Page 182 - Cultural Theory

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••• Speculation to the Death •••

the medium and its reception, though, against McLuhan, this mass is a also a
resistant force of inertia against the media (ibid.: 4), cancelling ‘the electricity of the
social’ it attempts to produce (ibid.: 1–2). Thus, for Baudrillard, the media produce
not a unified, conscious and empathetically aware global citizenry but a force refus-
ing and coalescing with the circuit of communication (ibid.: 90), a force comprised,
as a 1992 lecture makes clear, of blind particles, passing like commuters on individ-
ual trajectories, avoiding all contact with others and ‘all the potential violence’ of
exchange (1992b).
This reversal of McLuhan is seen again in Baudrillard’s use of his concepts of ‘hot’
and ‘cold’ (McLuhan, 1994: 22–32). Though Baudrillard retains them as a metaphor
for user participation in the media form, and agrees that our electronic media are
‘cold’, for him this represents not a high participation but their abolition of a ‘hot’
symbolic mode of relations and participation. Compare, for example, he says, the
‘hot’ live event with its ‘emotional charge’ and symbolic meaning and participation,
with the ‘cool’, processed, semiotic ‘television event’ (1990a: 160), and its cold sim-
ulacra and relations. The ‘cold media’, therefore, cannot produce the heat of sym-
bolic meaning and participation to rescue the cold social, as their very form,
Baudrillard argues, leads to ‘the freezing of every message’ and ‘the glaciation of
meaning’ (1983a: 35). Hence his critique of an attempt by German TV to dramatize
the Holocaust, to rekindle a cold historical event through cold media (1994b: 49–51).
Not only can the ‘cold light’ of television never illuminate such an event, but, in
replacing the memories and lives of the survivors for us, television actually functions
as an extension of the gas chambers, as ‘a cold monster of extermination’ (ibid.: 50),
producing the same process of ‘forgetting’ and of ‘liquidation’ (ibid.: 49). So, for
Baudrillard, ‘cold’ comes to stand as a stark metaphor for the entropic heat-death of
all symbolic relations and meaning through our electronic media, which, contrary to
all their promises and apparent production, extend not life, but death.
Baudrillard’s reformulation of the semiotic in Forget Foucault as the order of ‘pro-
duction’ allows him to radicalize his critical picture of Western society and to empha-
size the production and materialization of the real as its defining characteristic. This
is ‘pro-duction in the literal sense’, Baudrillard says, meaning ‘to render visible, to
cause to appear and to be made to appear: pro-ducere’ (1987: 21), hence he again sub-
sumes industrial production as part of a wider historical process marking the West.
Today, he argues, our informational and communicational technologies become the
primary site of this drive for the real, their ‘orgy of production’ and of ‘realism’, repre-
senting the ‘rage to summon everything before the jurisdiction of signs’ (1990a: 32):
to make everything real, visible, produced, and marked; to transcribe, record, gather,
prove, index and register every aspect and form, and to perfectly realise and make
instantly available all reality (1987: 21–2). His example of this is pornography whose
fantasy is not sexuality but reality, as ‘a forcing of signs, a baroque enterprise of sig-
nification’ (1990a: 28), that assumes the reality of sexuality can be manifested in its
gynaecological, hypervisible, ‘instantaneous, exacerbated representation’ (ibid.: 29).
This is our modern form of unreality, Baudrillard says, created by adding to the real,
and engaging, ‘more reference, more truth, more exactitude … having everything

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