path: root/implosion.otx

\chap The Implosion of Meaning in the Media

{\leftskip=0.25in plus1fill\rightskip=0.25in\it\noindent
by Jean Baudrillard\nl
translated by John Johnston
\par}


We are in a universe where there is more and more information,
and less and less meaning. Consider three hypotheses:
\begitems\style -
* either information produces meaning (a negentropic
factor), but doesn't succeed in compensation for the
brutal loss of signification in every domain. The reinjection
of message and content by means of the media is vain,
since meaning is devoured and lost more rapidly than it
is reinjected. In this case, appeal has to be made to a
productivity at the base in order to relieve the failing
media. This is the whole ideology of free speech, of the
media subdivided into innumerable individual cells of
transmission, indeed \dq{anti-media} (CB radios, etc.).
* or information has nothing to do with signification.
It is something else, an operational model of another
order, outside of meaning and the circulation of meaning
properly speaking. This is the hypothesis of Shannon:
a sphere of information that is purely instrumental, a
technical medium implying no end purpose of meaning,
and thus which must not itself be implicated in a value
judgment. A kind of code, perhaps like the genetic
code: it is what it is, it functions as it does; meaning
it is something else, coming afterwards in some way, as
in Jacques Monod's \bt{Chance and Necessity}. In this
case, there would simply be no significant relation
between the inflation of information and the deflation
of meaning.
* or rather the contrary: there is a rigorous
and necessary correlation between the two, to the extent
that information is directly destructive of meaning and
signification, or neutralizes it. The loss of meaning is
directly linked to the dissolving and dissuasive action
of information, the media, and the mass media.
\enditems

The third hypothesis is the most interesting, although it
goes against the grain of all accepted opinion. Everywhere
socialization is measured according to exposure through media
messages. Those who are under-exposed to the media are
virtually asocial or desocialized. Everywhere information is
reputed to produce an accelerated circulation of meaning, a
plus-value of meaning homologous to the economic plus
value which results from the accelerated rotation of capital.
Information is given as creative of communication, and even if
the wastage is enormous a general consensus would have it
that there is in the total nonetheless a surplus of meaning,
which is redistributed in all the interstices of the social fabric---
just as a consensus would have it that material production,
despite its dysfunctions and irrationalities, nevertheless leads
to an excess of wealth and social finality. We are all accomplices
in this myth. lt is the alpha and omega of our modernity,
without which the credibility of our social organization
would collapse, Yet \e{the fact is that it is collapsing,} and for this
very reason. Just where we think that information is producing
meaning, it is doing the exact opposite.

Information devours its own contents; it devours communication 
and the social \e{(le social)}, and for two reasons:

\vskip 1em

\b{1.} Instead of causing communication, it \e{exhausts itself in
the act} of staging the communication; instead of producing
meaning, it exhausts itself in the staging of meaning. It is a
gigantic process of simulation with which we are very familiar.
The non-directed interview, speech, listeners who telephone 
in, participation at all levels, blackmail through
speech---all say: "It's your concern, you are the event, etc."
More and more information is invaded by this sort of phantom
content, this homeopathic graft, this awakened dream of
communication. It is a circular set-up in which the desire of
the audience is put on stage, an anti-theater of communication,
 which, as we know, is never anything but the recycling
"in the negative" of traditional institutions, the integrated
circuit of the negative. Immense energies are deployed in
order to keep this simulacre standing upright, and to avoid the
brutal de-simulation which would confront us with the obvious
reality of a radical loss of meaning.

It is useless to wonder if it is the loss of communication
that causes this escalation in the simulacre, or if it is the
simulacre that is there first, with this dissuasive finality, since
it short-circuits in advance all possibility of communication
(precession of the model which puts an end to the real). It is
useless to wonder which is the first term. There is none, it is a
circular process---that of simulation, that of the hyperreal: a
hyperreality of communication and of meaning, more real
than the real. Hence the real is abolished.

Thus communication as well as \e{the social} function as a
closed circuit, as a lure---to which is attached the force of a
myth. The belief and the faith in information attached to this
tautological proof give the system itself, by doubling its signs,
an unlocatable reality.

But this belief may be thought to be as ambiguous as the
one attached to myths in archaic societies. One both believes
and doesn't believe. The question is simply not posed. "I
know very well, but all the same\ld" A sort of inverted simulation
corresponds in the masses, in each one of us, to this
simulation of meaning and of communication in which this
system encloses us. To the tautology of the system the masses
have responded with ambivalence; to dissuasion they have
responded with disaffection, and an always enigmatic belief.
The myth exists, but one must guard against thinking that
people believe in it. That is the trap of critical thought, which
can only be exercised given the naiveté and the stupidity of the
masses as a presupposition.

\vskip 1em

\b{2.} Behind this exacerbated staging of communication, the
mass media, with its pressure of information, carries out an
irresistible destructuration of the social.

