The whole chaotic constellation ot the social revolves around thai spongy referent, that opaque bul equally translucent real'ty. that nothingness: the masses. A statistical crystal ball, the masses are "swirling with currents and flows," in the image of matter and the natural elements. So at least they are represented to us. They can be "mesmerized," the social envelops them, like static electricity; but most of the time, precisely, they form an earth', that is, they absorb all the 'Translator'sNote:Throughout thetext "lamasse." "faire masse" imply a condensation of terms which allows Etaudrillard to makra numbvr of central puns and allusions. For not only docs la masse directly reler to the physical and philosophical sense ot "substance" or "matter," it can just as easily mean "the majority" (as in "the mass of workers") or even the electrical usage of an "earth": hence faire masse can simultaneously mean to form a mass, to form an earth or to form a majority. 1 Jean Baudrillard electricity of the social and political and neutralise it forever. They are neither good conductors of the political, nor good conductors of the social, nor good conductors of meaning in general. Everything flows through them, everything magnetises them, but diffuses throughout them without leaving a trace. And. ultimately, the appeal to the masses has always .gone unanswered. They do not radiate; on the contrary, they absorb all radiation from the outlying constellations of State, History, Culture. iMean-ing. They are inertia, the strength of inertia, the strength of the neutral. In this seme, the mass is characteristic of our modernily, as a highly implosive phenomenon, irreducible for any traditional theory and practice, even perhaps for any theory and practice at all. According to their imaginary representation, the masses drift somewhere between pa«iv ity and wild spontaneity, but always as a potential energy, a reservoir of the social and of social energy; today a mute referent, tomorrow, when they speak up and cease to be the "silent majority," a protagonist of history — now, in fact, the masses have no history to write, neither 2 In trie Shadow of the Silent Majorities past nor future, they have no virtual energies to release, nor any desire to fulfill: their strength is aehud, in the present, and sufficient unto itself. It consisls in the'r silence, in their capacity to absorb and neutralise, already superior to any power acting upon them. It ts a specific inertial slrength, whose effectivity differs from that of all those schemas of production, radiation and expansion according to which our imaginary functions, even in its wish to destroy those same schemas. An unacceptable and unintelligible figure of implosion (is this still a "process"7> — stumbling block to all our systems of meaning, against which they summon all their resistance, and screening, with a renewed outbreak of signification, with a blaze of signifiers, the central collapse of meaning. Thesocial void is scattered with interstitial objects and crystalline clusters which spin around and coalesce in a cerebral chiaroscuro. So is the mass, an in vacuo aggregation of individual particles, refuse of the social and of media impulses: an opaque nebula whose 3 Jean Baudrillard growing densily absorbs all [be surrounding energy and light rays, to collapse finally under its own weight. Á black hole which engulfs the social. This is. therefore, exactly the reverse of a "sociological" understanding. Sociology can only depict the expansion of the social and its vicissitudes. It survives only on the positive and definitive hypothesis of (he social. The reab-sorption, the implosion of the social escapes it. The hypothesis of the death of the social is also that of its own death. The term "mass" is not a concept. It is a leitmotif of political demagogy, a soft, sticky, lumpenanalylical notion. A good sociology would attempt to surpass it with 'more subtle" categories: socio-professional ones, categories of class, cultural status, etc. Wrong: it is by prowling around these soft and acritical notions (like "mana" once was) that one can go further than intelligent critical sociology. Besides, it will be noticed retrospectively that the concepts "class." "social relations," "power," "status," "institution" — and "social" itself — all those too explicit concepts which are the glory of the legitimate sciences, have also A In the Shadow o( the- Silent Majorities only ever been muddled notions themselves, but notions upon which agreement has nevertheless been reached for mysterious ends: those of preserving a certain code of analysis. To want to specify the term "mass" is a mistake — it is to provide meaning for that which has none. One says: "the mass of workers." But the mass is never that of the workers, nor of any other social subject or object. The "peasant masses" of old were not in fact masses: only those form a mass who are freed from their symbolic bondage, "released" (only to be caught in infinite "networks") and destined