Baudrillard's Thoughts On Media

"...what if the sign did not relate either to the object or to

meaning, but to the promotion of the sign as sign? And what if
information did not relate either to the event or the facts, but to
the promotion of information itself as event? And more precisely
today: what if television no longer related to anything except
itself as message?"

-- Jean Baudrillard, Screened Out

1. Introduction: The territory of reality no longer precedes the map

of representation
2. The media are what always prevent a response.
3. Information devours its own content.
4. The secret vice of media.
5. Bibliography.

Introduction:

Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007), sociologist, philosopher, and the

author of over thirty books, is best known for his theories of
simulacra and hyperreality.
According to Baudrillard, the territory of reality no longer precedes
the map of representation. Images and signs have become more
"real" to us than "reality" itself. In the past, signifiers stood in a one-
to-one correspondence with their referents: today they do not; they
proliferate in all directions; they themselves are perceived and
interpreted as "real". For example, the Main Street of Disneyland

has become a more "real" representation of Main Street in our

collective mind than the Main Street of towns and cities itself. The
idea of New York and Paris one experiences in a Las Vegas casino
has become as real or more real to people than the actual cities

themselves.

"Something has disappeared: the sovereign difference [between

maps and territories] that constituted the charm of abstraction,"

Baudrillard writes in Simulacra And Simulation. "The real is

produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks,

models of control -- and it can be reproduced an indefinite number

of times from these. It no longer needs to be rational, because it no

longer measures itself against either an ideal or negative instance. It

is no longer anything but operational."

In the past, a "real" moment occurred when a person experienced

another person's presence and speech, or observed something that

was happening in the neighboorhood or across the street. Today

what we experience more and more are spectacles, images,

symbols, signs. To understand to what great degree we have all

become dependent on circuitry and networks, try living a week

without a cell phone, or PC, or TV, or DVD player, or iPod, or

radio. Perhaps for many, such deprivation would be equivalent to

an emotional and psychological death. The feeling of absence

would hit them in a quite destabilizing way.
Consider a few plain examples of the way that symbols and signs

affect our thought processes. Take the act of driving to work every
morning. A woman turns on the radio in her car and hears a

commercial for a new kind of home mortgage, or a pitch for general

nutrition centers, or a claim about a new fast-working sleeping pill.

She looks out the window and sees a billboard of a beautiful face
with the message, "Maybe she's born with it. Maybe it's

Maybelline." At work, before retrieving her emails, she glances at

the headlines of an Internet portal and all at once confronts the

following:

Tips for taking your baby on a plane.

Poll: Fat-cancer link not widely known.
10 easy ways to stash away cash.
Does your baby need a therapist?
See Eve Longoria's fave San Antonio spots.

After work she stops by the mall to buy a CD for her daughter,
but before she enters the record store, she notices a giant poster

of Mariah Carey in a micro-skirt, with a heavily painted face,

legs spread out in that familiar, alluring pose. What meaning can
be attached to the poster? Maybe none at all, or maybe the
subliminal message that buying the CD will give you an

erection, or turn you in to a similarly seductive woman. What is

the connection between everything this woman has seen and
heard on a single given day, and the actual experiences of her
life?

Or consider a viewer's reaction, after a televised presidential

debate, that such-and-such a candidate came across as genuine

or honest. What does honesty mean in this context? Nothing
really at all: politicians present their best face before the TV
cameras, seem often to be what in fact they are not, will often
tell people what they want to hear so as to derive an advantage.
In this example it is not easy to distinguish simulated
authenticity from genuine authenticity, to dig beneath a
transparent image to find the real.

We've all seen the bumper sticker "We Support Our Troops" --

another diabolical sign that seems to express a veiled attitude. It

suggests that criticizing the leaders who send young men to die
in war is tantamount to not being on the side of the young men,
or condemning them per se; or, if you are opposed to the Iraq

war, you are opposed to the American troops, whatever

"opposed" is supposed to mean in this example.

Or, still again, consider the question "Will Hillary run?" -- a favorite
of pundits who think they are being clever or naughty when in fact
they are being absurd and trite. The following might be said about

this construction:

1) The first-person usage is itself a sign: the smallest paucity really

"know" the human being that is Hillary Clinton. For everybody else
she is a plastic-doll public-figure that has been constructed by the
media. There is no differentiating who she really is from the

meanings that the major media pour into the public plastic doll. "Is
she good or bad, a liberal or a moderate? Does she have a chance to
win? Does the party want/need her as the nominee in 2008?" These

questions have no connection whatsoever either to truth or to the

lived experience of human beings. If they are intelligible at all, it as
a kind of code transmitted and legitimated by pundits and
journalists, and circulated to create a constant smog in the political

air.

