Jonathan Bignell

Baudrillard and McLuhan: Modernity and the Media

NOTE: I cannot remember why I wrote this paper (!), but it is currently unpublished and
looks like a draft that I didn’t have time to develop further. Many of the points raised here
have been developed in my book Postmodern Media Culture (Edinburgh University Press,
2000). There is a list of my published writing at http://www.reading.ac.uk/ftt/about/staff/j-
bignell.aspx and some publications can be downloaded for free from there or from my
Academia.edu pages.

This paper is a deconstructive reading of some of the central concepts in the work of
Jean Baudrillard and Marshall McLuhan which concern the position of the mass media of
television and film as symptoms, examples, and prefigurations of the condition of modernity.
I shall discuss these issues in relation to the question of history, of how these texts deploy
forms of writing which situate media and modernity in a historical continuum.
The central issue of the paper is the relationship between descriptive discourses and
analytic, critical discourses in Baudrillard’s and McLuhan’s work, and I shall demonstrate
that the same slippage between description and critique is evident in both these writers’
discussion of television and cinema. Description will be shown to entail a discursive position
outside the historical process from which it may be narrated, and analysis will be shown to
entail a discursive position adopting this description as the grounds for an evaluative
judgement. While McLuhan’s judgement of the mass media is basically optimistic, relying
on an originary positivity, and Baudrillard’s pessimistic, relying on an originary negativity,
the movement from description to analysis in both cases constitutes a violent tendentiousness.
Modernity is seen by Baudrillard (following the Frankfurt school) as a loss of a
mythic and religious past, replaced by alienation, secularisation and rationalism. He retains
the Enlightenment goal of emancipation, so that a society characterised by the lost totality
might be restored in a further dialectical stage. But since for Baudrillard the system’s powers
extend to subjectivity and language, then there is no exteriority from which an enabling
critique can derive. For even the concepts of ideology and alienation are seen as themselves
alienated and effects of the system, in a vertiginous escalation of his argument whose
eschatological fervour is familiar in the discourses of postmodernism. In the context of a
discussion of the human sciences’ critical discourse in general, Jacques Derrida has remarked
on the issues at stake in this kind of rereading of theory:
The quality and fecundity of a discourse are perhaps measured by the critical rigour
with which this relation to the history of metaphysics and to inherited concepts is

1
 thought. Here it is a question both of a critical relation to the language of the social
sciences and a critical responsibility of the discourse itself. It is a question of
explicitly and systematically posing the problem of the status of a discourse which
borrows from a heritage the resources necessary for the deconstruction of that
heritage itself. A problem of economy and strategy.1
I shall show that Baudrillard's rereading of Marx and of semiology leaves him without a
discursive position for his own writing. His critique of Marx and of semiology reproduces
the structures it analyses, vitiating its deconstructive possibilities.
Every theory of modernity implicitly or explicitly constructs a history in which
modernity can be thought. Baudrillard's model of modernity posits an imaginary mythic
society as a lost origin, seen in terms of communication rather than (for Marx) in terms of
production. Primitive societies are characterised by symbolic exchange, a notion deriving
from, among others, Claude Levi-Strauss. Symbolic exchange denotes the interaction based
on gift and counter-gift, where the objects exchanged have stable symbolic meanings of
reciprocal obligation, and the exchange has value through its symbolisation of relationship,
regardless of the value or usefulness of the objects themselves. Wedding rings are a vestigial
example of this form of exchange. In his more recent work, the real existence of this epoch
of symbolic exchange comes into question, and is referred to as a ‘dream’, while still
fulfilling its structural functions of anteriority and externality in his argument.2 The signs of
this symbolic epoch are not subject to a principle of general equivalence, they are not
arbitrary, and are stable marks of social relations. Symbolic exchange then functions as the
other of the commodity system which he attacks, and as Lyotard points out this form of
society looks a lot like that of the noble savage, the primitive, which has bolstered the claims
of western imperialism at least since Rousseau.3 The description of the anterior society of
symbolic exchange appears to repeat the description given of it in the nostalgic discourse of
the Enlightenment which Baudrillard wishes to displace.
The key move in Baudrillard’s critique of communication and ideology is the linking
of Marxism and semiology through the inversion of their binary oppositional structures. His
work on these theoretical issues underlies his writing on the media in contemporary culture.
For Baudrillard, the commodity form and the sign form share the same structure. While
Marx theorised exchange-value and use-value in the commodity, prioritising the importance

1
Derrida, J., ’Structure, sign and play in the human sciences’, in Writing and Difference,
trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, Kegan & Paul, 1978), p.282.
2
Baudrillard, J., ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’, in Hal Foster (ed.), Postmodern Culture
(London: Pluto, 1985), p.126.
3
Lyotard, J-F.,Economie Libidinale (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1974), p.130.

