bourgeois represen- 17 Jean 8audrillard tative systems (constitutionality: eighteenth- century England, the United States of America, the France of bourgeois revolutions, the Europe of 1848). It is with marxist thought, in its successive developments, that the end of the political and of its particular energy was inaugurated. Here began the absolute hegemony of the social and the economic, and the compulsion, on the part of the political, to become the legislative, institu- tional, executive mirror of the social. The auton- omy of the political was inversely proportional to the growing hegemony of the social. Liberal thought always thrives on a kind of nostalgic dialectic between the two, but socialist thought, revolutionary thought openly postu- lates a dissolution of the political at some point in history, in the final transparency of the social. The social won. But, at this point of general- isation, of saturation, where it is no more than the zero degree of the political, at this point of ab- solute reference, of omnipresence and diffraction in all the interstices of physical and mental space, what becomes of the social itself? It is the sign of its end: the energy of the social is reversed, its 18 In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities specificity is lost, its historIcal quality and its ideality vanish in favour of a configuration where not only the political. becomes volatilised, but where the social itself no longer has any name. Anonymous. THE MASS. THE MASSES. The Silent Majority The dwindling of the political from a pure strategic arrangement to a system of represen- tation, then to the present scenario of neo- figuration, where the system continues under the same manifold signs but where these no longer represent anything and no longer have their equivalent in a reality or a real social substance: there is no longer any political in- vestiture because there is no longer even any social referent of the classical kind (a people, a class, a proletariat, objective conditions) to lend force to effective political signs. Quite simply, there is no longer any social signified to give force to a political signifier. The only referent which still functions is that of the silent majority. All contemporary 19 Jean Baudrillard systems function on this nebulous entity, on this floating substance whose existence is no longer social, but statistical, and whose only mode of appearance is that of the survey. A simulation on the horizon of the social, or rather on whose horizon the social has already disappeared. That the silent majority (or the masses) is an imaginary referent does not mean they dont ex- ist. It means that their representation is no longer possible. The masses are no longer a referent because they no longer belong to the order of representation. They dont express them~elves, they are surveyed. They dont reflect upon themselves, they are tested. The referendum (and the media are a constant referendum of directed questions and answers) has been substituted for the political referent. Now polls, tests, the referendum, media are devices which no longer belong to a dimension of representations, but to one of simulation. They no longer have a referent in view, but a model. Here, revolution in relation to the devices of classical sociality (of which elec- tions, institutions, the instances of representa- tion, and even of repression, still form a part) is complete: in all this, social meaning still flows 20 In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities between one pole and another, in a dialectical structure which allows for a political stake and contradictions. Everything changes with the device of simu- lation. In the couple silent majority / survey for example, there is no longer any pole nor any dif- ferential term, hence no electricity of the social either: it is short-circuited by the confusing of poles, in a total circularity of signalling (exactly as is the case with molecular communication and with the substance it informs in DNA and the genetic code). This is the ideal form of simula- tion: collapse of poles, orbital circulation of models (this is also the matrix of every implosive process). Bombarded with stimuli, messages and tests, the masses are simply an opaque, blind stratum, like those clusters of stellar gas known only through analysis of their light spectrum - radiation spectrum equivalent to statistics and surveys - but precisely: it can no longer be a question of expression or representation, but only of the simulation of an ever inexpressible and unexpressed social. This is the meaning of 21 Jean Baudrillard their silence. But this silence is paradoxical - it isnt a silence which does not speak, it is a silence which refuses to be spoken for in its name. And in this sense, far from being a form of alienation, it is an absolute weapon. No one can be said to represent the silent ma- jority, and that is its revenge. The masses are no longer an authority to which one might refer as one formerly referred to class or to the people. Withdrawn into their silence, they are no longer (a) subject (especially not to - or of - history), hence they can no longer be spoken for, articu- lated, represented, nor pass through the political mirror stage and the cycle of imaginary iden- tifications. One sees what strength results from this: no longer being (a) subject, they can no longer be alienated - neither in their own language (they have none), nor in any other which would pretend to speak for them. The end of revolutionary convictions. For these have always speculated on the possibility of the masses, or the proletariat, denying themselves as such. But the mass is not a place of negativity or explosion, it is a place of absorption and implosion. Inaccessible to schemas of liberation, revolu- tion and historicity; this is its mode of defense, its 22 In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities particular mode of retaliation. Model of simula- tion and imaginary referent for use by a phantom political class which now no longer knows what kind of power it wields over it, the mass is at the same time the death, the end of this political proc- ess thought to rule over it. And into it is engulfed the political as will and representation. The strategy of power has long seemed founded on the apathy of the masses. The more passive they were, the more secure it was. But this logic is only characteristic of the bureaucratic and centralist phase of power. And it is this which to- day turns against it: the inertia it has fostered be- comes the sign of its own death. That is why it seeks to reverse its strategies: from passivity to participation, from silence to speech. But it is too late. The threshold of the critical mass, that of the involution of the social through inertia, is exceeded. 3 Everywhere the masses are encouraged to speak, they are urged to live socially, electorally, organisationally, sexually, in participation, in festival, in free speech, etc. The spectre must be exorcised, it must pronounce its name. Nothing shows more dramatically that the only genuine problem today is the silence of the mass, the 23 Jean Baudrillard silence of the silent majority. All reserves are exhausted in maintaining this mass in controlled emulsion and in prevent- ing it from falling back into its panic-inducing in- ertia and its silence. No longer being under the reign of will or representation, it falls under the province of diagnosis, or divination pure and simple - whence the universal reign of informa- tion and statistics: we must ausculate it, sound it out, unearth some oracle from within it. Whence the mania for seduction, solicitude and all the solicitation surrounding it. Whence prediction by resonance, the effects of forecasting and of an il- lusory mass outlook: The French people think ... The majority of Germans disapprove ... All England thrilled to the birth of the Prince ... etc. - a mirror held out for an ever blind, ever absent recognition. Whence that bombardment of signs which the mass is thought to re-echo. It is interrogated by converging waves, by light or linguistic stimuli, exactly like distant stars or nuclei …