The Masses

Definition

The masses, in Fatal Strategies (1983), are Baudrillard's prime example of the pure object — not an alienated subject awaiting liberation, but a silent, absorptive "antibody" that neutralizes every attempt to make it speak, vote, or desire. "The masses are not at all an object of oppression and manipulation. The masses do not have to be liberated and, in any case, they cannot be. All their (transpolitical) power is in being there as pure object—that is to say, in opposing their silence and their absence of desire against any political wish to make them speak." Where Simulacra and Simulation established the masses' silence as a strategy against the media, Fatal Strategies gives the thesis its philosophical ground: the masses embody the object's revenge and the "anti-will." "The masses know that they know nothing and they have no desire to know. The masses know they are powerless, and they don't want power." Their passivity is not stupidity but a "sovereign delegation" of the will to experts (Brummel's "Which lake do I prefer?"). The masses also supply the book's theory of polls: "A screen, whether TV or survey, represents nothing"; "We record everything, but we don't believe it, because we have become screens ourselves." The masses are "the ecstasy of the social" — the social that "has absorbed all the inverse energies of the antisocial, of inertia, resistance and silence." See supremacy-of-the-object, the-hostage, voluntary-servitude, transpolitical, spectacle.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: "the masses are pure object"; "the masses are very snobbish; they act like Brummel and sovereignly delegate the faculty of choice" (1983).
• Michel de Certeau — a cousin theorist of the everyday's silent tactics against the disciplinary apparatus.
• Paul Virilio — the media/telepresence condition within which mass silence operates.
• Not yet paged: Brummel (Beau Brummell), the dandy whose delegation of choice Baudrillard makes the masses' model.

Related Concepts

• Supremacy of the Object — the masses are the object's social form.
• The Hostage — "the masses are the absolute prototype of the hostage."
• Voluntary Servitude — the masses' anti-will draws on La Boétie's problem.
• The Transpolitical — "the only transpolitical condition is that of masses."
• Spectacle — "the people… takes revenge through the spectacle of its own disappearance."
• Implosion of Meaning — the media-mass equilibrium in Simulacra and Simulation.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Fatal Strategies (Baudrillard 1983) — the defining source: "The Evil Genie of the Object"; "the masses are pure object"; the poll/statistics analysis; "the masses are the ecstasy of the social."
• Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard 1981/1994) — "The Beaubourg Effect" and "The Implosion of Meaning in the Media": the masses as catastrophic agent, "the masses' silence is a strategy, not passivity."
• The Practice of Everyday Life (de Certeau 1980) — the everyday's tactics against the disciplinary apparatus.
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book's central case (ch. 3): the masses as "not an external limit to the social… but an internal limit… brought about by this very overcoming" (p. 61); "there are no masses, we never see the masses" (p. 63); their conformity both the difference that allows representation and its effect — "In order to explain how the masses conform to their theory, we already need a theory that has tried to conform to the masses" (p. 135); the masses as "a pure creature of representation, the power of language to change or double the world" (p. 63); Baudrillard's own handling of them audited against the double strategy (pp. 61–62). See double-strategy, doubling, the-neutral.

Open Questions

• Is the "sovereign" mass an empirical claim or a polemical inversion of elitist sociology? Baudrillard's evidence is largely rhetorical.
• Does the masses-as-object thesis foreclose democratic politics entirely, or does it relocate agency below the level of the subject? The wiki should test it against everyday-vs-iconic-architecture and power-and-space.