2
of exchange-value, semiology theorised signifier and signified in the sign giving priority to
the signifier. In Marx, commodity fetishism mystifies real labour into abstract social labour.
Use-value is not fetishised because it is transparent, a natural property of objects in relation to
human needs, and irreducible. Baudrillard argues that concrete social labour was abstracted
into social labour embodied in the occult form of exchange-value, and also that, contrary to
Marx, the principle of utility in use-value is also an abstraction, a code of abstract
equivalence, and together with exchange-value, both sides of the commodity are involved in
the nullification of symbolic exchange.
If use-value is not quantitative in the arithmetical sense, it still involves equivalence.
Considered as useful values, all goods are already comparable among themselves,
because they are assigned to the same rational-functional common denominator, the
same abstract determination. Only objects or categories of goods cathected in the
singular and personal act of symbolic exchange (the gift, the present) are strictly
incomparable.4
Just as occurs for Marx with exchange-value where the producer's creativity becomes abstract
social labour power, so for Baudrillard the consumer in the system of use-value has not
enjoyment or desire, but abstract social need power. Marx’s championing of the naturalness
of use-value and the needs it satisfies cannot produce a non-alienated society where everyone
receives according to their needs, because this relies on the principle of general equivalence
of use-value which is parallel and homologous to the general equivalence in exchange-value,
underlain by money, which allows the principle of general equivalence via something with
negligible use-value.
The point of this analysis is that the hierarchy of exchange and use function as a code,
a binary opposition in which objects simply mark a difference, indeed become signs in a
system of equivalence. Baudrillard calls this the ‘semiological reduction’: ‘In fact, it is the
semiological organisation itself, the entrenchment in a system of signs, that has the goal of
reducing the symbolic function. This semiological reduction of the symbolic properly
constitutes the ideological process.’5 The commodity form is grounded in an illusory
naturalness of use-value, and the sign form is grounded in the reality-effect produced by the
signified/referent. The reality-effect of the signified/referent becomes an ideological effect
produced by the sign form.

4
Baudrillard, J., ‘Beyond Use Value’, in For A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign
(St. Louis: Telos, 1981), p.132.
5
Baudrillard, J., ‘Fetishism and Ideology’, in For A Critique of the Political Economy of the
Sign (St. Louis: Telos, 1981), p.98.

3
 The crucial thing is to see that the separation of the sign and the world is a fiction, and
leads to a science fiction. The logic of the equivalence, abstraction, discreteness and
projection of the sign engulfs the Rft. as surely as it does the Sd. This ‘world’ that the
sign evokes (the better to distance itself from it) is nothing but the effect of the sign,
the shadow that it carries about, its ‘pantographic’ extension. Even better, this world
is quite simply the Sd.-Rft.6
So as the empire of signs expands, primarily through the media, and especially TV,
everything undergoes a semiological reduction, and the code eliminates exteriority so that the
model takes over from the real. Indeed the real becomes an ideological guarantee, the
‘hyperreal’. Where all referents, like the real, the social, nature, are already reproduced in the
terms of the code, there is no more real at all.
Baudrillard relates this analysis to the theory of the subject by discussing fetishism.
Fetishism is not seen as the worship of an object primarily, but the worship of the object’s
coded inscription in the semiological system. The split subject of Lacanian psychoanalysis
negates his/her lack by slipping from term to term of the Symbolic Order, signifier to
signifier, displacing desire onto the desire for the perfect closure of the code or system, a
process of suture.
It is a question of substituting - for an erogenous body, divided in castration, source of
an ever-perilous desire - a montage, an artefact of phanasmagorical fragments, an
arsenal or a panoply of accessories, or of parts of the body [...] These fetish objects
are always caught in a system of assemblage and separation, in a code.
Circumscribed in this way, they become the possible objects of a security-giving
worship. This is to substitute the line of demarcation between element-signs for the
great dividing line of castration.7
The two problems of this formulation are that, first, this fascination with the code which
produces fetishism is said to be characteristic of modern societies, although fetishism is also
characteristic of the primitive cultures which are said to be different from modern ones.
Second, if primitive societies are different, not subject to this suture, they must also be non-
castrated and their subjects unified, which Lacan portrays as imaginary, impossible, an
unrepresentable originary state which is part of, and functions in Baudrillard’s texts in the
same way as the ‘dream’ of symbolic exchange.
McLuhan does not explicitly situate his discourse in relation to materialism or
semiology. However, he does address the nature of language and the sign, and questions of
alienation and subjectivity, and links these in a similar way to Baudrillard. McLuhan’s 1964

