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••• William Merrin •••

are systematically reversed (see Merrin, 2002). This is seen in his use of the concept
of ‘implosion’, which, for McLuhan, referred to the geographical, temporal and, most
importantly, affective contraction of the globe under the speed of electronic tech-
nologies. For Baudrillard, in contrast, it is the semiotic process ‘where simulation
begins’ (1994b: 31), with the implosion of the poles of the symbolic relationship
which institutes the sign (1981: 65) and of the sign’s absorption of its referent to pro-
duce reality from its own play of signifiers (1975: 127). The media operate as a
‘macroscopic’ extension of these processes as they do not dissolve away to give us
perfect access to the real, rather their simulacra implode with the real ‘in a sort of
nebulous hyperreality’ (1983a: 100) in which ‘even the definition and distinct action
of the medium are no longer distinguishable’ (ibid.: 101), resulting in a mutual dis-
solution of reality and medium (1994b: 30).
All attempts to get closer to this real technologically only perfect this simulacrum,
Baudrillard argues, as ‘the more closely the real is pursued … the greater does the real
absence from the world grow’ (1998a: 122). The increasing perfection of the real only
results in a ‘hyperreality’, a concept incorporating two processes for Baudrillard,
being first of all the inevitable result of all attempts to realize the real as the real and
to set it above the real as its exemplar, and, second, the result of the technical per-
fection of the image from its model which produces an excessive hyper-fidelity
eclipsing and coming to define for us our own experience. This semiotic hyperreal-
ization again abolishes any symbolic relationship as, Baudrillard says, faced with
such an image, ‘we have nothing to add … nothing to give in exchange’ (1990a: 30),
being reduced to staring ‘fascinated and dumb-founded’ at the empty banality of the
real, ‘approaching and sniffing this cadaver-like hyper-similitude’ and ‘hallucinating
on platitude’ (1983b: 42–3).
It is in his work, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities ([1978] 1983a), however, that
Baudrillard presents his most systematic picture of the media’s destruction of rela-
tions and meaning, tracing the emergence of Western society ‘on the ruins of the
symbolic’ in the Renaissance (ibid.: 65), and the fate of the forms of simulated social-
ity (‘the social’) it produced to replace it. Baudrillard sees our societies as desperately
trying to produce and stage this social – a scene of communication, response, activ-
ity, and meaning – but all their electronic technologies which they employ only has-
ten the collapse and ‘implosion’ of this already simulacral sociality, he argues. The
effort of the staging and the over-production of meaning, information and commu-
nication, together with the masses, own non-response and disinterest is ‘directly
destructive of meaning and signification’, Baudrillard argues (ibid.: 95). No-one can
understand, hold, or use all that is produced, thus ‘we live in a universe where there
is more and more information and less and less meaning’ (ibid.: 95). Simulation,
therefore, again has a neutralizing effect, a ‘dissolving and dissuasive action’, upon
those very realities it attempts to produce (ibid.: 96), though, as ‘the alpha and
omega of our modernity’, the ‘immense energies’ we expend on this production
cannot be halted by us (ibid.: 97–8).
Baudrillard’s concept of ‘the masses’ here has proven controversial but it is derived
from a McLuhanist rather than a Marxist or sociological framework, as a product of
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