to be no more than the innumerable end points of precisely those same theoretical models which do not succeed in integrating them and which finally only produce them as statistical refuse. The mass is without attribute, predicate, quality, reference. This is its difinilion, or its radical lack of definition. It has no sociological "reality." It has nothing to do with any real population, body or specific social aggregate. Any attempt to qualify it only seeks to transfer it back lo sociology and rescue it from 5 Jean Baudrillard this indistinctness which is not even thai oi equivalence (the unlimited sum of equivalent individuals: 1+1 + 1 — such is the sociological definition), but that of the neutral, that is to say neither one nor the other (ne-uter). There is no longer any polarity between the one and the other in the mass. This is what causes lhat vacuum and inwardly collapsing effect in all those systems which survive or» the separation and distinction of poles (two, or many in more complex systems). This is what makes the circulation of meaning within the mass impossible.-it is: instantaneously dispersed, like atoms in a void. This is also what makes it impossible for the mass to be alienated, since neither the one nor the other exist there any longer. A speechless mass for every hollow spokes-man w'ithout a past. Admirable conjunction, between those who have nothing to say, and the masses, who do not speak. Ominous emptiness of all discourse. No hysteria or potential fascism, but simulation by precipitation of every lost referential. Black box of every referential, of every uncaptured meaning, of impossible history, of untraceable systems of representation, the mass is what remains when the social has been 6 in ihe Shadow of the Silent Majorities completely removed. Regarding the impossibility of making meaning circulate among the masses, the best example is God. The masses have hardly retained anything but the image of him, never the Idea. They have never been affected by the Idea of God. which has remained a matter for the clergy, nor by anguish over sin and personal salvation. What they have retained is the enchantment of saints and martyrs: the last judgment; the Dance of Death; sorcery; the ceremony and spectacle of the Church; the immanence of ritual — the contrast to the transcendence of the Idea. They were and have remained pagans, in.their way, never haunted by ihe Supreme Authority, but surviving on Ihe small change of images, superstition and the devil. Degraded praclices with regard lo the spiritual wager of faith? Indeed. It is their particular way, through the banality of rituals and profane simulacra, of refusing the categorical imperative of morality and faith, the sublime imperative of mearting, which they have always re- 7 I Jean Baudnllard jectcd. It isn't that they have not been able to attain the higher enlightenment of religion: they have ignored it. They don't refuse lo die fot a faith, for a cause, for an idol. What they refuse is transcendence; the uncertainty, the difference. . the waiting, the asceticism which constitute the sublime exaction of religion. For the masses, the Kingdom of God has always been already here on earth, in the pagan immanence of images, in the spectacle of it presented by the Church. Fantastic distortion of the religious principle. The masses have absorbed religion by their sorcerous and spectacular manner of practising it. All the great Schemas of reason have suffered the same fate. They have only traced their trajectory, they have only followed the thread of their history along the thin edge of the social stratum bearing meaning (and in particular of the stratum bearing social meaning), and on the whole they have only penetrated into the masses at the cost of their misappropriation, of their radical distortion. So it was with Historical Reason,. Political Reason. Cultural Reason. Revolutionary Reason — so even with the very Reason of the Social, the most interesting since this seems inherent to ihe masses, and appears to ft In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities have produced them throughout its evolution. Are the masses the "mirror of the social"? No, they don't reflect the social, nor are they reflected in the social — it is the mirror of the social which shatters to pieces on them. Even this image is not right, since it still evokes the idea of a hard substance, of an opaque resistance. Rather, the masses function as a gigantic black hole which inexorably inflects, bends and distorts all energy and light radiation approaching it: an implosivesphere, in which the curvature of spaces accelerates, in which all dimensions curve back on themselves and "involve" to the point of annihilation, leaving in their stead only a sphere of potential engulfment. The Abyss of Meaning So it is with information. Whatever its political, pedagogical, cultural content, the plan is always to get some meaning across, to keep the masses within reason; an imperative to produce meaning that takes the form