Simulacra and the Breakdown of Meaning in Mass Media

Jean Baudrillard analyzes how the modern flow of information, which creates a vast number of copies and simulacra, ultimately destroys reality. Baudrillard, a postmodernist intellectual “guru,” once opened our eyes to the “unreality of what is happening.” “We live in a world of simulacra,” he said, backing this up with a heap of examples: labor is no longer productive but rather serves a social function (“everyone must be busy”), representative bodies no longer represent anyone, and now it is not the base that determines the superstructure, but the other way around. According to Baudrillard, we have lost our connection to reality and entered the era of hyperreality—an age where the image is more important than the content, and the link between objects, phenomena, and their signs is broken (we actually owe the concept behind the movie “The Matrix” to Baudrillard, though he believed his ideas were distorted there).

Baudrillard assigns a significant role in this process to the media: in his view, the modern, frenzied flow of information creates a huge number of copies and simulacra that ultimately destroy reality. Moreover, Baudrillard notes, the more information there is, the less meaning there is, even though logically it should be the opposite. He devotes an entire chapter of his book Simulacra and Simulation (1981) to analyzing this problem. So, let’s read and figure out why there is a total inflation of information and what can be done about it.

Three Hypotheses About Information and Meaning

We live in a world where there is more and more information and less and less meaning. In this regard, three hypotheses are possible:

1. Information produces meaning (a negentropic factor), but it fails to compensate for the brutal loss of meaning in all areas. Attempts to re-inject meaning through more media, messages, and content are futile: the loss and absorption of meaning happen faster than it can be re-injected. In this case, we should turn to the productive base to replace the failing media—an entire ideology of freedom of speech, information media split into countless separate broadcasting units, or the ideology of “anti-media” (radio pirates, etc.).
2. Information has nothing to do with signification. It is something entirely different, an operational model of another order, external to meaning and its circulation. This is, for example, the hypothesis of C. Shannon, who argued that the sphere of information is purely instrumental, a technical environment that does not imply any ultimate meaning and therefore should not be involved in evaluative judgment. It is a kind of code, like the genetic code: it is what it is, it functions as it functions, and meaning is something else that appears after the fact. In this case, there would be no essential connection between the inflation of information and the deflation of meaning.
3. There is a strict and necessary correlation between these two phenomena, in that information directly destroys or neutralizes meaning and signification. Thus, the loss of meaning is directly linked to the corrosive, dissuasive action of information, information media, and mass media.

This last hypothesis is the most interesting, but it goes against common opinion. Socialization is everywhere measured by susceptibility to media messages. The desocialized, or actually asocial, person is the one who is not sufficiently receptive to information media. Information is believed to accelerate the circulation of meaning and create a surplus value of meaning, similar to the surplus value in economics resulting from the accelerated circulation of capital. Information is seen as the creator of communication, and despite huge unproductive costs, there is a general consensus that we are still dealing with a growth of meaning, redistributed throughout the social sphere—just as there is consensus that material production, despite its failures and irrationalities, still leads to increased welfare and social harmony. We all participate in this persistent myth. It is the alpha and omega of our modernity, without which trust in our social organization would be undermined. And yet, the fact is that it is undermined, precisely for this reason: where we believe information produces meaning, the opposite occurs.

How Information Devours Its Own Content

Information devours its own content. It devours communication and the social. This happens for two reasons:

1. Instead of creating communication, information exhausts itself in staging communication. Instead of producing meaning, it exhausts itself in staging meaning. We are faced with a very familiar, gigantic process of simulation. Unprepared interviews, call-ins from viewers and listeners, all sorts of interactivity, verbal blackmail: “This concerns you, the event is you,” and so on. More and more information is invaded by this kind of phantom content, this homeopathic inoculation, this dream of awakening communication. It’s a circular scheme, a stage play of what the audience desires, an anti-theater of communication, which is always just a reuse through the negation of the traditional institution, an integrated negative scheme. Huge energy is spent keeping the simulacrum at bay, to avoid a sudden dissimulation that would confront us with the obvious reality of a radical loss of meaning.It is pointless to ask whether the loss of communication leads to this escalation within the simulacrum, or whether the simulacrum appears first to preempt any possibility of communication (the precession of the model, which ends the real). It is a cyclical process—a process of simulation, of the hyperreal. The hyperreality of communication and meaning. More real than the real itself—this is how it is abolished.

