Four essays turning on one reversal, restated from four angles. The masses are not the unrealized subject of history waiting to be organized and given voice. They are the point at which the social, meaning, the political, and representation collapse inward. Baudrillard names that collapse implosion and sets it term for term against the explosion (expansion, accumulation, production, liberation) he says has governed the West for centuries.
The argument is built to defeat the consolations of the left as much as those of power. Two centuries of organizing, education, and consciousness-raising failed to convert the masses to meaning, and Baudrillard rejects both standard accounts of that failure: manipulation from above, mystification from within. His wager is that the indifference is the masses' practice, a positive counter-strategy of absorption and neutralization, and that it works as an absolute weapon precisely because it cannot be represented, spoken for, or alienated. The governing physical metaphor is the black hole, a density that absorbs all radiation and returns no information.
The four essays are not interchangeable. The title essay lays out the full apparatus: mass, simulation, the survey, terrorism, implosion against explosion. "… Or, The End of the Social" is the most systematic piece, organized around three hypotheses about whether the social ever existed, with a fourth named in its notes. "The Implosion of Meaning in the Media" runs the same operation on information theory and McLuhan. "Our Theater of Cruelty" is the shortest and most occasional, a two-part reading of the Mogadishu hijacking and the deaths at Stammheim that concretizes the terrorism material. The brief reconstructs each in the source's own sequence and under the source's own section headings, because the sequence is part of the argument.
On register: the prose is essayistic and assertion-dense, not demonstrative. Baudrillard rarely argues a claim to a conclusion. He restates it at escalating intensity and lets analogies (microphysics, black holes, DNA and the genetic code, atomic simulation chambers) carry the load. The connective prose below paraphrases the move-structure. The block quotes carry the formulations that travel, each whole and anchored to its printed page.
The essay opens on the masses as the nothingness around which the whole constellation of the social turns. The masses absorb the electricity of the social and ground it out, in the triple pun the translator flags at the foot of the first page.
Page 1, translator's note
Throughout the text "la masse," "faire 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 "matter," 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 mean to form a mass, to form an earth or to form a majority.
Pages 1–2
The whole chaotic constellation of the social revolves around that spongy referent, that opaque but equally translucent reality, that nothingness: 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 electricity of the social and political and neutralise it forever.
What follows is the claim that the masses conduct nothing, and that this non-conduction is not weakness but the strength of the neutral.
Page 2
They are neither good conductors of the political, nor good conductors of the social, nor good conductors of meaning in general. Everything flows through them, everything 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 contrary, they absorb all radiation from the outlying constellations of State, History, Culture, Meaning. They are inertia, the strength of inertia, the strength of the neutral.
The decisive refusal arrives at once: this inertia is not stored potential. Baudrillard denies the masses the "reservoir" status on which all revolutionary hope depends, and locates their strength in the present and in silence.
Pages 2–3
According to their imaginary representation, the masses drift somewhere between passivity and wild spontaneity, but always as a potential 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 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 absorb and neutralise, already superior to any power acting upon them.
He marks the cost to sociology up front: the hypothesis of the death of the social is also the hypothesis of sociology's own death, since the discipline survives only on the positive hypothesis of the social. The status of the word "mass" is then declared a deliberate move, not a defect of rigor.
Page 4
The term "mass" is not a concept. It 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 notions (like "mana" once was) that one can go further than intelligent critical sociology.
To specify the term, then, is to falsify it. The mass has no attribute and no referent, and its lack of definition is its definition.
Page 5
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 integrating them and which finally only produce them as statistical refuse. The mass is without attribute, predicate, quality, reference. This is its definition, or its radical lack of definition. It has no sociological "reality."
The mass is the neutral, neither one pole nor the other, which is what makes meaning impossible to circulate within it and what makes it impossible to alienate.
Page 6
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 circulation 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.
The worked example is religion. The masses kept the image of God and the spectacle of the Church, never the Idea, and what they refused was transcendence.
Pages 7–8
Regarding the impossibility of making meaning circulate among the masses, the best example 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 contrast to the transcendence of the Idea. They were and have remained pagans, in their way, never haunted by the Supreme Authority, but surviving on the small change of images, superstition and the devil.
Page 8
It isn't that they have not been able to attain the higher enlightenment of religion: they have ignored it. They don't refuse to die for a faith, for a cause, for an idol. What they refuse is transcendence; the uncertainty, the difference, the waiting, the asceticism which constitute the sublime exaction of religion.
The same fate met every great schema of reason. The masses are not the mirror of the social; the mirror of the social shatters on them, and the corrected image is the black hole.
Page 9
Are the masses the "mirror of the social"? No, they don't 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 "involve" to the point of annihilation, leaving in their stead only a sphere of potential engulfment.
Whatever its content, information always intends to get some meaning across and keep the masses within reason. The masses resist that imperative scandalously, and the resistance is the datum.
Page 10
Nonsense: the masses scandalously resist this imperative 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.
The "mystification" hypothesis is dismissed as the self-protection of the producers of meaning, and the reverse hypothesis is put in its place: the refusal is exercised in freedom, against a terror sensed behind the hegemony of meaning.
Page 10
Nor is anything served by alleging that they are mystified. This is always a hypocritical hypothesis which protects the intellectual complaisance of the producers of meaning: the masses spontaneously 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 this political will. They scent the simplifying terror which is behind the ideal hegemony of meaning.
This inverts the received scenario. Meaning is no longer the line of force in our societies but an accident concerning only a thin layer, and individuals too are episodic conductors of meaning who form a mass most of the time.
Page 11
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 contrary, 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.
The example is the night of Klaus Croissant's extradition, set against a televised World Cup qualifier, with the intelligentsia's consternation as the real object of analysis.
Page 12
On the night of Klaus Croissant's extradition, 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 indignation of the illuminati over this scandalous indifference.
The silent majority, he argues, is even stripped of its indifference: the apathy itself must be charged to power, never granted as the masses' own behavior. He then states the proven, repeating fact and his refusal of both explanations for it.
Page 14
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 football 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.
The proposed method is to begin again from this refuse, as Freud began from the psychic remainder, and he notes why the political order has never risked it.
