By Jean Baudrillard
Released twelve months after omit Foucault, within the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (1978) could be the most vital sociopolitical manifesto of the 20th century: it demands not anything under the tip of either sociology and politics. Disenfranchised revolutionaries (the pink Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof Gang) was hoping to arrive the hundreds without delay via miraculous activities, yet their message simply performed into the palms of the media and the nation. In a media society which means has no that means anymore; conversation only communicates itself. Jean Baudrillard makes use of this final outburst of ideological terrorism in Europe to exhibit the top of the "Social." as soon as invoked through Marx because the motor of background, the hundreds no longer have sociological fact. within the digital media society, the entire lots can do--and all they are going to do--is benefit from the spectacle. within the Shadow of the Silent Majorities takes to its final end the "end of ideologies" skilled in Europe after the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the demise of progressive illusions after may possibly 1968. Ideological terrorism does not symbolize whatever anymore, writes Baudrillard, now not even itself. it is only the final hysterical response to discredited political illusions.
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Example text
Any means will do to impose meaning, to disregard how far terrorism is without legitimacy, without political consequences, without any historical continuity. Its only "ripples" are precisely not an historical flow but its story, its shock wave in the media. This story no more belongs to an objective and informative order than terrorism does to the political order. Both are elsewhere, in an order which is neither of meaning nor of representation - mythical perhaps, simulacrum undoubtedly. The other aspect of terrorist violence is its 54 In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities disclaiming of any determination and of any quality.
We are really only acquainted with representative series, we know little about analogicaL affinitive, im-mediatised, non-reference series and other systems. Undoubtedly something very substantial passes between them (the masses and terrorism) which we would seek in vain in the 52 In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities historical precedents of representative systems (assembly /people, party /proletariat, minoritiesmarginals/groupuscules ... ). And just as a positive social energy passes between the two poles of any representative system, it could be said that between the masses and terrorism, between these two non-poles of a non-representative system, also passes an energy, but a reverse energy, an energy not of social accumulation and transformation, but of social dispersal, of dispersion of the social, of absorption and annulment of the political.
They are the leitmotif of every discourse; they are the obsession of every social 48 In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities project; but all run aground on them, for all remain rooted in the classical definition of the masses, which is that of an eschatological faith in the social and its fulfillment. Now, the masses aren't the social, they are the reversion of any social and of any socialism. Enough theorists have criticised meaning, denounced the traps of liberty and the mystifications of the political, radically censured rationality and every form of representation; however, when the masses wander through meaning, the political, representation, history, ideology, with a somnambulent strength of denial, when they realise here and now everything which the most radical critics have been able to envisage, then the latter know not what to make of it, and persist in dreaming of a future revolution - a critical revolution, a revolution of prestige, that of the social, that of desire.