Another point that paralyses the potency of Baudrillard’s proposition would be his insensitivity to difference. According to Baudrillard, the explosion of media messages results in the implosion of meaning. Too much to see in too much detail does not mean that one can see clearly. There might have some truth in this assertion when it is put into the context of advanced, industrialized (or post-industrialized to be precise) societies when such “explosion” and “implosion” belong to those who can “have” it all. It is in fact a privilege to experience this incredible process described by Baudrillard since there are not many who can afford to do it. To be able to have a taste of this media frenzy, one has to have at least a basic TV set, (preferably one that is good enough to enable clear reception from the numerous channels brought about by Satellite and Cable TV), a computer with modem which should at least be fast enough to transfer data from the information highway called the “Internet”, not to mention a reserve of money which would be used for paying the alarming phone bill at the end of each month. If one has none of the above, he/she can still have a glimpse of what it is like to be in the hyperreality by going to the cinema. If it proves to be something unaffordable, then stroll along the high streets to see those massive advertisements and infinite newspapers and magazines. But if that too is too much to ask for, then the world Baudrillard described is a highly exclusive arena which members would be those who already have it all. Those who are struggling with more immediate deprivation such as the lack of clean water, disease and starvation could never be included in Baudrillard’s “Hyperreal Club”, so are those who constantly live along and under the poverty line.
For those who “have”, Baudrillard claims that they adopt a strategy of “disappearance” as a resistance to the “capture, networking and forced identification”[1] dictated by the tyrannical media. By over-accepting and hyper-conforming to the bombardment of media messages, the masses “turn themselves into an impenetrable and meaningless surface”[2], cut off from any connection to meaning and speech. This refusal to react and interact is proved redundant by “cultural text” theory and audience research. John Fiske (1987) and Stuart Hall (1973, 1980) respectively claims that media messages can be read differently according to both the code inherent in the media text and the recipients themselves. “Interpellation” is the term employed by Fiske to describe the relationship between the implicit discourse of the media text and the subject position taken up by the addressee. Hall utilizes the concept of “encoding” and “decoding” to suggest that recipients of media text interpret it differently according to the form of cultural capital at their disposal. Dick Hebdige (1979) suggests that different groups interpret given text by taking it out from its context in order to juxtapose it to their own right (the concept of “bricolage”). All these theories suggest that the recipients of media messages are not as indifferent as Baudrillard argued. It is not within the scope of this discussion to examine the above claims in depth but they are used as examples to illustrate the big gap that Baudrillard has left behind in his assumption, namely a homogenous, undifferentiated mass which is very much similar to what the Frankfurt School (T. Adorno and M. Horkheimer specifically) refers to as a bunch passive dupes. In this respect, Baudrillard commits more or less the same mistake made by the Frankfurt School in flattening the mass as a universalized, generalized, classless, stateless, ungendered and non-ethnic sum total to which, of course, Baudrillard himself does not belong. Such elitist assertion is doomed to fail especially when certain marginal positions such as Feminism and Postcolonialism have long been challenging the validity of such eccentric hypothesis.
[1] J. Baudrillard, ‘The Masses’ in Jean Baudrillard Selected Writings, Mark Foster (ed), Oxford, Polity Press, 1988, pp. 213.
[2] Ibid. pp. 213.
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