Page 15
We might as well begin again, as Freud did in the psychic order, from this remainder, from this blind sediment, from this waste or refuse of meaning, from this unanalysed and perhaps unanalysable fact (there is a good reason why such a Copernican Revolution has never been undertaken in the political universe: it is the whole political order that is in danger of paying the price).
A compressed genealogy. The political emerges from the religious sphere in the Renaissance and wins renown with Machiavelli as a pure game of signs played on the absence of truth, of the same order as Renaissance theatre and perspective space.
Page 16
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 historical "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 representation — semiurgy and strategy, not ideology — its function was one of virtuosity, not of truth.
The Machiavellian immorality is relocated: not in the use of means but in the disregard for ends, where Nietzsche is recruited for the claim that maximal political energy lives in that disregard.
Page 16
The cynicism and immorality of Machiavellian politics 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.
From the eighteenth century, and especially the Revolution, the political takes a social reference and enters representation, paralleling theatre and perspective space. After the golden age of bourgeois representative systems, marxist thought inaugurates the end of the political by installing the hegemony of the social.
Page 18
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, institutional, executive mirror of the social. The autonomy of the political was inversely proportional to the growing hegemony of the social.
Socialist and revolutionary thought openly wills the dissolution of the political into the transparency of the social. The verdict on that victory is the hinge of the essay.
Pages 18–19
The social won. But, at this point of generalisation, of saturation, where it is no more than the zero degree of the political, at this point of absolute 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 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 political dwindles from a strategic arrangement to representation to a present "neo-figuration" where signs no longer represent anything, because there is no social signified left to give a political signifier its force. The only functioning referent is the silent majority, statistical rather than social, appearing only in the survey.
Page 20
The masses are no longer a referent because they no longer belong to the order of representation. They don't express themselves, they are surveyed. They don't 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.
The couple "silent majority / survey" has no pole and no differential term, and is short-circuited exactly as the genetic code is, which Baudrillard names the ideal form of simulation and the matrix of implosion.
Page 21
Everything changes with the device of simulation. In the couple "silent majority / survey" for example, there is no longer any pole nor any differential 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 simulation: collapse of poles, orbital circulation of models (this is also the matrix of every implosive process).
The silence is the decisive figure, and it is carefully qualified against alienation. It is not a mute absence of speech but a refusal to be spoken for, and therefore a weapon.
Page 22
This is the meaning of their silence. But this silence is paradoxical — it isn't 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 majority, and that is its revenge.
Because the masses are no longer a subject, they cannot pass through the political mirror stage and cannot be alienated. Baudrillard marks this as the end of revolutionary convictions, and corrects the figure: the mass is not explosion but implosion.
Page 22
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.
Power's old strategy rested on apathy. That inertia now turns against it, so power tries to reverse course toward participation and speech. The reversal comes too late.
Page 23
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 today turns against it: the inertia it has fostered becomes 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 economic translation arrives here, and is among the most portable passages in the book: the shift from producing goods to producing demand, dated to the crisis of 1929.
Pages 26–27
Basically, what goes for commodities also goes for meaning. For a long time capital only had to produce goods; consumption ran by itself. Today it is necessary to produce consumers, to produce demand, and this production is infinitely more costly than that of goods (for the most part, and above all since 1929, the social arose out of this crisis of demand: the production of demand largely overlaps the production of the social itself).
The same logic runs on meaning. Meaning is no longer scarce, it is overproduced, and what weakens is the demand for it. Producing that demand becomes the system's crucial and finally impossible task.
Page 27
Today, everything has changed: no longer is meaning in short supply, it is produced everywhere, in ever increasing quantities — it is demand which is weakening. And it is the production of this demand for meaning which has become crucial for the system. Without this demand for, without this susceptibility to, without this minimal participation in meaning, power is nothing but an empty simulacrum and an isolated effect of perspective.
The mass absorbs all social energy and refracts none of it, returning a tautological response to every question. The denial of manipulation closes the section.
Pages 29–30
For if the political seeks to "pick up" the masses in a social echo or simulation chamber (the media, information), it is the masses who in return become a huge echo or simulation chamber of the social. Manipulation has never existed. The game is played on both sides, with the same weapons, and who can say which is winning today: the simulation power performs on the masses, or the inverse simulation held out by the masses for power to be swallowed up in.
The mass realizes a double paradox. It is at once object and subject of simulation, and its hyperconformity is an immanent form of humor. Every attempt to make it a subject hits the impossibility of an autonomous change in consciousness, and every attempt to make it an object hits the fact that manipulation gets absorbed and reversed.
Page 30
The mass realises that paradox of being both an object of simulation (it only exists at the point of convergence of all the media waves which depict it) and a subject of simulation, capable of refracting all the models and of emulating them by hypersimulation (its hyperconformity, an immanent form of humour).
Page 30
Every effort to make an object of it, to treat and analyse it as brute matter, according to objective laws, runs head on into the contrary fact that it is impossible to manipulate the masses in any determinate way, or to understand them in terms of elements, relations, structures and wholes. All manipulation plunges, gets sucked into the mass, absorbed, distorted, reversibilised.
The analogy is microphysics, where the object vanishes at the point the observing subject is annulled. From this Baudrillard draws a pataphysics of the social, routed through Hegel's irony of feminity and Soldier Schweik as figures of an excessive fidelity that annuls the law it obeys.
Page 33
There would thus be a fantastic irony about "matter," and every object of science, just as there is a fantastic irony about the masses in their muteness, or in their statistical discourse so conforming to the questions put to them, akin to the eternal irony of feminity of which Hegel speaks — the irony of a false fidelity, of an excessive fidelity to the law, an ultimately impenetrable simulation of passivity and obedience, and which annuls in return the law governing them, in accordance with the immortal example of Soldier Schweik.
The "axiom of credibility" runs through the scientist, the adman, and the political class alike. The adman cannot afford to believe the message's refractive index is nil.
Page 34
The adman cannot but believe that people believe in it — however, slightly, that is, that a minimal probability exists of the message reaching its goal and being decoded according to its meaning. Any principle of uncertainty is excluded. If it turned out that the refractive index of this message in the recipient were nil, advertising would instantly collapse.
