Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) has
been described as the postmodernist theoretician and practitioner who
carried furthest its ideas. Unlike Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari,
who never adopted the discourse of the postmodernist,he was the only one
who did so.What kind of person was he? What kinds of concerns did he
have and how did he deal with them?
in Reims, France 1929 of peasant stock from a civil servant father and
the only member of his family to receive higher education, he became a
secondary school teacher in 1956 and an editor of Edition du Seuil in
early 1960s,translated works of Peter Weiss and Bertolt Brecht and a history of revolutionary movements by Wilhem Mühlmann during which period he began writing articles for the literary journal Les Temps Modernes and reading the cultural and sociological critiques upon everyday French life by Henri Lefebvre and the semiological analyses of contemporary French society by the structuralist Roland Barthes. In 1966, he entered the U of Paris, Nanterre in to study languages, sociology and philosophy and became Lefebvre’s assistant. He wrote and defended a “These de Troisieme Cycle” on “Le Système des objects”
(The system of objects) which he published as a book in 1968 (E 1996)
and started teaching sociology at the university, something he did until
he left in 1987.Two years later, he wrote another book of social analysis, La socièté de consommation (Consumer society) (1970 E 1998), followed in 1972 by “For a critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (E 1981). His writings were much influenced by Marcel Mauss (an anthropologist influenced by Emile Durkheim), Roland Barthes,(a structuralist and post structuralist whose thoughts are much influenced by Levi-Strauss and the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure) and George Bataille ( another literary and cultural critic much influenced by psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan).
What is modernism for Baudrillard?
It’s “a characteristic mode of civilization, which opposed itself to
tradition,that is to say, to all other anterior or traditional cultures:
confronting the geographic and symbolic diversity of the latter,
modernity imposes itself throughout the world as a homogeneous unity,
irradiating from the Occident “ (After Foucault 1987 63 ). His view is different from that of Foucault, for whom modernity is seen as a process of increasing rationalization,normalization and domination and those of Deleuze and Guatarri,
for whom modernity is an oppressive “territorialization” of desire into
certain constrictive social structures and repressed personalities that
nevertheless seek rhizomic lines of escape. He theorized modernity in
terms of his analysis of the system of objects, the consumer society,
media and information, modern art, contemporary fashion, sexuality and
thought.
even “schizofunctional” objects. There he suggests that the new systems
of mass consumption is bound up with the explosive proliferation of consumer
goods and services which fascinate and attract and sometimes control
what and how the subject sees, thinks and acts and how they shape and
structure even his needs, desires fantasies and behavior and how it
gives him a new morality, a new form of hypercivilzation..
In Consumer Society, he analyses the implications of credit and advertising for the commodification of everyday life of the masses, following Levi Strauss’ structural linguistic sociological approach of combining semiology to sociology. He argues that in
advanced late capitalist society, the socio-psychological “display
value” of the commodity has replaced the “utility value” of objects of
the traditional pre-modern society and more values are now placed on the
“meaning” of commodities as a “sign” than for its actual utility in the
consumer’s life. In buying a product, a consumer is really buying a
certain group identity, a certain social status and is merely fulfilling the needs of the productive system under the illusion that he is serving his own private
wants. To the extent that he is still ostensibly important in the
capitalist production system which is designed for continuous running of
its machines, the consumer’s demands for “display” have already been
carefully planned and managed ( both generated and then sustained)
through constantly exposing him to the manufacturers’ or his sale
agents’ advertisement because their products are
deliberately built not to last in what is called “planned obsolescence”
so that with minor modifications which are then “hyped” as huge
“improvements”, they can have a steady flow of profit. The modern
consumer masses are not satisfying “real” demands” truly originating
from within themselves. All they are doing is satisfying a craving which
has been “created” or “generated” or “manufactured” inside his psyche
by the manufacturer of the relevant commodities or services.In his next two books, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972) (“CPES”) and The Mirror of Production (1973 E 1975)(“MP”), Baudrillard argues that in our postmodern society, not only has the “sign” come to dominate both our social and our economic activity, all supposed connections between referent (the real object ), and signifier (the marker or sign for the concept of the real object ) have been definitively ruptured.
