In his text “The End of the Panopticon”, Baudrillard writes the following: “Such immixture, such a viral, endemic, chronic, alarming presence of the medium…But we must be careful of the negative twist discourse gives this…from a representative sphere of meaning to the genetic sphere of the programmed signal.” (55) This densely-packed statement can be considered to be a nutshell summary of the point of this text in its entirey: Baudrillard’s point here is to indicate how “reality” has been replaced by representations. Namely, we are no longer in touch with reality: we are instead in contact with simulacrums of reality. What is omnipresent in our everyday in other words is the presence of what Baudrillard terms “medium”: this bears a clear connection to our forms of modern media, which give us representations of events. What is problematic for Baudrillard is the extent by which it is the act of representation itself that becomes dominant: the content of what is to be communicated has been lost, replaced by the importance of the media, i.e., in our contemporary times phenomena such as Twitter, Facebook, etc., are alluded to as revolutionary devices simply because the way they can represent reality, not because of the content of these messages.
This is emphasized in the somewhat obscure remark Baudrillard makes about “the negative twist discourse gives” to the “alarming presence of the medium”: it is not that before the dominance of the medium in this form, we lived in a world without representation. Baudrillard makes this clear by marking the movement from a “representative sphere of meaning to the genetic sphere of the programmed signal.” If our contact with reality was in the past shaped by meaning, for example, various customs, traditions, world-views, what has now occurred is that the meanings inherent to these various forms of life have disappeared, and all that is left is the form of transmission or what Baudrillard calls a signal. With our infatuation, to borrow Baudrillard’s terms, with how these “signals”, i.e., forms of media, have increased in complexity and power, what has been lost is the content of these same signals. This is why Baudrillard talks about the signal as a type of “virus”: it is something that in its communicative power, in a certain sense, destroys the own content of its message, rendering these messages trivial in the endless noise and flush of information. What is important now is the way in which this information has now become ubiquitous, not the meaning of information.
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"Baudrillard Compared To Plato".
What Baudrillard suggests in this passage can be compared to Plato’s allegory of the cave, although at the same time it can be said that it marks a further development in Plato’s allegory. For Plato, the myth about the citizens unknowingly bound in a cave, simultaneously subject to images that they do not know are not true representations of reality, seems to embody a situation that is quite similar to what Baudrillard describes: what is present in the Platonic story is a sense in which representation and meanings are controlled by another, by some elite, to the obliviousness of those subject to these manipulations. For Plato, true thinking means arising from this cave, to see the false images as false images, and then transcend these imposed prejudices and meanings, essentially in order to think for oneself and deny those who deny the individual access to reality.
There are clear parallels with Baudrillard’s remark: there is a sense of manipulation, of being shut out from the experience of “true reality” in the form of some imitation. However, at the same time, Plato’s cave consists of images that in a certain sense are concrete: the way Plato tells the allegory of the cave suggests that some precise content is being communicated to those in the cave, as they are being told what to think about reality. This is therefore still a meaning or representation of reality, even though it is ultimately controlled and manipulated by others – some message is being told.
In Baudrillard’s scenario, however, even the message has become superfluous. The message has been overtaken by the medium: in Plato’s allegorical terms, therefore, what we are now experiencing is something to the effect of a being mesmerized by the forms of the shadows themselves being produced on the cave wall: we are amazed, for example, that such shadows are three dimensional, that they can be downloaded from one part of the “cave” (or Internet) to another at instantaneous speed, at the very realistic appearance of these same shadows. This is something to the effect of the ultimate form of the manipulation of the cave: the rulers who control the media do not even have to work to try and create some messages with which to manipulate those imprisoned: instead they can merely overwhelm individuals with the speed or the technological advancement of the medium itself. In Plato’s terms, what is now at stake is the prisoners in the cave being hypnotized by the way the shadows are made as opposed to what they are communicating: this, for Baudrillard, is an even more insidious form of manipulation, because it does not even attempt to give us one view or representation of reality – it rather proclaims the importance of being able to “manipulate” reality, to create representations on amazingly more complex levels.
Baudrillard’s remark about the map and the territory, saying that the map comes before the territory, in a certain sense repeats this same idea: one does not have a direct contact with reality, i.e., the territory explored by the explorer, and then after making a map of this territory, but the map instead exists before the territory. These are imaginary frames of reference that affect our view of reality, instead of letting reality shape our relation to the world. In this way, we deny the very possibility of reality affecting us, of something different challenging our preconceptions – we instead approach the world above all through our emphasis on our ability to manipulate it – reality is unimportant, irrelevant, it only exists as reality to the extent that it can be manipulated and lose its very reality. Something is therefore paradoxically considered real to the extent that it is not real: i.e., that it can be manipulated, that its message and content can be eliminated.
Certainly, Baudrillard’s remarks seem almost prophetic. Constant popular discourses emphasize the accomplishments of the new technologies, from the ipad to the Internet to the aforementioned Twitter and Facebook: what is communicated through these same mediums is in a serious sense secondary or even irrelevant in comparison to the media itself. This is shown in the endless re-designs of Apple or other products – the medium itself is celebrated. The philosopher Marshall McLuhan wrote “the medium is the message”: and this certainly seems to be a slogan similar to Baudrillard. However, in a more radical sense, for Baudrillard the slogan is rather that “the medium is reality”, to the extent that the medium cuts us off from reality – it achieves its very power to the extent that it successfully disconnects us from real experiences and encounters, creating a substitute that at the same time draws us in with its very power to deny reality.