McLuhan's formula names the present "cool" phase, where every message freezes into the medium. Critical thought produces differences; the masses produce a lack of differentiation and prefer the medium.
Page 35
THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE, McLuhan prophesied: a formula characteristic of the present phase, the "cool" phase of the whole mass media culture, that of a freezing, neutralisation of every message in a vacuous ether. That of a glaciation of meaning.
Fascination is then defined precisely, and explicitly cut off from the death drive. It is not a function of meaning but of meaning's disaffection, and its motive is defiance.
Pages 35–36
For fascination is not dependent on meaning, it is proportional to the disaffection of meaning. It is obtained by neutralising the message in favour of the medium, by neutralising the idea of favour of the idol, by neutralising the truth in favour of the simulacrum. It is at this level that the media function. Fascination is their law, and their specific violence, a massive violence denying communication by meaning in favour of another mode of communication.
Page 36
For it is not meaning or the increase of meaning which gives tremendous pleasure, but its neutralisation which fascinates (cf. Witz, the operation of wit, in L'Echange Symbolique et la Mort). And not by some death drive, which implies that life is still on the side of meaning, but quite simply by defiance, by an allergy to reference, to the message, to the code and to every category of the linguistic enterprise.
The political class survives on the same credibility hypothesis, having long been mere spectacle on the screen of private life. The people have become a public that treats politics as theatre.
Page 37
For some time now, the electoral game has been akin to TV game shows in the consciousness of the people. The latter, who have always served as alibi and as supernumerary on the political stage, avenge themselves by treating as a theatrical performance the political scene and its actors. The people have become a public. It is the football match or film or cartoon which serve as models for their perception of the political sphere.
The section ends on the reversal of public and private. Until the 1960s the private was the dark side of the political. Now withdrawal into the private may be a direct defiance of the political, and the depoliticized masses may stand not short of the political but beyond it.
Pages 38–39
Today, there is a reversal of the downbeat and the upbeat: one begins to forsee that ordinary life, men in their banality, could well not be the insignificant side of history — better: that withdrawing into the private could well be a direct defiance of the political, a form of actively resisting political manipulation.
Pages 39–40
A staggering hypothesis. The depoliticised masses would not be this side of the political, but beyond it. The private, the unnamable, the ordinary, the insignificant, petty wiles, petty perversions etc., would not be this side of representation, but beyond it. In their "naive" practice (and without having waited for analysis of the "end of the political"), the masses would sentence the political to annihilation, they would be spontaneously transpolitical like they are translinguistic in their language.
He immediately fences off the "liberationist" misreading that would convert this private universe into a new revolutionary energy, and dismisses it flatly.
Page 40
Exaltation of micro-desires, small differences, unconscious practices, anonymous marginalities. Final somersault of the intellectuals to exalt insignficance, to promote non-sense into the order of sense. And to transfer it back to political reason. Banality, inertia, apoliticism used to be fascist; they are in the process of becoming revolutionary — without changing meaning, without ceasing to have meaning. Micro-revolution of banality, transpolitics of desire — one more trick of the "liberationists". The denial of meaning has no meaning.
Baudrillard distinguishes two resistances, and concedes that the older one is not the mass's. Historical resistance to the social has outpaced the social itself, but the old frontal resistances came from differentiated traditional groups, not from the mass in them.
Pages 41–42
Those frontal resistances still corresponded to an equally frontal and violent period of socialisation, and came from traditional groups seeking to preserve their own culture, their original cultures. It was not the mass in them which resisted, but, on the contrary, differentiated structures, in opposition to the homogeneous and abstract model of the social.
That older type survives in the "two-step flow of communication," where microgroups decode messages through their own sub-codes, recycling the dominant culture as natives recycle western money or Corsicans recycle universal suffrage.
Page 42
Microgroups and individuals, far from taking their cue from a uniform and imposed decoding, decode messages in their own way. They intercept them (through leaders) and transpose them (second level), contrasting the dominant code with their own particular sub-codes, finally recycling everything passing into their own cycle, exactly like primitive natives recycle western money in their symbolic circulation (the Siane of New Guinea) or like the Corsicans recycle universal suffrage and elections in their clan rivalry strategies.
The mass's refusal is different in kind. It has no code of its own, accepts everything, and redirects it into the spectacular, which yields the chiastic formula that the masses are the stronger medium.
Page 44
But it has been overlooked, in this naive logic of communication, that the masses are a stronger medium than all the media, that it is the former who envelop and absorb the latter — or at least there is no priority of one over the other. The mass and the media are one single process. Mass(age) is the message.
Consumption is the demonstration. Economists cannot rationalize it because the masses made it a matter of sign-value and potlatch, blocking the economy.
Page 45
They have turned consumption into a dimension of status and prestige, of useless keeping up with the Joneses or simulation, of potlatch which surpassed use value in every way. A desperate attempt has been made from all sides (official propaganda, consumer societies, ecologues and sociologues) to instil into them sensible spending and functional calculation in matters of consumption, but it is hopeless.
The operative principle is stated as a strategy: a system is abolished by being pushed into hyperlogic, by an excess that amortizes it.
Page 46
They know that there is no liberation, and that a system is abolished only by pushing it into hyperlogic, by forcing it into an excessive practice which is equivalent to a brutal amortization. "You want us to consume — O.K., let's consume always more, and anything whatsoever; for any useless and absurd purpose."
Medicine is the parallel case. Frontal resistance gives way to a panicked overconsumption that ruins the institution, so that the masses are not alienated in medicine but in the act of destroying it.
Page 47
The masses alienated in medicine? Not at all: they are in the process of ruining its institution, of making Social Security explode, of putting the social itself in danger by craving always more of it, as with commodities. What greater mockery can there be than this craving for the social as an item of individual consumption, submitted to an ever-escalating supply and demand? A parody and a paradox: it is by their very inertia in the ways of the social laid out for them that the masses go beyond its logic and its limits, and destroy its whole edifice.
The genuine stake lies in this confrontation, and Baudrillard names what it is not: neither class struggle nor the molecular politics of desire.
Pages 47–48
There lies the genuine stake today, in this underhand, inescapable confrontation between the silent majority and the social imposed on them, in this hypersimulation reduplicating simulation and exterminating it according to its own logic — not in any class struggle nor in the molecular hodge-podge of desire-breaching minorities.