Signs now appear to have broken loose from human control, roaming and
circulating freely in our capitalist consumer society and making
apparently random, arbitrary, chaotic, rhizomic connections with each
other instead of with any real objects or persons and in consequence all
objective, universalist meanings have “imploded” in this mad chaos. Our
own “creations” have now come to dominate our lives. In a sense, we
have “invented” ourselves or for the masses, they have been “invented” by those in power.
After CPES, he broke with Marxism and wrote a sharp critique of Marxism in MP and put forward a distinctly postmodernist perspective in his L’échange symbolique et la mort
(Symbolic Exchange and Death1976 E 1993)(SED”). He says this because
people are now in a new era of simulation in which social production
(information processing, communication and knowledge industries etc) is
replacing industrial production as the organizing form of society and in
this era, labor is no longer a force of production but is itself just
“one sign amongst many ” (SED 10), a sign of one’s social position, way
of life and mode of servitude and wages bear no rational relation to
one’s work and what one produces but to one’s place within the system
(SED 19) and political economy is no longer the foundation, the social
determinant or even a structural “reality” in which other phenomena can
be interpreted and explained (SED 31) What this means is that
technological mediation has usurped the productive role of the Kantian
subject, the locus of an original synthesis of concepts and
intuitions,as well as the Marxist worker, the producer of capital
through labor and the Freudian unconscious, the mechanism of repression
and desire. He says:”From now on, signs are exchanged against each other
rather than against the real” (SED 7) and so production now means signs
producing other signs. For this reason, the system of symbolic exchange
is no longer real but “hyperreal”. In this new system, the so-called
“real” is “that of which it is possible to provide an equivalent
reproduction” whereas the “hyperreal” is “that which is always already
reproduced.” (SED 73) But he denies that there are any
centres of truth which escape or stand outside the logic of language,
such ideas being little more than convenient or ideologically motivated
illusions.
In
SED, he declares the end of capitalist political economy: “The end of
labor. The end of production. The end of political economy. The end of
the signifier/signified dialectic which facilitates the accumulation of
knowledge and of meaning, the linear syntagma
(narrative/epic/lyric) of cumulative discourse. And at the same time,
the end simultaneously of the exchange value/use value dialectic which
is the only thing that makes accumulation and social production
possible. The end of linear dimension of discourse. The end of linear
dimension of the commodity. The end of the classical era of the sign.
The end of the eras of production.” (SED 8) Instead, people live in the
“hyperreality” of simulations in which images, spectacles, and the play
of signs replace the concepts of production and class conflict as key
constituents of contemporary society. He thinks that we are now living
in a society in which signs are produced by other signs by new sign
machines in ever expanding and spiraling cycles. ( e.g. derivatives)
Although
technology has replaced capital as the most important element in the
production of meaning and purpose, he suggests replacing capitalistic
market exchange values and instrumental rationality by what he calls the
values of “symbolic exchanges”. For him, “symbolic exchange” covers a
number of activities including
“the exchange of looks, the present (which comes and goes, prodigality,
festival—and also destruction (which returns to non-value what
production has erected, valorized (SED 207). In this, he is using Lacan’s
concepts of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real to develop this
concept of the sign while attacking orthodoxies of the political left,
beginning with the assumed reality of power, production, desire, society
and political legitimacy, claiming that all these so-called “realities”
have become simulations, ie. signs without any referent, because the
real and the imaginary have been absorbed into the symbolic. He also
relies upon the cultural theory of George Bataille, Marcel Mauss, and Alfred Jarry.”
To him, “The symbolic social relations is the uninterrupted cycle of
giving and receiving, which, in primitive exchange, includes the
consumption of the ‘surplus’ and deliberate anti-production”(MP 143 ).
Through such practice, he hopes to avoid being dominated by and to
subvert the capitalist values (utility, functional and exchange value)
more radically than Marxist practices which to him are but the “mirror
of production”(e.g workers control, socialization of the means of
production), stressing only use value (hence utility and instrumental
rationality) whilst attacking exchange value, thus in effect merely
seeking a “good” use of the economy ie. a more efficient and equitable
organization of production rather than a completely different kind of
society based upon different values and forms of culture and life. He
says:“ Marxism is therefore only a limited petit bourgeois critique, one
more step in the banalization of life towards the ‘good use” of the social! He says, “ Bataille,
to the contrary, sweeps away all this slave dialectic from an
aristocratic pointof view, that of the master struggling with his death.