of the constantly repeated imperative to moralise 9 Jean Baudrillard information: to belter inform, to belter socialise, to raise the cultural level of the masses, etc. Nonsense: the masses scandalously resist this imperative of rational communication. They are r given meaning: they want spectacle. No effort has been able to convert them to the seriousness of the content, nor ev^n to the seriousness ol the code. Messages are given to them, they only want some sign, they idolise the play of signs and stereotypes, they idolise any content so long as it resolves itself into a spectacular sequence. What they reject is the "dialectic" of meaning. Nor is anything served by alleging that they are mystified. This is always a hypocritical hypothesis which protects th? intellectual complaisance of the producers of meaning: the masses spontaneously aspire to the natural light of reason. This in order to evade the reverse hypothesis, namely that it is in complete "freedom".that the ' masses oppose their refusal of meaning and their will to spectacle to the ultimatum of meaning. They distrust, a* with death, this transparency and this pofif icfl/ will. They scent the simplifying terror which is behind the ideal hegemony of meaning, and they rtract in their own way, by reducing all articulate discourse to a single irra- 10 In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities tional and baseless dimension, where signs lose their meaning and peter out in fascination: the spectacular. Once aga jp, it is not a question of mystification: it isaqueslion of their own exigencies, of an explicit 3i\(\ positive counter-strategy — the task of absorbing and annihilating culture, knowledge, power, the social. An immemorial task, but one which assumes its full scope today. A deep antagonism which forces the inversion of received scenarios: it is no longer meaning which would be the ideal line of force in our societies, that which eludes it being only waste intended for «absorption some time or other — on the contrary, it is meaning which is only an ambiguous and inconsequential accident, an effect due to ideal convergence of a perspective space al any given moment (History, Power, etc.) and which, moreover, has only ever really concerned a tiny fraction and superficial layer of our "societies." And this is true of individuals also: we are only i-pisodic conductors of meaning, for in the main, and profoundly, we form a mass, living most of the time in panic or haphazardly, above and beyond any meaning. Now, with this inverse hypothesis, every- 11 Jean Baudrillatd (hing changes. Take one example from a thousand concerning ihis contempt (or meaning, the folklore of silent passivities. On the night of Klaus Croissant's extradition, the TV transmitted a football match in which France played to qualify for the world cup. Some hundreds of people demonstrated outside la Sante. a few barristers ran to and fro in the night; twenty million people spent their evening glued to the screen. An explosion of popular joy when France won. Consternation and indignation of the illuminati over this scandalous indifference. La Monde: "9 pm. At that time the German barrister had already been taken out of la Sante- A few minutes later, Rochetcau scored the first goal." Melodrama of indignation.1 Not a single query about the mystery of this indifference. One same reason is always invoked: the manipulation of the masses by power, their mystification by football. In any case, this indifference ought not to be. hence it has nothing to 12 In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities tell us. In other words, the "silent majority" is even stripped of its indifference, it has no right even that this be recognised and imputed to it. even this apathy must have been imposed on it by power. What contempt behind this interpretation! Mj stified, the masses are not allowed their own behavior. Occasionally, they are conceded a ri". nlulionary spontaneity by which they glimpse the "rationality of their own desire," that yes, but God protect us from their silence and their inertia. It is exactly this indifference, however, thai demands to be analysed in its positive brutality, instead of being dismissed as white magic, or as a magic alienation which always turns the multitudes away from their revolutionary vocation. Moreover, how does it succeed in turning them away? Can one ask questions about (he strange fact thai, after several revolutions and a century or two of political apprenticeship, in spite of the newspapers, Ihe trade unions, the parties, the intellectuals and all Ihe energy put into educating and mobilising ihe people, there arc still (and it will be exactly the same in ten or twenty years) a thousand persons who stand up and twenty million who remain "passive" — and nol JemBauďillard only passive, bul who. in all good (aith and with glee and without even asking themselves why, frankly prefer a football match to a human and political drama? It i~- curious that this proven fact has never succeeded