He warns against the move he has just enabled: the masses must not be made a new glorious reference, because they do not exist as one. They realize in practice what the most radical critics only envisaged, which leaves the critics dreaming of a future revolution the masses have already foreclosed. Their revolution by involution is implosive and blind, and has nothing to say.
Page 49
Now, the masses aren't the social, they are the reversion of any social and of any socialism. Enough theorists have criticised meaning, denounced the traps of liberty and the mystifications of the political, radically censured rationality and every form of representation; however, when the masses wander through meaning, the political, representation, history, ideology, with a somnambulent strength of denial, when they realise here and now everything which the most radical critics have been able to envisage, then the latter know not what to make of it, and persist in dreaming of a future revolution — a critical revolution, a revolution of prestige, that of the social, that of desire. This revolution by involution is not theirs: it is not critical-explosive, it is implosive and blind. It proceeds by inertia, and not from a new and joyous negativity. It is silent and involutive — exactly the reverse of all speech making and consciousness raising. It has no meaning. It has nothing to say to us.
The one phenomenon in affinity with the masses is terrorism, and the affinity is structural rather than solidaristic. Terrorism claims to aim at capital but in fact aims at the social, in response to the terrorism of the social.
Page 50
For terrorism claims to really aim at capital (global imperialism, etc.) but it mistakes its enemy, and in doing so it aims at its true enemy, which is the social. Present-day terrorism aims at the social in response to the terrorism of the social. It aims at the social such as it is produced today — the orbital, interstitial, nuclear, tissual network of control and security, which invests us on all sides and produces us, all of us, as a silent majority.
The affinity is that both are the most radical contemporary denial of the representative system, and Baudrillard refuses to overclaim the relation between two things that lie outside representation.
Page 52
It is simply to say: there is no equivalent to the blind, non-representative, senseless character of the terrorist act, but the blind, senseless and unrepresentational behavior of the masses. What they do have in common is that they are the most radical, most intense contemporary form of the denial of the whole representative system. That is all. No one really knows what relation can be established between two elements that are outside representation.
He resists the causal reading as well: the point is the simultaneity, not that the age of the silent majority produces terrorism.
Page 53
It cannot be said that it is the "age of the silent majority" which "produces" terrorism. It is the simultaneity of the two which is staggering, and noteworthy. Whether or not one accepts its brutality, it alone truly marks the end of the political and of the social.
Present-day terrorism has no determinate enemy and strikes at random, which distinguishes it from banditry and commando action. The Palestinians strike through Israel at an anonymous global order.
Page 55
Do the Palestinians strike at Israel by means of intermediary hostages? No, it is through Israel as intermediary that they strike at a mythical, or not even mythical, anonymous, undifferentiated enemy; a kind of omnipresent global social order, whenever, whoever, down to the last of the "innocents." Terrorism is this: it is novel, and insoluble, only because it strikes wherever, whenever, whoever; otherwise it would only be ransom or a military commando act.
Its blindness mirrors the system's own lack of differentiation, and the innocent victim is the system's purest product, anonymous and substitutable.
Page 56
Paradoxically, it seems that the innocent pay the crime of being nothing, of being lotless, of having been dispossessed of their name by an equally anonymous system whose purest incarnation they then become. They are the end products of the social, of a now globalised abstract sociality. It is in this sense, in the sense in which they are precisely anybody, that they are the predestined victims of terrorism.
Hence the analogy to natural catastrophe, with the New York blackouts as terrorist situations needing no terrorist.
Pages 56–57
It is in this sense, or rather in this defiance of sense, that the terrorist act is akin to the natural catastrophe. There is no difference between an earthquake in Guatemala and the hijacking of a Lufthansa Boeing with three hundred passengers on board, between the "natural" intervention and the "human" terrorist intervention. Nature is terrorist, as is the abrupt failure of the whole technological system: the great New York blackouts ('65 and '77) create more wonderful terrorist situations than the true ones, dream situations.
The closing section names the master opposition. The masses, the media, and terrorism describe one process of implosion, carried by a violence of the void.
Page 58
In their triangular affinity, the masses, the media and terrorism describe the presently prevailing process of implosion. The whole process is affected by a violence which is only just beginning, an orbital and nuclear violence of intake and fascination, a violence of the void (fascination is the extreme intensity of the neutral). For us today, implosion can only be violent and catastrophic because it comes from the failure of the system of explosion and of organised expansion which has predominated in the West now for a few centuries.
Implosion is not necessarily catastrophic. In controlled form it was the secret of primitive societies, which died when they switched over to explosion. He notes the inexplicable pre-Columbian collapses as the exception.
Pages 58–59
Implosion is not necessarily a catastrophic process. In a subdued and controlled form, it has even been the main secret of primitive and traditional societies. Not expansive or centrifugal configurations, but centripetal ones: singular pluralities never directed towards the universal, but centered about a cyclic process — ritual — and tending to "involve" in a non-representative, unauthoritarian process; without any disjunctive polarity, yet without caving in on themselves either.
Modern civilizations live on explosion, whose controlled phase was their golden age. That explosion has become uncontrollable and reached the limits of the universal, so the West is now ravaged by implosion for failing to curb its explosive process.
Page 60
But, according to a process of boom and acceleration, this explosive process has become uncontrollable, it has acquired a fatal speed or amplitude, or rather it has reached the limits of the universal, it has saturated the field of possible expansion and, just as primitive societies were ravaged by explosion for not knowing how to curb the implosive process any longer, so our culture begins to be ravaged by implosion for not having known how to curb and equilibrate the explosive process.
Every attempt to save expansion is archaic, including the liberation of desire, which is only the final stage of the liberation of energy. The molecular revolution succeeds the molar investment of capital.
Pages 60–61
Including all those who want to free libidinal energies, plural energies, fragmentary intensities, etc. The "molecular revolution" only represents the final stage of "liberation of energy" (or of proliferation of segments, etc.) up to the infinitesimal boundaries of the field of expansion which has been that of our culture. The infinitesimal attempt of desire succeeding the infinite attempt of capital.
