Four essays turning on one reversal, restated from four angles. The masses are not the unrealized subject of history waiting to be organized and given voice. They are the point at which the social, meaning, the political, and representation collapse inward. Baudrillard names that collapse implosion and sets it term for term against the explosion (expansion, accumulation, production, liberation) he says has governed the West for centuries.
The argument is built to defeat the consolations of the left as much as those of power. Two centuries of organizing, education, and consciousness-raising failed to convert the masses to meaning, and Baudrillard rejects both standard accounts of that failure: manipulation from above, mystification from within. His wager is that the indifference is the masses' practice, a positive counter-strategy of absorption and neutralization, and that it works as an absolute weapon precisely because it cannot be represented, spoken for, or alienated. The governing physical metaphor is the black hole, a density that absorbs all radiation and returns no information.
The four essays are not interchangeable. The title essay lays out the full apparatus: mass, simulation, the survey, terrorism, implosion against explosion. "… Or, The End of the Social" is the most systematic piece, organized around three hypotheses about whether the social ever existed, with a fourth named in its notes. "The Implosion of Meaning in the Media" runs the same operation on information theory and McLuhan. "Our Theater of Cruelty" is the shortest and most occasional, a two-part reading of the Mogadishu hijacking and the deaths at Stammheim that concretizes the terrorism material. The brief reconstructs each in the source's own sequence and under the source's own section headings, because the sequence is part of the argument.
On register: the prose is essayistic and assertion-dense, not demonstrative. Baudrillard rarely argues a claim to a conclusion. He restates it at escalating intensity and lets analogies (microphysics, black holes, DNA and the genetic code, atomic simulation chambers) carry the load. The connective prose below paraphrases the move-structure. The block quotes carry the formulations that travel, each whole and anchored to its printed page.
The essay opens on the masses as the nothingness around which the whole constellation of the social turns. The masses absorb the electricity of the social and ground it out, in the triple pun the translator flags at the foot of the first page.
Page 1, translator's note
Throughout the text "la masse," "faire masse" imply a condensation of terms which allows Baudrillard to make a number of central puns and allusions. For not only does la masse directly refer to the physical and philosophical sense of "substance" or "matter," it can just as easily mean "the majority" (as in "the mass of workers") or even the electrical usage of an "earth"; hence faire masse can simultaneously mean to form a mass, to form an earth or to form a majority.
Pages 1–2
The whole chaotic constellation of the social revolves around that spongy referent, that opaque but equally translucent reality, that nothingness: the masses. A statistical crystal ball, the masses are "swirling with currents and flows," in the image of matter and the natural elements. So at least they are represented to us. They can be "mesmerized," the social envelops them, like static electricity; but most of the time, precisely, they form an earth, that is, they absorb all the electricity of the social and political and neutralise it forever.
What follows is the claim that the masses conduct nothing, and that this non-conduction is not weakness but the strength of the neutral.
Page 2
They are neither good conductors of the political, nor good conductors of the social, nor good conductors of meaning in general. Everything flows through them, everything magnetises them, but diffuses throughout them without leaving a trace. And, ultimately, the appeal to the masses has always gone unanswered. They do not radiate; on the contrary, they absorb all radiation from the outlying constellations of State, History, Culture, Meaning. They are inertia, the strength of inertia, the strength of the neutral.
The decisive refusal arrives at once: this inertia is not stored potential. Baudrillard denies the masses the "reservoir" status on which all revolutionary hope depends, and locates their strength in the present and in silence.
Pages 2–3
According to their imaginary representation, the masses drift somewhere between passivity and wild spontaneity, but always as a potential energy, a reservoir of the social and of social energy; today a mute referent, tomorrow, when they speak up and cease to be the "silent majority," a protagonist of history — now, in fact, the masses have no history to write, neither past nor future, they have no virtual energies to release, nor any desire to fulfill: their strength is actual, in the present, and sufficient unto itself. It consists in their silence, in their capacity to absorb and neutralise, already superior to any power acting upon them.
He marks the cost to sociology up front: the hypothesis of the death of the social is also the hypothesis of sociology's own death, since the discipline survives only on the positive hypothesis of the social. The status of the word "mass" is then declared a deliberate move, not a defect of rigor.
