The flow of information took control of our lives much earlier than we think, hypermarkets imperceptibly turned into entire cities, and advertising began not only to encourage us to buy, but also to dictate how to live better. On the birthday of the French postmodern philosopher and sociologist Jean Baudrillard, T&P publishes excerpts from the philosopher's main work, Simulacra and Simulation.
The illusion of meaning in the media
We are in a world in which there is more and more information and less and less meaning. In this regard, three hypotheses are possible:
- Either information produces meaning (negentropic factor), but is unable to compensate for the severe loss of meaning in all areas. Attempts to re-inject it through an increasing number of media, messages and content are in vain: the loss, absorption of meaning occurs faster than its re-injection. In this case, one should look to the productive base to replace the failing media. That is, to the whole ideology of freedom of speech, the media, divided into countless separate units of broadcasting, or to the ideology of "anti-media" (radio pirates, etc.).
- Or information has nothing to do with signification at all. This is something completely different, an operating model of a different order, external to meaning and its circulation. This is, in particular, K. Shannon's hypothesis, according to which the sphere of information, a purely instrumental, technical environment, does not imply any final meaning and therefore should also not participate in a value judgment. It is a kind of code, such as a genetic one: it is what it is, it functions the way it functions, and meaning is something else that appears, so to speak, after the fact, as in Monod's work “Accident and Necessity ". In this case, there simply would be no significant relationship between information inflation and meaning deflation.
- Or, on the contrary, there is a strong and necessary correlation between these two phenomena to the extent that information directly destroys or neutralizes meaning and signification. Thus, it turns out that the loss of meaning is directly related to the corrupting, dissuading action of information, the media and the media.
This is the most interesting hypothesis, but it runs counter to the conventional wisdom. Socialization is universally measured in terms of receptivity to media reports. Desocialized, and in fact asocial, is one who is not sufficiently receptive to the media.
Information devours its own content. It devours communication and social. And this happens for two reasons:
- Instead of creating communication, information exhausts itself in staging communication. Instead of producing meaning, it exhausts itself in staging meaning. This is a very familiar giant simulation process. Unprepared interviews, phone calls from viewers and listeners, all kinds of interactivity, verbal blackmail: "This concerns you, the event is you, etc." More and more information is being invaded by this kind of ghostly content, this homeopathic grafting, this dream of awakening communication. A circular scheme in which what the audience wants is played out on the stage, an anti-theater of communication, which, as you know, is always only a reuse through the negation of the traditional institution, an integrated negative scheme. Great energyaimed at keeping the simulacrum at a distance in order to avoid sudden dissimulation, which would confront us with the obvious reality of a radical loss of meaning.
- In addition to this, by excessive staging of communication, the media are strenuously seeking information on the irresistible destructuring of the irrevocable social.
Thus, the media are not the movers of socialization, but quite the opposite, the implosion of the social among the masses. And this is only a macroscopic expansion of the implosion of meaning at the microscopic level of a sign. This implosion should be analyzed on the basis of McLuhan's formula "medium is the message", the possible conclusions from which are far from being exhausted.
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Hypermarket and hypermarket
Everywhere around thirty kilometers, arrows will direct you to these large sorting centers, which are hypermarkets, to this hyperspace of goods, where a new sociality is being produced in many ways. It is worth seeing how a hypermarket centralizes and redistributes an entire neighborhood with its population, how it concentrates and rationalizes day schedules, traffic routes, human behavior - creating a gigantic back and forth movement, very much like regular commuter traffic that gets swallowed up at certain times. and are thrown back by their place of work.
There is no relief, no perspective, no vanishing point where the eye could get lost, only an all-encompassing screen on which billboards and the products themselves appear in their continuous exposition as equivalent signs successively replacing each other. There is only staff who are solely engaged in restoring the foreground - the first rows of goods on display, where the withdrawal of them by consumers could create a small gap. Self-service further emphasizes this lack of depth: the same homogeneous space unites, without mediation, people with things - a space of direct manipulation. But who is manipulating whom?
