Role of Media as an agent of Social Change

Prof. Swapna Mukherjee Memorial Lecture

Women’s College, Kolkata

29th November, 2011

The subject, assigned to me, deliberately affirms the contemporary media operation toward a definite social change. The referent or external area of the subject i.e. ‘social’ or precisely ‘social change’ assures multi-dimensional emergence of facets in our ‘social’ lives caused chiefly by the media operation or at least defined in such a manner. If we watch the revolutionary upsurge in Egypt and other neighbouring West Asian nations, a very popular note still reigns in popular psyche almost a ruling that the Facebook posts of someone Asma Mahfooz initiated the upsurge. Whatever the actual base would be, this very popular notion hits the global attention quite easily through popular mediation. So what we see here that the notion mediated becomes more catchy attractive and reduced than the actual upsurge and many such parallel reasons or connotations. And this very catchy, attractive and reduced notion becomes a slogan in popular media, which beyond proper reasoning have made it a ‘public opinion’. It now makes you believe that the Facebook posts by Lady Mahfooz created the upsurge that ended the 30 years of tyranny and dictatorship in Egypt. It appears like a headline of a news story which often in most cases comes down to be arbitrarily produced by the journalists according to his/her house policy than readers’ choice. Here my point is by any means not to establish the absurd ‘readers’ choice’, but the journalists’ policy that is not also one of readers’ very own. So making of social or social change happens and you expect me to tell you the story of how assuredly media do this change. I will tell you the story accordingly.

Before moving into details of the stories let me ask you a very old and unpopular question; what do media do to its people? Denis McQuail has quite interestingly identified some categories of functioning that media perpetrate for its audience. These are:

(i) media exert power and inequality;

(ii) national integration;

(iii) social change;

(iv) controlling mass;

You can now safely remove the tag of ‘national integration’ from all global media houses operating in India. Gone are those days of public service broadcasting with Akashbani and Doordarshan and ‘Mile Sur Mera Tumhara’. Media at that time at least for a decade until 1990 never worked as an ‘agent’ but its being was well acclaimed as a developmental tool for Indian people.

Media as an agent…

Do we really have an idea of our media to be acting as an agent? What does an agent do specially to its society or social? Does this ‘agent identity of media’ mean everything but responsibility? Commonly a human or an institutional agent looks after everything professionally without having any emotional, ideological, or cultural attachment to the society or institution. Cultural Anthropology defines ‘agent’ as a concept related mostly to the power…deployed between individual and social structures…act for power. 

Did we mean such a functioning of media? Your subject then clearly suggests that mass media perpetrates the social change as just an agent not as a pillar of democracy or your very own and old friend as fourth estate or watch dog. Why the media is to be treated as a confirmed agent of social change…for its affirmed freedom? 

As and when we try to build an appropriate understanding with media in terms of its operation in our region or national territory, it always becomes our sacred duty to affirm the freedom of media, educating value of media, as an instrument of making public opinion, our agenda-setter, and our cultivator. Do we have any space remaining to accept media in other way as our very own? Do we nevertheless see media from public sphere? 

We do always better to portray our past relationship with media which commonly describes a very social relationship with our own mass media, sometimes as a family member. But difficulty arises when it comes to the contemporary media operation. If media acts as an agent, we have a functional relationship with it, may be a needful relationship. Now for a needful and empowered media it is subsequently very easy to organize any form of social change as it anyway appears to be more powerful, authoritative, and maker of popular opinion. Objectivity of news is now an index of not just mere social credibility but a commercial credential of every media house for simply to sustain as a corporate identity to its political and corporate authority. 

It is however very difficult to judge whether media or popular media act as a social agent although a mass consent would affirm every media house as an empowered corporate body that produces news story and other contents for its targeted audience or consumers to earn and maximize profit. Some quotes may however endorse my point:

(i) We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective.

— Michael Eisner, CEO, The Walt Disney Co., (Internal Memo). Quoted from Mickey Mouse Monopoly-Disney, Childhood & Corporate Power

(ii) We are here to serve advertisers. That is our raison d'etre.