6
Baudrillard, J., ‘Towards A Critique’, in For A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign
(St. Louis: Telos, 1981), pp.151-2.
7
Baudrillard, J., ‘Fetishism and Ideology’, in For A Critique of the Political Economy of the
Sign (St. Louis: Telos, 1981), p.95.

4
book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man is divided into two parts. Part One is a
series of essays outlining his method and approach to media as extensions of the human body
and nervous system, and Part Two is a series of essays on media beginning with speech and
writing, and including sections on maps, clothing, printing, the telegraph, the typewriter, film,
television and finally automated electronic systems. Like Baudrillard, McLuhan constructs a
historical progression in the development of media as representational systems, in which each
epoch is characterised by the modality of human consciousness and potentiality which it
stresses. For McLuhan, the effect of every medium, including language, is to externalise or
auto-amputate some aspect of the human totality, so that finally it seems to emerge that there
is no content remaining in the notion of the human. By virtue of automated simulations of
the human nervous system in computer models and communication technologies, the
category of the human is absorbed by and substituted for these models and media.
Like Baudrillard’s, McLuhan's discourse sets up a series of historical periods.
Primitive societies, whose members McLuhan calls ‘natives’, are characterised by a culture
of involvement, of non-alienation, which is exemplified in ritual, and by a symbolic
interaction where a medium is not separated from its message. The modern or post-primitive
phase is characterised by progressive fragmentation of society into specialised groups and
functions, with a concomitant fragmentation of the total human potentiality into abstracted
modes of being. This is a culture of progressive alienation which accompanies the
development of productivity, and is enabled by the invention of phonetic writing. McLuhan
views alphabetic writing as a translation system whose content is speech, but whose form
begins the process of distanciation of both subject and referent from the totality of lived
experience. The latest phase of culture, which we might now term postmodernity, is
characterised by a return to what McLuhan calls the ‘involvement in depth’ of primitive
societies, the tactile integration of previously fragmented parts, and this epoch is both
signalled and created by the television medium and computer-controlled processes of
representation and production. These new media both evolve into a beyond of language,
beyond writing, and involve a return to integrated lived experience because they mime or
simulate human creativity.
After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical
technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had
extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric
technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace,
abolishing both time and space as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we
approach the final phase of the extensions of man - the technological simulation of

5
 consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and
corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already
extended our senses and our nerves by the various media.8
The categories of real and representation, production and consumption, consciousness and its
objects, are collapsed together. But the coherence of a notion of human consciousness must
disappear inasmuch as these binary structures of difference which define it against nature
themselves disappear. McLuhan’s history ends by announcing the end of history as a
consequence of the end of representation.
The media of film and television are crucial examples in McLuhan’s thesis. Film
works as a point of transition from one state of development to another, from the mechanical
to the electrical.
Mechanization was never so vividly fragmented or sequential as in the birth of the
movies, the moment that translated us beyond mechanism into the world of growth
and organic interrelation. The movie, by sheer speeding up the mechanical, carried us
from the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configuration
and structure. [...] When electric speed further takes over from mechanical movie
sequences, then the lines of force in structures and in media become loud and clear.
We return to the inclusive form of the icon.9
Both writers propose cinema and more especially television to be examples of a modern
condition, determined by a historical shift, but also propose that the modern condition entails
the impossibility of the media’s determination by factors outside themselves, because the
real, or the message, the contents of the media, are absorbed or nullified by the nature of the
media. Both writers propose that one of the attributes of modernity is the impossibility of a
critical distance from it, so that the historicizing discourse which names an example and
states a case cannot legitimately claim the distance which allows evaluative judgement. The
problem for both writers is how to establish modernity as the referent of historical discourse
and at the same time to judge it.
The fact of this implosion of contents, of absorption of meaning, of the whole
evanescence of the medium itself, of the re-absorption of the whole dialectic of
communication in a total circularity of the model, of the implosion of the social in the
masses, can appear catastrophic and hopeless. But it is only so in regard to the
idealism that dominates our whole vision of information. We all live by a fanatical
idealism of meaning and communication, by an idealism of communication through
meaning, and, in this perspective, it is very much a catastrophe of meaning which lies
in wait for us.10

