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Jean
Baudrillard
In The Shadow Of The Silent Majorities
Translated by Paul Foss, John Johnston, Paul Patton and Andrew Berardini
Introduction by Sylvère Lotringer
The masses aren’t
the social. They absorb all the social energy, but no longer
refract it.
They absorb every sign and every meaning, but no longer reflect
them. They never participate. They are the reversion
of any social and of any socialism. They wander through meaning,
politics, representation, history, ideology, with a somnambulent
strength of denial. Indeed the only phenomenon that may be
in a relation of affinity with it, is terrorism. Contemporary
terrorism aims at the social in response to the terrorism of
the social. |
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Published one year after Forget Foucault,
In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (1983 ; originally
published in French in 1978) challenges political representation,
mediation and dialectics. It probably is the most important
socio-political manifesto of the 20th century (parallel to The
Communist Manifesto), because it brought both sociology and
politics to rest. Disenfranchized revolutionaries (Red Brigades,
Baader-Meinhof) hoped to reach them directly through spectacular
actions, but their message merely played in to the hands of the
media and the State. In a media society meaning has no meaning
anymore, communication merely communicates itself. Ironically,
sociologist Jean Baudrillard uses this last outburst of ideological
terrorism in Europe to showcase the end of the ‘social.’ Once
invoked by Marx as the motor of history, the masses have no more
sociological ‘reality.’ In the electronic media society,
all the masses can do is merely enjoy the spectacle ; they
actively resist any meaning and any injunction by their inherent
inertia. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities takes
to its ultimate conclusion the ‘end of ideologies’ experienced
in Europe after the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the demise of
revolutionary illusions after May 1968. Ideological terrorism doesn’t
represent anything anymore, not even itself. It is just the last
hysterical reaction to discredited political illusions.
Outlaw sociologist and philosopher, Jean Baudrillard is one of the
most provocative and renowned contemporary social theorist. His
books include Fatal Strategies, The Conspiracy of Art,
and Utopia Deferred. |
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