Rhetoric, Culture, and Technology
James P. Zappen
Rhetoric and Digital Media: Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard
A. Marshall McLuhan
1. "When King Lear proposes 'our darker purpose' as the subdivision of
his kingdom, he is expressing a politically daring and avant-garde
intent for the early seventeenth century . . . . Lear
is proposing an extremely modern idea of delegation of authority from
centre to margins. His 'darker purpose' would have been recognized at
once as left-wing Machiavellianism by an Elizabethan audience. The new
patterns of power and organization which had been discussed during the
preceding century were now, in the early seventeenth century, being felt
at all levels of social and private life." (11)
2. "Competitive individualism had become the scandal of a society long
invested with corporate and collective values. The role played by print
in instituting new patterns of culture is not unfamiliar. But one natural
consequence of the specializing action of the new forms of knowledge was
that all kinds of power took on a strongly centralist character. Whereas
the role of the feudal monarch had been inclusive, the king actually
including in himself all his subjects, the Renaissance prince tended
to become an exclusive power centre surrounded by his individual
subjects. And the result of such centralism, itself dependent on many
new developments in roads and commerce, was the habit of delegation
of powers and the specializing of many functions in separate areas and
individuals." (12)
3. "The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image
of a global village." (31)
4. From Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man: "Now,
to the degree that—under the effect of this pressure and thanks
to their psychic permeability—the human elements infiltrated more
and more into each other, their minds (mysterious coincidence) were
mutually stimulated by proximity. And as though dilated upon themselves,
they each extended little by little the radius of their influence upon
this earth which, by the same token, shrank steadily. What, in fact,
do we see happening in the modern paroxysm? It has been stated over
and over again. Through the discovery yesterday of the railway, the
motor car and the aeroplane, the physical influence of each man [or
woman], formerly restricted to a few miles, now extends to hundreds of
leagues or more. Better still: thanks to the prodigious biological event
represented by the discovery of electro-magnetic waves, each individual
finds him[/her]self henceforth (actively and passively) simultaneously
present, over land and sea, in every corner of the earth." (32)
5. "People of literary and critical bias find the shrill vehemence
of de Chardin as disconcerting as his uncritical enthusiasm for the
cosmic membrane that has been snapped round the globe by the electric
dilation of our various senses. This externalization of our senses
creates what de Chardin calls the 'noosphere' or a technological brain
for the world. Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library
the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as in
an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone
outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic,
we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting
a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed
co-existence . . . . Terror is the normal state of any
oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time." (32)
6. "Print as an immediate technological extension of the human person gave
its first age an unprecedented access of power and vehemence. Visually,
print is very much more 'high definition' than manuscript. Print was,
that is to say, a very 'hot' medium coming into a world that for thousands
of years had been served by the 'cool' medium of script. Thus our own
'roaring twenties' were the first to feel the hot movie medium and also
the hot radio medium. It was the first great consumer age. So with print
Europe experienced its first consumer phase, for not only is print a
consumer medium and commodity, but it taught men how to organize all
other activities on a systematic lineal basis." (138)
7. "The 'simultaneous field' of electronic information structures, today
reconstitutes the conditions and need for dialogue and participation,
rather than specialism and private initiative in all levels of social
experience." (141)
Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic
Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 11, 31-32, 138, 141.
8. "There is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like
radio from a cool one like the telephone, or a hot medium like the
movie from a cool one like TV. A hot medium is one that extends one
single sense in 'high definition.' High definition is the state of
being well filled with data. A photograph is, visually, 'high
definition.' A cartoon is 'low definition,' simply because very little
visual information is provided. Telephone is a cool medium, or one of
low definition, because the ear is given a meager amount of
information. And speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so
little is given and so much has to be filled in by the listener. On the
other hand, hot media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed
by the audience. Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and
cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience.
Naturally, therefore, a hot medium like radio has very different
effects on the user from a cool medium like the telephone." (22-23)
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
(1964; Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 22-23.
