In the shadow of the silent

majorities; Baudrillard
Date Created @July 30, 2023 1:35 PM

Status Done 🙌
‘they [the masses] are inertia, the strength of inertia, the strength of the neutral’. Their imaginary
representations give the illusion that the masses oscillate between the extremes of passivity and
vigour vis-a-vis action, always with the potential to switch from being the “silent majority” to the
“protagonist of history”. This is not true. The strength of the masses lays not in their capacity for
action but rather their absolute lack of it. Their silence is more powerful than any entity acting
upon them. They are the antithesis to meaning, their existence defies our imaginative capacities
and tendencies to categorise. They are the ‘reverse of a “sociological” understanding’.
Constrained by positive understandings of the “social”, the masses escape the discipline. It is not
a concept. ‘It is a leitmotif of political demagogy, a soft, sticky, lumpenanalytical notion.’ Any
attempt to categorise it through ideas of class, cultural status etc. is redundant. The sociologists
quest for legitimacy, of ‘preserving a certain code of analysis’, is rendered futile when faced with
the obstacle of the masses. ‘To want to specify the term "mass" is a mistake - it is to provide
meaning for that which has none’, for a mass is never of any social subject or object.
‘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 definition, 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.’
Meaning itself is impossible to circulate amongst the masses, the best example of which is God.
The masses have merely retained his image, not the idea. It is the spectacle, the performance of
ritual that they are more taken by. It is not as if they have been unable to aspire to the ‘higher
enlightenment of religion’, they have simply ignored it. Their refusal is not that of faith, or a
cause, but that of ‘transcendence, uncertainty, the asceticism which constitute the sublime
exaction of religion’. They have absorbed it, just have they absorb all reason.

In the shadow of the silent majorities; Baudrillard 1

 The masses are not the “mirror of the social”, they are the hammer which shatters the social to
pieces. A black hole.

The Abyss of Meaning

information, whether political, pedagogical, cultural etc, is always used to communicate meaning
and keep the masses within reason, to better inform, socialise, and raise the cultural level of
masses. Or so it is thought, in reality the masses resist this communication. They care only for
the spectacle. They make use of this as a counter-strategy, to annihilate culture, knowledge,
power, and the social. Meaning no longer occupies center stage, it is now an ‘ambiguous and
inconsequential accident, an effect due to ideal convergence of a perspective space at any given
moment (History, Power, etc.) and which, moreover, has only ever really concerned a tiny
fraction and superficial layer of our "societies.”’
It is the same with the individual, each an episodic conductor of meaning but for the most part a
mere part of the mass—living in panic, above and beyond meaning.
To better understand its implications, Baudrillard gives the example of a football match, the one
in which france played to qualify for the world cup. Transmitted on the TV, 20 million ppl saw it.
At the same time, Klaus Croissant (criminal) was being extruded and a few hundreds had
gathered to protest. In the numbers themselves we hear a story, one of gross indifference. Yet the
French media couldn’t care less, rather than an enquiry into the nature of this indifference (one
spurred by a manipulation of the masses and their mystification by football), they choose instead
to merely perform indignation. Most are of the belief that the masses, the silent majority, was not
(and is not) afforded the recognition of its indifference even. Baudrillard, ridicules this
interpretation. It is no game of power that produces disinterest in the masses. It is the very nature
of the masses. It is their ‘true, their only practice… there is no other ideal of them to image,
nothing in this to deplore, but everything to analyse as the brute fat of a collective retaliation and
of a refusal to participate in the recommended ideals, however enlightened.’

Rise and Fall of the Political

Charts out the changing ideas of the ‘political’. Posits that it first emerged during the renaissance
from religion and the clergy; it was limited to strategy, in a very Machiavellian sense, and had

In the shadow of the silent majorities; Baudrillard 2

 nothing to do with the social or the historical. The 18th century marked a decisive turn in this
conception of politics. ‘It took upon itself a social reference, the social invested it.’
Simultaneously, the political ‘performance’ was now dominated by representation; a shift was
seen in ‘politics’ from being a game of mere signs, to that of the signified. It became about the
people and their will, it became invested with meaning. There remained a balance b/w the
‘proper sphere of the political and the forces reflected in it: the social, historical, and economic’,
one that corresponded to the golden age of bourgeois representative systems (USA, England,
France).
This balance was disrupted, marking the end of the ‘political’, with the development of marxist
thought. The social and economic emerged as hegemonic with the political being discarded as a
mirror of the social, taking the form of the legislative, institutional, and executive; its autonomy
severely curtailed. Socialist thought, he says, calls for a complete dissolution of the political in
history. The social won the battle in the 19th century, only to be transformed into the mass,
losing its specificity and historical quality in favour of a configuration where the political
becomes volatilised and it itself loses all meaning. The system reduced to mere signs, a facade, a
performance.