in making political analysis shift ground, but on the contrary reinforces it in its vision of an omnipotent, manipulatory power, and a mass prostrate in an unintelligible coma. Now none nf this is true, and both the above are a deception: power manipulates nothing, thejnasses are neither mislead hor "* mystified. Power is only too happy to make football bear a facile responsibility, even to take upon itself the diabolical responsibility for stupefying the masses. Thi' comforts it in its illusion of being power, and le«ds away from the much more l. dangerous fact that this indifference of the masses is their true, their o.ily practice, that there is no other ideal of them to imagine, nothing in this to deplore, but everything to analyse as the brute fact of a collective retaliation and of a refusal to participate in the recommended ideals, however enlightened. 14 in the Shadow of tt» Silent Majorities What is at stake in the masses lies elsewhere. We might as well take note and recognise that any hope of revolution, the whole promise of the social and of social change has only been able to function up till now thanks to this dodging of the issue, this fantastic denial. We might as well begin again, as Freud did in the psychic order,2 from this remainder, from this blind sediment, from this waste or refuse of meaning, from this unanalysed and perhaps unanalysable fact (there is a good reason why such a Copcrnican Revolution has never been undertaken in the political universe: it is the whole political order that is in danger of paying the price). Rise and Fall of the Political The political and the social seem inseparable to us, twin constellations, since at least the French Revolution, under the sign (determinant or not) of the economic. But for us today, this undoubtedly is only true of their simultaneous decline. ifi Jean Baudriiiard When the political emerged during the Renaissance from the religious and ecclesiastic spheres, to win reknown with Machiavelli, it was at first only a pure game of signs, a pure strategy which was not burdened with any social or historical "truth," but, on the contrary, played on the absence of truth (as did later the worldly strategy of the Jesuits on the absence of God). To begin with, the political space belonged to the same order as that of Renaissance mechanical theatre, or of perspective space in painting, which were invented at the same time. Its form was that of a game, not of a system of representation — semiurgy and strategy, not ideology — its function was one of virtuosity, not of truth (hence the game, subtle and a corollary to this, of Balthazar Gracian in Homme de Cour). The cynicism and immorality of Machiavellian politics lay there: not as the vulgar understanding has it in the unscrupulous usage of means, but in the offhand disregard for ends. Now, as Nietzsche well knew, it is in this disregard for a social, / psychological, historical truth, in this exercise of simulacra as such, that the maximum of political energy is found, where the political is a game and is not yet given a reason. 16 In the Shadow ot the Silent Majorities It is since the eighteenth century, and particularly since the Revolution, that the political FäsTaken a decisive turn. It_took upon itself a social reference, the social invested it. At the samélime, ü-enterexiinto_representation, its performance became dominated by representative mechanisms (theatre pursued a parallel fate: it Sw a representative theatre — likewise for perspective space: machinery at the start, it became the place where a truth of space and of representation was inscribed). The political scene became that of the evocation of a fundamental / signified: the people, the will of the people, etc. It no longer worked on signs alone, but on meaning; henceforth summoned to best signify the real it expressed, summoned to become transparent, to moralise itself and to respond to the social ideal of good representation. For a long time, nevertheless, a balance came into play between the proper sphere of the political and the forces reflected in it: the social, the historical, the economic. Undoubtedly this balance corresponds to the golden age of bourgeois represen- 17 JcanBaudfíllafd tative systems (constitutionality: cighteenlh-century England, the United States of America, the France of bourgeois revolutions, the Europe of 1846). It is with marxist thought, in its successive developments, that the end ol the political and of its particular energy was inaugurated. Here began the absolute hegemony of the social and the economic, arid the compulsion, on the part ol the political, lo become the legislative, institutional, executive mirror of the social. The autonomy of the political was inversely proportional to the growing hegemony of the social. Liberal thought always thrives on a kind of nostalgic dialectic between the two, but socialist thought, revolutionary thought openly postulates a dissolution of the political at some point in history, in the final transparency of the social. The social won. But, at this point of generalisation, of saturation, where it is no more than the zero degree of the political, at this point of absolute reference, of omnipresence and diffraction in all the interstices of physical and mental space, what becomes of the social itself? H is the sign of its end: the energy of the social is reversed, its 18 In il*o Shadow ot the Silent Majorities Specificity is lost, its historical quality and its ideality vanish in favour of a configuration where not only the political becomes volatilised, but ivli.