The only alternatives are a violent implosion or a smooth one. The traces of the smooth version are real but doomed, because the historical passage between system-types has always been violent.
Page 61
But nothing will halt the implosive process, and the only remaining alternative is between a violent or catastrophic implosion, and a smooth implosion, an implosion in slow motion. There are traces of the latter, of various attempts to control new impulses which are anti-universalist, anti-representative, tribal, centripetal, etc.: communes, ecology, ZPG, drugs — all of these undoubtedly belong to this order. But we must not delude ourselves about a smooth transition. It is doomed to be short lived and to fail.
This is the volume's most architecturally explicit essay. It opens by destabilizing the term: do modern societies correspond to socialization or to progressive desocialization? The institutions that signpost the advance of the social, capital chief among them, produce and destroy the social in one movement, and the media act in two directions at once.
Page 66
Media, all media, information, all information, act in two directions: outwardly they produce more of the social, inwardly they neutralise social relations and the social itself. But then, if the social is both destroyed by what produces it (the media, information) and reabsorbed by what it produces (the masses), it follows that its definition is empty, and that this term which serves as universal alibi for every discourse, no longer analyses anything, no longer designates anything.
He attacks the phrase "social relation" as already a rationalization, and proposes that there were societies without the social, whose symbolic ties were neither relational nor social.
Page 67
The "social sciences" came to consecrate this obviousness and agelessness of the social. But we must change our tune. There were societies without the social, just as there were societies without history. Networks of symbolic ties were precisely neither "relational" nor "social." At the other extreme, our "society" is perhaps in the process of putting an end to the social, of burying the social beneath a simulation of the social.
This yields the formula that governs the first hypothesis: capital is not a social machine but a violence the social perpetrates on itself.
Page 69
Which implies the formula: capital is a defiance of society. That is to say that this perspective, this panoptic machine, this machine of truth, of rationality, of productivity which is capital, is without objective finality, without reason: it is above all a violence, and this violence is perpetrated by the social on the social, but basically it is not a social machine.
A long parenthetical defines defiance, the essay's pivot-concept, which recurs across the volume. It is not a dialectic but an extermination of the structural position of every term, a triumphant suicide.
Pages 69–70
(Defiance is not a dialectic, nor a confrontation between respective poles, or terms, in an extended structure. It is a process of extermination of the structural position of each term, of the subject position of each of the antagonists, and in particular of the one who hurls the challenge: because of this it even abandons any contractual position which might give rise to a "relation." Exchange of value is no longer its logic. Its logic abandons positions of value and positions of meaning. The protagonist of defiance is always in a suicidal position, but it is a triumphant suicide: it is by the destruction of value, the destruction of meaning (one's own, their own) that the other is forced into a never equivalent, ever escalating response. Defiance always comes from that which has no meaning, no name, no identity.)
On a base of challenge, seduction, and death, there has only ever been a simulation of the social. The only likely event is a brutal de-simulation, itself a challenge to the belief that capital and power have a logic of their own.
Pages 70–71
The social has basically never existed. There never has been any "social relation." Nothing has ever functioned socially. On this inescapable basis of challenge, seduction and death, there has never been anything but simulation of the social and the social relation. In which case, there is no point dreaming about a "real" sociality, a hidden sociality, an ideal socialist: this just hypostatises a simulacrum.
What we are seeing, on this hypothesis, is a disintegration with the features of catastrophe rather than revolution, and one that cannot be resocialized, distinct from the marginal defections that feed the failing social.
Pages 71–72
This is really what we are seeing today: the disintegration of the whole idea of the social, the consumption and involution of the social, the breakdown of the social simulacrum, a genuine defiance of the constructive and productive approach to the social which dominates us. All quite suddenly, as if the social had never existed. A breakdown which has all the features of a catastrophe, not an evolution or revolution. No longer a "crisis" of the social, but the reabsorption of its system.
The subtler death. Far from being volatilized, the social triumphs, but as residue. We live in a civilization of the supersocial and simultaneously of indestructible residue piling up as the social spreads.
Page 72
The social has really existed, it exists even more and more, it invests everything, it alone exists. Far from being volatilised, it is the social which triumphs; the reality of the social is imposed everywhere. But, contrary to the antiquated idea which makes the social into an objective progress of mankind, everything which escapes it being only residue, it is possible to envisage that the social itself is only residue, and that, if it has triumphed in the real, it is precisely as such.
The historical demonstration is a dated genealogy of the social as administration of refuse, beginning with the first Paris poorhouse.
Pages 73–74
1544 saw the opening of the first great poor house in Paris: vagrants, lunatics, the sick, everyone not integrated by the group and discarded as remainders were taken in charge under the emerging sign of the social. This was extended to the dimensions of National Assistance in the nineteenth century, then Social Security in the twentieth century.
The illustration is Le Monde's "Society" column, where only the unsocialized appear. The structural turn comes when residue reaches the scale of the whole: the social then designates itself as remainder.
Page 75
But what happens when everybody is socialised? Then the machine stops, the dynamic is reversed, and it is the whole social system which becomes residue. As the social progressively gets rid of all of its residue, it becomes residual itself. By placing residual categories under the rubric "Society," the social designates itself as remainder.
The social then becomes the scene of an exorbitant processing of death, excremental, and shifts under simulation from a space of Reclusion to one of Preclusion, appearing as use value pure and simple.
Page 76
It is from the point of view of this administration of refuse that the social can appear today for what it really is: a right, a need, a service, a use value pure and simple. No longer a conflictual, political structure: but a welcoming structure. The limit of the economist value of the social as use value is in effect its ecologist value as niche.
The argument is anti-socialist and anti-utilitarian. The social exists to soak up the excess wealth whose redistribution would ruin the order.
Page 77
The social exists to look after the soaking up of excess wealth which, redistributed to all and sundry, would ruin the social order, would create an intolerably utopian situation.
Modern societies always produce a surplus, and the surplus must be got rid of rather than sacrificed. The social exists on the double basis of producing remainders and eradicating them.
Page 78
The social exists on the double basis of the production of remainders and their eradication. If all wealth were sacrificed, people would lose a sense of the real. If all wealth became disposable, people would lose a sense of the useful and the useless. The social exists to take care of the useless consumption of remainders so that individuals can be assigned to the useful management of their lives.