9. "Herbert Krugman performed brain-wave studies, comparing the response
of subjects to print and television. One subject was reading a book
as the TV came on. As soon as she looked up, her brain waves slowed
significantly. In less than two minutes, she was in a predominantly
alpha state—relaxed passive, unfocused. Her brain-wave response to
three different types of content was basically the same, even though she
told Krugman she 'liked' one, 'disliked' another, and 'was bored by' the
third. As a result of a series of such experiments, Krugman argues that
this predominantly alpha state is characteristic of how people respond
to TV—any TV. He recently remarked, 'the ability of respondents to
show high right brain response to even familiar logos, their right brain
response to stories even before the idea content has been added to them,
the predominantly right brain response to TV, and perhaps even to what we
call print advertising—all suggests that in contrast to teaching,
the unique power of the electronic media is to shape the content of
people's imagery, and in that particular way determine their behavior
and their views' . . . .
How paradoxical that the hardware channels
of radio and telephonic communication contribute to an extraordinary
software effect. Nathaniel Hawthorne was particularly sensitive to the
implications of electric information and not infrequently remarked on
them . . . . When people are on the telephone or on
the air, they have no physical bodies but are translated into abstract
images. Their old physical beings are entirely irrelevant to the new
situations. The discarnate user of electric media bypasses all former
spatial restrictions and is present in many places simultaneously as
a disembodied intelligence. This puts him one step above angels, who
can only be in one place at a time. Since, however, discarnate man has
no relation to natural law (or to Western lineality), his impulse is
towards anarchy and lawlessness. Minus his body, the user of telephone
or radio or TV also is minus his private identity, an effect that is
becoming increasingly evident."
Marshall and Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media: The New Science (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1988), 71-72.
10. "Robotism, or right-hemisphere thinking, is a capacity to be a
conscious presence in many places at once. It is a right-hemisphere
mode—the dominant brain mode of the extended mechanical abilities
of our bodies, keyed to one time and one place. Communication media of
the future will accentuate the extensions of our nervous systems, which
can be disembodied and made totally collective. New population patterns
will fuel the shift from smokestack industries to a marketing-information
economy, primarily in the U.S. and Europe. Video-related technologies
are the critical instruments of such change. The ultimate interactive
nature of some video-related technologies will produce the dominant
right-hemisphere social patterns of the next century. For example,
the new telecommunication multi-carrier corporation, dedicated solely
to moving all kinds of data at the speed of light, will continually
generate tailor-made products and services for individual consumers who
have pre-signaled their preferences through an ongoing data base. Users
will simultaneously become producers and consumers." (83)
11. "In a state of social implosion, induced by information moving at
the speed of light, those who are part of information monopolies, like
the foreign-exchange analyst or the book editor, will not see change
as threatening. But when ordinary people do not know who they are,
they get anxious and violent. Many men went to the frontier in the last
century to prove themselves. In the border town of the American West,
everybody was a nobody until he wrested an identity through taking a
risk and pure grit. The frontier was a hardware society which allowed
men and women to define themselves by transforming the land.
The electronic society does not do so; it does not have solid goals,
objectives, or private identity. In it, man does not so much transform
the land as he metamorphosizes himself into abstract information for
the convenience of others. Without restraint, he can become boundless,
directionless, falling easily into the dark of the mind and the world
of primordial intuition. Loss of individualism invites once again the
comfort of tribal loyalties." (98)
Marshall McLuhan and Bruce R. Powers, The Global Village:
Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1989), 83, 98.
12. "Why is the title of the book 'The medium is the massage' and not
'The medium is the message'?
Actually, the title was a mistake. When the book came back from the
typesetter's, it had on the cover 'Massage' as it still does. The title
was supposed to have read 'The Medium is the Message' but the
typesetter had made an error. When Marshall McLuhan saw the typo he
exclaimed, 'Leave it alone! It's great, and right on target!' Now there
are possible four readings for the last word of the title, all of them
accurate: 'Message' and 'Mess Age,' 'Massage' and 'Mass Age.'"
Marshall McLuhan FAQs: http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/faqs.html
B. Jean Baudrillard
1. "In symbolic exchange, of which the gift is our most proximate
illustration, the object is not an object: it is inseparable from the
concrete relation in which it is exchanged, the transferential pact
that it seals between two persons: it is thus not independent as such.