-re the SOI .M ilseU no longer has any name. Anonymous. THE MASS. Till: MASSES. The Silení Majoritu The dwindling of the political from a pure Strategic arrangement to a system of representation, then lo the present scenario of neo-figuration, where the system continues under the same manifold signs but where these no longer represent anything and no longer have their "equivalent" in a "reality" or a real social siil>stance: there is no longer any political investiture because there is no longer even any social referent of the classical kind (a people, a class, a proletariat, objective conditions) to lend force to eflective political signs. Quite simply, there is no longer any social signified to give force to a political signifier. The only referent which still functions is that of the silent majority. All contemporary 19 Jet." Baud" Hard systems function on this nebulous entity, on this floating substance whose existence is no ^/longer social, but statistical, and whose only mode of appearance is that of the survey. A simulation on the horizon of the social, or rather on whose horizon the social has already disappeared. That the silent majority (or the masses) is an imaginary referent does not mean they don't exist. It means that their representation is no longer possible. The mass» s are no longer a referent / because they no longer belong to (he order of representation. They don't express themselves, they are surveyed. They don't reflect upon themselves, they are tested. The referendum (and the media are a constant referendum of directed questions and answers) has been substituted for the political referent. Now polls, tests, the referendum, media are devices which no longer belong to a dimension of representations, but to one of Simula cion. They no longer have a referent in view, but a model. Here, revolution in relation to the devices of classical sociality (of which elections, institutions, the instances of representation, and even of repression, still form a pari) is complete: in all this, social meaning still flows 20 In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities between one pole and another, in a dialectical structure which allows for a political stake and contradictions. Everything changes with the device of simulation. In the couple "silent majorit y /survey" for example, there is no longer any pole nor any differential lerm, hence no electricity of the social either: it is short-circuited by the confusing of poles, in a total circularity of signalling (exactly as is the case with molecular communication and with the substance it informs in DNA and the genetic code). This is the ideal form of simulation: collapse of poles, orbital circulation of models (this is also the matrix of every implosive process). Bombarded with stimuli, messages and tests, ihe masses are simply an opaque, blind stralum, like those clusters of stellar gas known only through analysis of their light spectrum — radiation spectrum equivalent to statistics and surveys — but precisely: ii can no longer be a question of expression or representation, but only of the simulation of an ever inexpressible and unexpressed social. This is ihe meaning of 21 i i Jean Baudrillard their silence. Bul this silence is paradoxical — it isn't a silence which does not speak, it is a silence which re/uses to be spoken for in its name. And in this sense, far from being a form of alienation, it is an absolute weapon. No one can be said to represent the silent majority, and that is its revenge. The masses are no longer an authority to which one might refer as one formerly referred to class or to the people. Withdrawn into their silence, they are no longer (a) subject (especially not to — or of — history), r hence they can no longer be spoken for, articulated, represented, nor pass through the political "mirror stage" and the cycle of imaginary identifications. One sees what strength results from this: no longer being (a) subject, they can no longer be alienated — neither in their own language (they have none), nor in any other which would pretend to speak for them. The end of revolutionary convictions. For these have always speculated on the possibility of the masses, or the proletariat, denying themselves as such. But the mass is not a place of negativity or explosion, it is a place of absorption and implosion. Inaccessible to Schemas of liberation, revolution and historicity; this is its mode of defense, its 2.2 (n the Shadow of the