Wasteful expenditure is therefore functional, and socialism, the champion of use value, misunderstands the social entirely.
Page 80
In a society incapable of total reversion and committed to use value, there is a kind of intelligence and wisdom in the institution of the social and of its "objective" wastefulness: prestige operations, Concorde, the moon, missiles, satellites, even public works and Social Security in their absurd one-upmanship. An implicit understanding of the stupidity and the limits of use value. The true artlessness is that of socialists and humanists of every shade who want all wealth to be redistributed and that there should be no useless expenditure, etc.
The privation that the social manufactures is what socialism would abolish, and Baudrillard routes the point through Marshall Sahlins, then states the inversion of Marx plainly.
Pages 80–81
The social manufactures this privation necessary to the distinction between good and evil, and to the whole moral order in general — a privation absent from the "first affluent societies" described by Marshall Sahlins. This is what socialism does not see and why, by wanting to abolish this privation and insisting on a generalised access to wealth, it puts an end to the social while believing that it is heightening it.
Page 81
When everything, including the social, becomes use value, it is a world become inert, where the reverse of what Marx dreamed occurs. He dreamed of the economic being reabsorbed into a (transfigured) social; what is happening to us is the social being reabsorbed into a (banalised) political economy: administration pure and simple. It is the wrong use of wealth which saves a society. Nothing has changed since Mandeville and his Fable of the Bees.
Here Baudrillard grants the social a real history and dates its death by simulacral order. It meant something within second-order simulacra, and dies absorbed into third-order ones.
Pages 82–83
The social has well and truly existed, but does not exist any more. It has existed as coherent space, as reality principle: the social relation, the production of social relations, the social as dynamic abstraction, scene of conflicts and historical contradictions, the social as structure and as stake, as strategy and as ideal — all this has had an end in view, all this has meant something. The social has not always been a delusion, as in the first hypothesis, nor remainder, as in the second. But precisely, it has only had an end in view, a meaning as power, as work, as capital, from the perspective space of a rational distribution, from the finalised space of an ideal convergence, which is also that of production — in short, in the narrow gap of second-order simulacra, and, absorbed into third-order simulacra, it is dying.
The rational sociality of the contract gives way to the sociality of contact and connection. The spatial figure is Los Angeles, where the social dies in the space of simulation.
Page 83
The rational sociality of the contract, dialectical sociality (that of the State and of civil society, of public and private, of the social and the individual) gives way to the sociality of contact, of the circuit and transistorised network of millions of molecules and particles maintained in a random gravitational field, magnetised by the constant circulation and the thousands of tactical combinations which electrify them. But is it still a question of the socius? Where is sociality in Los Angeles?
This is the volume's clearest statement of the hyperreal, with the Borges map for second-order simulation explicitly superseded by an in-the-field transfiguration of the real into model.
Page 84
There is no longer really even any projection of models in the real (which is still equivalent to the substitution of the map for the territory in Borges), but an in-the-field, here-and-now transfiguration of the real into model. A fantastic short-circuit: the real is hyperrealised. Neither realised, nor idealised: but hyperrealised. The hyperreal is the abolition of the real not by violent destruction, but by its assumption, elevation to the strength of the model.
The task of all media is to produce this extra real to the point of obscenity. The temporal claim follows: history will never have had time to reach revolution, having been outstripped by its own signs.
Page 85
The history of the social will never have had time to lead to revolution: it will have been outstripped by signs of the social and of revolution. The social will never have had time to lead to socialism, it will have been short-circuited by the hypersocial, by the hyperreality of the social (but perhaps socialism is no more than this?).
Twelve endnotes carry material that travels. The relevant loci, in the source's own words where the wording is load-bearing:
Note 2 fixes the limit of the Freud analogy and refuses to read the masses through libidinal economy. Reich is named as the prior form of the error.
Pages 87–88, note 2
There is no desire for fascism and for power any more than there is for revolution. Last hope: that the masses have an unconscious or a desire, which would allow their recathexis as bearer, or instrument of meaning. Desire, reinvented everywhere, is only the referential of political despair. And the strategy of desire, after having been tried out in the marketing industry, is today polished up further in its revolutionary promotion in the masses.
Note 3 transposes "critical mass" from nuclear explosion to nuclear implosion.
Page 88, note 3
The notion of "critical mass," usually associated with the process of nuclear explosion, is reapplied here with reference to nuclear implosion. What we are witnessing in the domain of the social and of the political, with the involuntary phenomenon of the masses and the silent majority, is a kind of inverse explosion by the force of inertia — this also has its point of no return.
Note 5 glosses the black hole as the figure for an absence of information that overturns the knowledge procedure built on the positive signal.
Page 89, note 5
They are, therefore, regions in space from which no information can come. Their discovery and their being taken into consideration therefore imply a kind of overturning of every traditional science and knowledge procedure. While the latter is always based on information, the message, the positive signal (some "meaning"), conveyed by a medium (waves or light), here something different appears whose meaning or mystery revolves around the absence of information.
Note 6 is the single-line citation for the Beaubourg reference: L'effet Beaubourg, Paris, 1977 (Éd. Galilée). Note 7 puts seduction on the side of challenge rather than exchange, paralleling the social.
Page 90, note 7
If sex and sexuality, such as the sexual revolution turns them into, are really a mode of exchange and production of sexual relations, seduction on the other hand is contrary to exchange, and close to challenge. Sexuality has precisely become a "sexual relation," it can be talked about in these already rationalised terms of value and exchange, only by ignoring any form of seduction — just as the social only becomes a "social relation" when it has lost any symbolic dimension.
Note 9 gives the three levels of residue cross-referenced to L'Échange symbolique et la mort, with the social added as residue in the social order. Note 10 cites Clastres on the draining of social residue among the Guayaki and Tupi-Guarani. Note 11 reads Hölderlin's madness through the surplus that cannot be counterbalanced, then gives the store-customers and wine-growers examples.
Page 91, note 11
More familiar to us, witness the fatal disorder in people overexposed to wealth and to good fortune — thus those customers in a large store who were offered to help themselves to anything they wanted: pandemonium broke out. Or again those wine growers to whom the State offered more money to pull out their vines than they could get by working them. They were much more destructured by this unexpected subsidy than by any traditional exploitation of their labor power.