— the C.E.O. of Westinghouse(CBS), Advertising Age, February 3, 97

I can also recall a very interesting quote a media representative on a television channel during 2006 Cricket World Cup: We don’t serve people; we only have a professional relationship with the advertisers to run the programme for revenue.

You may safely differ and rule out my opinion. You may even conform to the notion that media do much to us as an agent and we do not expect media doing something more than this. This is the way to initiate critical media studies and debate on operational philosophy of the contemporary media.

Social Change…

Now what do we mean by social change? Is it something related to the social transformation? In media and cultural studies, we have two types of social change:

(i) major or macro social change that often appears to be revolutionary, as earlier seen in socialist revolutions; but recently in 

(a) Egypt and other West Asian nations including newly born South Sudan;

(b) Obama’s win over many traditional rifts and questions within US territory;

(c) significant socio-political change in many Latin American countries, like, Brazil, Nicaragua, Uruguay;

(d) demolition of Iraq and Afghanistan in the name and tag-line of liberation; and 

(e) live telecast of Gulf War;

(f) massive religious upsurge;

(g) ethnic and subaltern political outbursts as seen in UP and many other Indian states etc. 

(h) information revolution through social networking sites and media; complete dissolution of information, its institutional base, and the notion of public opinion; as we can count people voting on an opinion and hardly sustain.

(ii) minor or micro social change that appears to be quite subtle but can exert enough power to change the existing social order. Minor social changes often deal with ethnicity, individuality, social and cultural categories like, languages, emotions, conventions, rituals, hierarchies, deliberate praxis, exterior and interior behavioural expressions, milestones, traffic signals and all possible mundane exercises that affect life.

Mass media through programmes like mega soap operas, reality shows, news bulletins put a control over the above minor but significant categories that subtly cause a social change. Media were however also directly involved in disclosure of Watergate scam in late 70s, Jessica Lall murder case some years back and many such issues of investigation.

How do media perpetrate social change…

It is now quite interesting to watch that media mostly deal with all minor categories of social change to influence its audience except in some regional cases where media are seen quite polarized to a specific political stance. 

In all repetitive contents, like, news bulletins, mega soap operas, newer reality shows media while reiterating selective social categories cultivate its audience to change the behaviour in the long run. Noted communication theorist George Gerbner stated that “television acts as a ‘socializing agent’ that educates viewers on a separate version of reality. The concrete base behind the cultivation theory states that viewers tend to have more faith in the television version of reality the more they watch television. ‘Television world dramatically overemphasizes the prevalence of law enforcement jobs in the real world (Chandler).

So if now the cultivation power of media is instrumental to how media perpetrate social change, it involves certain procedural aspects or features media usually perform. It should also be noted at the same time that now we are not talking about the traditional developing agenda of mass media as a state machinery or organ. We are now in a situation where media conglomerates control the global media operation from phone tapping to providing necessary political backing. In such a situation all pervasive media operation leaves a very scant space for people’s participation in public sphere.

From the initial phase of global media operation with the collapse of Soviet Union people had an opportunity to observe the live media operation in the first Gulf War in 1990. Noted media theorist Douglas Kellner rediscovered the whole story behind the war declaration. US’s foremost official channel CNN publicizing two satellite photographs claimed that an ‘amass of 100,000 Iraqi soldiers gathered at the Qatar border. President George Bush in no further delay declared the deadliest war against Iraq. Later within two months it was further discovered that the yellow stretch was actually a line of sand bags and other materials delimitating the Iraq-Qatar border. An unprecedented social change comprising not only the destruction of a nation and huge public property but an afresh reach of global media through it also.

Media however, as analyzed so far, perform certain chronologically structured functions for every genre of its contents or programmes. US media theorists though found media audience very much willing to accept all media operations, have nevertheless restructured all aspects of media effect toward both major and minor social change. These are: 

(i) Priming: propagating before context;

(ii) Framing: how to prepare the message capsule;

(iii) Agenda Setting: short term media effect on both individual and mass audience; media set people’s agenda;

(iv) Media Cultivate: media in the long run change audience’s behaviour and ideology;

And in this manner media perform its duty to change the socio-political or socio-economic order.