Silent Majorities particular mode of retaliation. Model of simulation and imaginary referent for use by a phantom political class which now no longer knows what kind of "power" it wields over it, the mass is at the same time the death, the end of this political process thought to rule over it. And ihto it is engulfed the political as will and representation. The strategy of power has long seemed founded on the apathy of the masses. The more passive they were, the more secure it was. But this logic is only characteristic of the bureaucratic and centralist phase of power. And it is this which today turns against it: the inertia it has fostered becomes the sign of its own death. That is why it seeks to reverse its strategies: from passivity to participation, from silence to speech. But it is too late. The threshold of the "critical mass," that of the involution of the social through inertia, is exceeded.1 Everywhere the masses are encouraged to speak, they are urged to live socially, electorally, organisationally, sexually, in participation, in festival, in free speech, etc. The spectre must be exorcised, it must pronounce its name. Nothing shows more dramatically thai the only genuine problem today is the silence of the mass, the 23 I Jean Baudrillard silence of (he silent majority. All reserves are exhausted in maintaining this mass in controlled emulsion and in preventing it from falling back into ils panic-inducing inertia and its silence. No longer being under the reign of will or representation, it falls under the province of diagnosis, or divination pure and simple — whence the universal reign of information and statistics: we must ausculate it, sound it out, unearth some oracle from within it. Whence the mania for seduction, solicitude and all the solicitation surrounding it. Whence prediction by resonance, the effects of forecasting and of an illusory mass outlook: "The French people think .. .The majority of Germans disapprove. . All England thrilled to the birth of the Prince.. .etc." — a mirror held out for an ever'blind, ever absent recognition. Whence that boml'ardment of signs which the mass is thought to le-echo. It is interrogated by converging waves by light or linguistic stimuli, exactly like distant stars or nuclei bombarded with particles in a cyclotron. Information is exactly this. Not a mode of communication or 24 In the Shadow of (he Silent Majorities of meaning, but a mode of conslant emulsion, of input-output and of controlled chain reactions, exactly as in atomic simulation chambers. We must free the "energy" of the mass in order to*5* fabricate the "social." But it is a contradictory process, for information and security, in all their forms, instead of intensifying or creating the "social relation," are on the contrary entropie processes, modalities of the end of the social. It is thought that the masses may be structured by injecting them with information, their captive social energy is believed to be released by means o( information and messages (today it is no longer the institutional grid as such, rather it is the quantity of information and the degree of media exposure which measures socialisation). Quite the contrary. Instead of transforming the mass into energy, information produces even more mass. Instead of informing as it claims, instead of giving form and structure, information neutralises even further the "social field"; more and more it creates an inert mass impermeable to the classical institutions of the social, and to the very contents of information. Today, replacing the fission of symbolic structures by the social JeanBaudrillard and its rational violence, is the fission of the social itself by the "irrational" violence of media and information — the final result being precisely an atomised, miclearised, modularised mass, the result of two centuries of accelerated socialisation and which brings it irremediably to an end. The mass is only mass because its social energy has already frozen. It is a cold reservoir, capable of absorbing and neutralising any hot energy. It resembles those half-dead systems into which more energy is injected than is withdrawn, those paid-out deposits exorbitantly maintained in a state of artificial exploitation. Immense energy is expended in mitigating the tendentially declining rate of political investment and the absolute fragility of the social principle of reality, in maintaining this simulation of the social and in preventing it from totally imploding. And the system risks being swallowed up by it. Basically, what goes for commodities also goes for meaning. For a long time capital only 26 in the Shadow ot the Silent Majorities had to produce goods; consumption ran by itself. Today it is necessary to produce consumers, to produce demand, and this production is infinitely more costly than that of goods (forjhe mpst.part. and above all since 1°29. the_social_arose out of tliis crisis of demand: the production of demand largely overlaps the production of the social ' itself).