8
McLuhan, M., Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London: Ark, 1987), pp.4-5.
9
McLuhan, M., Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London: Ark, 1987), p.12.
10
Baudrillard, J., In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (New York: Semiotexte, 1983),
p.103.

6
Baudrillard does not argue for a critical practice to redress this situation, since for him
pragmatic activity must be founded on notions of the real, the social or the community, and
these have been absorbed and nullified by the system (capitalism and its law of value), and
replaced by simulations of them which are complicit with the system. He argues instead for
hyperconformism, passivity and disinvestment, which will lead to the system’s collapse
through its implosion on itself.
Resistance to the system cannot be a claim for subjectivity, but instead the role of
passive object.
To a system whose argument is oppression and repression, the strategic resistance is
the liberating claim of subjecthood. But this reflects rather the system’s previous
phase, and even if we are still confronted with it, it is no longer the strategic terrain:
the system’s current argument is maximisation of the word and the maximal
production of meaning. Thus the strategic resistance is that of a refusal of meaning
and refusal of the word - or of the hyperconformist simulation of the very
mechanisms of the system, which is a form of refusal and non-reception.11
It is this refusal which Baudrillard outlines in his discussion of the masses in In The Shadow
of the Silent Majorities, where the passive mass audience, particularly of TV, absorbs and
nullifies the messages of the medium.
Baudrillard’s notion of resistance as object is only resistance if the system has taken
over the world, and if it has there is no possible subject position for Baudrillard as critic and
strategist to write his text. If the system has not achieved dominance, resistance as object is
complicit with the system’s repression and oppression, against which subjectivity is the
strategy he recommends. If the poles of sender and receiver of messages have collapsed into
each other because communication is abandoned in favour of fascination with the code, then
Baudrillard’s own writing and also its reading must be impossible. The creation and
reception of meaning can no longer take place. He himself criticises McLuhan for this error,
the collapsing of one pole of a binary into the other, in his discussion of McLuhan's formula
‘the medium is the message’.
McLuhan’s formula, the medium is the message, which is the key formula of the era
of simulation, this very formula must be envisaged at its limit, where, after all
contents and messages have been volatilised in the medium, it is the medium itself
which is volatilised as such. [...] In short, the medium is the message signifies not
only the end of the message, but also the end of the medium. There are no longer
media in the literal sense of the term (I am talking above all about the electronic mass