It has, properly speaking, neither use value nor (economic) exchange
value. The object given has symbolic exchange value. This is the
paradox of the gift: it is on the one hand (relatively) arbitrary: it
matters little what object is involved. Provided it is given, it can
fully signify the relation. On the other hand, once it has been
given—and because of this—it is this object and not
another. The gift is unique, specified by the people exchanging and the
unique moment of the exchange. It is arbitrary, and yet absolutely
singular." (64)
2. "So it is necessary to distinguish the logic of consumption, which
is a logic of the sign and of difference, from several other logics
that habitually get entangled with it in the welter of evidential
considerations . . . . Four logics would be
concerned here:
1. A functional logic of use value;
2. An economic logic of exchange value;
3. A logic of symbolic exchange;
4. A logic of sign value.
The first is a logic of practical operations, the second one of
equivalence, the third, ambivalence, and the fourth, difference.
Or again: a logic of utility, a logic of the market, a logic of
the gift, and a logic of status. Organized in accordance with one
of the above groupings, the object assumes respectively the status
of an instrument, a commodity, a symbol, or a
sign." (66)
3. "Let us compare two examples:
The wedding ring: This is a unique
object, symbol of the relationship of the couple. One would neither think
of changing it (barring mishap) nor of wearing several. The symbolic
object is made to last and to witness in its duration the permanence of
the relationship. Fashion plays as negligible a role at the strictly
symbolic level as at the level of pure instrumentality.
The ordinary ring is quite different:
it does not symbolize a relationship. It is a non-singular object, a
personal gratification, a sign in the eyes of others. I can wear several
of them. I can substitute them. The ordinary ring takes part in the play
of my accessories and the constellation of fashion. It is an object of
consumption." (66)
4. "Let us recapitulate the various types of status of the object
according to the specific and (theoretically) exhaustive logics that
may penetrate it:
1. The refrigerator is specified by its
function and irreplaceable in this respect. There is a necessary relation
between the object and its function, The arbitrary nature of the sign
is not involved, But all refrigerators are interchangeable in regard to
this function (their objective 'meaning').
2, By contrast, if the refrigerator is taken
as an element of comfort or of luxury (standing), then in principle any
other such element can be substituted for it. The object tends to the
status of sign, and each social status will be signified by an entire
constellation of exchangeable signs. No necessary relation to the subject
or the world is involved. There is only a systematic relation obligated
to all other signs. And in this combinatory abstraction lie the elements
of a code.
3. In their symbolic relationship to
the subject (or in reciprocal exchange), all objects are potentially
interchangeable. Any object can serve as a doll for the little girl. But
once cathected, it is this one and not another. The symbolic
material is relatively arbitrary, but the subject-object relation is
fused. Symbolic discourse is an idiom." (68)
5. "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)." (169)
6. "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. To
give, and to do it in such a way that one is unable to repay, is to
disrupt the exchange to your profit and to institute a monopoly. The
social process is thus thrown out of equilibrium, whereas repaying
disrupts this power relationship and institutes (or reinstitutes),
on the basis of an antagonistic reciprocity, the circuit of symbolic
exchange. The same goes for the media: they speak, or something is spoken
there, but in such a way as to exclude any response anywhere. This
is why the only revolution in this domain indeed, the revolution
everywhere: the revolution tout court—lies in restoring
this possibility of response. But such a simple possibility presupposes
an upheaval in the entire existing structure of the media." (170)
7. "The generalized order of consumption is nothing other than that
sphere where it is no longer permitted to give, to reimburse or to
exchange, but only to take and to make use of (appropriation,
individualized use value). In this case, consumption goods also
constitute a mass medium: they answer to the general state of affairs
we have described. Their specific function is of little import: the
consumption of products and messages is the abstract social relation
that they establish, the ban raised against all forms of response and
reciprocity." (171)
8. "May '68 will serve well enough as an example. Everything would lead
us to believe in the subversive impact of the media during this
period . . . .