* For a long time it was enough for_power to produce meaning (political, ideological, cultural, sexual), and the demand followed; it absorbed supply and still surpassed it. Meaning was in short supply, and all the revolutionaries offered themselves to produce still more. Today, everything has changed; no longer is meaning in short supply, il is produced everywhere, in ever increasing quantities — it is demand which is weakening. And il is the production of this de- J mand for meaning which has become crucial for the system. Without this demand for, without this susceptibility to, without this minimal participation in meaning, power is noihing but an empty simulacrum and an isolated effect of perspective. Here, too. the production of demand is infinitely more costly than the production of meaning itself. Beyond a certain point, it is impossible, all the energy muslered by the system 2 f JeanBagofiiiard will no longer be enough. The demand for objects and for services can always be artificially produced, at a high, but accessible cost; the system has proved this. The desire for meaning, when it is in short supply, and the desire for reality, when it is weakening everywhere, cannot be made good and together threaten total ruin. The mass absorbs all the social energy, but no longer refracts it. It absorbs every sign and ^every meaning, but no longer reflects them. It absorbs all messages and digests them. For every question put to it. it sends back a tautological and circular response,* It never participates. Inundated by flows and tests, it forms a mass or earth: it is happy t o be a good conductor of flows, but of any flow, a good conductor of information, but of any informal ion. a good conductor of norms, but of any norm, and thereby to reflect the social in its absolute transparency, to give place only to the effects of power and of the social, the latter like constellations fluctuating around this imperceptible nucleus. The mass is dumb like I easts, and its silence is equal to the silence of be. sts. Despite having been surveyed to death (and the constant solicitation, the information, to which it is submitted is ~i In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities equivalent to experimental torture on laboratoř)' animals), it says neither whether the truth is to the left or to the right, nor whether it prefers revolution or repression. It is without truth and without reason. It has been attributed with every arbitrary remark. It is without conscience and without unconscious. This silence is unbearable. It is the unknown of the political equation, the unknown which annuls every political equation. Everybody, questions it. but never as silence, always to make it speak. But the inertial strength of the masses is ünTalhomableT literally,"no "sounding" or survey .-will cause it to become evident, since their effect is to blanket it out. A silence which topples the political and the social into the hyperreality with which we associate it. For if the political seeks to "pick up" the masses in a social echo or simulation chamber (the media, information), it is the masses who in return become a huge echo or simulation chamber of the social. Manipulation has never existed. The game is played on both sides, with the same weapons, and who can say which is winning today: the simulation power Jean BaiKJrillanJ performs on the masses, or the inverse simulation held out by the masses for power to be swallowed up in. Neither Subject Nor Object The mass realises that paradox of being both an object of simulation (it only exists at the point ofčonvergence of all the media waves which dépTcTit)"änd_a_súbject «^simulation, capable of 'ctinglilLthe-mocleU and of emulating them by hypcrsimulation (its hyperconformity, an immanent form of-humour). The mass realises that paradox of not being a subject, a group-subject, but of not being an object either. Every effort to make a subject of it (real or mythical) runs head on into the glaring impossibility of an autonomous change in consciousness. Every effort to make an object of it, to treat and analyse it as brute matter, according to objective laws, runs head on into the contrary fact that it is impossible to manipulate the masses in any determinate way, or to understand (hem in terms of elements, relations, structures and wholes. All manipulation plunges, gets sucked into the mass, absorbed, distorted, reversibilised. 