One can accuse this perspective of being pre- or post-Marxist. At any
rate, Marxism is only the disenchanted horizon of capital—all that
precedes or follows it is more radical than that.”
Faced
with such increasing uniformity and standardization in our world of
mass communication and mass consumption, we do not really have much
opportunity to express what is left of our individuality, our uniqueness
and for the exercise of freedom as a human being. Against the call of
the modern capitalist to produce value and meaning, he calls for their
extermination and annihilation through Mauss’s gift-exchange, Saussure’s anagrams and Freud’s concept of Thanatos. He
suggess that we should perhaps think of returning to the values of gift
exchange practiced in certain pre-modern societies as a new basis of
value to replace the dominant capitalist values of either utility values
or values of exchange of commodities through the use of money in the
economic market. He thought that the value of goods resides not just on
their utility and that goods have also non-material, psychological and
social value, as a symbol or a sign of wealth, of power, of generosity,
of fame, of reputation, prestige hence social status e.g. through
extravagance. In this book, he agrees with George Bataille’s
notion of a “general economy” where expenditure, waste, sacrifice and
destruction was said to be more fundamental to human life than economies
of production and utility. In a 1976 review of a volume of the Complete Works of George Bataille,
he writes: “The central idea is that the economy which governs our
societies results from a misappropriation of the fundamental human
principle, which is a solar principle of expenditure.” (1987 57). He thinks that by
nature, human beings gain pleasure from such things as expenditure,
waste, festivities, sacrifices etc. in which they are sovereign and free
to expend the excesses of their energy and that by contrast, the
capitalist imperatives of labor, utility and savings are by implication
unnatural and go against human nature
He thinks that instead of concentrating on taking, on production and on
the accumulation of wealth, we should concentrate more on giving, on
consumption and on dissipating what we have accumulated, like a
Rockefeller, a Carnegie, a Guggenheim, a Bill Gates, a Warren Buffet, a
Templeton, a Soros by giving gifts and donating to charities. Whilst
everyone has the capacity to spend some money to buys goods and give
gifts for its “display value” (witness the hot pursuit for “name
brands”), not everybody belongs to those categories of the billionaire
philanthropists mentioned. So he never repeated the suggestion again
after the 1980s. Thus “symbolic exchange” became the lynchpin of his
“revolutionary” alternative to capitalist values and practices. This
smells of Nietzsche’s morality of the master who create their own
values and their life articulates an excess, an overflow and
intensification of creative and erotic energies and a little like Rousseau’s
defence of the “natural sauvage”.. But he did not subsequently further
develop this idea..He has no theory of class or group revolt, or any
theory of political organization or strategy of the sort frequent in
1960’s France. To him, the individual in postmodern societies have
become so overpowered by consumer values, media ideologies and role
model are so seductive in the world of cyberspace that they have little
choice but to continue to live in the world of illusion and fantasy.
In
MP, he links his suggestion of symbolic exchange to the revolutionary
projects of his time eg. the revolts of the marginal groups like blacks,
women and gays, advocating difference over similarity, affirming their
own needs above those of the dominant society in everyday
life,concentrating on practices of everyday life,and lifestyles,
discourse, bodies, sexuality, communication to liberate the modern man
from social repression and domination rather than to engage in the big
class struggle, at the level of the factory or the state, resonating
with the micro-politics of Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari but unlike them, he does not advocate the unleashing of desire as the basis of radical politics which he later mocks in After Foucault (1977 E 1987).(“AF”) To Baudrillard,
May 1968 student movement was provoked by the realization that “we were
no longer productive” (SED 29) and that direct opposition within the
system of communication and exchange only reproduces the mechanisms of
the system itself. To him, strategically, capital can only be defeated
by introducing something inexchangeable into the symbolic order ie.