2) The question presupposes that a) it matters whether Mrs. Clinton

will run; b) that electoral outcomes have any significance in

contemporary America; c) that such a species of question is

important enough to keep repeating month after month, year after
year.

Baudrillard would see all such examples as evidence that we are

living in a fundamentally different age -- an age dominated more by

appearances than by what used to be known as reality; an age of

simulacra, or copies of originals that no longer exist.

Like McLuhan, he thinks that it is the technological structure of

media that affects our attitudes, feelings, and thoughts, and that the
view that media can serve some ultimate emancipatory end -- e.g.,

by being more inclusive, by offering more radical or subversive

voices in the mix of programming -- is simply delusional. He even
questions whether information produces meaning or whether it
destroys it.

The passages below trace Baudrillard's thinking over a period of

three decades. A list of important references follows.

"The Media Are What Always Prevent A Response"

(From "Requiem for the Media," 1972)
"...it is not as vehicles of content, but in their form and very
operation, that media induce a social relation; and this is not an
exploitative relation: it involves the abstraction, separation, and

abolition of exchange itself. The media are not co-efficients, but

effectors of ideology. Reciprocally, ideology does not exist in some
place apart, as the discourse of the dominant class, before it is
channeled through the media...media ideology functions at the level

of form, at the level of the separation it establishes, which is a social

division.

"The mass media are anti-mediatory and intransitive. They fabricate

non-communication -- this is what characterizes them, if one agrees

to define communication as an exchange, as a reciprocal space of a

speech and a response, and thus of a responsibility (not a

psychological or moral responsibility, but a personal, mutual

correlation in exchange). We must understand communication as

something other than the simple transmission-reception of a

message, whether or not the latter is considered reversible through

feedback. Now, the totality of the existing architecture of the media

founds itself on this latter definition: they are what always prevents
response, making all processes of exchange impossible...

"To understand the term response properly, we must take it in an

emphatic sense, by referring to an equivalent in 'primitive' societies:

power belongs to the one who can give and cannot be repaid. To

give, and to do it in such a way that one is unable to repay, is to

disrupt the exchange to your profit and to institute a monopoly. The

social process is thus thrown out of equilibrium, whereas repaying

disrupts this power relationship and institutes (or reinstitutes), on the

basis of an antagonistic reciprocity, the circuit of symbolic

exchange. The same goes for the media: they speak, or something is
spoken there, but in such a way as to exclude any response

anywhere. This is why the only revolution in this domain -- indeed,

the revolution everywhere: the revolution tout court -- lies in

restoring this possibility of response. But such a simple possibility

presupposes an upheaval in the entire existing structure of the

media.

"No other theory or strategy is possible. All vague impulses to

democratize content, subvert it, restore the 'transparency of the

code,' control the information process, contrive a reversibility of

circuits, or take power over media are hopeless -- unless the

monopoly of speech is broken; and one cannot break the monopoly

of speech if one’s goal is simply to distribute it equally to everyone.

Speech must be able to exchange, give, and repay itself as is

occasionally the case with looks and smiles. It cannot simply be

interrupted, congealed, stockpiled, and redistributed in some corner

of the social process."

Information Devours Its Own Content

(From Simulacra and Simulation, University of Michigan Press,
pp. 80-83)

"Information is thought to create communication, and even if the

waste is enormous, a general consensus would have it that
nevertheless, as a whole, there be an excess of meaning, which

is redistributed in all the interstices of the social -- just as

consensus would have it that material production, despite its

dysfunctions and irrationalities, opens onto an excess of wealth

and social purpose. We are all complicitous in this myth. It is the

alpha and omega of our modernity, without which the credibility

of our social organization would collapse. Well, the fact is that it

is collapsing, and for this very reason: because where we think

that information produces meaning, the opposite occurs.

"Information devours its own content. It devours communication

and the social. And for two reasons.

"1. Rather than creating communication, it exhausts itself in the act

of staging communication. Rather than producing meaning, it

exhausts itself in the staging of meaning. A gigantic process of

simulation that is very familiar...

"It is useless to ask if it is the loss of communication that produces

this escalation in the simulacrum, or whether it is the simulacrum

that is there first for dissuasive ends, to short-circuit in advance any

possibility of communication (precession of the model that calls an

end to the real). Useless to ask which is the first term, there is none,

it is a circular process -- that of simulation, that of the hyperreal. The

hyperreality of communication and of meaning. More real than the

real, that is how the real is abolished...

"2. Behind this exacerbated mise-en-scene of communication, the

mass media, the pressure of information pursues an irresistible

destructuration of the social.