Media spectacle and package…

But things are gradually becoming very complicated in the contemporary global mediation. With the growth of mediation and the globalization of media mass consumption of media contents is becoming the social order that has outlined the traditional notion of development. Today’s world and region receive mediational development much before territorial development. They receive advertisement of a product much before the produced one. Most of our population even does not have that opportunity to see the product for buying although they have enough exposure through popular media. But all industrial attentions converge to the centre of capital accumulation thus marginalizing peripheries and thus creating a havoc social change in favour of affordability and affluent exposure.

Media contents, i.e. advertisements, news, reality shows, mega soaps have gradually become distinct packages that broadcast everything but the truth of the product-message. A massive fictionalization of all above contents moves beyond the common head and judgements. Noted French theorist Jean Baudrillard comments interestingly: media practices have rearranged our senses of place and time. Television is the real world; television is dissolved into life and life is dissolved into television. The fiction is realized and the real becomes fiction…no freedom beyond this activity. We are proletariatized regardless of class, a function of the spectacle.

Deterritorialization of Culture

This newer term corresponds to a newer cultural space [chiefly under western and also in developing countries’ industrialization strategies] that has been created because of deterritorialization of traditional cultural spaces. It even appears to be mandatory along with the natural institutional growth toward modernization. According to Garcia Canclini, this notion refers to ‘the loss of the natural relation between culture with geographic and social territory [including] relocalizations of new and old forms of symbolic production’. Basically with the industrial [technological] modernization, random inflow of popular cultural elements and forms are deterritorializing traditional cultural spaces and releasing cultural signs from any fixed time and space. Noted analyst James Lull has stated that ‘deterritorialization is the [partial] disintegration of human and symbolic constellations and patterns... it is a consequence of the cultural disjuncture... it is one indication of the cultural change that the disjunctures stimulate’.

But theorists interestingly while further deriving the term ‘deterritorialization’ have time and again exemplified the migration of third world people into ‘more developed’ specially western territories. Naturally this migration causes severe uprooting of the traditional cultural base and major disruption of its valuation that compulsively drives individuals to adapt desirably [or undesirably] new cultural base elements for leading a better cultural life. Prof. Lull exemplified this kind of deterritorialization that the African and Asian slave trade in colonial North America, Brazil, and the Carribbean countries ago...and illegal immigrant Mexican farm workers in United States’. In India also such migrations [though within the national territory but in such a vast location, migration often results in the transportation of individual belongings more than 2000 kilometers from one part to another corner of the country] had been a major occurrence always, both in its colonial and post colonial times, from less developed areas to the bit more affluent places. But theorists like Canclini, Lull in this context do not usually accept any definition of newer cultural codification as they desire to identify this phenomenon as quite natural and inevitable as well. They leave it as purely a ‘human matter’.

But the deterritorialization of culture howsoever occurs in human mind, under any circumstance, through only physical migration from any kind of ‘less to affluent’, this theoretical proposition has been reduced to an idealized end that ‘culture never dies, even in conditions of orchestrated repression’. But this is also an open ended conclusion that people from most of the developing countries, while migrating to a better place for enhanced living, invariably opt out the root cultural praxis to make room for adopting better cultural elements and newer praxis. Only thing may be left alive that people would perform some codes of their root cultural practices superficially that would never percolate to the next generations, e.g., organizing Durga Puja festival by the non resident Bengalee people. This global festival is performed quite differently across regions and settlements outside Bengal keeping the rituals almost unchanged. Here this festival can’t make a course of life along with other popular codifications of that region. Baudrillard once very interestingly quoted that ‘we don’t want nature, we want parks; we similarly don’t want exact course of religion but the Durga Puja as festival only. So it is quite naturally discursive and so deterritorialized. We can also argue that a person migrating more than thousand miles for, say, knitting cut piece cloths from far east of India to the farthest west, say, Gujarat, this migration definitely would cause a severe damage to the cultural practices as the person would have to adopt newer cultural praxis as common or essential cultural interfaces and of course along with some superficial ethno-religious practices, what Lull has nucleated as complete root ‘culture’. In terms of social mediation this phenomenon, across traditional class limitations, in the long term would definitely affect individual’s ideology toward his own life pattern. Therefore he has become completely deterritorialized.