something having the irreversible function of natural death, which that
symbolic order excludes and renders invisible.The system simulates
natural death with fascinating images of violent death and catastrophe,
where death is the result of artificial processes and “accidents” but he
says “only the death function cannot be programmed and localized”
(SED 126) ie. Since death is the simple and irreversible finality of
Life, he calls for the development strategic experimentation with signs
and codes into “fatal strategies” to make the system suffer reversal and
collapse.However, these strategies must be carried out within the
system of the symbolic order (language/media), they are matters of
rhetoric and art or their hybrid and they also function as gifts or
sacrifices for which the system has no counter move or equivalence e.g. a
prime example of this strategy is the graffiti artist who experiment
with symbolic markings and codes to suggest communication while blocking
it, by signing their inscriptions with pseudonyms instead of
recognizable names: “They are seeking not to escape the combinatory in
order to regain an identity but to turn indeterminacy against the
system, to turn indeterminacy into extermination” (SED 78) However,
though he calls for a “cultural revolution and total revolution (MP
130), he never explicitly formulated any concrete revolutionary
programme or practice apart from suggesting, as noted, the use of urban
graffiti as a form of political resistance (SED 118). The only practice
that he can really recommend is total refusal, total negativity and the utopia of radical otherness (MP 130).
There is always a streak of the nihilism in Baudrillard’s
thinking. In an article in a journal On the Beach 6 Spring 1984 called
“On Nihilism”(“ON”), first delivered as a lecture in 1980, he wrote, “If
being nihilist is to privilege this point of inertia and the analysis
of this irreversibility of systems to the point of no return, then I am a
nihilist…If being nihilist is to be obsessed with the mode of
disappearance, and no longer with the mode of production, then I am a
nihilist. Disappearance, aphanisis, implosion, Fury of the Versschwindens” (ON 39). In this article, Baudrillard for the first time, characterized as” modern” the era of Marx, Freud,
the era in which politics, culture and social life were interpreted as
epiphenomena of the economy or emotional acts were interpreted in terms
of human desire or of the unconsciousness. To him, such explanations and
the so-called meaning they found are mere “hermeneutics of suspicion”
because they purported to use “depth” analysis to demystify “reality”
and to reveal the so-called “underlying realities” which lay behind
appearances and the forces that constituted such “facts” and were all
based on the dialectics of history, of the economy or of desire.
Modernity is to him, “the radical destruction of appearances, the
disenchantment of the world and its abandonment to the violence of
interpretation and history”. (ON 38). He wanted to start a
“second revolution, that of the twentieth century, of postmodernity,
which is the immense process of the destruction of meaning, equal to the
earlier destruction of appearances” and said that “ Whoever lives by
meaning dies by meaning.” (ON 38-39). To him, the postmodern world is
devoid of meaning: it is a universe of nihilism where theories float in a
void, unanchored in any secure harbor. Meaning requires depth, a hidden
dimension. But to Baudrillard, in postmodern society, everything
is “obscene”, visible, explicit, transparent and always in motion. In
the postmodern world, dead meanings and frozen forms mutate into new
permutations and combinations of the same in ever accelerating rhythms
by growing beyond their limits until they collapse from their own force
and their own vertigo and turn in upon on themselves,
implode and collapse back into inertia. But his nihilism is not the kind
of active nihilism posited by Nietzsche (The Will to Power 1967 17). It
is a nihilism without joy, without energy, without hope for a better
future. He says: “melancholy is the fundamental tonality of functional
systems, of the present systems of simulation, programming and
information. Melancholy is the quality inherent in the mode of
disappearance of meaning, in the mode of volatilization of meaning in
operational systems”(ON 39). To him, postmodernism is a response to
emptiness and anguish oriented toward “the restoration of a past
culture…to bring back all past cultures, to bring back everything that
one has destroyed,all that one has destroyed in joy and which one is
reconstructing in sadness in order to try to live, to survive. Really,
that is the tendency. But I hope it won’t finish there. I hope there is a
solution that is more original than that. For the moment, one really
doesn’t see it [Laughter]( Game with Vestiges” On the Beach 5
Winter 1984 19-25)(“GWV”) To him, in the sphere of art, every possible
artistic form and function has been exhausted. Theory too has exhausted
itself. Thus postmodernist society is “characteristic of a universe
where there are no more definition possible…It has all been done, The
extreme limit of these possibilities has been reached. It has destroyed
itself. It has deconstructed its entire universe. So all that are left
are pieces. All that remains to be done is to play with the pieces.
Playing with the pieces—that is postmodern.” (GWV 24)
analyzes images, signs, and how they relate to contemporary society
which he thinks has become a society of” hyperreality”. Following the
lead of Marshall McLuhan (The Medium is the Message),
he turned his attention from socio-economic analysis to the analysis of
how the form of mass media affects the form of human social relations
in the contemporary world, combining Saussurean semiotics and Maussian symbolic exchange.
