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Contemporary Cultural Theory

(p. 121), provides the Baudrillardian counterpart to Lyotard’s shift
from modernity and postmodernity. In this new world of the mass
media, wrote Baudrillard: ‘Simulation is... the generation by
models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal’ (p. 1). The
resulting ‘implosion of meaning’ implies the ‘end of the social’
and the decline of the political, since what is true of signs in
general is true of political signs in particular. For Baudrillard,
then, both the rational liberal individual subject and the class-
conscious collective subject cease to function: ‘there is no longer
any social signified to give force to a political signifier’
(Baudrillard, 1983, p. 19). The one still functional referent is ‘the
silent majority’, or ‘the masses’. But since their existence is merely
statistical rather than social, they function only as an imaginary
referent for the simulations of the media (pp. 19–20).
It follows that in the most fundamental of senses, the media
and the masses imply each other: ‘Mass(age) is the message’
(p. 44). This mutual implication of masses and media is, for
Baudrillard, a matter neither of manipulation nor of democrat-
isation, a cause neither for hope nor for regret (Baudrillard, 1988,
p. 207). To the contrary, the inertia of the masses is precisely their
strength: ‘the masses are a stronger medium than all the media’
(Baudrillard, 1983, p. 44). Hence his conclusion that since ‘the
system’ itself aims to maximise speech, meaning and partici-
pation, the ‘actual strategy of the masses’, their strategic
resistance, is that of ‘the refusal of meaning and the refusal of
speech’ (Baudrillard, 1988, p. 219). The masses thereby become
the repository of Baudrillard’s hopes and expectations for ‘a
finally delusive, illusive, and allusive strategy’, the ‘correlative’
of an ‘ironic, joyful, and seductive unconscious’ (p. 217). As with
much in Baudrillard, it’s not at all clear that this makes very much
sense. What we can say, however, is that for all its apparently
utopian gestures, this account actually gives rise to a developing
political fatalism. The ‘clearest result of the whole media envi-
ronment’, he concludes, is ‘stupor...a radical uncertainty as to
our own desire, our own choice, our own opinion, our own will’
(p. 209). To suffer from stupor of this kind is to be a part of the
‘masses’, to be ‘made up of... useless hyperinformation which
claims to enlighten... when all it does is clutter up the space of

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