Arjun Appadurai argues in this context, ‘...deterritorialization...sometimes...creates exaggerated and intensified senses of criticism or attachment to politics in the home state. Deterritorialization, whether of Hindus, Sikhs, Palestinians, or Ukranians, is now at the core of a variety of global fundamentalisms, Islamic and Hindu fundamentalism...’. But this example does not ensure common people’s disorientation toward such, if we at all say fundamentalism in general, because apart from fanatic religious outbreaks, or counter political outbreaks, fundamentalist principles, even after killing innocent mass, still comfortably exist both peripheries in common psyche of general people who do not at all participate in any such practices.

Thus deterritorialization analysis must accept the theoretical process of discourse analysis so that the signification of ‘deterritorialization’, ‘fundamentalism’, ‘symbolic power’ and many other terms can be perpetrated and understood appropriately. However deterritorialization of culture should not claim any importance in a determinate cultural space because ‘class’ analysis even can perform here better than deterritorialization. But on the other hand such deterritorialization motion can well initiate an important debate on globalization of culture. It is not really the postmodernism in the alternative or any such related elitist theories what can rescue popular culture from being either dominated by the nationalist force or transcorporate ‘global’ force. The prime question here to be raised is the people’s struggle and the resultant cultural practice which is completely independent of any given format. If it is political or cultural it would then initiate ideology, as Hall argues, ‘ideology can no longer be seen as a dependent variable, a mere reflection of a pre-given reality in the mind. Nor are its outcomes predictable by derivation from some simple determinist logic. They depend on the balance of forces in a historical conjuncture: on the politics of signification...’.

Popular Culture as Postmodern Culture: I Shop Therefore I Am

The Film Run Lola Run: Life on a crossroad

Popular culture is being widely defined in recent years in terms of postmodernity incidentally by the urban civil identities of many ambitious third world nations precisely Indian social centres. With the adventurous growth of global mediation the gross definition of popular ‘social’ culture has evidently been fragmented into certain inter-temporal but globalist symbolic cultural artifacts as newer codifications of life patterns. The postmodernity of culture in a certain periphery is therefore guided by an imposition of those symbolic globalist cultural artifacts on the locally operative cultural space. Postmodernity can thus be worked out as a post-theoretical condition that overrules traditional cultural contours i.e. ruling culture, deviant culture, oppositional culture and even grossly the popular culture. It also transcends all kinds of traditional social and cultural identity demarcations, like authentic culture, suite culture, street culture, commercial culture etc. But alongside the known elements of regional popular culture one must have a clear idea about what is postmodernism or postmodernity and its association with the popular or contemporary culture.

Immediately after the second world war lots of research works were organized in the United States that challenged all moots of traditional modernist development of society, literature, and of course the popular culture. Number of theorists has worked so far on postmodernism and postmodern culture, notably Fredric Jameson, Jean Francois Lyotard et.al. towards a definable, notional release of individual identity from all possible social and political dominations.

Defining Postmodernity

However Jean Francois Lyotard in his “The condition of postmodernity” (1979, translated in English, 1984) has defined postmodern condition as, ‘a crisis in the status of knowledge in western societies’ that overrule all metanarrative apparatus of legitimation, rejecting all totalizing frameworks from telling universalist stories (metanarratives), Marxism, Liberalism, Christianity etc. [Storey, 2001]. Postmodernism according to Lyotard thus rejects all such metanarratives used to dominate, homogenize other voices, opinions, discourses, and other forms of plurality in the name of universal principles. In postmodern condition, heterogeneity or plurality thus rules over the universality and homogeneity of narratives i.e. values, ‘ism’s, ‘logy’s etc.

The annulations of metanarratives as grand narratives in postmodernity however reveals something more than what is commonly understood in terms of the fragmentation of grand narrative. Postmodernity unlike the French Poststructurality here prescribes a plausible post-semiotic outcome of every such critique of the modernist references. This is the most problematic and viscid area of the understanding of postmodernity anywhere other than literary creations. Postmodernity cannot rest in a poststructural indeterminacy but needs a postcommercial or hyperreal space to render the mediated form of the signified of a text.

