Baudrillard's "Death of the Real": Image Manufacturing the Reality Distortion in Contemporary Media
THESIS: Key postmodernists have responded to media society that erodes the public sphere, augments the state propaganda network, and uses its own codified language that is conceptually bankrupt in order to limit the public's understanding of their true motives.
Jean Baudrillard (philosopher/writer/critic of contemporary society, culture, and thought; member of French Postmodern school) had an explanation for how “reality” can be reconstructed by those in power, and how this reconstruction can be so seamlessly integrated into a social consciousness:
"The very definition of the real has become: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. . . The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced: that is the hyperreal… which is entirely in simulation." (Baudrillard 1985).
And:
“The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth -- it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.” (Ecclesiastes.)
Example:
Corporate media transmits manufactured images of a person using their product --> individual purchases product, having internalized the image --> the reproduction of the media transmission is simulacrum*
*1. It is the reflection of a basic reality.
2. It masks and perverts a basic reality.
3. It masks the absence of a basic reality.
4. It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.]
For Baudrillard, the transition between (2) and (3) above marks the decisive shift into simulacra (Poster 1988).
Baudrillard theorizes that the lack of distinctions between reality and simulacra originates in several phenomenon:
1. Contemporary media: television, film, print and the Internet--are products necessitated by their own advertisements?
2. Exchange value: an object's value is rooted in/indicated by its price--not its usefulness.
3. Multinational capitalism, by which the link between organic materials and the products derived from these materials is severed.
4. Urbanization: separates human beings from their “natural” environment.
5. Language and ideology, “in which language is used to obscure rather than reveal reality when used by dominant, politically powerful groups”
-Turned his attention to Marshall McLuhan, developing ideas about how the nature of social relations is determined by the forms of communication that a society employs.
(refer to: http://flowtv.org/?p=67)
-“television is not a medium of communication but a technology of non-communication because it precludes the reciprocity necessary to symbolic exchange. The audience cannot 'give back' to television” (Groening 2007). He sees this one-way push of corporate media as seeping into American economics and politics as well:
-examined the psychology of consumption: how the U.S.'s capitalist economy is stimulated through--not only the purchasing of goods--but of the identity that these products “represent.”
Baudrillard's first three works can thus be read in the framework of a neo-Marxian critique of capitalist societies. One could read Baudrillard's emphasis on consumption as a supplement to Marx's analysis of production and his focus on culture and signs as an important supplement to classical Marxian political economy, which adds a cultural and semiological dimension to the Marxian project. But in his 1973 provocation, The Mirror of Production (translated into English in 1975), Baudrillard carries out a systematic attack on classical Marxism, claiming that Marxism is but a mirror of bourgeois society, placing production at the center of life, thus naturalizing the capitalist organization of society.
According to Baudrillard, in the "media society," mass communication channels have destroyed domestic space through colonization and saturation. when we are exposed to "instant communication," when we stand at the point where different media intersect, we begin to respond to these transmissions "ecstatically," immediately, rather than critically (Maltby 1991: 7).
BAUDRILLARD AND THE IRAQ WAR:
As with the Gulf War, Baudrillard believed the current Iraq War to be largely a television event. In an age of media saturation, the viewer has difficulty distinguishing between manufactured violent situations and those that occur in reality. He drew the controversial conclusion that often we prefer imitation to reality.
This state of what Baudrillard called "hyperreality" explains why we are swamped by TV "reality shows," which are anything but. And it accounts for the perennial allure of Disneyland, which he said is "presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real” (Woo 2007).
In an essay titled "The Spirit of Terrorism," published in Le Monde two months after 9/11, he wrote that the World Trade Center attacks were the consequence of a "terrorist imagination" bred by an "insufferable superpower," the U.S. "In the end," he concluded, "it was they who did it, but we who wished it."
From The Spirit of Terrorism And Requiem for the Twin Towers
“…That we have dreamed of this event, that everybody without exception has dreamt of it, because everybody must dream of the destruction of any power hegemonic to that degree, -- this is unacceptable for Western moral conscience, but it is still a fact, and one which is justly measured by the pathetic violence of all those discourses which attempt to erase it.
In the end, they did it, but we wanted it."
If one does not take that into account, the event loses all symbolic dimension to become a pure accident, an act purely arbitrary, the murderous fantasy of a few fanatics, who would need only to be suppressed. But we know very well that this is not so. Thus all those delirious, counter-phobic exorcisms: because evil is there, everywhere as an obscure object of desire. Without this deep complicity, the event would not have had such repercussions, and without doubt, terrorists know that in their symbolic strategy they can count on this unavowable complicity” (Baudrillard 2001).
In The Seduction of Unreason, Richard Wolin misinterpreted Baudrillard's analysis of the September 11 attacks, accusing him and philosopher Slavoj Zizek of championing what was then widely perceived as an “act of terrorism.” Zizek responded to Wolin in the journal Critical Inquiry, describing this (Wolin's) view as “intellectually barbar[ic].” Baudrillard's recognition of America's culpability in the attack was not an expression of happiness over the event.
“More recently, they have made inroads among champions of the postmodern left, such as Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Zizek. In their theories, America represents the epitome of a postmodern, technological Moloch: a land devoid of history and tradition in which the seductions and illusions of a media-dominated mass culture have attained unchallenged hegemony. The postmodernists allege that the traditional orientations of family, community, and politics have ceded to the febrile delusions of "hyperreality." Today, we experience the reign of "simulacra": media-generated copies, shorn of originals, that circulate autonomously. This attitude helps explain the enthusiasm with which Baudrillard greeted the September 11 attacks: a 'dream come true'” (Wolin 2004).
A CONCLUSION:
Baudrillard's main critique of the “society of production” was that it allowed for ceaseless reproduction, simulation, and seduction. The way in which we observe our culture--rather, observe it observing us--is a result of a the “panoptic” and repressive power of our corporate media/information society. “Culture becomes culture industry, democracy becomes a form of massmanipulation, and science and technology form a crucial part of an apparatus of social domination” (Kellner 2007).
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