Baština (Jan 2019)
Baudrillard's concept of simulation in the era of mass culture
Abstract
Jean Baudrillard, a cultural critic and media intellectual, claimed that the contemporary culture was postmodern. It is marked by plurality, diversion, intense fragmentation, and indirection. He discovers that it is mass media that create demands and seduction of objects and ultimately make the contemporary society a powerful consumer society. Media have shaken the very foundation of postmodern culture, giving a new direction to reality. Baudrillard describes that the relationship between the real and simulacra has undergone a tremendous change in the contemporary society. Now the very concept of a true copy is thrown into the wind. Models and simulacra have become reality. In the postmodern media and consumer society, everything becomes an image, a sign, a spectacle, a transaesthetic, transpolitical, and transsexual. The present paper made an investigation as to how Baudrillard focused his critical attention on the three points - (i) postmodern society is the society of communication established by mass media; (ii) postmodern society is a consumer society and (iii) the culture of postmodern society is based on simulation or simulacra or hyperreality. Deeply influenced by Saussure, Durkheim and Freud, Baudrillard starts as a Marxist sociologist, but later on like his contemporaries, such as Althusser and Lyotard, he analyses Marxian capitalist production in the light of structuralist theory of production and circulation of signs. But again after the tumultuous events of 1968, such as No Bra Day in May celebrated by miniskirt clad American women by burning brassieres and underwears, he gets disillusioned and disoriented. There undergoes a radical change in his Marxiststructuralist stance, which is inadequate to analyse the fundamental of the contemporary society. He develops a broader and more analytical outlook toward society. He argues that there is a rupture between modernity and postmodernity, marked by cyberculture. This culture is completely in the clutch of mass media, pestering and victimizing the individual. Baudrillard finds Marx's economic philosophy incapable of explaining life in the late capitalist societies, because they are based on consumer. Throughout his life, Marx lays emphasis on the mode of production so much that the other aspect of capitalism i.e. consumer and culture slips from his mind. Baudrillard, by the way, supplements it by consumer, the focal point of his discussion. Now there is a shift from production to consumerism. This idea - the analysis of society through consumer and culture - occurs to his mind during his sojourn in America and writes a travelogue America in the lifestyle of the Americans.