Page 4
The term "mass" is not a concept. It is a leitmotif of political demagogy, a soft, sticky, lumpenanalytical notion. A good sociology would attempt to surpass it with "more subtle" categories: socio-professional ones, categories of class, cultural status, etc. Wrong: it is by prowling around these soft and acritical notions (like "mana" once was) that one can go further than intelligent critical sociology.
To specify the term, then, is to falsify it. The mass has no attribute and no referent, and its lack of definition is its definition.
Page 5
To want to specify the term "mass" is a mistake — it is to provide meaning for that which has none. One says: "the mass of workers." But the mass is never that of the workers, nor of any other social subject or object. The "peasant masses" of old were not in fact masses: only those form a mass who are freed from their symbolic bondage, "released" (only to be caught in infinite "networks") and destined to be no more than the innumerable end points of precisely those same theoretical models which do not succeed in integrating them and which finally only produce them as statistical refuse. The mass is without attribute, predicate, quality, reference. This is its definition, or its radical lack of definition. It has no sociological "reality."
The mass is the neutral, neither one pole nor the other, which is what makes meaning impossible to circulate within it and what makes it impossible to alienate.
Page 6
There is no longer any polarity between the one and the other in the mass. This is what causes that vacuum and inwardly collapsing effect in all those systems which survive on the separation and distinction of poles (two, or many in more complex systems). This is what makes the circulation of meaning within the mass impossible: it is instantaneously dispersed, like atoms in a void. This is also what makes it impossible for the mass to be alienated, since neither the one nor the other exist there any longer.
The worked example is religion. The masses kept the image of God and the spectacle of the Church, never the Idea, and what they refused was transcendence.
Pages 7–8
Regarding the impossibility of making meaning circulate among the masses, the best example is God. The masses have hardly retained anything but the image of him, never the Idea. They have never been affected by the Idea of God, which has remained a matter for the clergy, nor by anguish over sin and personal salvation. What they have retained is the enchantment of saints and martyrs; the last judgment; the Dance of Death; sorcery; the ceremony and spectacle of the Church; the immanence of ritual — the contrast to the transcendence of the Idea. They were and have remained pagans, in their way, never haunted by the Supreme Authority, but surviving on the small change of images, superstition and the devil.
Page 8
It isn't that they have not been able to attain the higher enlightenment of religion: they have ignored it. They don't refuse to die for a faith, for a cause, for an idol. What they refuse is transcendence; the uncertainty, the difference, the waiting, the asceticism which constitute the sublime exaction of religion.
The same fate met every great schema of reason. The masses are not the mirror of the social; the mirror of the social shatters on them, and the corrected image is the black hole.
Page 9
Are the masses the "mirror of the social"? No, they don't reflect the social, nor are they reflected in the social — it is the mirror of the social which shatters to pieces on them. Even this image is not right, since it still evokes the idea of a hard substance, of an opaque resistance. Rather, the masses function as a gigantic black hole which inexorably inflects, bends and distorts all energy and light radiation approaching it: an implosive sphere, in which the curvature of spaces accelerates, in which all dimensions curve back on themselves and "involve" to the point of annihilation, leaving in their stead only a sphere of potential engulfment.
Whatever its content, information always intends to get some meaning across and keep the masses within reason. The masses resist that imperative scandalously, and the resistance is the datum.
Page 10
Nonsense: the masses scandalously resist this imperative of rational communication. They are given meaning: they want spectacle. No effort has been able to convert them to the seriousness of the content, nor even to the seriousness of the code. Messages are given to them, they only want some sign, they idolise the play of signs and stereotypes, they idolise any content so long as it resolves itself into a spectacular sequence. What they reject is the "dialectic" of meaning.
The "mystification" hypothesis is dismissed as the self-protection of the producers of meaning, and the reverse hypothesis is put in its place: the refusal is exercised in freedom, against a terror sensed behind the hegemony of meaning.
Page 10
Nor is anything served by alleging that they are mystified. This is always a hypocritical hypothesis which protects the intellectual complaisance of the producers of meaning: the masses spontaneously aspire to the natural light of reason. This in order to evade the reverse hypothesis, namely that it is in complete "freedom" that the masses oppose their refusal of meaning and their will to spectacle to the ultimatum of meaning. They distrust, as with death, this transparency and this political will. They scent the simplifying terror which is behind the ideal hegemony of meaning.