11
Baudrillard, J., In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (New York: Semiotexte, 1983),
p.108.

7
 media) - that is to say, a power mediating between one reality and another, between
one state of the real and another - neither in content nor in form.12
The binary opposition which does remain here is that between real and false, which is
equivalent to that between symbolic and sign. Implosion can only be total if the category of
the real remains as the lost originary referent, just as the semiological reduction can only be
total if symbolic exchange remains as the lost origin from which we have been barred. The
illusory world of simulation can only be illusory and negative against these positive and
anterior terms. By characterising semiology as definitively abolishing the referent and the
real, Baudrillard falls into an excessive repetition of his model which contains no internal
difference or play – Derrida’s differance. His critique of the binary oppositions of political
economy and of the sign follows the first move of a deconstructive logic, by displacing the
privileged term, and showing the interleaving of one term in the other. But the form of
totalising identity which remains has no outside or edge except the categories of symbolic
exchange and the real, both of which have been bracketed out in his analysis. He therefore
re-enacts the totalisation for which he attacks both political economy and semiology. In fact,
the supplement which is both inside and outside Baudrillard’s critique is the everyday notion
of writing itself. Writing is the precondition for his own texts, the possibility of meaning-
effects, which is at once outside his work as the terrain of theoretical and practical activity
which he inhabits, and also inside his work as the medium through which his message is
communicated.
With television, McLuhan announces that the social subject has become involved in a
process of productive creation of sense which derives from the incompleteness of the image
as object. This creativity is the involvement in depth, the tactility of multiple sensual
engagement, which he sees in modernist literature and painting.
With TV, the viewer is the screen. He is bombarded with light impulses that James
Joyce called the ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ that imbues his ‘soulskin with
sobconscious inklings’. The TV image is visually low in data. The TV image is not a
still shot. It is not a photo in any sense, but a ceaselessly forming contour of things
limned by the scanning-finger. The resulting plastic contour appears by light through,
not light on, and the image so formed has the quality of sculpture and icon, rather than
of picture. [...] the viewer of the TV mosaic, with technical control of the image,
unconsciously reconfigures the dots into an abstract work of art on the pattern of a
Seurat or a Roualt.13

12
Baudrillard, J., In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (New York: Semiotexte, 1983),
pp.101-3.
13
McLuhan, M., Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London: Ark, 1987), p.313.

8
The viewer is then a sort of artist, with a depth involvement in the process of representation,
and is no longer the alienated consumer of a fragmentary commodity object. The TV viewer,
particularly the child who has grown up immersed in TV, then becomes a new kind of
citizen, a citizen of the global village in which social responsibility and involvement in
everyone else’s life is both necessary and unavoidable because of global media systems. The
TV medium then prefigures and inaugurates the epoch of creative simulation of
consciousness: ‘Television completes the cycle of the human sensorium. With the
omnipresent ear and the moving eye, we have abolished writing, the specialized acoustic-
visual metaphor that established the dynamics of Western civilization.’14
The figure of the artist is regarded as the potential mediator between the new
organisation of culture and old mechanised and fragmented means of perception. McLuhan’s
work is saturated with examples drawn from modernist art and from earlier literary works
which function as examples and prefigurations of the state of development he describes. The
artist is seen as someone who perceives developments in consciousness before their effects
are generally recognised, and whose non-alienated activity (he rejects the containment of art
in forms of aestehtic appreciation and in the market) is an illustration of the inclusive view
McLuhan himself espouses. The twentieth-century art which McLuhan refers to is seen as an
attempt to present an unrepresentable wholeness, what Lyotard might call a postmodern
practice, in the sense that it is an attempt to present the unpresentable.
The same separation of sight and sound and meaning that is peculiar to the phonetic
alphabet also extends to its social and psychological effects. Literate man undergoes
much separation of his imaginative, emotional and sense-life, as Rousseau (and later
the Romantic poets and philosophers) proclaimed long ago. Today the mere mention
of D. H. Lawrence will serve to recall the twentieth-century efforts made to by-pass
literate man in order to recover human ‘wholeness’.15
McLuhan’s writing, however, cites these postmodern works as prefigurations of a
representational epoch in which a wholeness can become present and presentable. His own
book Counterblast (1954) is an obvious example of the use of typographic, stylistic and
discursive forms deriving from literary modernism, since it is explicitly a re-use of the
techniques of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis’s Blast magazine. Forms of artistic
production, and especially writing, which carry this modernist avant-garde quality of
deformation and revelation are the supplement in McLuhan’s texts. They belong to phases of

14
McLuhan, M., The Medium is the Massage (London: Penguin, 1967), p.125.
15
McLuhan, M., Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London: Ark, 1987), pp. 87-
8.