   Thus, not only communication but also the social function in a closed cycle, as a seduction attached to the power of myth. Trust, faith in information, joins this tautological proof that the system provides about itself, duplicating elusive reality in signs.

   However, this faith is as ambiguous as the faith that accompanied myths in archaic societies. People believed and did not believe. No one is tormented by doubts: “I know for sure, and yet…” This kind of reverse simulation arises in the masses, in each of us, in response to the simulation of meaning and communication in which the system encloses us. In response to the system’s tautology, there is the ambivalence of the masses; in response to apotropaic action, there is discontent or still-mysterious belief. The myth continues to exist, but it is a mistake to think people believe in it: this is the trap for critical thought, which can only function by assuming the naivety and stupidity of the masses.

2. In addition, through excessive staging of communication, the media intensify the information-driven, irreversible destructuring of the social. Thus, information decomposes meaning, decomposes the social, turning them into a kind of nebula doomed not to the growth of something new, but rather to total entropy.Thus, mass media are not engines of socialization, but rather the opposite: engines of the implosion of the social within the masses. This is just the macroscopic extension of the implosion of meaning at the microscopic level of the sign. This implosion should be analyzed starting from McLuhan’s formula “the medium is the message,” whose possible implications are far from exhausted.

   It means that all content of meaning is absorbed by the single dominant form of media. Only the media themselves are the event—regardless of content, whether conformist or subversive. This is a serious problem for any counter-information, radio pirates, anti-media, etc. But there is an even more serious problem, which McLuhan himself did not see. For beyond this neutralization of all content, one might hope that the media would still function in their form, and that the real could be transformed under the influence of the media as form. If all content is abolished, perhaps there remains a revolutionary and subversive value in using the media as such. Thus—and this is where McLuhan’s formula leads in its ultimate sense—not only does the message implode into the media, but, in the same movement, the media implode into the real, the media and the real implode into a kind of hyperreal nebula, in which the definition and proper action of the media are no longer distinguishable.

   Even the “traditional” status of the media, characteristic of modernity, is called into question. McLuhan’s formula—the medium is the message, the key formula of the era of simulation (the medium is the message—the sender is the receiver, the closure of all poles—the end of perspective and panoptic space—these are the alpha and omega of our modernity)—must itself be considered in its ultimate expression: after all content and messages evaporate into the media, the media themselves disappear as such. In essence, it is thanks to the message that the media acquire the features of credibility; it is the message that gives the media their definite, clear status as a communication intermediary. Without the message, the media themselves fall into the uncertainty inherent in all our systems of analysis and evaluation. Only the model, whose action is immediate, generates at once the message, the media, and the “real.”

   Finally, “the medium is the message” means not only the end of the message, but also the end of the media. There are no more media in the literal sense of the word (primarily electronic mass media), that is, no more instance that mediates between one reality and another, between one state of the real and another. Neither in content nor in form. This is what implosion means: the mutual absorption of poles, a short circuit between the poles of any differential system of meaning, the erasure of clear boundaries and oppositions, including the opposition between media and the real—hence, the impossibility of any mediated expression of one by the other or any dialectical dependence between them. The circularity of all media effects. Hence, the impossibility of meaning as a one-way vector from one pole to another. We must fully analyze this critical but original situation: it is the only thing left to us.

   It is pointless to dream of revolution through content, pointless to dream of revolution through form, because the media and the real now make up a single nebula, the truth of which cannot be deciphered.

   The fact of this implosion of content, the absorption of meaning, the disappearance of the media themselves, the resorption of any dialectic of communication in the total circulation of the model, the implosion of the social in the masses may seem catastrophic and desperate. But it only looks that way in the light of the idealism that completely dominates our view of information. We all exist in a frenzied idealism of meaning and communication, in the idealism of communication through meaning, and it is from this perspective that the catastrophe of meaning threatens us.

   However, we should understand that the term “catastrophe” has a “catastrophic” sense of end and destruction only in a linear vision of accumulation leading to completion, which the system imposes on us. Etymologically, the term means simply a “turn,” a “folding of the cycle,” which leads to what could be called an “event horizon,” a horizon of meaning beyond which it is impossible to go: beyond it, nothing has meaning for us—but it is enough to step outside this ultimatum of meaning for the catastrophe itself to no longer be the last day of reckoning, as it functions in our modern imagination.

   Beyond the horizon of meaning lies fascination, the result of the neutralization and implosion of meaning. Beyond the horizon of the social are the masses, the result of the neutralization and implosion of the social.