Thus information dissolves meaning and dissolves the social
into a sort of nebulous state leading not at all to a surfeit of
innovation but to the very contrary, to total entropy.\fnote{Here we have discussed information only in the social register of communication. But it would be fascinating to consider the hypothesis within the framework of the \e{cybernetic} theory of communication.  There also, the fundamental thesis would have it that information would be synonymous with negentropy, the resistance to entropy, and an excess of meaning and of organization. But it would be fitting to pose the opposite hypothesis: INFORMATION~=~ENTROPY.  For example: the information or knowledge about a system or an event that can be obtained is already a form of neutralization and of entropy of this system. (This applies to the sciences in general and to the human and social sciences in particular.) The information in which an event is reflected or through which it is diffused is already a degraded form of the event. One would not hesitate to analyze the intervention of the media in May 1968 in this sense. The extension given to the student action permitted the general strike, but the later was precisely a black box which neutralized the original virulence of the movement. The very amplification was a mortal trap and not a positive extension. Distrust the universalization of struggles through information. Distrust campaigns of solidarity at every level, this solidarity that 1s both electronic and worldwide. Every strategy of the universalization of differences is an entropic strategy of the system.}

Thus the media do not bring about socialization, but just
the opposite: the implosion of the social in the masses. And
this is only the macroscopic extension of the \e{implosion of
meaning} at the microscopic level of the sign. The latter is to be
analyzed starting from McLuhan's formula \e{the medium is the
message}, the consequences of which are far from being
exhausted.

Its meaning is that all the contents of meaning are absorbed
in the medium's dominant form. The medium alone makes
the event---and does this whatever the contents, whether
conformist or subversive. A serious problem for all counter-information,
pirate radios, anti-media, etc. But there is something
even more serious, which McLuhan himself did not
make clear. For beyond this neutralization of all content, one
could still hope to manipulate the medium in its form, and to
transform the real by utilizing the impact of the medium as
form. With all content nullified, perhaps there is still a revolutionary
subversive use-value of the medium as such. Yet---and
this is where McLuhan's formula at its extreme limit leads---there
is not only the implosion of the medium itself in the real,
\e{the implosion of the medium and the real} in a sort of nebulous
hyperreality where even the definition and the distinct action
of the medium are no longer distinguishable.

Even the \dq{traditional status} of the media themselves,
characteristic of our modernity, is put into question.
Mcluhan's formula, \e{the medium is the message}, which is the
kev formula of the era of simulation, (the medium is the
message---the sender is the receiver---the circularity of all
poles---the end of panoptic and perspectival space---such is
the alpha and omega of \e{our} modernity), this very formula
must be envisaged at its limit, where, after all contents and
messages have been volatilized in the medium, it is the medium
itself which is volatilized as such. At bottom, it is still the
message which lends credibility to the medium, and which
gives to the medium its distinct and determined status as
intermediary of communication. Without a message, the
medium also falls into that indefinite state characteristic of all
our great systems of judgement and value. A single \e{model}
whose efficacy is \e{immediacy}, simultaneously generates the
message, the medium, and the \dq{real}.

In short, \e{the medium is the message} signifies not only the
cnd of the message, but also the end of the medium. There are
no longer media in the literal sense of the term (I am talking
above all about the electronic mass media)---that is to say, a
power mediating between one reality and another, between
one state of the real and another---neither in content nor in
form. Strictly speaking, this is what implosion signifies: the
absorption of one pole into another, the short-circuit between
poles of every differential system of meaning, the effacement
of terms and of distinct oppositions, and thus that of the
medium and the real. Hence the impossibility of any mediation,
of any dialectical intervention between the two or from
one to the other, and the circularity of all media effects. Hence
the impossibility of a sense (meaning), in the literal sense of a
unilateral vector leading from one pole to another. This critical---but
original---situation must be thought through to the very
end; it is the only one we are left with. To dream of a revolution
through content or through form is useless since the
medium and the real are now in a single nebulous state whose
truth is undecipherable.

The fact of this implosion of contents, absorption of mean-
ing, evanescence of the medium itself, re-absorption of the
whole dialectic of communication in a total circularity of the
model, and implosion of the social in the masses, can appear
catastrophic and hopeless. But it is only so in regard to the
idealism that dominates our whole vision of information. We
all live by a fanatical idealism of meaning and communication, 
by an idealism of communication through meaning,
and, in this perspective, it is very much a \e{catastrophe of
meaning} which lies in wait for us.

But it must be seen that the term "catastrophe" has this
"catastrophic" meaning of the end and annihilation only in a
linear vision of accumulation and productive finality which
the system imposes on us. Etymologically, the term only
signifies the curvature, the winding down to the bottom of a
cycle leading to what can be called the "horizon of the event,"
to the horizon of meaning, beyond which we cannot go.
Beyond it, nothing takes place that has meaning for us---but it
suffices to exceed this ultimatum of meaning in order that
catastrophe it elf no longer appear as the last, nililistic day of
reckoning, such as it functions in our current collective fantasy.