This inverts the received scenario. Meaning is no longer the line of force in our societies but an accident concerning only a thin layer, and individuals too are episodic conductors of meaning who form a mass most of the time.
Page 11
it is no longer meaning which would be the ideal line of force in our societies, that which eludes it being only waste intended for reabsorption some time or other — on the contrary, it is meaning which is only an ambiguous and inconsequential accident, an effect due to ideal convergence of a perspective space at any given moment (History, Power, etc.) and which, moreover, has only ever really concerned a tiny fraction and superficial layer of our "societies." And this is true of individuals also: we are only episodic conductors of meaning, for in the main, and profoundly, we form a mass, living most of the time in panic or haphazardly, above and beyond any meaning.
The example is the night of Klaus Croissant's extradition, set against a televised World Cup qualifier, with the intelligentsia's consternation as the real object of analysis.
Page 12
On the night of Klaus Croissant's extradition, the TV transmitted a football match in which France played to qualify for the world cup. Some hundreds of people demonstrated outside la Sante, a few barristers ran to and fro in the night; twenty million people spent their evening glued to the screen. An explosion of popular joy when France won. Consternation and indignation of the illuminati over this scandalous indifference.
The silent majority, he argues, is even stripped of its indifference: the apathy itself must be charged to power, never granted as the masses' own behavior. He then states the proven, repeating fact and his refusal of both explanations for it.
Page 14
Now none of this is true, and both the above are a deception: power manipulates nothing, the masses are neither mislead nor mystified. Power is only too happy to make football bear a facile responsibility, even to take upon itself the diabolical responsibility for stupefying the masses. This comforts it in its illusion of being power, and leads away from the much more dangerous fact that this indifference of the masses is their true, their only practice.
The proposed method is to begin again from this refuse, as Freud began from the psychic remainder, and he notes why the political order has never risked it.
Page 15
We might as well begin again, as Freud did in the psychic order, from this remainder, from this blind sediment, from this waste or refuse of meaning, from this unanalysed and perhaps unanalysable fact (there is a good reason why such a Copernican Revolution has never been undertaken in the political universe: it is the whole political order that is in danger of paying the price).
A compressed genealogy. The political emerges from the religious sphere in the Renaissance and wins renown with Machiavelli as a pure game of signs played on the absence of truth, of the same order as Renaissance theatre and perspective space.
Page 16
When the political emerged during the Renaissance from the religious and ecclesiastic spheres, to win reknown with Machiavelli, it was at first only a pure game of signs, a pure strategy which was not burdened with any social or historical "truth," but, on the contrary, played on the absence of truth (as did later the worldly strategy of the Jesuits on the absence of God). To begin with, the political space belonged to the same order as that of Renaissance mechanical theatre, or of perspective space in painting, which were invented at the same time. Its form was that of a game, not of a system of representation — semiurgy and strategy, not ideology — its function was one of virtuosity, not of truth.
The Machiavellian immorality is relocated: not in the use of means but in the disregard for ends, where Nietzsche is recruited for the claim that maximal political energy lives in that disregard.
Page 16
The cynicism and immorality of Machiavellian politics lay there: not as the vulgar understanding has it in the unscrupulous usage of means, but in the offhand disregard for ends. Now, as Nietzsche well knew, it is in this disregard for a social, psychological, historical truth, in this exercise of simulacra as such, that the maximum of political energy is found, where the political is a game and is not yet given a reason.
From the eighteenth century, and especially the Revolution, the political takes a social reference and enters representation, paralleling theatre and perspective space. After the golden age of bourgeois representative systems, marxist thought inaugurates the end of the political by installing the hegemony of the social.
Page 18
It is with marxist thought, in its successive developments, that the end of the political and of its particular energy was inaugurated. Here began the absolute hegemony of the social and the economic, and the compulsion, on the part of the political, to become the legislative, institutional, executive mirror of the social. The autonomy of the political was inversely proportional to the growing hegemony of the social.
Socialist and revolutionary thought openly wills the dissolution of the political into the transparency of the social. The verdict on that victory is the hinge of the essay.