Lyotard argues that all aspects of modern societies depend on such metanarratives as grand narratives. The basic tenets of postmodernity therefore reveals that every attempt to create an “order” always calls for an alternative creation of a “disorder,” of an equal dimension, but a “grand narrative” shadows such constructive disorders. Postmodernism while rejecting such metanarratives as grand narratives, welcomes thus “micro-narratives,” micro-stories that explain individual praxis, events, rather than Universalist or globalist concepts. Postmodern “micro-narratives” are always situational, provisional, contingent, and temporary, making no claim to universality, truth, reason, or stability (Sarup).

In terms of ‘post-codification’ postmodernity can be quite well differentiated from ‘cultural studies’ though both deal with individuality and its cultural developments. Individuality, in cultural studies, largely takes the form of a counter-hegemonic to the modernist institutional legacy of domination but does not ignore the possibility of political unification of the mass. Their counter-hegemony though rejects structural metanarratives or grand narratives, involves a greater installation of plurality in popular cultural praxis. 

But postmodernity on the other hand not only rejects Universalist metanarratives but gives also a plausible and at the same time quite utopian end of a ‘disorder’ wherein reality, according to them, may occasionally exist. The counter hegemonic individual does not prefer postmodern ‘disorderly chaos’ that needs support of hyperreal ‘postconsumerism’ to establish itself. Cultural studies inherits ‘ideology’ independent of any political metanarrative, say, ‘base and superstructure’ but indeed political and further directs people to organize struggle.

Genealogy of postmodernity

While tracing out the genealogy of postmodernist thought one must rediscover and redefine the course of historicism that tells us outright development of modernism along with massive optimistic development of science and of course social science. ‘Modernist thought had its successful origins and developments in the European Enlightenment period. This era was sharply demarcated by a celebration of the liberating potentials of the social sciences, the materialistic gains of capitalism, new forms of rational thought, due process safeguards, abstract rights applicable to all, and the individual it was a time of great optimism (Milovanovic, 1992a, 1994a; Dews, 1987; Sarup, 1989; Lyotard, 1984; Baker, 1993).

Postmodernists are fundamentally opposed to such modernist thought. Sensitized by the insights of some of the classical thinkers, ranging from Marx, to Weber, to Durkheim, Freud, and the critical thought of the Frankfurt School, postmodernist thought emerged with a new intensity in the late 1980s and early 1990s. “Let us wage a war on totality” stated one of its key exponents (Lyotard, 1984: 82). Most of the key concepts of modernist thought were critically examined and found to be wanting. Entrenched bureaucratic powers, monopolies, the manipulative advertisement industry, dominant and totalizing discourses, and the ideology of the legal apparatus were seen as exerting repressive powers. In fact, the notion of the individual free, self-determining, reflective, and the center of activity was seen as an ideological construction, nowhere more apparent than in the notion of the juridical subject, the so-called reasonable man in law. Rather than the notion of the individual, the centered subject, the postmodernists were to advocate the notion of the decentered subject’ (Dragan Milovanovic).

Baudrillard on postmodernity

According to one of the most vibrant theorists of poststructurality, Jean Baudrillard, postmodernity is not simply a culture of sign, rather it is a culture of ‘simulacrum’, i.e., introspective identical copy that transcending the original text determinacy, on what Walter Benjamin has reiterated that, mechanical reproduction has destroyed the ‘aura’ of the work of art. Baudrillard’s notion was the long drawn distinctions between original and the copy has now been virtually destroyed, and so the geo-social space and the relative metanarratives. This, according to Baudrillard, is the simulation process. Basically, as simulation is expressed, all the recorded contents, like film, music, are nothing but a copy without the original. John Storey has added that a film is a construction made from editing together film footage shots in different times and spaces. Baudrillard’s simulation is the hyperreal regeneration of a reality text in absense of its original identity and hyperrealism is the characteristic mode of postmodernity, where in its realm the distinction between simulation and the ‘real’ implodes in which real and imaginary gradually collapse into each other (Storey, 2001). Also in this way French poststructuralism merged into the conditions postmodernity. What is still important here is to note that, according to Baudrillard, simulation is getting more and more real than the real. It can perform even better than what the real does. This is also where media operate so powerfully, because it leads people to simulate the real more importantly than the event. So even been badly defeated in Vietnam war in Sixties, American film industry could still manage to let the simulation alive in favour of US Army in number of Hollywood productions over years.