"Thus information dissolves meaning and dissolves the social, in a

sort of nebulous state dedicated not to a surplus of innovation, but,

on the contrary, to total entropy...

"Only the medium can make an event -- whatever the contents,

whether they are conformist or subversive. A serious problem for all

counterinformation, pirate radios, antimedia, etc. But there is

something even more serious, which McLuhan himself did not see.
Because beyond this neutralization of all content, one could still

expect to manipulate the medium in its form and to transform the

real by using the impact of the medium as form. If all the content is
wiped out, there is perhaps still a subversive, revolutionary use

value of the medium as such. That is -- and this is where

McLuhan's formula leads, pushed to its limit -- there is not only an

implosion of the message in the medium, there is, in the same

movement, the implosion of the medium itself in the real, the

implosion of the medium and of the real in a sort of hyperreal

nebula, in which even the definition and distinct notion of the

medium can no longer be determined...

"Evidently, there is a paradox in this inextricable conjunction of the

masses and the media: do the media neutralize meaning and

produce unformed or informed masses, or is it the masses who

victoriously resist the media by directing or absorbing all the

messages that the media produce without responding to them?...

"Are the mass media on the side of power in the manipulation of the

masses, or are they on the side of the masses in the liquidation of

meaning, in the violence perpetrated on meaning, and in

fascination? Is it the media that induce fascination in the masses, or

is it the masses who direct the media into the spectacle?...The media

carry meaning and countermeaning, they manipulate in all

directions at once, nothing can control this process, they are the

vehicle for the simulation internal to the system and the simulation

that destroys the system, according to an absolutely Mobian and

circular logic -- and it is exactly like this. There is no alternative to

this, no logical resolution."

The Secret Vice Of Media

(From Screened Out, Verso 2002, pp.188-189)

"...what if the sign did not relate either to the object or to meaning,
but to the promotion of the sign as sign? And what if information

did not relate either to the event or the facts, but to the promotion of
information itself as event? And more precisely today: what if

television no longer related to anything except itself as message?

This is where McLuhan's formulation can be seen to be absolutely

brilliant: the medium has swallowed the message and it is this, the

multi-medium, which is proliferating in all directions. And we are,

indeed, seeing terrestrial and cable channels and services

proliferating while actual programme content is disappearing and

melting away -- the TV viewer's almost involuntary channel-

hopping here echoing television's own obsession with its own

channels.

"But this is not where the true corruption lies. The secret vice,

already pointed out by Umberto Eco, lies in the way the media

become self-referring and speak only among themselves. The

multimedium is becoming the intermedium. This already

problematic situation is aggravated when it is a single hypermedium

-- television -- eyeing itself. All the more so as this tele-centrism is

combined with a very severe implicit moral and political judgement:

it implies that the masses basically neither need nor desire meaning

or information -- that all they ask for is signs and images. Television

provides them with these in great quantities, returning to the real

world, with utter -- though well camouflaged -- contempt, in the

form of 'reality shows' or vox-pops -- that is to say, in the form of

universal self-commentary and mocked-up scenarios, where both

the questions and the answers are 'fixed'."

Bibliography

Key Baudrillard Texts On Media:

For A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (St. Louis:
Telos Press, 1973).

Simulations (Semiotexte, 1983)

Simulacra And Simulation (Ann Arbor MI: University of Michigan

Press, 1994), trans. Sheila Faria Glaser.

The Perfect Crime (New York: Verso, 1996).

Screened Out (New York: Verso, 2002).

More About Baudrillard:

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "Jean Baudrillard"

International Journal of Baudrillard Studies

Welcome to the World of Jean Baudrillard

Baudrillard: A New McLuhan? (By Douglas Kellner)

European Graduate School Overview

A Collection of Baudrillard's Books

A Few Articles & Quotes:

"The Spirit of Terrorism"

"Holy Europe"

"The Pyres of Autumn"

Baudrillard Quotes

Criticism:
The "Ecstasy" of Jean Baudrillard (By Richard Vine). A
beautifully written, highly critical essay which offers a good
summary of Baudrillard's thinking. The piece, however, is
completely one-sided -- more an excoriation exercise than a
disinterested consideration of Baudrillard's strengths and
weaknesses. One would never know, reading Vine, that
Baudrillard is one of the world's most influential media
theorists -- the heir of Marshall McLuhan in the eyes of many.

Douglas Kellner, Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to

Postmodernism and Beyond (Stanford University Press, 1990)

Further Reading:
Media Files. Philosophical Society.com's list of scholarly
articles on the media. See, esp., McLuhan's Philosophy and
Our Mediated Life.

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