The Silent Majority

Picking up where the prev section left off, he says that the reason for the devolution of the
political to that of mere theatrics itself is a consequence of the absence of ‘any social referent of
the classical kind (a people, a class, a proletariat, objective conditions) to lend force to effective
political signs’. The only referent is the silent majority, or the mass. Itself an amorphous blob of
nothingness, it eludes representation. ‘Their existence is no longer social, but statistical’, reduced
to surveys they no longer ‘belong to the order of representation’. Meaningful representation is
simulated, nothing has meaning; the masses refuse meaning. Making metaphorical use of an
electrical circuit, he writes ‘Everything changes with the device of simulation. In the couple
"silent majority / survey" for example, there is no longer any pole nor any differential term,
hence no electricity of the social either: it is short-circuited by the confusing of poles, in a total
circularity of signalling. This is the ideal form of simulation: collapse of poles, orbital circulation
of models’.
Subjected to constant stimuli of information, a simulation of an ‘ever inexpressible and
unexpressed social’ is what forms the meaning of the masses silence. This silence itself,
however, is not one that ‘does not speak, it is a silence which refuses to be spoken for in its

In the shadow of the silent majorities; Baudrillard 3

 name’. It is a weapon. One that is made use of by the masses to engulf the political as will and
representation. Power over the apathetic itself was seen as a tool to maintain status positions, yet
now the apathy overpowers it. This is why the masses are encouraged to speak, urged to live
socially, electorally, organizationally, sexually, in participation, in festival, in free speech, etc., it
is an effort to break the mass, to render it dead , to have the spectre ‘pronounce its name’. All in
vain.

The information dispersed amongst the masses in an effort to dissipate the silent majority does
quite the opposite. ‘Instead of transforming the mass into energy, information produces even
more mass. Instead of informing as it claims, in- stead 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.’

A lot of energy is spent in keeping things—political investment, the ‘social principle of

reality’—afloat and from preventing implosion. The system risks being swallowed up. He here
speaks on the production of the demand for meaning. Comparing commodities to meaning, he
speaks of capitals contemporary necessity to produce consumers, to produce demand, a
production that is more costly than of goods. Similarly, the demand for meaning is in deficit but
the supply itself is aplenty; the system props itself up by producing the demand for meaning. A
production which costs more and more on the daily, rising until the price is impossible to pay.

Neither Subject Nor Object

The mass is no longer objectifiable (in political terms: no longer representable), and neutralises
any subject ‘who would claim to comprehend it’ (in political terms: it annuls anyone who would
claim to represent it)’ . Only the surveys and statistics claim to represent it, but this is mere
spectacle. The political sphere survives under the presumption that the masses are capable of
action, that these statistics are backed by them. ‘It is at this price aline that the political class can
still believe that it speaks and that it is politically heard.’ A mere pretence, politics has since
long been nothing but performance, one that is to be enjoyed as a form of entertainment on the
screen of private life; election games on the TV are not unlike the broadcast of football matches.
The people now avenge their treatment as supernumerary by the political through rendering the
political a simple drama being played out. ‘The people have become a public…. they even enjoy
day to day, like a home movie, the fluctuations of their own opinions in the daily opinion polls.
Nothing in all this engages any responsibility. At no time are the masses politically or historically
engaged in a conscious manner. They have only ever done so out of perversity, in complete

In the shadow of the silent majorities; Baudrillard 4

 irresponsibility.’ This is not a flight from politics but rather a retaliation, an antagonism between
the class which ‘bears the social, political, and cultural and the uninformed, residual, senseless
mass.’ The former seeks to ‘perfect the reign of meaning’, the latter distorts it, neutralises it,
diminishes it.

For the longest time, the public sphere was seen as a space for action. Now it is the private, the
banal, the insignificant. The withdrawal of men into the private is an act of direct defiance of the
political, a form of resisting political manipulation. The depoliticised masses are beyond the
political, the masses ‘sentence the political to annihilation’. This denial of meaning, however,
‘has no meaning’… some would seek to view this as the indication of a new revolution but the
masses never did, and never will, have any meaning.

From Resistance to Hyperconformity

The silent majority emerged from within an entire cycle of historical resistance to the social.
Official history merely documents the progress of the social, it fails to show how resistance to it
grew even ore rapidly. No longer primitive and violent in its strategy, the resistance is made
apparent in the "two-step flow of communication". the mass does not at all constitute a passive
receiving structure for media messages, whether they be political, cultural or advertising.
Microgroups and individuals, far from taking their cue from a uniform and imposed decoding,
decode messages in their own way. They intercept them (through leaders) and transpose them
(second level), contrasting the dominant code with their own particular sub-codes, finally
recycling everything passing into their own cycle.’

Mass and Terrorism

Between the masses and terrorism passes an energy, one of social dispersal, absorption and
annulment of the political. The silent majority itself does not produce terrorism, rather they occur
simultaneously, marking the end of the political and the social. It reveals the ‘reality of a violent
implosion of all our systems of representation’. Terrorism itself does not ‘aim at unmasking the
repressive character of the State

Implosive Systems, Explosive Systems

N/A

In the shadow of the silent majorities; Baudrillard 5

In the shadow of the silent majorities; Baudrillard 6