Baudrillard then made simulation analyses forward to rediscover ‘Disneyland’ that justified postmodern culture quite effectively but left a great utopian space activated also. In his words, ‘...Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the society in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real’.

Another one of the most influencial analysts of postmodernity, Fredric Jameson, in his Postmodernism and Consumer Society, has pointed out postmodernity as a condition where the erosion occurred in the older distinctions between high culture and mass culture or popular culture. Thus postmodernity transcends the traditional vested interest that has been preserved in the realm of high culture. According to Jameson in the realm of moderity [high modernity] popular culture has been brutally influenced institutionally toward high cultural praxis. Postmodernism according to Jameson, breaks any particularity or form of popular culture. It thus releases all popularly emerged texts from traditional or conventional motivation and pressure. Jameson argues these cultural texts as a ‘periodizing concept’ and is dominant in the neo-liberal economic and cultural paradigm what he has termed ‘postmodernism: the cultural logic of late capitalism’ that connotes neo-liberal transnational development of capitalism in the contemporary age of globalization. In this context Ernest Mandel’s trial of three stages of development of capitalism is to be considered: ‘market capitalism’, ‘monopoly capitalism’, ‘late or multinational or transnational capitalism’. Jameson while referring these stages of capitalist development into his cultural schema ‘Realism’, ‘modernism’ and ‘postmodernism’, argues that capitalism in its last category puts forward the purest form of capital into the uncommodified areas (Storey, 2001).

The question of historical transformation toward postmodernity:

Now to reach the core of such transformation of historical periods either from market to transnational orientation of capitalist development or from cultural ‘realism’ to ‘postmodernism’ a plausible alternative schema is needed other than typical historical metanarratives. Here in this context postmodernism differs sharply from cultural studies. Even though traditionally empowered historical metanarratives are being rejected by both postmodernism and cultural studies, there is a major difference between these rejections. For Raymond Williams the transformation of historical periods does not entail complete structural destruction of previous cultural codes and installation of a new one. It simply may cause a paradigmatic shift of ‘relative cultural codes’ that may involve a massive transformation of ruling of popular culture what we can denote different phases of dominant codes. Jameson in this context argues that postmodern condition is basically ‘the cultural dominant’ of late or transnational or neo-liberal [economic] capitalism that along with the free movement of capital delimiting newer cultural boundaries across national borders, calls for emancipation of cultural texts welcomes indeterminacy which is independent of its traditional signification process. But what is still worth mentioning about Jameson’s notion in this context is that postmodern dominant culture belongs to the western capitalist societies which have achieved hierarchy in both economic and popular cultural praxis, otherwise postmodernism and postmodern culture has also been characterized in many ways, such as, ‘Pastiche culture’, ‘culture of quotations’, culture of flatness or depthlessness, superficial in most literate sense, i.e. free from meaning etc. However, according to Jameson, postmodernity or postmodern culture is hopelessly a commercial culture typically promotes consumerist capitalism.

Poststructuralist Communication: Dissolution of Communicative Space in Hypercommerciality of Media

when traditional signification of communication dissolves...

Noted Philosopher Jacques Derrida in his redefinition of communication argues,“...Is it certain that there corresponds to the word communication a unique, univocal concept, a concept that can be rigorously grasped and transmitted: a communicable concept? Following a strange figure of discourse, one first must ask whether the word or signifier “communication” communicates a determined content, an identifiable meaning, a describable value. But in order to articulate and to propose this question, I already had to anticipate the meaning of the word communication: I have had to predetermine communication as the vehicle, transport, or site of passage of a meaning, and of a meaning that is one. If communication had several meanings, and if this plurality could not be reduced, then from the outset it would not be justified to define communication itself as the transmission of a meaning, assuming that we are capable of understanding one another as concerns each of these words (transmission, meaning, etc.). Now, the word communication, which nothing initially authorizes us to overlook as a word, and to impoverish as a polysemic word, opens a semantic field which precisely is not limited to semantics, semiotics, and even less to linguistics”.

