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Fiasco Press

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Journal of Swarm Scholarship

The Enzensberger-Baudrillard Mass Media Debate Reexamined: Temporal Models and the Dialectic
Jack Kredell

1. Hans Magnus Enzensbergers Constituents of a Theory of the Media, originally published in 1970 in the New Left Review, is an ambitious and urgent attempt to patch existing Marxist media theory with a Leninist social strategy of the new media. Enzensberger describes the emergent category of mass media as a consciousness industry, one that infiltrates into all other sectors of production, takes over more and more directional and control functions, and determines the standard of the prevailing technology (Enzensberger 261). Collectively the various technological and cultural manifestations of new media constitute a new and interconnected universal system. The essays voice is that of the traditional vanguard intellectual urging socialist strategy to recognize the emergence of electronic new media as the prevailing locus of contradiction within the system of post-industrial monopoly capitalism. Prophetically, Enzensberger exhorts the open secret of the emancipatory capacity of new media, which has been waiting, suppressed or crippled, for its moment to come to be recognized for its inherent power to mobilize. In contrast to bygone forms of social mobilization such as the protest march which, for the radical left at the time, bore the stigma of the rank and file Stalinist parade, the new organizational paradigm will make men as free as dancers, as aware as football players, surprising as guerrillas (Enzensberger 261). This notion that the mobilizing potential of electronic media will usher us into a more

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favorable spatial, kinetic and temporal orientation to political life is preordained by a progressive view of history. Gracing the present moment with a greater freedom of movement than ever before, mass media becomes the socio-cultural kindling that ignites the present moments ontological disposition to revolution. What is really being said, however, is that new media offers a new and improved version of mobilization, one that it is not constrained by the planned, linear determinations of marching and parading. Thus, the newness of new media is the degree to which it enables us to transcend the image of the past as the failure to mobilize. Regardless of the structural influence of Ezensbergers progressive critical paradigm, there is something innately magical, almost subversive even, about electronic medias ability to make us as free as dancers even prior to its strategic, emancipatory use. But how exactly does this freedom configure itself? With the resolute air of a positivist, Enzensberger asserts that the revolutionary potential of electronic media is concretized in an egalitarian structure which permits a new relationship between the means and the forces of production: For the first time in history, the media are making possible mass participation in a social and socialized productive process, the practical means of which are in the hands of the masses themselves (Enzensberger 262). Here an unlikely comparison can be drawn between Enzenberger and McLuhan based on the idea of technological immanence. In Enzensberger, what might be called the massness of the mass media, the totalizing degree of its enclosure of receivers and transmitters, superficially resembles Marshall McLuhans notion technological immanence, the audio-tactile ether in which the famous global village subsists. In actuality the two couldnt be more antithetical: Enznensbergers mass media is a hyper-egalitarian structure viewed within the framework of socialist discourse, one that enables greater individual

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Journal of Swarm Scholarship

participation and freedom of movement; by contrast, McLuhan writes about a spatio-temporal immanence that permits interconnectivity and interdependence as opposed to independence (or individuals for that matter).

2. McLuhan, as befitting his unlucky fate in American academia, will play only cameo roles in the work of the two theorists discussed. In Enzensberger, he appears, briefly, as a kind of intellectual extremist of the apolitical avant-garde whose work immodestly exhibits a lack conceptual stringency and historical responsibility. This is somewhat unusual, given that Enzensbergers essay is mostly pardonable of avant-garde delinquency due to its premature futurity; it is literally trying to express itself in terms which have not yet been invented. Though Dadaism teemed with barbarisms, it possessed an historical and prognostic value that for Enzensberger was non-intrinsic to work itself, since it was ...attempting to achieve those effects which the public today seeks in film with the means of painting (Enzensberger 275). For McLuhans vangaurdism, however, there is only hostility and outright rejection. The conflict between Enzensbergers responsible socialist left and representatives of the apolitical such as McLuhan is really a territorial dispute over the theoretical colonization of the new productive forces. Innocents writes Enzensbrger, have put themselves in the forefront of the new productive forces on the basis of mere institutions with which communism-to its detriment-has not wished to concern itself (Enzensberger 271). This is another way of saying that innocents of the apolitical avant-garde have often made greater strides than orthodox Marxists in the radicalization of new media because of their willingness to embrace and expose themselves to the new productive forces of the time. The popularity of the charlatan McLuhan