Note 12 is the connective tissue of the volume. It names the fourth hypothesis explicitly and points back to the main text, where it is the argument of the title essay.
Page 91, note 12
Fourth hypothesis: The implosion of the social into the masses. This hypothesis is akin to hypothesis 3 (simulation/deterrence/implosion) in another form. It is developed in the main text.
This essay runs the same three-hypothesis operation on information theory. The premise: more and more information, less and less meaning.
Page 95
We are in a universe where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.
The first hypothesis is that information produces meaning but cannot keep pace with its loss, which is the ideology of free speech and anti-media. The second, attributed to Shannon and the genetic code, is that information has nothing to do with signification. The third is the one Baudrillard takes up, against accepted opinion.
Page 96
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. The third hypothesis is the most interesting, although it goes against the grain of all accepted opinion.
The consensus he attacks treats information as a plus-value of meaning homologous to the rotation of capital, and he names it a myth we are all accomplices in, then states the reversal.
Page 97
We are all accomplices in this myth. It is the alpha and omega of our modernity, without which the credibility of our social organization would collapse. Yet 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 contents for two reasons. First, it exhausts itself staging communication, an anti-theatre in which the audience's desire is put on stage.
Pages 97–98
Instead of causing communication, it 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."
The belief at work is the structure of disavowal, and the masses answer dissuasion with disaffection.
Page 99
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…." 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.
Second, the media carry out a destructuration of the social, which is the macroscopic version of the implosion of meaning at the level of the sign. McLuhan's formula names this, and Baudrillard pushes it past McLuhan: not only the message implodes into the medium but the medium implodes into the real.
Page 101
Yet — and this is where McLuhan's formula at its extreme limit leads — there is not only the implosion of the message in the medium; in the same movement there is the implosion of the medium itself in the real, 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.
Page 102
In short, the medium is the message signifies not only the end 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.
This can appear catastrophic, but only within the idealism of meaning. Baudrillard redefines catastrophe etymologically as the curvature of a cycle, and locates fascination and the masses on the far side of the horizon of meaning.
Page 104
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 itself no longer appear as the last, nihilistic 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.
He cross-references his own "Requiem for the Media" and revises it: the absence of response may now be the masses' counter-strategy rather than power's strategy. The undecidability is posed as a series of either/ors, with Mogadishu Stammheim as the case, where the media are themselves terrorists.
Pages 105–106
Mogadishu Stammheim: 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.
The essay closes on the child/adult double bind, which generalizes the strategic argument. The system summons us at once to be autonomous subjects and submissive objects, and the child answers with a double strategy.
Pages 106–107
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.
Resistance-as-subject is unilaterally valorized but answers only the system's previous phase. The current argument is the maximal production of meaning, so the strategic resistance is now the refusal of meaning, or the hyperconformist simulation of the system.
Page 108
But 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.
Note 1 extends the argument to cybernetics with the equation that inverts the negentropy thesis, and reads the media's amplification of May 1968 as a neutralizing black box.
Pages 109–110, note 1
The extension given to the student action permitted the general strike, but the latter 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 is both electronic and worldwide. Every strategy of the universalization of differences is an entropic strategy of the system.
The shortest and most occasional essay, in two named parts, concretizing the terrorism material. The case is the October 1977 sequence: the Lufthansa hijacking ending at Mogadishu and the deaths of the Red Army Faction prisoners at Stammheim.
Terrorism carries death and simulation together, and its victory is singular: it alone makes the event, returning the political order to its nullity, while the media that orchestrate order broadcast the opposite.
Page 113
Dead or living, it is elsewhere that terrorism wins out. At least by this single fact: it alone makes the event, and thus returns the whole "political" order to its nullity. And the media, all while orchestrating the victory of order, only cause the evidence for the opposite to reverberate: to wit, that terrorism is burying the political order.
The title image follows: terrorism is not violent in itself, only the spectacle is, and that spectacle is our Theater of Cruelty.
Page 114
Terrorism is not violent in itself; only the spectacle it unleashes is truly violent. It is our Theater of Cruelty, the only one that remains to us, perhaps equal in every respect to that of Artaud or to that of the Renaissance, and extraordinary in that it brings together the spectacular and the challenge at their highest points.
It is a mixture of the symbolic and the spectacular, subversive because insoluble. Everything in it is reversible, and power buries terrorist and victim together.
Page 115
Everything in terrorism is ambivalent and reversible: death, the media, violence, victory. Who plays into the other's hands? Death itself is undefinable: the death of the terrorists is equivalent to that of the hostages; they are substitutable. In spite of all the efforts to set them into radical opposition, fascination allows no distinction to be made, and rightly so, for power finally does not make any either, but settles its accounts with everyone, and buries Baader and Schleyer together at Stuttgart.
The decisive structural claim is that the terrorists win by lacking the very thing the system has.
Page 116
The force of the terrorists comes to them precisely from the fact that they have no logic. The others do: it is quick, effective, flawless, without scruples; it is why they "win." If the terrorists had one, they would not make the errors that they do, but they would no longer be terrorists.
To demand that they be both illogical and effective is a fantasy of synthesis, and the rage to impose meaning on them is the real obscenity.
Page 117
Hence the stupidity and the obscenity of all that is reported about the terrorists: everywhere the wish to palm off meaning on them, to exterminate them with meaning, which is more effective than the bullets of specialized commandoes (and all the while subjecting them elsewhere, in the prisons, to sensory deprivation).
The polemic over how Baader and his comrades died is itself obscene, equally so in wanting to impose meaning on the hijackers and in wanting to restore the death to factual reality. The principle of meaning as truth is named the lifeblood of State terrorism.
Page 118
The insoluble polemic on the manner in which Baader and his comrades died is itself obscene, and for the same reason: there is an equal obscenity in wanting to forcibly impose meaning on the highjackers' act and in wanting to restore Baader's death to the order of factual reality. Principle of meaning as principle of truth: there you have the real life blood of State terrorism.
The general principle of the terrorist model is to oppose to the real an imaginary realm whose implosive energy absorbs everything real, provoking collapse through an excess of reality.