In this way poststructuralist theorists like Michael Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard et. al. have established infinite meanings can be produced and transmitted where no specific meaning is possibly achieved in communication of a message that may appear in any form. If the expectation or claim to have a definite or determinate meaning of a message is withdrawn from any level of social practices or if the concept of plurality can be extended to infinitely operative extent, communication then may achieve its highest possible limit of expansion. Thus structurality in communication or mass communication is, according the poststructuralists, is outright a superfluous issue to be discussed. Before to go into the deeper analysis on it, we must establish the basic tenets of poststructuralism:

In late 60s’ France, the notion of poststructuralism was to provide absolute emancipation of redears or recipients of the ‘Text’. The prime theoretical assumption was that recipients of a text in any form have the feel of emancipation to evaluate. The basic tenets can be articulated in the following ways:

(a) The Primacy of Theory

(b) The decentering of the subject

(c) The fundamental importance of the reader;

i.e. a text can be evaluated in infinite ways to get the meaning which a particular reader desires to achieve in terms of his / her cognitive attachment to that. According to Derrida, there is no particular structure of theorization involved to enrich the recipient with maximum possible output derived. Derrida has significantly pointed out that communicating a message doesn’t lead to the transmission of signification. Signification depends on the recipient of that message. In this way Derrida has discarded any possibility of convention or rule which may influence the signification. Only cultural aspiration of an individual recipient is needed which may reiterate any prior way of describing any similar kind of ‘text’. That is the reason why, according to Derrida, a novel / text has infinite opportunities to get read and followed even long after the death of the creator / communicator. Derrida even has discarded the option to describe or characterize a sign and even message as impoversihed to be ‘polysemic’. He has completely rejected any ideation of structuralist mode of cultural aspiration from the recipient’s end. Thus he has recommended complete dissolution of structures and ultimate liberalization of ‘text’ from any structural domination, even that be societal or cultural. He has pointed out certain distinctive features and non-features of communication. These are:

 Communication can never be definitive or determinate and uni-dimensional word to conceive any determinate meaning.

 Signifier cannot communicate any determinate or planned meaning; so communication cannot transmit any determinate meaning.

 So communication should not be defined only as the process of transmission of meaning.

 Communication is not dependent on semiosis or semio-linguistics. It rather depends on multi-dimensional use general or colloquial language which transcends traditional semiosis and semio-linguistics.

 Communication can be performed in even two different cultural contexts and perspectives and moreover in the cases of language differentiation, communication conveys no specific signification.

 So communication reveals or recognizes no semantic meaning or relationship between signs, i.e. a word cannot express any determinate meaning.

 Literal and specific meaning are the major sources of problems in the contemporary world.

 Conventional context is really a vague structure, but often used in communication analysis.

 Convention doesn’t exist; this is just the reiteration of the subject. Consensus may be achieved through continuous discussion.

 No suitable context can be produced for transmission of message, because what elements needed to produce a context are absolutely indeterminate “...are the prerequisites of a context ever absolutely determinable?”

 In written communication, the writer starts writing 

(a) when he / she intends to communicate something.

because (b) he / she represents his own idea.

(c) this representation becomes signified conveying his ideas.

(d) he / she can communicate well and through his writings, communicates incessantly to someone of the same grade. In this discourse he discovers writing as means of communication.

(e) As the process is continuous, it cannot produce any structure or meaning.

 The communicator can communicate the same subject through [non-verbal] gestures and postures.

 In written communication the recipient or addressee always remains absent. 

 Again even in absense of the communicator the message would be reproduced several times.

 Anyone can say that when I write the addressee is absent. Wouldn’t it represent the distance, belated, or any alternative idea?

 If this absense is the death of the addressee what then remain are the communicator and the writing. Even if everything is stopped the writer / communicator will go on writing. This process can only produce codes and is highly communicable even if the addressee or referent is absent.