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Journal of Swarm Scholarship

is directly related to communisms belated evaluation of electronic media. What is significant here about the configuration of the McLuhan galaxy, regardless of its own temporal model of the present, is that it is perceived as a threat to the linear and progressive interpretive model of the dialectical materialism espoused by Ezensbeger. Thus, while we are asked to laugh at the provocative idiocy of regressing to prehistoric tribal existence, the reason for McLuhans appearance at all is that such a regression, if true, would undermine the theoretical foundations of the Enlightenment. In Enzensbergers scant and patronizing treatment of McLuhans thought, isolated in the famous the medium is the message, the figure of McLuhan becomes as a kind of metonymic effigy for the mystique of the media which dissolves all problems in smoke (Enzensberger 270). What this depoliticizing mystique reinforces is the mistaken notion, according to Enzensberger, that media are neutral instruments by which any messages ones pleases can be transmitted without regard for their structure or the structure of the medium. McLuhans irony here goes unnoticed: the saying the medium is the message does in fact have a tautological structure, as Enzensbrger notes, but the point is the very opposite of neutrality: there is no message outside its medium. The expression refers specifically to the pre-foreclosure of neutrality through technological mediation. It is from the positions of this theoretical crux, first articulated by McLuhan, that Baudrillard will critique Enzensbergers strategy of reappropriating the media as a mobilizing tool for being practically and theoretically unlikely. 3. In 1972 Baudrillard published a response to Enzenbergers dialectical approach in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. In the exchange between Enzensberger and Baudrillard, which is fundamentally a debate about the future Marxist theory, the work of

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Journal of Swarm Scholarship

McLuhan assumes an important yet ambiguous role. However, I want to stress that the true object of Baudrillards critique of Enzensbergers socialist strategy and the structure of mass media is the status of the dialectic itself. If Baudrillards requiem for the dialectic holds true in the era of mass media and globalization, then his association with McLuhan constitutes an important theoretical allegiance as well as challenge that demands further development by the Left. Building on McLuhans criticism of Marxist materialism for circumscribing itself to the analysis of material production alone, and incorporating the frameworks of communication theory and cybernetics, Baudrillard locates the terminal deficiency of the dialectic in its artificial and internally mediated union of content. The impasse of the dialectic, and, analogously, of the mass media, is that the structure is coded in such a way as to prevent real exchange or reciprocity. Enzensbergers practical solution of transforming the media from a medium of manipulation to one of communication is misguided since media ideology functions at the level of form, at the level of the separation it establishes, which is a social division (Baudrillard 280). This direct application of McLuhan is noteworthy in that it forms the theoretical basis for Baudrillards own solution to radicalizing the media. According to Baudrillard, The mass media are anti-mediatory and intransitive. They fabricate non-communication-this is what characterizes them, if one agrees to define communication as an exchange, as a reciprocal space of a speech and a response, and thus of a responsibility (not a psychological or moral responsibility, but a personal, mutual correlation in exchange) (Baudrillard 280). What Baudrilliard denotes as reciprocal space, understood in a global and abstract sense, is ultimately where McLuhan and Baudrillard will depart. However, for our purposes,

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Baudrillards theory of mass mediation as being anti-mediatory opens a contested and fraught perspective from which we can view the dialectic and its extensions of critical discourse afresh. Baudrillards theory of the media comes out of the work of Marcel Mauss, especially the latters theory of symbolic exchange: To understand the term response properly, we must take it in an emphatic sense, by referring to an equivalent in primitive societies: power belongs to the one who can give and cannot be repaid (Baudrillard 281). For Baudrillard the media is a monopolized system of exchange in which the response is articulated in such as a way as to prevent antagonistic reciprocity. Thus our only hope of radicalizing the mass media consists in restoring this possibility of response at the level of form. No other theory or strategy is possible, writes Baudrillard. But if that doesnt sound like a cataclysmic endeavor, Baudrillard extends his analysis to the socio-cultural sphere as well, noting that the the consumption of products and messages is the abstract social relation that they establish, the ban raised against all forms of response and reciprocity (281). Baudrillards analysis of the media is directed at empiricism (Enzensbergers especially): So the functionalized object, like all messages functionalized by the media, like the operation of a referendum, controls rupture, the emergence of meaning, and censorship (281). Thus what the empirical transparency and immediacy of the mass media openly conceals is a semiotic worm, which, colonizing and hollowing out every last trace of meaning, leaves us in a lushly textured desert of appearances-a desert that Baudrillard would spend a lot time in his later works. A strange line of analogy can be drawn from the function of the law in Kafkas The Trial to Baudrillards schema of mass media in that the real labor of the law, like the mass media, is not in the exchange of content, but in the mediation of exchange itself. In Kafka, the omnipotent