But transgression and subversion never
get 'on the air' without being subtly negated as they are: transformed
into models, neutralized into signs, they are eviscerated of their
meaning." (173)
9. "The real revolutionary media during May [1968] were the walls and
their speech, the silk-screen posters and the hand-painted notices, the
street where speech began and was exchanged—everything that was an
immediate inscription, given and returned, spoken and answered,
mobile in the same space and time, reciprocal and antagonistic. The street
is, in this sense, the alternative and subversive form of the mass media,
since it isn't, like the latter, an objectified support for answerless
messages, a transmission system at a distance. It is the frayed space of
the symbolic exchange of speech—ephemeral, mortal: a speech that is
not reflected on the Platonic screen of the media. Institutionalized by
reproduction, reduced to a spectacle, this speech is expiring." (176-77)
10. "Graffiti is transgressive, not because it substitutes another
content, another discourse, but simply because it responds, there, on
the spot, and breaches the fundamental role of non-response enunciated
by all the media. Does it oppose one code to itself to deciphering as a
text rivaling commercial discourse; it presents itself as a
transgression. So, for example, the witticism, which is a transgressive
reversal of discourse, does not act on the basis of another code as
such; it works through the instantaneous deconstruction of the dominant
discursive code. It volatilizes the category of the code, and that of
the message." (183-84)
Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the
Sign, trans. Charles Levin (1972; St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981),
64, 66, 169-71, 173, 176-77, 183-84.
11. "Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the
mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory,
a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of
a real without origin or reality; a hyperreal. The territory no longer
precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that
precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—that
engenders the territory; and if one must return to the fable, today it is
the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It
is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in
the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The
desert of the real itself." (1)
12. "By crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of
the real, nor that of truth, the era of simulation is inaugurated by
a liquidation of all referentials—worse: with their artificial
resurrection in the system of signs, a material more malleable than
meaning, in that it lends itself to all systems of equivalences, to
all binary oppositions, to all combinatory algebra. It is no longer
a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It
is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the
real . . . ." (2)
13. "Such would be the successive stages of the image:
it is the reflection of a profound reality;
it masks and denatures a profound reality;
it masks the absence of a profound reality;
it has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure
simulacrum." (6)
14. "Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled
orders of simulacra. It is first of all a play of illusions
and phantasms: the Pirates, the Frontier, the Future World,
etc. . . . . Disneyland is presented as imaginary
in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of
Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but
belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is
no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology)
but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of
saving the reality principle." (12-13)
Jean Baudrillard, "The Precession of Simulacra," in Simulacra and
Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser, 1-42 (1978; Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1994) 1-2, 6, 12-13.
15. "In the symbolic exchange of the gift, . . . the
object 'is inseparable from the concrete relation in which it is
exchanged' and the 'transferential pact' it seals. Once given it is an
'absolutely singular' phenomenon, actualizing the 'unique moment of
the relationship and becoming 'the concrete manifestation of the total
relationship.' The sign originates with the breaking of this bond, no
longer gathering its meaning from it, but taking on a relationship to
all other signs in the semiotic system in its precoded difference, being
unilaterally, individually appropriated for that meaning. Baudrillard's
example [of the symbolic], highlighting the survival of the gift, is the
wedding ring, which, once exchanged, becomes a unique and irreplaceable
incarnation of the relationship. Contemporary examples of semioticization
are perhaps easier to find, from city centre theme pubs with original
farming tools and equipment anachronistically nailed to the walls and
original oak barrels decorated with plastic barley on the shelves behind
the seats, to America-themed diners and pizza restaurants with antique
typewriters, Chevy fenders and baseball gear fixed to the walls, all
semiotically organized and combining to signify what they might once
have actualized and lived." (17-18)
16. "Formulated as the symbolic, this [Baudrillard's theory of human
relations and communication] serves as the basis for his critique not
only of our semiotic society but also of our electronic media which,
