Originally posted on sciy.org by Rich Carlson on Wed 21 Dec 2005 10:20 AM PST
I found a wonderful web site from a Douglas Kellner, chair
of the philosophy of education department at UCLA, (I wonder if we can invite
him to the center?) which has several articles on critical theory and post
modern theory, including the differences between them. He even explorations
notions of the virtual call or most specifically the implications of
Baudrillard and Virilio.
He apparently also knows Arthur Kroker since he credits Kroker with help on the
Baudrillard, the new McLuhan Article.
Anyway if you are interested in the history of critical theory and the
differences between it and postmodern theory read this link re Critical Theory: Revisiting the Classics:
https://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell26.htm
for the very interesting article on Baudrillard and Mcluhan.
Here's an excerpt:
In another study in the _Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign_,
Baudrillard noted how the "TV Object" was becoming the center of the
household and was serving an essential "proof function" that the
owner was a genuine member of the consumer society (CPRES, pp. 53ff.). The
accelerating role of the media in contemporary society is for Baudrillard
equivalent to THE FALL into the postmodern society of simulations from the
modern universe of production. Modernity for Baudrillard is thus the era of
production characterized by the rise of industrial capitalism and the hegemony
of the bourgeoisie while postmodern society is an era of simulation dominated
by signs, codes, and models. Modernity thus centered on the production of
things -commodities and products -- while postmodernity is characterized by
radical semiurgy, by a proliferation of signs. Furthermore, following McLuhan,
Baudrillard interprets modernity as a process of explosion of commodification,
mechanization, technology, and market relations, while postmodern society is
the site of an implosion of all boundaries, regions, and distinctions between
high and low culture, appearence and reality, and just about every other binary
opposition maintained by traditional philosophy and social theory. Furthermore,
while modernity could be characterized as a process of increasing
differentiation of spheres of life (Max Weber as interpreted by Habermas),
postmodernity could be interpreted as a process of de-differentiation and
attendent implosion.[6]
The rise of the broadcast media, especially television, is an important
constituent of postmodernity for Baudrillard, along with the rapid
dissemination of signs and simulacra in every realm of social and everyday
life. By the late 1970s, Baudrillard interprets the media as key simulation
machines which reproduce images, signs, and codes which constitute an
autonomous realm of (hyper)reality and which come to play a key role in
everyday life and the obliteration of the social.[7] Baudrillard's analyses of
simulations and hyperreality probably constitute his most important
contributions to social theory and media critique. During an era when movie
actors simulate politics and charlatans simulate TV-religion the category of
simulation provides an essential instrument of radical social critique, while
the concept of hyperreality is also an extremely useful instrument of social
analysis for a media, cybernetic, and information society
(hyper)reality, a new media reality -- "more real than real" --
where "the real" is subordinate to representation leading to an
ultimate dissolving of the real. In addition, in "The Implosion of Meaning
in the Media," Baudrillard claims that the proliferation of signs and
information in the media obliterates meaning through neutralizing and
dissolving all content -- a process which leads both to a collapse of meaning
and the destruction of distinctions between media and reality. In a society
supposedly saturated with media messages, information and meaning
"implode," collapsing into meaningless "noise," pure effect
without content or meaning. Thus, for Baudrillard: "information is
directly destructive of meaning and signification, or neutralizes it. The loss
of meaning is directly linked to the dissolving and dissuasive action of
information, the media, and the mass media.... Information devours its own
contents; it devours communication and the social.... information dissolves
meaning and the social into a sort of nebulous state leading not at all to a
surfeit of innovation but to the very contrary, to total entropy" (SSM,
pp. 96-100).
Baudrillard uses here a model of the media as a black hole of signs and
information which absorb all contents into cybernetic noise which no longer
communicates meaningful messages in a process of implosion where all content
implodes into form. We thus see here how Baudrillard eventually adopts
McLuhan's media theory as his own, claiming that: "the medium is the message
signifies not only the end of the message, but also the end of the medium.
There are no longer media in the literal sense of the term (I am talking above
all about the electronic mass media) -- that is to say, a power mediating
between one reality and another, between one state of the real and another --
neither in content nor in form. Strictly speaking this is what implosion
signifies: the absorption of one pole into another, the short-circuit between
poles of every differential system of meaning, the effacement of terms and of
distinct oppositions, and thus that of the medium and the real. Hence the
impossibility of any mediation, of any dialectical intervention between the two
or from one to the other, circularity of all media effects. Hence the
impossibility of a sense (meaning), in the literal sense of a unilateral vector
which leads from one pole to another. This critical -- but original --
situation must be thought through to the very end; it is the only one we are
left with. It is useless to dream of a revolution through content or through
form, since the medium and the real are now in a single nebulous state whose
truth is undecipherable" (SSM, pp. 102-103).
In effect, Baudrillard is suggesting that the very project of developing a
radical theory of the media is impossible because there really are no
"media" in the sense of institutions and cultural machines mediating
between dominant political and economic powers and the population below. He
claims that the media and "reality" implode such that it is
impossible to distinguish between media representations and the
"reality" which they supposedly represent. Baudrillard also suggests
that the media intensify massification by producing mass audiences and massification
of ideas and experience. On the other hand, he claims that the masses absorb
all media content, neutralize, or even resist, meaning, and demand and obtain
more spectacle and entertainment, thus further eroding the boundary between
media and "the real." In this sense, the media implode into the
masses to an extent that it is unknowable what effects the media have on the
masses and how the masses process the media.
Consequently, on this view, the media pander to the masses, reproducing
their taste, their interest in spectacle and entertainment, their fantasies and
way of life, producing an implosion between mass consciousness and media
phantasmagoria. In this way, Baudrillard shortcircuits the manipulation theory
which sees media manipulation imposed from above producing mass consciousness,
yet he seems to share the contempt for the masses in standard manipulation
theory claiming that they want nothing more than spectacle, diversion,
entertainment and escape, and are incapable of, or uninterested in, producing
meaning.
......
Here is the address for the home page with various other related article:
https://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell.htm
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