Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard

Author:Jean Baudrillard
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Tags: Resemblance (Philosophy), Art, Social Science, Popular Culture, Philosophy, Social Change, General, Culture, Literary Criticism, Modern, History & Surveys, Reality, Materialism
ISBN: 9780472065219
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 1984-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

ABSOLUTE ADVERTISING, GROUND-ZERO ADVERTISING

Today what we are experiencing is the absorption of all virtual modes of expression into that of advertising. All original cultural forms, all determined languages are absorbed in advertising because it has no depth, it is instantaneous and instantaneously forgotten.

Triumph of superficial form, of the smallest common denominator of all signification, degree zero of meaning, triumph of entropy over all possible tropes. The lowest form of energy of the sign. This unarticulated, instantaneous form, without a past, without a future, without the possiblity of metamorphosis, has power over all the others. All current forms of activity tend toward advertising and most exhaust themselves therein. Not necessarily advertising itself, the kind that is produced as such—but the form of advertising, that of a simplified operational mode, vaguely seductive, vaguely consensual (all the modalities are confused therein, but in an attenuated, agitated mode). More generally, the form of advertising is one in which all particular contents are annulled at the very moment when they can be transcribed into each other, whereas what is inherent to “weighty” enunciations, to articulated forms of meaning (or of style) is that they cannot be translated into each other, any more than the rules of a game can be.

This long movement toward translatability and thus toward a complete combinatorial, which is that of the superficial transparency of everything, of their absolute advertising (of which professional advertising is, once again, only an episodic form), can be read in the vicissitudes of propaganda.

The whole scope of advertising and propaganda comes from the October Revolution and the market crash of 1929. Both languages of the masses, issuing from the mass production of ideas, or commodities, their registers, separate at first, progressively converge. Propaganda becomes the marketing and merchandising of idea-forces, of political men and parties with their “trademark image.” Propaganda approaches advertising as it would the vehicular model of the only great and veritable idea-force of this competing society, the commodity and the mark. This convergence defines a society-ours-in which there is no longer any difference between the economic and the political, because the same language reigns in both, from one end to the other; a society therefore where the political economy, literally speaking, is finally fully realized. That is to say dissolved as a specific power (as an historical mode of social contradiction), resolute, absorbed in a language without contradictions, like a dream, because traversed by purely superficial intensities.

A subsequent stage is crossed once the very language of the social, after that of the political, becomes confused with this fascinating solicitation of an agitated language, once the social turns itself into advertising, turns itself over to the popular vote by trying to impose its trademark image. From the historical destiny that it was, the social itself fell to the level of a “collective enterprise” securing its publicity on every level. See what surplus value of the social each advertisement tries to produce: werben werben (advertise advertise)—the solicitation of the social everywhere, present on walls, in the

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