The Implosion of Meaning in the Media
Information can produces meaning (a negative factor), but meaning is lost and devoured than it can be rejected.
The whole ideology of free speech, of of media being broken down into innumerbale individual cells of transmission, is "antimedia".
In Monods Chance and Necessity, no significant relation between the inflation of information and the deflation of meaning.
On the contrary there is necessary correlation between the two, the extent of information is directly destructive of meaning and signification or it neutralizes them.
Third hypothesis, everywhere socialization is measured by the exposure to media messages.
Everywhere information is though to produce an accelerated circulation of meaning.
Information is though to create communication, there being an excess of meaning which is redistributed in all the interstices of the social.
We are all complicitious in this myth, its the alpha and omega of our modernity, without which credibility of our social organization would collapse.
Rather than creating communication, it exhausts itself in the act of staging communication.
Awakening dream of communication, a circular arrangement through which one stages the desire of the audience, the antitheater of communication.
Immense energies are deployed to hold this simulacrum at bay, to avoid the brutal desimulation that would confront us in the face of the obvious reality of a radical loss of media.
There is a tautology of the system that the masses respond to with ambivalence, to deterrence they respond with disaffection.
Behind this exacerbated mise-en-scene of communication, the mass media, the pressure of information pursues an irresistible destruction of the social.
Thus information dissolves meaning and dissolves the social, in a sort of nebulous state dedicated not to a surplus of innovation, but on the contrary to total entropy.
Therefore media are the producers not of socialization, but of exactly the opposite, of the implosion of the social in the masses, this is the only macroscopic extension of the implosion of meaning at the microscopic level of the sign.
"Traditional" status of the media themselves characteristic of modernity is put in question.
Mcluhan's formula, the Medium is the Message is the key formula of the era of simulation.
The Medium the Message not only signifies the end of the message, but also the end of the medium.
Theres an implosion of contents, the absorption of meaning, of the evanescence of the medium itself, of the reabsorption of every dialectic of communication in total circularity.
Beyond meaning, there is the fascination that results from the neutralization and the implosion of meaning.
Evidently, there is a paradox in this inextricable conjunction of the masses and the media.
This absence of a response can no longer be understood at all as a strategy of power, but as a counterstrategy of the masses themselves when they encounter power.
Media that induce fascination in the masses.
Moga-dishu-Stammheim: the media make themselves into the vehicle of the moral condemnation of terroism and of the exploitation of fear for political ends.
The media carry meaning and countermeaning, they manipulate in all directions at once, they are vehicle for the simulation internal to the system and simulation that destroys the system.
The subject resistance is today unilaterally valorized and viewed as positive-just as in the political sphere only the practices of freedom, emancipation , expression and the constitution of a political subject are seen as valuable and subversive.
The liberating practices respond to one of the aspects of the system, to the constant ultimatum we are given to constitute ourselves, as pure objects.
To a system whose argument is oppression and repression, the strategic resistance is liberating claim of subjecthood.
Thus strategic resistance is that of the refusal of meaning and of the spoken word.
In formation in which an event is reflected or broadcast is already a degraded form of this event.
Amplification was itself a mortal trap and not a positive extension.
Absolute advertising, Ground-Zero Advertising
Today, we're experiencing the abosorption of all virtual modes of expression into that of advertising. All original cultural forms, all determined languages are absorbed in advertising because it has no depth, it is instantaneous and instantaneously forgotten.
The form of advertising is one in which all particular contents are annulled at the very moment when they can be transcribed into each other.
The whole scope of advertising and propaganda comes from the October Revolution and market crash of 1929. Propaganda becomes the marketing and merchandising of idea-forces, of political "trade mark image"
This convergence defines a society, the same language reigns in both.
Thus the form of advertising has imposed itself and developed at the expense of all the other languages as an increasingly neutral, equivaltent rhetoric, without affects, as an "asyntactic nebula.
Today advertising is no longer a stake, it has both "entered into our customs" and at the same time escaped the social and moral dramaturgy that it still represented twenty years ago.
The "thrill" of advertising has been displaced onto computers and onto the miniaturization of everyday life by computer science. Today publicity has become its own commodity. As a medium become its own message.
Advertising is completely in unison with the social, whose historical necessity has found itself absorbed by the pure and simple demand for the social. The social has lost precisely this power of illusion, it has fallen into the register of supply and demand, just as work has passed from being a force antagonistic to capital to the simple status of employment.
Today true advertising lies therein: in design of the social, in the exaltation of the social in all its forms.
Advertising is the prefiguration of this, the first manifestation of an uninterrupted thread of signs. It is in such a universe that what Virilio calls the aesthetic of disappearance gathers strength.
Las Vegas for instance one sees that advertising is not what brightens
or decorates the wall, it is what effaces the walls, that plunges us into this stupefied, hyperreal euphoria that we would not exchange for anything else.
The referential function, the poetic function, the allusion, the irony, the game of words, the unconscious.
That is why it is useless to analyze advertising as language, because something else is happening there, they function on the veritable operation of meaning.
Whatever the subjugation of publicity to management of capital, it always had more that a subjugated function, it was a mirror held out to the universe of political economy and of the commodity. Advertising no longer has a territory.
These supergadgets simply demonstrate that our social monumentality has become advertising.
Speleologists will rediscover it, at the same time that they discover a culture that chose to bury itself in order to definitively escape its own shadow, to bury itself in order to defininitively escape its own shadow to bury its seductions and its artifices as if it were already consecrating them to another world.