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Journal of Swarm Scholarship

discourse of the law interpellates the individual as an individual only to negate individuality per se. Famously, the law receives you when you come and dismisses you when you go. Likewise, transgression and subversion never get on on the air without being subtly negated as they are: transformed into models, neutralized into signs, they are eviscerated on their meaning (Baudrillard 282). In Baudrillards estimation, McLuhan gets close to the real structure of the mass media when he asserts the primacy of technological structure, the underlying a priori code that administers the form of the exchange: Furthermore, it has changed status with the extension of the mass media: from a parallel category (descended from almanacs and popular chronicles), it has evolved into a total system of mythological interpretation, a closed system of models of signification from which no event escapes (Baudrillard 283). For Baudrillard, our only hope of violating the system of structured communication is through a return to the symbolic exchange relation, that is, an unknown relation in which response is not predetermined by the ideological and hierarchical categories of transmitter and receiver, or, for that matter, the Marxist categories of consumer and producer. The relation consists of an unknown (x) in that the symbolic gesture has no concrete existence outside its unprincipled, multivalent, and spontaneous appearance. Thus it becomes inherently useless in the era of electronic mass media to strategize, let alone orientate oneself, politically. In its radical oath of transgression aimed at univocality, message, code, modeletc, the project of restoring symbolic exchange is the inverse, as well as reverse, of any rationalist tradition of political thought. As an instance of such a response Baudrillard cites the graffiti of May 68, which is

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transgressive because it responds, there, on the spot, and breaches the fundamental role of nonresponse enunciated by all the media (Baudrillard 287). But here we are faced with a kind of paradox of critical discourse; on the one hand, the discourse of the critic preserves itself by first enumerating and then fashioning theoretical models and histories based on instances of response or rupture; and on the other, critical discourse renounces its own imagined etiological bond with the transgressive component of its speech-a vanity-and lapses into silence. Weary but unperturbed by this kind of structural auto-da-fe, Baudrillard writes, But what does this subversive reading actually amount to? Is it still a reading, that is, a deciphering, a disengaging of a univocal meaningOr is it yet another controlling scheme of interpretation, rising from the ashes of the previous one? (287) By this logic nothing could be said without unintentionally reinstating some form of the dominant code. Ideally, the code of the last code, if it were perfect, would destroy the message and restore the ambivalence of meaning once and for all. But it cannot; we are forced into a position, the coordinates different each time, of repeated transgression: What is strategic in this sense is only what radically checkmates the dominant form (287). Yet each response is insufficient; it is always check and never mate. By virtue of our absolute adherence to transgression, perhaps an effect of the paranoia of manipulation (or worse, becoming manipulators, by instituting a new ideological code), we end up preserving the original integrity of the ruling form. This grand schism articulated in Baudrillards critical discourse is what the leftist theory of the time identified as the post-modern condition. Confronted by a monolithic self-regulating socioeconomic code, modernity, and its cultural logic of capitalism, Leftist theory responds by colonizing the theoretical-historical vantage point of after modernity and theorizing itself from

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the outside, as if from the mere condition of being post-modern. More than a semiotic model of McLuhans dictum of the medium as the message, the paradigm of mass media doubles as an historical model of modernity. 4. What Baudrillards versions of Enzensberger and McLuhan show us, in a way that neither capable of, is that the dialectical attempt to invert the structure of mass media by repositioning it the hands of the receiver is impossibly flawed because it mistakes the ideological category of the receiver for an ontological one. Therefore no strategic action or intervention can maintain its own semantic cohesion and force without, in Baudrillards lyrical schadenfreude, becoming subtly negated as they are: transformed into models, neutralized into signs, they are eviscerated of their meaning (282). More than just the defeat of the Lefts most amenable and prolific of methodologies, the dialectic, we are witness to the expiration of all rationalist methodologies issuing from the Enlightenment. However, keeping Baudrillard in mind, this collapse is not the result of progression, that is, replacing the old ideology with new ideological models or master narratives as such, but of their reduction by a ubiquitous system of mediation into nullifying social feedback. Ultimately Baudrillards critique unconsciously reproduces a model of temporality as impasse: the production of linearity or progress is undercut by action of eternal recurrence of symbolic exchange. Thus Requiem of the Mass Media operates through the assumption that historical progress ceases after modernity. The end result of Baudrillards critique of the sign and its omnipresent mediation is a kind a theoretical Babel in which linearity or progress and static symbiotically coexist. Internally, at the level of form, the mass media is a closed ideological system; externally, at the level of content, which is also the discrete or individual level, the media

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presents itself an open, reversible,transparent but ultimately impossible agent of social progress.

Works Cited:

Baudrillard, Jean. For A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, 164-184. Trans. Charles Levin. Saint Louis, MO.: Telos Press, 1981. Reprinted in The New Media Reader, Ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort. Cambridge, Massachusetts.: The MIT Press, 2003.

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. New Left Review (64)13-36. Nov/Dec 1970. Reprinted in Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, The Consciousness Industry, trans. Stuart Hood. New York: Seabury Press, 1974. Reprinted in The New Media Reader, Ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort. Cambridge, Massachusetts.: The MIT Press, 2003. .

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