Beyond meaning, there is fascination, which results from
the neutralization and implosion of meaning. Beyond the
horizon of the social, there are the masses, which result from
the neutralization and implosion of the social,

The essential thing today is to evaluate this double
challenge---the defiance of meaning by the masses and their
silence (which is not at all a passive resistance)---and the
defiance of meaning which comes from the media and its
fascination. In regard to this challenge all the marginal and
alternative attempts to resuscitate meaning are secondary.

Evidently there 1s a paradox in this inextricable conjunction
of the masses and the media: is it the media that neutralizes
meaning and that produces the "unformed" (or informed)
mass, or is it the mass that victoriously resists the media by
diverting or absorbing all the messages which it produces
without responding to them? Some time ago, in \et{Requiem for
the Media,} I analyzed (and condemned) the media as the
institution of an irreversible model of communication \e{without response.}
But today? This absence of response can be
understood as a counter-strategy of the masses themselves in
their encounter with power, and no longer at all as a strategy
of power. What then?

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 done to meaning and
in the fascination that results? Is it the media which induce
fascination in the masses, or is it the masses which divert the
media into spectacle? Mogadishu-Stammheim:\fnote{Stammheim was a member of the Baader-Meinhoff gang killed at Mogadishu, Somalia when a West German anti-terrorist squad stormed the airplane be and others had hijacked.} the media are
made the vehicle of the moral condemnation of terrorism and
of the exploitation of fear for political ends, but, simultaneously,
in the most total ambiguity, they propagate the brutal fascination
of the terrorist act. They are themselves terrorists, to the
extent to which they work through fascination (cf. Umberto
Eco on this eternal moral dilemma: how not to speak of
terrorism, how to find a \e{good use} for the media? \e{There is
none}). The media carry meaning and non-sense, and manipulate
in every sense simultaneously. The process cannot be
controlled, for the media convey the simulation internal to the
system and the simulation destructive of the system according
to a logic that 1s absolutely Möbian and circular. And this is
exactly what it is like. There is no alternative to it, no logical
resolution. Only a logical \e{exacerbation} and a catastrophic
resolution.

With one qualification. We are face to face with this system,
in a double situation, an insoluble "double bind"
exactly like children face to face with the adult universe. They
are simultaneously summoned to behave like autonomous
subjects, responsible, free, and conscious, and as submissive
objects, inert, obedient, and conforming. The child resists on
all levels, and to a contradictory demand he also responds
with a double strategy. To the demand to be an object, he
opposes all the practices of disobedience, revolt, emancipation;
in short, a total claim to subjecthood. To the demand to
be a subject, he opposes just as stubbornly and efficaciously
with an object's resistance, that is to say, in exactly the opposite
manner: infantilism, hyperconformism, a total dependence,
passivity, idiocy, Neither of the two strategies has more
objective value than the other. The resistance-as-subject is
today unilaterally valorized and held as positive---just as in
the political sphere only the practices of liberation, emancipation,
expression, and constitution as a political subject are
taken to be valuable and subversive. But this is to ignore the
equal impact, perhaps even superior, of all the practices-as-object---the 
renunciation of the position of subject and of
meaning---exactly the practices of the masses---which we
bury and forget under the contemptuous terms of alienation
and passivity. The liberating practices respond to one of the
aspects of the system, to the constant ultimatum to make of
ourselves as pure objects, but they don't respond to the other
demand, which is to constitute ourselves as subjects, to liberate\
ourselves, to express ourselves at any price, to vote, produce,
decide, speak, participate, play the game---a form of
blackmail and ultimatum just as serious as the other, probably
even more serious today. To a system whose argument is
oppression and repression, the strategic resistance is the liberating
claim of subjecthood. Bur this reflects rather the system's
 previous phase, and even if we are still confronted with
it, it is no longer the strategic terrain: the system's current
argument is the maximization of the word and the maximal
production of meaning. Thus the strategic resistance is that of
a refusal of meaning and a refusal of the word---or of the
hyperconformist simulation of the very mechanisms of the
system, which is a form of refusal and of non-reception. This
is the resistance of the masses: it is equivalent to sending back
to the system its own logic by doubling it, to reflecting, like a
mirror, meaning without absorbing it. This strategy (if one
can still speak of strategy) prevails today, because it was
ushered in by that phase of the system.

A mistake concerning strategy is a serious matter. All the
movements which only bet on liberation, emancipation, the
resurrection of the subject of history, of the group, of speech
as a raising of consciousness, indeed of a "seizure of the
unconscious" of subjects and of the masses, do not see that
they are acting in accordance with the system, whose imperative
today is the overproduction and regeneration of meaning
and speech.