The Double Challenge: Meaning and the Masses

The main thing today is to assess this double challenge—the challenge to meaning posed by the masses and their silence (which is not passive resistance), and the challenge to meaning that comes from the information media and their hypnosis. All attempts, marginal and alternative, to revive some particle of meaning seem secondary by comparison.

It is clear that in this complex interplay of the masses and the media lies a paradox: are the media neutralizing meaning and producing a “formless” or “informed” mass, or are the masses successfully resisting the media, rejecting or absorbing without response all the messages the media produce? Previously, in “Requiem for the Media,” I analyzed and described the media as an institution of an irreversible model of communication without response. And today? This lack of response can no longer be understood as a strategy of power, but as a counter-strategy of the masses themselves, directed against power. What then?

Are the media on the side of power, manipulating the masses, or are they on the side of the masses, liquidating meaning and, not without a certain pleasure, committing violence against it? Do the media hypnotize the masses, or do the masses force the media to become a meaningless spectacle? Mogadishu-Stammheim: the media turn themselves into a tool for moral condemnation of terrorism and the exploitation of fear for political purposes, but at the same time, in perfect ambiguity, they spread the inhuman fascination of the terrorist act—they themselves are terrorists, since they are subject to this fascination (the eternal moral dilemma; cf. Umberto Eco: how to avoid the topic of terrorism, how to find the right way to use the media—if it exists at all). The media carry meaning and counter-meaning, they manipulate in all directions at once, this process cannot be controlled, they are internal to the system of simulation, and the simulation that destroys the system, which fully corresponds to the Möbius strip and the logic of the loop—they coincide exactly. There is no alternative or logical solution to this. Only logical escalation and catastrophic resolution.

The Double Bind and the Paradox of Resistance

With one caveat. We are face to face with this system in a split and irresolvable “double bind” situation—just as children are face to face with the demands of the adult world. They are required to become independent, responsible, free, and conscious subjects, and at the same time to be obedient, inert, and submissive, which corresponds to the object. Note: “Double bind” is a concept from Gregory Bateson’s theory of schizophrenia, describing a paradoxical prescription that ultimately leads to madness: “I order you not to obey my orders.” For example, a mother verbally asks her child for affection, but through gestures demands the child keep a certain distance. This leads to any action by the child being seen as wrong, making it difficult to resolve the situation. The child resists in all directions and responds to contradictory demands with a double strategy. To the demand to be an object, the child opposes all possible forms of disobedience, rebellion, emancipation—in short, the claims of a subject. To the demand to be a subject, the child just as persistently and effectively opposes the resistance of the object: infantilism, hyper-conformism, total dependence, passivity, idiocy. Neither strategy is objectively more valuable than the other. Today, resistance as a subject is one-sidedly valued higher and seen as positive—just as in politics, only behavior aimed at liberation, emancipation, self-expression, and becoming a political subject is considered worthy and subversive. This means ignoring the influence, just as significant and certainly more important, of object behavior, the refusal of the subject position and awareness—this is the behavior of the masses, which we dismiss under the derogatory terms of alienation and passivity.

Behavior aimed at liberation responds to one aspect of the system, the constant ultimatum to present us as pure objects, but it does not respond to the other demand: that we become subjects, that we liberate ourselves, that we express ourselves at any cost, that we vote, produce, make decisions, speak, participate, play the game—this kind of blackmail and ultimatum used against us is just as serious, if not more so, today. In relation to a system whose argument is oppression and suppression, strategic resistance is the liberating claim of the subject. But this reflects an earlier phase of the system, and even if we are still in confrontation with it, it is no longer the strategic field: the current argument of the system is the maximization of speech, the maximization of the production of meaning. Therefore, strategic resistance is the refusal of meaning and speech—or the hyper-conformist simulation of the system’s own mechanisms, which is also a form of refusal and rejection. This is the strategy of the masses, and it is equivalent to returning the system’s own logic to it through its duplication, and meaning, like a reflection in a mirror—without absorbing it. This strategy (if it can still be called a strategy) prevails today, as it follows from the dominant phase of the system.

Choosing the wrong strategy is serious. All those movements that bet only on liberation, emancipation, the revival of the subject of history, the group, speech, on the consciousness (or rather unconsciousness) of subjects and masses, do not see that they are following the system’s current imperative: the overproduction and regeneration of meaning and speech.