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••• Speculation to the Death •••

‘the network of signs and messages’ it creates (1981: 200), and of his symbolic
critique of this simulacral mode of relations. For Baudrillard, the electronic media
represent one of the main sources of the sign’s production and dissemination, rein-
forcing its abolition of the symbolic and its simulacral and unilateral mode of com-
munication. Thus his critique of media and technology closely follows his critique of
the sign and of consumer culture.
This critique is made explicit in the 1971 essay, ‘Requiem for the Media’ (1981:
165–84) where, defining communication as ‘a reciprocal space of speech and
response’ creating immediate symbolic relations, rather than ‘the simple transmission-
reception of a message’, Baudrillard argues, contrary to all our intuition, that our
mass media are characterized by their ‘non-communication’ (1981: 169). This is
because they abolish those symbolic relations to replace them with a simulacral form
whose only reciprocity is in pre-programmed, controlled feedback systems such as
letters, phone-ins, or, today, emails (1981: 181). Thus, for him, radio and television
are a poor substitute for the collective communion of the symbolic, but Baudrillard
also offers here a critique of communication theory and its ‘simulation model of com-
munication’, which, in its formalization of its elements reduces and excludes all ‘the
reciprocity and antagonism’ of interpersonal communication (1981: 179). Despite
his own reservations about the concept’s formal connotations (1993a: 57),
Baudrillard’s project, therefore, revolves around the symbolic as a mode of commu-
nication, abolished and simulated in our contemporary media culture, in its own
competing mode of ‘communication’.
Baudrillard’s first discussion of media comes in a 1967 review (2001a: 39–44) of
McLuhan’s newly translated Understanding Media (McLuhan, 1994) where he adopts
McLuhan’s emphasis on the form of media, but turns this towards his own project to
argue that the media’s primary effect is to replace the symbolic with the semiotic, trans-
forming ‘the lived, unique, eventual character of that which it transmits’ into ‘a sign
which is juxtaposed among others in the abstract dimension of TV coverage’ (2001a:
42). Expanding on this in The Consumer Society, he argues, contrary to McLuhan, that
the media do not produce a direct ‘participation’ in the world, but instead offer a ‘fil-
tered, fragmented world’ ‘industrially processed’ by the media ‘into sign material’
(1998a: 124). ‘So we live’, Baudrillard says, ‘sheltered by signs, in the denial of the real’,
safe in the absence from a world with the alibi of participation in its simulacrum (ibid.:
34). Here, therefore, Baudrillard draws more upon Boorstin’s (1961) book The Image
(Boorstin, 1992) than on McLuhan, employing his idea of the ‘pseudo-event’ to
describe ‘a world of events, history, culture, and ideas not produced from shifting con-
tradictory, real experience, but produced as artefacts from elements of the code and the tech-
nical manipulation of the medium’ (Bandrillard, 1998a: 125). Thus the media are central
to the ‘vast process of simulation’ taking place ‘over the whole span of daily life’, pro-
ducing the event and all experience from its semiotic model, with this simulation
assuming the ‘force of reality’, abolishing the latter ‘in favour of this neo-reality of the
model which is given material force by the medium itself’ (ibid.: 126).
Baudrillard, therefore, accepts McLuhan’s approach to media, but believes it must
be extended and envisaged ‘at its limit’ (1983a: 102), where its critical conclusions

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