To McLuhan,
in modern media, the relevant media themselves do not have any message
of their own (e.g a neon light ). Any message they contain are given
them by advertisers and people in control of their use. Of course, there
are all kinds of media forms e.g. print media like books, periodicals,
newspapers, journals, radio broadcasting relying on sound and music,
movies, television relying on both sight and sound diffusing news,
documentaries, films, all kinds of shows and spectacles. Now that we
have the internet, all kinds of transactions can be effected through it
via all sorts of I-phones, blackberries, I-pad, portable and desktop
computers. For information and advertising, we have all sorts of big and
small, indoor or outdoor electronic bill board screens. Technicially,
the media are onlytechnological instruments for the recording and
distribution or diffusion of information as mere “data” to be processed
electronically just so long as they comply with the rules laid down in
the code of their operation. To Baudrillard, it is the specific
forms of such rules which have come to limit, dominate and shape the way
we perceive and understand “reality, the way we “see” the world”, the
way we communicate with the world and with other people and hence the
way we build up or the way we fail to build up viable social and
affective relations with others. At a more profound level, owing to the
formation of habits from constant exposure and use of the relevant media
instruments even our unconscious psyches are unavoidably affected. One
of the characteristics of modernism is the use of instrumental reason
required by our technology which for purposes of economy of scale and
costs, must be uniform and standardized. Hence our lives are without our
even knowing of it getting more and more standardized too: we live in
more or less the same kind of houses, use more or less the same type of
domestic appliances, go to the more or less the same types of schools,
are drilled to learn more or less the same kind “knowledge”, wear more
or less the same kind of clothes, consume more or less the same kjnd of
food and drinks, move about by mass transit system or if not, by more or
less the same types of cars, have more or less the same of
“entertainment”etc. Owing to the growth of globalization, the world is
getting more and more alike in many ways.
the media or the signs affect us through the use of what he calls
“simulacra”. What is a simulacrum? Very briefly, a simulacrum, is a sign
or an image which is supposed to represent something else real, e.g a
map may represent a territory. He says, “The simulacrum is never that
which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is
none. The simulacrum is true.” But under the capitalist system, the
value of all commodities is represented by one common undifferentiated
instrument, a sign in a linguistic and economic system viz., money which
in our contemporary world is represented by certain other signs ie.
figures in our electronic bank statement, thus turning every signs into
something which can only be understood in terms of other types of signs,
with little or no reference to anything “real” ie. the physical goods
we can actually use and which are theoretically supposed to form the
source of the relevant value. Not only that, the object of our economy
is mindless “growth” and “development” ie. corporate profits, GDP’s,
measured in terms of money and for that purpose, we invent goods and
services which themselves have their origin in “illusions”i.e. Mickey
Mouse, Doraemon, Barbie, the” ideal” home, the ideal refrigerator, the
ideal air conditioners, the ideal TV, the ideal washing machine, the
ideal detergent, the ideal food, the ideal drink, ideal restaurant, the
ideal supermarket, ideal body shape, ideal clothes, ideal shoes, ideal
toothpaste,the ideal perfume and all other forms of cosmetics, the ideal
sports clubs,the ideal massage parlors, ideal games, the ideal holiday,
the ideal hotel, the ideal airline, the ideal school, ideal insurance,
ideal investment services, ideal baby, the ideal mates from the dating
or marriage service, ideal ...all of which have precious little to do
with “reality”. We now communicate with our colleagues, our friends, our
family through electronic text messages, emails, msn messengers, video
phone, all products of our ever changing technology, where everything is
reduced to and limited by the format of the instrument of communication
ie. a flat screen of varying size having only two dimensions,with
limits as to length of time, the form of the messages etc. or the flat
surface of the bill boards or electronic billboards. We now live in a
virtual world where words have become signs or symbols for other signs
and symbols, where space has taken over time, causation and history and
the where the visual images have largely superseded the written word. To
him, “Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being
or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origins
or reality: a hyperreal.” (Simulations1983). To Baudrillard,
hyperreality has become something which happens daily and which
encompasses every aspect of our lives: “ Today it is quotidian reality
in its entirety—political, social, historical and economic—that from now
on incorporates the simulatory dimension of hyperreality (Simulation
147). Thus Baudrillard argues that today the concept of “reality” has been negated. Nothing is what it appears to be.The
most spectacular examples of power of the sign or simulacra are the
spectacular collapse of Lehman Brothers and the collapse of World Trade
Centre in 911. To Baudrillard, the twin Towers of the World Trade Center, have replaced
a New York of constantly competing, distinct heights with a singular
model of the ultimate New York building: already doubled, already
reproduced, itself a reproduction, a singular model for all conceivable development. The
collapse of World Trade Centre stemmed from the terrorist acts of
certain Muslim fundamentalist motivated entirely by certain “religious”
and “political” beliefs , taking the WTC as symbols of evil American
power . What are beliefs if not mere ideas in people’s heads? Are they
real? Can their effects y be more real? But do such religious and
political beliefs bear any substantial and obvious causal relations to
what a modernist mind would regard as “reality”?