9
production which are in other terms fragmented and alienated, while also being an outside, an
instance of a different sensibility into which McLuhan’s critical discussion itself attempts to
fit. But the new epoch he announces becomes a new totality, in which the difference and
deferral of the effort to present the unpresentable, the text of Derrida’s differance, is
reintegrated into a unified technological culture which has no outside, no differance.
Our new electric technology that extends our senses and nerves in a global embrace
has large implications for the future of language. Electric technology does not need
words any more than the digital computer needs numbers. Electricity points the way
to an extension of the process of consciousness itself, on world scale, and without any
verbalization whatever. Such a state of collective awareness may have been the
preverbal condition of men. Language as the technology of human extension, whose
powers of division and separation we know so well, may have been the ‘Tower of
Babel’ by which men sought to scale the highest heavens. Today, computers hold out
the promise of a means of instant translation of any code or language into any other
code or language. The computer, in short, promises by technology a Pentecostal
condition of universal understanding and unity.16
Where Baudrillard proclaims kind of implosion into hyperreality which has no outside and
therefore no critical dimension, McLuhan proclaims an implosion caused by universal
translation and inter-involvement in a newly symbolic village society. He expresses the hope
that this universal language will enable the cultivation of microcultures which preserve
difference and autonomy, since the new global society offers involvement in depth in
unfamiliar modes of experience. The potential abandonment of alphabetic writing with its
cultivation of difference as value, hierarchy and mechanical specialization would be replaced
by a transparency of communication, a truly Biblical return to an unfallen language without
difference in these senses.
In a reversal of Baudrillard’s direction on the issue, McLuhan sees simulation, or the
generation of reality from models, as the liberation of human society from capitalism’s
generation of artificial needs. Instead, the real needs deriving from use-value would be
knowable, predictable and satisfiable. Simulation is beyond ideology for both McLuhan and
Baudrillard, for similar reasons, but is evaluated in opposite terms, which demonstates the
reversibility and identity between their approaches.
The specifications of a plane can be programmed and the plane tested under a variety
of extreme conditions before it has left the drafting board. So with new products and
new organizations of many kinds. We can now, by computer, deal with complex
social needs with the same architectural certainty that we previously attempted in
private housing.17

16
McLuhan, M., Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London: Ark, 1987), p. 80.
17
McLuhan, M., Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London: Ark, 1987), p. 358.

10
McLuhan suggests that it is the intellectual, especially the artist, who is needed to take
control of this epoch, particularly since the global village of electronic simulation has no
subjectivity in the usual sense of a separated perceiver or point of view whose rationality
could control its effects.
Like the figure of the artist in his texts, McLuhan’s authorial I belongs to the new
inclusive community of postmodernity inasmuch as it is the voice which represents and
speaks for it. But this I is split, divided by the necessity of also being the origin outside his
text and outside the global village of a writing which can articulate its essence or form.
McLuhan is producing a descriptive historical narrative of the media which deploys examples
representing the essence of a medium or an epoch. But he is also at the same time making an
implicitly political judgement about the relationship between media effects and a
fundamental essence of the human which transcends the instances of the history, and which
media represent and also deform. These two discourses of description and judgement, which
Lyotard might call language-games, are different, and give rise to an internal splitting or
difference in his texts. It is these differences, the authorial I both inside and outside the text,
and the descriptive and the judgemental discourse, which produce the curious reading-effects
in McLuhan’s work. An excitement, a vertiginous sense of involvement, is produced, but
also a sense of the tendentious and manipulative violence towards his material, which results
in totalising assertion and neglects the particularity of his examples.
Baudrillard’s work shares these problems, but he is aware of some of their difficulties,
and has referred to his writing practice as one of ‘objective irony’. The difference between
illusion and reality, the negation of reality by illusion, comes to an end when the media have
inaugurated the hyperreal because the real is definitively absent. The irony of distance which
philosophy is said to have used in order to analyse reality can no longer operate, and analysis
cannot mediate between reality and illusion. So the distance which is left is that within the
system under discussion, an irony of the object of discussion itself. Baudrillard claims to
play the system against itself, by writing as if there were meaning, theoretical discourse,
though the analysis of the system proclaims this to be impossible. ‘What I try to do, I you
like, is to get out of the objectivity/subjectivity dialectic, in order to reach a point where I can
make of the system an object, a pure object, one with no meaning whatsoever.’18 Baudrillard
claims to shift between the positions of analyst or one who judges, and representer of the
system or one who describes, and a third position where both subject and object of the

18
Baudrillard, J., The Evil Demon of Images (Sydney: Power, 1984), p.42.

11
discourse are volatilised. This position would itself be an attempt to present the
unpresentable, and would make Baudrillard’s text postmodern in Lyotard’s sense, except that
inasmuch as it is both readable and writable within the rules of description and judgement, it
must inevitably fail to achieve this presentation of the system’s lack of meaning.

12