Baudrillard Reading: Packaging or ‘Explosion-Implosion’ of information dissolves meaning of communication

when signs mutate in a package

Noted French theorist Jean Baudrillard has come out with an extension of ‘explosion of technology’ that results to an implosion of a concept ‘global village’. Baudrillard prime notion of poststructurality or postmodernity rests on infinite implosion in, what he called, individual postmodern mirror that reflects the individual notion toward incessant explosion of information. He explained that we consume more products because of information. So his central logic was that we consume more and more information. Naturally consumption of more information is to be backed by more technological explosion. Here at this point Baudrillard has made a post-historic notion that the more information we consume the less meaning we derive from them, i.e. we consume less meaning but implode on the other hand. As information explodes meaning implodes. Baudrillard’s prime notion is that as information explodes it neutralizes itself or devours its own content.

Thus according to Baudrillard, explosion of information destroys communication and the social for two reasons:

(a) instead of causing communication, it exhausts itself in the act of staging the communication; instead of producing meaning it exhausts itself in the staging of meaning;

(b) the mass media, with its pressure of information, carries out an irresistible destruction of the social.

Consequently Baudrillard has designated this post-social condition as a continual brand-making process as he defines communication is an act that has a branded effect and must have a packaging, which on the other hand always transcends normal meaning making sense. He argues interestingly that this is not sufficient telling that packaging has beome more important than the product in an age of image making or information of packaging deletes the meaning. Meaning has rather been corrupted that again corrupts the whole description of the social. He calls this phase ‘catastrophe of meaning’ and no resolution or revolution is possible to overcome this ‘catastrophe’.

So beyond this catastrophe individual ‘fascination’ exists that comes from the neutralization of information and implosion of meaning and everything becomes reduced to titilation, obscenity and pornography. So individualist human has the sole option to describe its privileged self and offers a sense of explosion to the extent what he can explain up to. Beyond that variety exists in the world.

Simulation & mutation of signs:

Baudrillard however at this point has re-discovered a world where individual is in all sense independent while producing meaning and reproducing the code. He designates this transcendent re-codification as simulation where signs have been mutated [means subsequent phases do not replace previous phases; they contain and add to them] to satisfy phasal representations. He interestingly observes that ‘we don’t want nature: we want parks; we don’t value living as much as the health which can be bought; we don’t want foreign culture: we want Disneyland; Indians of the west don’t want indigenous culture: they want Durga Puja. He thus has made a history of signs mutated in three phases:

(a) counterfeit: dominant in the era of renaissance and industrial revolution and still evident today. The first order of the sign is the counterfeit that represents a meaning arbitrarily. Counterfeits enforced class structures and fake status symbols. Advertisement of ‘Nano’-car transmits its class referent, that lets the user remind that he/she does not belong to the class but the class that pays the price.

(b) production: was the dominant scheme of industrial era. It represents the second order of the sign that represents economic prosperity and cultural progress of the social is, according to Baudrillard, is industrial purpose of the sign. Dominant social always signifies such second order meaning of signs in its favour, like, ‘Nano’ reminds audience of the gifts of industrialization.

(c) simulation: this is the contemporary mutation of signs. Baudrillard’s notion to simulation is the postmodern sign that no longer represents or signifies any class or social reality despite reality occurs in everyday life. The sign in simulation signifies the hyper-relations between the market and individualist consumer. In this phase consumer or audience [individualist] thinks that he/she is the sender of the message and the sign appears not as a message but a feedback to the consumer’s message [fascinated desire]. They individually start thinking that for them the sign is created. For them mediation occurs and they have the individual power to control the sign and its meaning.

Thus audience [consumer as Baudrillard termed deliberately replacing sender, communicator, people etc.] consume more information but less meaning and implode to establish individual choice or fascination. Thus making own individuality as a free agent consumer simulates the meaning through implosion of media contents. Naturally media specially ‘Television’ becomes the real world that enters into the life and life enters into the television.

While analyzing extensively, Ernest A Hakanen lets Baudrillard’s view become expressed in his own words: “In such a system the old Marxist commodity is queer and trivial. The new media consumer doesn’t fall victim to commodification. This notion might be liberating, but it is not. We fall for meaningless image. But then again, it works for what we have become. The arbitrariness of images and signs further releases us from being right, wrong, good, bad, true, false etc. We live in a world in which advertisements do not have to show the product. This is evidence not only that we buy the signs, but more so that we do not attach meaning to our philosophized world...Alas our individuality, always in the spotlight, is that and only that, in the spotlight. The spotlight functionalizes human being. The social limits of the spotlight and playing to the spotlight are the individual. The social framework and its communicative action are the self. There is no freedom beyond this activity. We are proletariatized regardless of class, a function of spectacle”.

Let’s conclude the poststructurality and beyond it of communication or mediation with Baudrillard’s own observation [In the shadow or the silent majorities] of what we are:

“an insoluble ‘double bind’ like children face to face with an adult universe. They are summoned to behave like autonomous subjects, responsible, free, and conscious, and as submissive object, inert, obedient, and conforming. The child resists on all levels, and to a contradictory demand he/she also responds with a double strategy. To demand to be an object, he/she opposes all the practices of disobedience, revolt, emancipation; in short a total claim to subjecthood. To demand to be a subject, he opposes just as stubbornly and efficaciously with an objects’s resistance, that is to say, in exactly the opposite manner: infantilism, hyperconformity, a total dependence, passivity, idiocy” (Baudrillard: The system of Objects).