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Файл:Philosophy sociocultural and anthropological aspects. Educational manual for students of medical universities
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According to Baudrillard, we live in an era not of society but of
the masses. The mass has no attribute, no predicate, no quality, no
reference. This is precisely its radical indeterminacy. It has no
sociological reality. "The silent majority (which the masses are) is an
imaginary referent (an imaginary Other)".
The masses "do not express themselves — they are probed".
They do not reflect — they are subjected to testing. The political
referent gave way to a referendum (the organizer of a permanent,
never-ending referendum is the mass media). However, soundings,
tests, a referendum, the media act as mechanisms that operate in
terms of simulation, and not in terms of representation.
The masses absorb and neutralize all the influence of the social
and political irrevocably. Thus the social dies, and with it the social
sciences.
The masses are not the subject of history, because they are not
able to represent themselves politically, the masses do not show any
political interest. For example, all Russians are concerned about the
situation of the spread of coronavirus. But who are they all? This is
the faceless mass.
The features of the mass are hyperconformism, silence and
indifference to any problem.
Another feature of the mass is the presence of simulacra.
Georges Bataille introduced the word "simulacrum" into modern
usage. Also, this term is actively used by such philosophers as
Deleuze and Baudrillard. Previously (beginning with the Latin
translations of Plato) it meant simply an image, a picture,
a representation. For example, a photograph is a simulacrum of the
reality that is displayed on it. Not necessarily an exact image, as in
a photograph: paintings, drawings in the sand, retelling a real story in
your own words — all these are simulacras.
Baudrillard uses the concepts of the simulacra — the copy
without an original — and simulation.
In simple terms, a simulacrum is an image without an original,
a representation of something that does not really exist. For example,
Baudrillard, in his famous work There Was No Gulf War, called the
1991 Gulf War a simulacrum, in the sense that there was no way for
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CNN viewers to know if anything actually happened. Or is it just
fake.
Simulacra and Simulation delineates the sign-order into four
stages.
The first stage is a faithful image/copy, where we believe, and
it may even be correct, that a sign is a "reflection of a profound
reality", this is a good appearance, in what Baudrillard called "the
sacramental order".
The second stage is perversion of reality, this is where we
come to believe the sign to be an unfaithful copy, which "masks and
denatures" reality as an "evil appearance — it is of the order of
maleficence". Here, signs and images do not faithfully reveal reality
to us, but can hint at the existence of an obscure reality which the
sign itself is incapable of encapsulating.
The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality, where
the sign pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no
original. Signs and images claim to represent something real, but no
representation is taking place and arbitrary images are merely
suggested as things which they have no relationship to. Baudrillard
calls this the "order of sorcery", a regime of semantic algebra where
all human meaning is conjured artificially to appear as a reference to
the (increasingly) hermetic truth.
The fourth stage is pure simulacrum, in which the simulacrum
has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely
reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or
signs is only of the order of other such claims. This is a regime of
total equivalency, where cultural products need no longer even
pretend to be real in a naïve sense, because the experiences of
consumers' lives are so predominantly artificial that even claims to
reality are expected to be phrased in artificial, "hyperreal" terms. Any
naïve pretension to reality as such is perceived as bereft of critical
self-awareness, and thus as oversentimental.
The masses themselves have turned into an audience that is
only interested in spectacles, and this is how important political
events in the country are perceived. They completely withdraw into
the world of private life. A related phenomenon, close in purpose to
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the masses, is terrorism, which, like the masses, destroys the social.
Only terror, according to Baudrillard, makes the masses react to
mega-events.
The emergence of the silent majority (the masses), according to
Baudrillard, must be considered within the framework of a holistic
process of historical resistance to the social. This is the result of the
individualization and enlightenment of society, the masses —
a product of the information society. The volume of information in
the modern world is so great that the masses oppose it with a strategy
of dissipating meaning and enjoying spectacles.
The authorities flirt with the masses, surround them with care,
enlighten them, trying to implement feedback, but the effect is the
opposite. The information that they are trying to introduce into the
masses in order to transform the masses into energy for the
construction of the "social", only carries out further production of the
mass, more and more weakening the "field of sociality".
A parody of submission, destructive simulation and hyperconformism are the features of modernity. The masses go beyond the
social, playing by its own rules, shattering it with hypersimulation;
they avoid meaning, ideology, politics, history and any
representation in every possible way, which means the collapse of
not only power, but also the revolution, the collapse of all hopes for
liberation. The essence of modernity lies in the opposition of the
silent majority of the sociality imposed on it.
Practical tasks and questions
1. Why is it so important to clearly define the subject of social
philosophy?
2. What do sociology and social philosophy have in common?
3. Why did Auguste Comte consider sociology to be an exact
science of society, while philosophy was not?
4. What does it mean for philosophy to offer an analysis of
sociality as such?
5. What are the foundations of sociality identified by David
Hume?
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6. What are the foundations of sociality identified by Marx?
7. Why does social philosophy not use the term "society", but
use the term "sociality" or "social being"?
8. What problems of social philosophy do you know?
9. What are the special features of the classical theories of
society?
10. What are the special features of the non-classical theories
of society?
11. What are the special features of the Post-non-classical
theories of society?
12. How does Max Weber explain the essence of sociality?
13. What is social action?
14. What types of social action according to Weber is?
15. Who proposes the concept of social a priori? What is it?
16. How is Simmel's theory related to Kant's theory?
17. What three important components of Social a priori do you
know?
18. What intersubjectivity is?
19. What are the features George Herbert Mead's theory of the
generalized other?
20. What subsystems are included in society?
21. What are the most important components of the structure of
the social identified in the theory of Marx?
22. What are the base and the superstructure in the theory of
Marx?
23. What factors of society stratification are identified by
Pitirim Sorokin?
24. What is social mobility? What are the types of social
mobility?
25. What are the features of structural functionalism of
T. Parsons?
26. What elements of the social system does Parsons indicate?
27. Why is modern society in crisis?
28. Why according to Jean Baudrillard we live in an era not of
society but of the masses??
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29. Why mass singularities are hyperconformism, silence and
indifference?
30. What is simulacrum?
31. What four stages of Simulation do you know?
32. How is the development of the information society
connected with the problem of the masses?
References
1. Baudrillard, J. In the shadow of the silent majorities … or
the end of the social. — Columbia University New York City, New
York, 2013. — 299 p.
2. Blackwell, D.W., Angel, J.F. & Miniard, P.U. Consumer
Behavior. — Sankt-Petersburg : Peter, 1999. — 759 p.
3. Baudrillard, J. The consumer Society. Its myths and
structures. — Moscow : Cultural revolution Republic, 2006. —
269 p.
4. Simmel, G. How is Society Possible? — URL:
brocku.ca/MeadProject/Simmel/Simmel_1910.html (дата
обращения: 10.07.2023).
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