The postmodern recombinant culture of cyber-commodities is a system of simulated differences or differences-in-sameness. The sign-object takes on its meaning in a system of marginal or minimal differences from other sign-objects, according to a code of hierarchical significations (Coke and Pepsi, McDonalds and Burger King, the subset of formula-generated episodes of a TV series or pop-cult movie franchise which are mediocre). The sign-object acquires sense from its differential relationship to other signs. As Marshall McLuhan points out, the media is the message. In this case, the media of equivalence and universal exchangeability makes “the code” become the primary quality of all sign-objects. This insight is an extension of what Marx had recog- nized in his analysis of the universal exchangeability system that is called money and the system of equivalence of exchange-value which, according to Marx, diminishes the use- value of everything made under capitalism.
What occurred in the mid-to-late twentieth century was that America was no longer physically locatable in the specific geographical space situated between New England or New York and the nation’s westernmost frontier (which shifted from the Virginia-Kentucky border to the Mississippi River, then eventually California and then Hawaii). At a certain indeterminate point in its history, America exploded from physicality to virtu- ality and “became the world.” Or the other way around – the whole world imploded into virtuality and became Americanized: the same big color TV screens everywhere; the same shopping malls; the same Coca-Cola, all-American hamburger, and “French fries”; your identity, logo, or “personal” message printed on a T-shirt; the images of horseback-rid- ing cowboys and Superman comics; the glories and tragedies of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe; eventually McDonalds, Starbucks, Nike sneakers. and Apple computers every- where on the planet.
Jean Baudrillard’s entire oeuvre is a study of America, of that virtual America, of that post-World War II model of “social” existence which, in his 1986 book entitled America, he called “utopia realized.” He regarded the term “social” as obsolete since henceforth “the social” was merely simulated by electronic networks and opinion polls. Baudrillard did indeed travel to physical America (he was a visiting professor three times in the 1970s-1980s at public universities in California), but this was not strictly necessary. He could have meditated on virtual America and its mythologies of economic abundance and personalized liberty by turning on the nearest TV set, frequenting the regional superstore (a buying place combining supermarket and department store), or grabbing takeout from the corner fast food outlet.
The Parisian metropolitan area versions of Americanization were plentiful and painful: the Westfield Parly-2 shopping mall near a major highway exit 45 minutes west of downtown Paris with 150 retail stores opened in 1969; the Centre Pompidou high- tech building complex dedicated to culture (symbolizing the spectacular-commodified marriage of art and technology) located in the 4th arrondissement of Paris opened in 1977 and has since had more than 180 million visitors; and Disneyland Paris (whose name speaks for itself), located 45 minutes east of the center of Paris, opened in 1992.
For Baudrillard, mass identity architecture is “deterritorialization” or the disappear- ance of the “terrain” of space. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari also write about deter- ritorialization in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980). The concept brings Baudrillard close to the French social scientist Marc Augé, who argues in Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity that typical spaces such as international airports and hotel rooms are designed to look exactly like all other airports and hotel rooms, to be effectively nowhere, to erase history, identity, and tangible spatial ex- perience.
In The Consumer Society, Baudrillard writes about the ambience of department stores, shopping centers, supermarkets, hypermarkets, le drugstore, and shopping malls – those cities in miniature which surround the visitor with every kind of culinary and cultural ex- perience and amenity – cafés, restaurants, food courts, cinemas, bookstores, travel agen- cies, art galleries, fashion shows, music and dancing, waterfalls, greenery – a veritable cornucopia and “culturalization” and even “naturalization” of selling and buying.
The hypermarket, for Baudrillard, is at the center of the architecture and layout of the sprawling metropolitan area, alongside the “integrated circuit” networks of highways, multistory parking lots, and telecommunications topologies and computer terminals. These circulatory hallmarks of the built environment of the metro area are direct applications of first-order cybernetics, an interdisciplinary knowledge field originated by MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener. In his 1948 book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Wiener outlines the scientific study of regulatory systems in human, natural, and artificial worlds, and the formalization of the concept of feedback.
The hypermarket integrates humans into information and communication networks as systems of disciplinary socialization via technology. In an inversion of the trend since the nineteenth century of increased urbanization, the migration to the suburbs renders cities as satellites of the hypermarkets and accompanying commercial and residential developments which surround them. Baudrillard’s analysis is reminiscent of the novels of the great science fiction writer J.G. Ballard, about whom Baudrillard writes in Simulacra and Simulation.
In The Consumer Society, Baudrillard considers the fate of the over-socialized body in the consumer realm. The body must be managed, routinized, enhanced – it is a supreme signifier of status and cultural citizenship. Beneath the aura of “personal care” and “sexual liberation” is the body as a work of investment. We visit beauty and skin care salons; get a face lift, an abdominal tightening, or a chin reprofiling, have our eyelids“corrected.” We go to a tanning center, a cosmetic surgery center, undergo a computerized body com- position test. Consumer society sells us alcohol, cigarettes, and fast cars but “use them at your own risk.”
The body has substituted itself for the soul as the “object of salvation.” “Bodily pleasure” serves a similar moral and ideological function to the salvation of the soul in Christian theology. In Christianity, salvation is attained through conversion, purifi- cation, faith in Christ as the savior, and the resolution of earthly conflict in a happy afterlife. Consumer culture, filling in the gap of the disappeared “social,” promotes a similar belief that salvation is a private affair, to be pursued via the micro-codes of wellness and self-adornment. The narcissistic possessive individualism of consumer citizenship confers on us our “rights” – the right to health and fitness, the right to be sexy, the right to narrative “answers,” the right to declare one’s own fandom of a team, a celebrity, a vacation destination, or a pedigree of dog.
In the essay “Requiem for the Media” in Political Economyofthe Sign, Baudrillard writes about “speech without response.” In classical groundbreaking texts of Western civi- lization such as Plato’s The Sophist in ancient Greece and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty in the nineteenth century, great thinkers made the practice of alternating questioning and answering essential to the notion of arriving at truths in democracy, science, and human affairs. In the media culture, the continuous exchange of questions and answers revered by those philosophers has been deformed into the format of the yes-or-no referendum or speech without response. For Plato and Mill, truth was not about facts but rather about the process of inquiry. Truth was to be separated from falsehood in a dia- logical engagement. Today anything resembling the Socratic method is short-circuited. The question insists with an authoritarian tone on hearing a specific anticipated answer, or the answer is pre-given in the question. The participation of the citizen is limited to a yes or no. This goes a long way towards explaining the contemporary “post-truth” deterioration of democracy into polarization and hardened antagonistic positions.