Even repression integrates as a sign in this world of simulation. Repression that has turned into dissuasion is becoming just another sign in the world of persuasion. CCTV systems are themselves part of the simulacrum environment. Full surveillance of all points would require more sophisticated and technically advanced equipment than the store itself. It wouldn't be cost effective. On the other hand, an allusion to repression has been introduced, a mechanism for giving a sign of this order; and this sign can coexist with all others, even with the imperative of the opposite content, for example, with the one expressed by giant billboards inviting you to relax and choose a product in complete peace.
The latter looks at you, you look at yourself in it, in a crowd among other people, it is a mirror of consumer activity, a transparent mirror without amalgam, a game with halving and doubling that closes this world in itself.
A hypermarket is an expression of a whole way of life, from which not only the village, but also the city has disappeared, giving way to "agglomeration" - a fully functionally delimited urban zoning, permeated through and through by a system of signs - an equivalent, a micro-model of which it is at the consumption level. But the role of the hypermarket goes far beyond consumption, and items lose their specific reality in it: what prevails is their serial, circulating, spectacular internal organization - the future model of social relationships.
The hypermarket “model” can thus help in understanding what is meant by the end of modernism. Major cities have witnessed the emergence, over about a century (1850-1950), of a generation of "modern" supermarkets, but this radical modernization associated with modernization of transport did not disturb the structure of the city. Cities remained cities, while new cities become satellites of a hypermarket or shopping center, served by a programmed transport network, and cease to be cities to become metropolitan areas.
Absolute Ads - Zero Ads
What we are seeing now is the absorption of all possible modes of expression in the way of expression, which is advertising. All original forms of culture, all deterministic varieties of language are absorbed by it, because it is devoid of depth, fleeting and immediately forgotten. The triumph of the surface form, the lowest common denominator of all meanings, the zero degree of meaning, the triumph of entropy over all possible paths. The lowest form of sign energy. This form, indistinct, instantaneous, without a past, without a future, without a chance for transformation, is therefore the final form, has power over all others. All modern types of activity gravitate towards advertising, and most of them are limited to advertising.
Advertising and propaganda have been gaining their full scope since the October Revolution and the 1929 world crisis. Both are the language of the masses, generated by the mass production of ideas or goods, so their registers, initially separate, tend to gradually converge. Propaganda turns into marketing and merchandising of core ideas, politicians and parties with their reputations and brands.
This convergence determines the nature of society (our society), in which there is no longer a difference between economic and political, because the same language reigns everywhere in it, a society in which political economy, in the literal sense, was finally realized in full least. That is, it dissolved as a specific instance (as a historical form of social conflict), found its solution, was absorbed in the language without contradictions, as in a dream, because it experienced only external tension.
The next period begins when the very language of the social, after the language of the political has done it, begins to coincide with this hypnotic and obsessive language of agitation, when the social begins to advertise itself, begins to achieve widespread recognition, trying to impose its image and brand. From the level of historical choice, as it was, the social itself has descended to the level of "joint venture", which provides its all-round advertising.
Just look at the growth of the social that any of its advertisements are trying to create: werben werben (advertisements, advertisements) - the urgent appeal of the social is present everywhere on the walls, in the warm and lifeless voices of women announcers, in the low and high sounds of phonograms and in colorful video images that are everywhere. scroll in front of us. Everywhere there is sociality, absolute sociality, realized, finally, in absolute advertising - that is, the hallucination of sociality, which has remained on all walls in a simplified form of social demand, and to which the advertising echo immediately responds. Social as a scenario, of which we are the bewildered audience.
Thus, the advertising form imposed itself and developed at the expense of all other varieties of language, like rhetoric, which became more and more neutral, more even, dispassionate, like the "asyntactic nebula" in the expression of Iva Sturdze, which envelops us from all sides. This determines the boundaries of the current power of advertising and the conditions for its disappearance, because advertising is no longer an end in itself, because when it “became a habit”, it immediately left the social and moral drama that it was twenty years ago.