Four essays turning on one reversal, restated from four angles. The masses are not the unrealized subject of history waiting to be organized and given voice. They are the point at which the social, meaning, the political, and representation collapse inward. Baudrillard names that collapse implosion and sets it term for term against the explosion (expansion, accumulation, production, liberation) he says has governed the West for centuries.
The argument is built to defeat the consolations of the left as much as those of power. Two centuries of organizing, education, and consciousness-raising failed to convert the masses to meaning, and Baudrillard rejects both standard accounts of that failure: manipulation from above, mystification from within. His wager is that the indifference is the masses' practice, a positive counter-strategy of absorption and neutralization, and that it works as an absolute weapon precisely because it cannot be represented, spoken for, or alienated. The governing physical metaphor is the black hole, a density that absorbs all radiation and returns no information.
The four essays are not interchangeable. The title essay lays out the full apparatus: mass, simulation, the survey, terrorism, implosion against explosion. "… Or, The End of the Social" is the most systematic piece, organized around three hypotheses about whether the social ever existed, with a fourth named in its notes. "The Implosion of Meaning in the Media" runs the same operation on information theory and McLuhan. "Our Theater of Cruelty" is the shortest and most occasional, a two-part reading of the Mogadishu hijacking and the deaths at Stammheim that concretizes the terrorism material. The brief reconstructs each in the source's own sequence and under the source's own section headings, because the sequence is part of the argument.
On register: the prose is essayistic and assertion-dense, not demonstrative. Baudrillard rarely argues a claim to a conclusion. He restates it at escalating intensity and lets analogies (microphysics, black holes, DNA and the genetic code, atomic simulation chambers) carry the load. The connective prose below paraphrases the move-structure. The block quotes carry the formulations that travel, each whole and anchored to its printed page.
The essay opens on the masses as the nothingness around which the whole constellation of the social turns. The masses absorb the electricity of the social and ground it out, in the triple pun the translator flags at the foot of the first page.
Page 1, translator's note
Throughout the text "la masse," "faire masse" imply a condensation of terms which allows Baudrillard to make a number of central puns and allusions. For not only does la masse directly refer to the physical and philosophical sense of "substance" or "matter," it can just as easily mean "the majority" (as in "the mass of workers") or even the electrical usage of an "earth"; hence faire masse can simultaneously mean to form a mass, to form an earth or to form a majority.
Pages 1–2
The whole chaotic constellation of the social revolves around that spongy referent, that opaque but equally translucent reality, that nothingness: the masses. A statistical crystal ball, the masses are "swirling with currents and flows," in the image of matter and the natural elements. So at least they are represented to us. They can be "mesmerized," the social envelops them, like static electricity; but most of the time, precisely, they form an earth, that is, they absorb all the electricity of the social and political and neutralise it forever.
What follows is the claim that the masses conduct nothing, and that this non-conduction is not weakness but the strength of the neutral.
Page 2
They are neither good conductors of the political, nor good conductors of the social, nor good conductors of meaning in general. Everything flows through them, everything magnetises them, but diffuses throughout them without leaving a trace. And, ultimately, the appeal to the masses has always gone unanswered. They do not radiate; on the contrary, they absorb all radiation from the outlying constellations of State, History, Culture, Meaning. They are inertia, the strength of inertia, the strength of the neutral.
The decisive refusal arrives at once: this inertia is not stored potential. Baudrillard denies the masses the "reservoir" status on which all revolutionary hope depends, and locates their strength in the present and in silence.
Pages 2–3
According to their imaginary representation, the masses drift somewhere between passivity and wild spontaneity, but always as a potential energy, a reservoir of the social and of social energy; today a mute referent, tomorrow, when they speak up and cease to be the "silent majority," a protagonist of history — now, in fact, the masses have no history to write, neither past nor future, they have no virtual energies to release, nor any desire to fulfill: their strength is actual, in the present, and sufficient unto itself. It consists in their silence, in their capacity to absorb and neutralise, already superior to any power acting upon them.
He marks the cost to sociology up front: the hypothesis of the death of the social is also the hypothesis of sociology's own death, since the discipline survives only on the positive hypothesis of the social. The status of the word "mass" is then declared a deliberate move, not a defect of rigor.
Page 4
The term "mass" is not a concept. It is a leitmotif of political demagogy, a soft, sticky, lumpenanalytical notion. A good sociology would attempt to surpass it with "more subtle" categories: socio-professional ones, categories of class, cultural status, etc. Wrong: it is by prowling around these soft and acritical notions (like "mana" once was) that one can go further than intelligent critical sociology.
To specify the term, then, is to falsify it. The mass has no attribute and no referent, and its lack of definition is its definition.
End of the preview
You have read the opening of In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities. Create an account to unlock the full SAARUTU brief and the rest of the research library.
