An A to Z of Theory | Jean Baudrillard: The Masses

Continuing his series on Baudrillard, Ceasefire columnist Andrew Robinson explores why the French theorist believes the masses are not just passive conformists in today's world, but rather, a quietly subversive force.

By Andrew Robinson

Ceasefire Magazine
October 26, 2012

In discussing resistance from below, Baudrillard’s main emphasis is on the masses. The masses are the aggregate left in place by the operations of the code. They are a ‘homogeneous human and mental flux’. They are the ecstatic form of the social. More social than the social, they absorb the force of its other – inertia, resistance, silence. The masses are the product of the stockpiling of people by the system – whether in queues, factories, prisons or camps. They are the end-product of the social, but they also put an end to the social. They are the sphere in which the social implodes in simulation. People are seduced into the mass by a kind of ‘stupefied, hyperreal euphoria’ which arises from an experience of everything being on, and reduced to, the surface.

The masses are continuous with the proletariat in their desituated, atomised existence. They are people ‘freed’ from specific embedded positions, continuing to exist only as a statistical residue. They are no longer polarised or differentiated. Instead, they are dispersed like atoms. They are speechless – the ‘silent majority’. They do not express themselves. Instead they are surveyed and tested from outside. Hence they are within knowledge, but never represented. They are the product and counterpart of the code’s regime of testing and interrogation. They are created by simulation, not simply portrayed by it.

Despite their apparently abject position, the masses remain a powerful force of resistance. The only cultural practice left is the cultural practice of the masses. This practice is manipulative and depends on chance. It plays with signs, and has no meaning. It is based on an unconscious desire for the symbolic murder of the political class.

Baudrillard writes as if there is a constant strategic conflict, or invisible class war, between the system and the masses. This is not, however, a standard Marxist struggle in the superstructures. The masses are not oppressed and manipulated. They are not alienated. Rather, they are sovereign. They remain passive, and in this way, neutralise the system. Baudrillard insists, provocatively, that the masses are smarter than the critical theorists who denounce them as naïve or stupid. The critics make the mistake of thinking the masses believe in the things they take part in. The appearance of alienation is just a philosophical ideal applied to the masses for purposes of representation.

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