 It is to be noted that this absense not only indicates a ‘continuous modification of presence’ but a departation or a complete alienation which deserves the possibility of deadly absense, i.e., while writing a creator transcends even the deadly absense of the addressee.

 Every context is thus a code, which rejects any possibility of conventional code or context.

 Like the absense of addressee, it is applicable for the addresser or communicator also, i.e., immediate after the transmission of message communicator also remains deadly absent. And the message is stored in a machine and can be reproduced ‘n’ times for which presence of the addresser is not required.

 So the absence of the addresser can be justified from practical outlook under following considerations:

(a) absense from conveying meaning or signification;

(b) absense of the intention to signify;

(c) absense from wanting to communicate;

 So it is evident that during communication both addresser and addressee remain totally absent.

 As it is already mentioned that signifier and signified are not at all existent excepting some inferior amount of presence which create crisis of meaning.

because, (a) communicator may manipulate the signs;

 Communication doesn’t have any specific signification.

 some message may possess some meanings but referent is not specific:

[Circle is a square]

the message signifies but the referent is absent.

 There are some messages which signify nothing. This can be called agrammaticality. These are:

[Abracadabra]

[Hocas Focas Gilli Gilli Gay]

These are all agrammatical and can only be justified by ‘Teleology’.

Jean Baudrillard:

Another French theorist Jean Baudrillard has also done seminal work on poststructural approach of communication.

 McLuhun conceptualized the revolution of technology would also explode geo-existence of human being. In this discourse he postulated the concept of ‘global village’. With the explosion of geo-social identity, ‘local’ becomes smaller and tend to be personal toward the implosion of self. This causes massive increase of information flow and the people are induced to consume more and more commodities. But the truth is that people consume the information first as essential commodity. As more information is available people show less interest to consume ‘meaning’. Thus ultimately explosion of information devalues the utility of information.

 Information doesn’t only produce or reveal meaning. Mass media as being flooded by excess information have inevitably deconstructed the traditional unitary concept of social perspective and practices.

 Communication is a derived process. So in this process ‘Brand’ is distinguishably precious. So in the contemporary age ‘packaging’, which an represent brand is a very important element of message. It is further to be remembered that such packaging even transcends the production of meaning of the message. Nowadays packaging is more important than the product or the commodity. So transmission of information for packaging has mopped up the necessity of meaning. In other words, the issue of ‘production of meaning in communication’ has become least important.

 So in mass mediated information the ideas like, ‘social perspective’, ‘social context’ of information are no longer evident. It can be defined as “catastrophe of meaning”. We have no other options but to remain in this situation. So out of neutralization of meaning, beyond meaning, and imploded meaning the concept of “fascination” comes in.

 Thus people have no other option but to think about his / her personal or individual self. People want implosion in quest of better interpretation, heterogeneity among the things in the world. Only mass media provide such heterogeneity.

 Media practices have rearranged our senses of place and time. No distinction of hierarchies, hyperreality dissolves the old oppositions; the more real than the real has become the only existence. Media have deleted all the public places, so destroyed the differences between the external and internal world.

 More information and more information, lesser and lesser meaning and finally rejection of meaning are the elements of communication.

 Mass media have elevated our senses. Television is the real world; Life is dissolved into television and television is dissolved into life. The fiction is the reality and the reality is the fiction.

 The personality of an individual can best be expressed as an object in accordance with the economic necessity or consideration. The basis of such expression, as articulated by the media, is to establish that a person can act as a free agent in the world who is not associated with any society, state, even with any given option of life pattern and other givens.

 Without mass media people or mass cannot make any sense of culture. Culture is taken out of the hands of the masses. People or the mass is no longer the source of culture but is inspired by the mediated culture.

 Mass is not considered by what people think about it. It is rather justified by how people actively participate to accept the transmission of mediation process and of course the information.

 Thus social perspective of communication means the development of self identity. No concept of emancipation is possible beyond this development.

 So we are proletariatized regardless of class, a function of the spectacle. This is doubtless to be the postmodernity where people watch media content and forget but never associate themselves with that.

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).