Pages 18–19
The social won. But, at this point of generalisation, of saturation, where it is no more than the zero degree of the political, at this point of absolute reference, of omnipresence and diffraction in all the interstices of physical and mental space, what becomes of the social itself? It is the sign of its end: the energy of the social is reversed, its specificity is lost, its historical quality and its ideality vanish in favour of a configuration where not only the political becomes volatilised, but where the social itself no longer has any name. Anonymous. THE MASS. THE MASSES.
The political dwindles from a strategic arrangement to representation to a present "neo-figuration" where signs no longer represent anything, because there is no social signified left to give a political signifier its force. The only functioning referent is the silent majority, statistical rather than social, appearing only in the survey.
Page 20
The masses are no longer a referent because they no longer belong to the order of representation. They don't express themselves, they are surveyed. They don't reflect upon themselves, they are tested. The referendum (and the media are a constant referendum of directed questions and answers) has been substituted for the political referent. Now polls, tests, the referendum, media are devices which no longer belong to a dimension of representations, but to one of simulation. They no longer have a referent in view, but a model.
The couple "silent majority / survey" has no pole and no differential term, and is short-circuited exactly as the genetic code is, which Baudrillard names the ideal form of simulation and the matrix of implosion.
Page 21
Everything changes with the device of simulation. In the couple "silent majority / survey" for example, there is no longer any pole nor any differential term, hence no electricity of the social either: it is short-circuited by the confusing of poles, in a total circularity of signalling (exactly as is the case with molecular communication and with the substance it informs in DNA and the genetic code). This is the ideal form of simulation: collapse of poles, orbital circulation of models (this is also the matrix of every implosive process).
The silence is the decisive figure, and it is carefully qualified against alienation. It is not a mute absence of speech but a refusal to be spoken for, and therefore a weapon.
Page 22
This is the meaning of their silence. But this silence is paradoxical — it isn't a silence which does not speak, it is a silence which refuses to be spoken for in its name. And in this sense, far from being a form of alienation, it is an absolute weapon. No one can be said to represent the silent majority, and that is its revenge.
Because the masses are no longer a subject, they cannot pass through the political mirror stage and cannot be alienated. Baudrillard marks this as the end of revolutionary convictions, and corrects the figure: the mass is not explosion but implosion.
Page 22
The end of revolutionary convictions. For these have always speculated on the possibility of the masses, or the proletariat, denying themselves as such. But the mass is not a place of negativity or explosion, it is a place of absorption and implosion.
Power's old strategy rested on apathy. That inertia now turns against it, so power tries to reverse course toward participation and speech. The reversal comes too late.
Page 23
The strategy of power has long seemed founded on the apathy of the masses. The more passive they were, the more secure it was. But this logic is only characteristic of the bureaucratic and centralist phase of power. And it is this which today turns against it: the inertia it has fostered becomes the sign of its own death. That is why it seeks to reverse its strategies: from passivity to participation, from silence to speech. But it is too late.
The economic translation arrives here, and is among the most portable passages in the book: the shift from producing goods to producing demand, dated to the crisis of 1929.
Pages 26–27
Basically, what goes for commodities also goes for meaning. For a long time capital only had to produce goods; consumption ran by itself. Today it is necessary to produce consumers, to produce demand, and this production is infinitely more costly than that of goods (for the most part, and above all since 1929, the social arose out of this crisis of demand: the production of demand largely overlaps the production of the social itself).
The same logic runs on meaning. Meaning is no longer scarce, it is overproduced, and what weakens is the demand for it. Producing that demand becomes the system's crucial and finally impossible task.
Page 27
Today, everything has changed: no longer is meaning in short supply, it is produced everywhere, in ever increasing quantities — it is demand which is weakening. And it is the production of this demand for meaning which has become crucial for the system. Without this demand for, without this susceptibility to, without this minimal participation in meaning, power is nothing but an empty simulacrum and an isolated effect of perspective.
The mass absorbs all social energy and refracts none of it, returning a tautological response to every question. The denial of manipulation closes the section.
Pages 29–30
For if the political seeks to "pick up" the masses in a social echo or simulation chamber (the media, information), it is the masses who in return become a huge echo or simulation chamber of the social. Manipulation has never existed. The game is played on both sides, with the same weapons, and who can say which is winning today: the simulation power performs on the masses, or the inverse simulation held out by the masses for power to be swallowed up in.
End of the preview
You have read the opening of In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities. Create an account to unlock the full SAARUTU brief and the rest of the research library.