30 In theShadowot the Silent Majorities It is impossible to know where it goes; most likely it goes round and round in an endless cycle, foiling every* intention on the part of the manipulators. No analysis would know how to contain this diffuse, decentered, Brownian, molecular reality: the notion of object vanishes just as "matter," in the- ultimate analysis, vanishes on the horizon of microphysics — it is impossible to comprehend the latter as object once that infinitesimal point is reached where the subject of observation is himself annulled. No more object of knowledge, no more subject of knowledge. The mass brings about the same insoluble boundary situation in the field of the "social". No longer is it objectifiablc (in political terms: no longer is it represent able), and it annuls any subject who would claim to comprehend it (in political terms: it annuls anybody who would claim to represent it). Only surveys and statistics (like the law of large numbers and the calculus of probabilities in mathematical physics) can account for it, but one knows that this incantation, this meteoric ritual of statistics and surveys has 31 ManBaudrHlaid no teal object, especially not the masses whom it is thought to express. It simply simulates an elusive object, but whose absence is nevertheless intolerable. It "produces" it in the form of anticipated responses, of circular signals which seem to circumscribe its existence and lo bear witness to its will. Floating signs — such are surveys — instantaneous signs, intended for manipulation, and whose conclusions can be interchanged. Everybody knows ihe profound indeterminateness which rules over statistics (the calculus of probabilities or large numbers also correspond to an indeterminateness themselves, to a "Plimsoll line" of the concept of matter, to which again hardly any notion of "objective law" corresponds). Besides, it is not certain that the procedures oi scientific experimentation in the so-called exact sciences have much more truthfulness than surveys and statistics. In any discipline whatsoever, thecoded, controlled, "objective" form of inquiry only allows for this circular type of truth, from which the very object aimed at is excluded. In any case, it is possible to think that the uncertainty surrounding this enterprise of the objective determination of the world remains total and that 32 In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (;ven matter and the inanimate, when summoned to respond, in the various sciences of nature, in the same terms and according to the same procedures as the masses and "social" beings in statistics and surveys, also send back the same conforming signals, the same coded responses, with the same exasperating, endless conformity, only to better escape, in the last instance, exactly like the masses, any definition as object. There would thus be a fantastic irony about "matter," and every object of science, just as there is a fantastic irony about the masses in their muteness, or in their statistical discourse so conforming to the questions put to them, akin to the eternal irony of feminity of which Hegel speaks — the irony of a false fidelity, of an excessive fidelity to the law, an ultimately impenetrable simulation of passivity and obedience, and which annuls in return the law governing them, in accordance with the immortal example of Soldier Schweik. From this would follow, in the literal sense, a pataphysics or science of imaginary solutions, a science of the simulation or hypersimulation of 33 Jean Baudfiiiard an exact, true, objective world, with its universal laws, including the delirium of those who interpret it according to these laws. The masses and their involuntary humor would introduce us to'a pataphysics of the social which ultimately would relieve us of all that cumbersome metaphysics of the social. This contradicts all received views of the process of truth, but perhaps the latter is only an illusion of judgment. The scientist cannot believe that matter, or living beings, do not respond "ob- iectively" to the questions he puts, or that they respond to them too objectively for his questions to be sound. This hypothesis alone seems absurd and unthinkable to him. He will never accept it. He will never leave the enchanted and simulated circle of his enquiry. The same hypothesis applies everywhere, the same axiom of credibility. The adman cannot but believe that people believe in it — however, slightly, thai is, that a minimal probability exists of the message reaching its goal and being decoded according to its meaning. Any principle of uncertainty is excluded. If it turned out that the refractive index of this message in the recipient were nil, advertising would instantly collapse. It V- only surveys on that belief which it accords itself (this is the same wager as that of science about the objectivity of the world) and which it doesn't try too hard to verify, in terror that the contrary hypothesis might also be true, namely that the great majority of advertising messages never reach their destination, that the viewing public no longer differentiates between the contents, which are refracted in the void. The medium alone functions as an atmospheric effect and acts as spectacle and fascination. THj^MEDlüMOS-THE MESSAGE, McLuhan prophesied: a_ f or-—mula čharacteristic_pi_jhe_prcsent_ph.ase, the ^•'odoI" phase of.ihe whole mass-media.culture, that of a freezing, neutralisation of every message •• in a vacuous etherľThaJ of aglaciation of meaning? Critical thought judges and chooses, it produces differences, it is by selection that it presides j over meaning. The masses, on the other han