Lehman
Brothers collapsed because of the domino effect of its cash flow
problems owing to the collapse of a number of financial instruments,
themselves dependent on the success or failure of a number of other
financial instruments like other bonds, debentures, other investment
funds, insurances, forward contracts and the financial health of Lehman
Brothers are dependent on the continued success of all branches of its
investment business. The chain of causation and interdependence is so
complicated that its full effects nobody could work them out when the
relevant instruments were put on the market. Now the whole of the
American economy is affected and indirectly even China and Hong Kong. In
our world, what is represented is representation itself! It’s like
looking at ourselves in a hall of mirrors, where all we see are images
of images in other mirrors, all distorted in one way or another.
(1) the
development of nuclear weapons as deterrents—useful only in the
hyperreal sense, a reference with no real referent, since they are
always meant to be reproducible but are never intended to be used.
(2) a menage-a-trois
with identical twins where the fantasy comprises having perfection
reproduced in front of your eyes, though the reality behind this
reproduction is nil and impossible to comprehend otherwise, since the twins are still just people. The very act of perceiving these, Baudrillard insists, is confined to our touch, since we already assume the reproducibility of everything and since it is not the reality of these simulations that we imagine (in fact, we no longer "imagine" in the same sense as before; both the “imagined” and the “real” are equally “hyperreal”, both equally reproducible and already reproductions themselves), but the reproducibility thereof. We do not imagine them reproduced for us, since the original image is itself a reproduction—rather, we perceive the model and the simulation.
A specific analogy that Baudrillard uses is a fable derived from On Exactitude in Science by Jorge Luis Borges,
In it, a great Empire created a map that was so detailed it was as
large as the Empire itself. The actual map grew and decayed as the
Empire itself conquered or lost territory. When the Empire crumbled, all
that was left was the map. In Baudrillard's rendition, it is the
map that people live in, the simulation of reality, and it is reality
that is crumbling away from disuse.
Why does Baudrillard describe
the postmodern world hyperreal? In the postmodern media, boundaries between
information and entertainment, between images and politics have imploded.
TV news and documentaries have come to resemble more and more the form
of entertainment, using dramatic and melodramatic codes to frame their
stories and various talk shows utilize the format of news commentators
to disguise culture industry “hypes” as “facts” and “information and the
result has been called “infotainment” in which the traditional
boundaries between information and entertainment has broken down. And
the same thing is happening in our politics, where our politicians are
more concerned with their popularity ratings than the kind of things
that they actually do and where in political campaigns, image has become
more important than substance and election campaigns are more and more
dependent on media advisors, PR consultants and pollster have
transformed politics into image contests or sign struggles. Media
messages and semiurgy now saturates the social field, with meaning and
messages flattening each other out in a neutralized flow of information,
entertainment, advertising and politics. As a result, the masses have
become bored and apathetic and all messages and political solicitations
implode as if sucked in by a black hole. Thus all class distinctions,
political ideologies, cultural values and forms have collapsed and
imploded (SS). We are now living in a new era of simulation in which
computerization, information processing, media, cybernetic control
systems and models have become the organizing principle of production as
well as those of for the organization of our social life and are
passing from what he call a “metallurgic” to “semiurgic” society (SS
185). In this era, the signs have taken on a life of their own to
dominate us. “Radical semiurgy” describes the dramatic proliferation of
signs which come to dominate all social life .(SS 185). What appears on the TV screen or computer screen has come to affect people's actual lives and they are now putting into practice and feeling the kind of manipulated fantasies they see on the screen as if they were more real than what happens in their humdrum and standardized lives.
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