Page 226 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Conclusion 211
mass-media society, sexuality was perhaps the most intimate and
private aspect of social experience. For Baudrillard, the fate that
befalls sexuality in a mediated culture, is indicative of a general
process of industrialized revelation that takes Kracauer’s then concept
of Ratio to an exponentially new level – a now pervaded by ‘a
pornography of circuits and networks’. In contrast to cultural
populism, Baudrillard, like Adorno before him, argues that the
breadth of available polysemic interpretations belies their essentially
uniform nature. The range is indeed wide as he recognizes in his
claim that American television constitutes ‘the living incarnation of
the ludic’ (Baudrillard 1990a: 150). However, such interpretations
are of limited liberatory value because: ‘They are no longer objects
of libidinal investment; for they are made selectively available within
a range of choices – with leisure itself now appearing, relative to
work, as just another channel on the screen of time’ (1990a: 158).
This argument is reminiscent of two important features of Adorno’s
culture industry argument: the increasing incursion of work into the
previously distinct and insulated personal leisure time; and his
previously cited dismissal of purported differences between com-
modities.
The peculiarly absorbed nature of the fascination that the media
engenders has been recognized by all the key theorists under
consideration in this volume. For Baudrillard, like Adorno before
him, the mediascape’s promotion of fascination represents a social
sphere emptied out of the more enchanted and seductive properties
present in a symbol-rich non-mediated society. Mass-media society is
an etiolated, pervasively commodified realm of semiotic signs that
are manipulated systematically by a culture industry that has at its
disposal ever more sophisticated techniques:
All this belongs to the ludic realm where one encounters a cold
seduction – the narcissistic spell of electronic and information
systems, the cold attraction of the terminals and mediums that
we have become, surrounded as we are by consoles, isolated
and seduced by their manipulation … This is the modern
meaning play, the ‘ludic’ sense, connoting the suppleness and
polyvalence of combinations. Understood in this sense, ‘play,’
its very possibility, is at the basis of the metastability of systems.
It has nothing to do with play as a dual or agonistic relation; it
is the cold seduction that governs the spheres of information
and communication. And it is in this cold seduction that the
social and its representations are now wearing themselves thin.
(Baudrillard 1990a: 162)
Using McLuhanite notions (narcosis, hot and cold) but with dis-
tinctly more critical intent, Baudrillard suggests that a ‘choice’
between commodities that are essentially the same replaces the warm

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