Page 119
One knows nothing about terrorism if one does not see that it is not a question of real violence, nor of opposing one violence to another (which, owing to their disproportion, is absurd, and besides, all real violence, like real order in general, is always on the side of power), but to oppose to the full violence and to the full order a clearly superior model of extermination and virulence operating through emptiness. The secret is to oppose to the order of the real an absolutely imaginary realm, absolutely ineffectual at the level of reality, but whose implosive energy absorbs everything real and all the violence of real power which founders there.
Repression and transgression belong to the old order of the law and the expanding system; here the virulence comes from implosion. The reading of the German state mirrors the reading of the hijackers: its errors were toward a defined end, making the truth of the death, not the death, fascinating.
Page 121
By sowing this doubt, this deliberate ambiguity concerning the facts, it insured that the truth about this death, and not the death itself, became fascinating. Everyone exhausted himself in argument and in attempts at clarification — clarifications reinforced by the theatricality of the event which acts as a gigantic dissuasion of the terrorists' execution — everyone, and above all the revolutionaries who wanted strongly to have it that Baader had been "assassinated." They too were vultures of the truth.
To want revenge is to fall back into a contract of equivalence. The death at full price opens a cycle of vertigo, against which the state sets a recycling of the truth.
Page 122
It matters little that the "reality" of this death (the truth about …) is stolen from you, since it is not of the order of the real, and therein lies its force. You are the one who depreciates it by wanting to institute it as a fact, as capital with the value of death, and to exhaust it in death, whereas this death at full price, not liquidated in the equivalence of meaning and vengeance, opens a cycle of vertigo in which the system itself can only come to be implicated in the end.
The closing diagnosis is a sacred union not against terrorist violence but in the production of truth, against which even a proven liquidation would not be a scandal.
Page 123
A strategy of sacred union, and not at all moral, against the terrorist violence, but, much more profoundly, a sacred union in the production of truth, of the facts, of the real. Even if this truth explodes (if in fifteen years it is finally established that Baader was coldly liquidated), it will hardly be a scandal. No power will be frightened by it; if necessary, the crew of leaders will be changed. The price of the truth for power is superficial. On the other hand, the benefits of general mobilization, dissuasion, pacification and mental socialization obtained through this crystalization of the truth are immense. A smart operation, under which Baader's death threatens to be buried definitively.
The formulations below run across all four essays and are the ones most likely to travel. Each entry gives the move and points to the full block quotes already carried in the body, with a representative locus rather than an exhaustive list. The quotes themselves live above, in their sections, at full length.
The master opposition: explosion is expansion, accumulation, production, liberation, the Western norm for centuries; implosion is absorption, collapse of poles, the present process, and was the controlled secret of primitive societies.
Not a concept but a leitmotif; the neutral; the black hole that absorbs all radiation and returns none; neither subject nor object; a reference that "doesn't exist" as a positive entity.
The referent that functions only statistically, by survey; a silence that refuses to be spoken for and is therefore an absolute weapon, not alienation.
Survey, poll, and referendum belong to simulation rather than representation: a model, not a referent. Second-order simulacra (the Borges map) give way to third-order, the in-the-field transfiguration of the real into model.
Not a dialectic but the extermination of the structural position of each term, a triumphant suicide coming from that which has no meaning, name, or identity. Capital is a defiance of society; seduction is close to defiance.
The extreme intensity of the neutral; not dependent on meaning but proportional to its disaffection; explicitly cut off from the death drive and routed instead through defiance. What lies beyond the horizon of meaning.
The mass's immanent humor; the strategy of abolishing a system by pushing it into hyperlogic, with medicine and Social Security ruined by overconsumption; the object-strategy of the double bind.
Once everyone is socialized the social designates itself as remainder; waste and recycling; its entropic, welcoming, use-value face.
Taken past McLuhan: not only the end of the message but the end of the medium; "Mass(age) is the message."
Against the negentropy thesis: information is directly destructive of meaning; the cybernetic inversion stated as an equation, with May 1968 read as a neutralizing black box.
The non-representative act in structural affinity with the masses; aims at the social in response to the terrorism of the social; wins by having no logic; our Theater of Cruelty; strikes wherever, whenever, whoever.
Baudrillard, Jean. 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. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. Foreign Agents Series, Jim Fleming and Sylvère Lotringer, series editors.
Contents and pagination, as printed: "In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities," pages 1–61; "… Or, The End of the Social," pages 65–91; "The Implosion of Meaning in the Media," pages 95–110; "Our Theater of Cruelty," pages 113–123.
The digital file is catalogued as the 2007 second edition with an introduction by Sylvère Lotringer, but the scanned content is the 1983 first-edition text: the copyright page reads "©1983, Jean Baudrillard and Semiotext(e)," the table of contents lists only the four essays beginning at page 1, and no Lotringer introduction is present in the scan. Page references in this brief are therefore reliable for the 1983 setting only. Anyone footnoting against the 2007 reprint should verify pagination, since the added front matter may shift it.
File-to-print offset for this scan: the printed page equals the PDF page index minus 5 (PDF page 6 is printed page 1). All loci above cite the printed pagination.
This is a scanned PDF, not a clean digital edition. The block quotes carry the faithful printed text: mechanical scan artifacts (line-break hyphenation, letter swaps such as long-s and i/l confusions, dropped spaces, the running-head misreadings) have been normalized to what the page prints. Genuine printed anomalies are not normalized; they are preserved verbatim and recorded below. A clean EPUB or MOBI would allow a further verbatim pass on any passage where the scan is doubtful.
Note 1 of "… Or, The End of the Social" prints the magazine title as "Charlie-Hebda" (page 87); the standard title is Charlie-Hebdo. Preserved as printed.
In the functional-ventilation excursus the text reads "the 'first affluent societies' described by Marshall Sahlins" (pages 80–81). Sahlins's own phrase is "the original affluent society." The source's wording is preserved in the block quote above.
The bracketed excursus heading "EXCURSUS: The Social, or The Functional Ventilation of Remainders" and its surrounding square brackets are the source's own typographic device (pages 77–82), preserved as printed and noted at the head of that section.