for him, constitute one of the primary sites for the production and
dissemination of the sign. The emphasis on the form of media and its
effects immediately highlights the influence of Marshall McLuhan and
his claim that 'the medium is the message,' that the real message or
significance of a medium is the technology itself and its psychic and
social consequences . . . the transformation of the
symbolic into the semiotic" (19-20)
17. "Baudrillard finds this model of 'non-response' reproduced throughout
our society ("Requiem for the Media," 170), in the unilaterality of
the media, of semiotic consumption, of the hyperrealized image that
leaves no room for investment, phantasy or response (Seduction,
30) . . . . Everywhere, unilaterality and the
exclusion of the symbolic reign. The media no more create a community,
Baudrillard says, than 'the possession of a refrigerator or a toaster'
("Requiem for the Media," 171). As we silently gather round it at
night, we can see his point: television is killing the art of symbolic
exchange. We find in Baudrillard, therefore, a counter-intuitive image of
a mediatized society of non-communication in which 'people are no longer
speaking to each other,' being 'definitively isolated in the face of a
speech without response' ("Requiem for the Media," 172)." (20)
18. "May 1968 provides proof of this process for Baudrillard ("Requiem
for the Media," 172-77). Far from spreading the revolutionary uprisings,
he argues, the media transformed a living movement, with its own
rhythm and time, into a media object and event, short-circuiting its
occurrence . . . . If, therefore, the revolution will
be televised, is any symbolic co-option of the media possible? Baudrillard
finds it in the streets: the real revolutionary media during May were
the walls and their speech, the silkscreen posters and the handpainted
notices, as it was only there, in that immediate, reciprocal and external
space, that 'speech began and was exchanged' ("Requiem for the Media,"
176). Transgressive, ephemeral, dualistic, both inviting and producing
a response, these graffiti breach 'the fundamental rule of non-response
enunciated by all the media' ("Requiem for the Media," 183). In it,
Baudrillard says, 'an immediate communication process is rediscovered'
("Requiem for the Media," 182)." (21)
19. "Between Symbolic Exchange and Death in 1976 and
Seduction in 1979, 'the significance of the sign suddenly reverses
in Bandrillard's thought' . . . .
Thus the sign is no longer antithetical
to the symbolic but . . . instrumental in its
actualization. Its 'enchanted simulation' turns the 'evil forces' of
appearances against truth . . . to create a 'charmed
universe' of seduction. Against this Baudrillard describes again the
realm of the 'disenchanted' simulacrum whose 'hyperreality' eclipses
experience in its technical perfection and absolute semio-realization of
the real. The simulacrum, therefore, is marked not by an unreality but
instead by its excess of reality and truth, by a 'diabolical' conformity
that makes it 'more real than the real.' Pornography is exemplary here,
Baudrillard says, as its motivating phantasy is reality, believing that
the truth of sexuality can be discovered through the production of more
reality, by a 'forcing of signs' and hypervisibility. This is our modern
form of 'obscenity,' Baudrillard says: a mode devoted to the overexposed,
the 'all-too-visible,' the 'absolute proximity of the thing seen' and a
'hypervision in close-up'" (38-39)
20. "This idea of resistance is developed in Baudrillard's later work,
where he argues that, in contrast to the disenchanted simulacrum which
works towards 'the perfection of reproduction' and the 'extermination
of the real by its double,' the enchanted form employs simulation to
expose and reverse this process. Hence his curious claim that there is an
'authentic' as well as an 'inauthentic' form of simulation, an example
of which he finds in Warhol's soup cans, in simulacra that 'attacked
the concept of originality in an original way' . . . .
This reversal in Baudrillard's attitude
to the sign and to simulation after 1976 enables him to make his peace
with and even conscript the evil demon of appearances, leading to a
more sophisticated conception of the symbolic that no longer ties him
to a simplistic opposition to the image. This strategy, however, is
still problematic. Baudrillard's reconceptualization of his critique in
terms of seduction-production and enchanted and disenchanted simulacra
clearly retains the symbolic-semiotic distinction and the privileging
of the former term as a site of opposition . . . .
This reconceptualization also leaves
unanswered the problem of how we should distinguish 'good' symbolic and
'bad' semiotic simulacra. If the symbolic is now admitted to be the
product of the play of appearances, what critical force can it still
have against simulacra?" (40-41)
21. "Baudrillard's central concern, therefore, is with the semiotic
transformation of the symbolic. The fact that he sees the electronic
media as a primary agent in this semioticization places him in stark
opposition to McLuhan, although his claim that the semiotic takes the
former symbolic as its significatory content echoes McLuhan's belief
in new media taking older forms as their content. For Baudrillard, in
contrast to McLuhan, the electronic media do not merely rearrange or
'massage' perception, consciousness and experience, they replace
them with their simulacra. 'So we live,' he says, 'in the denial of
the real,' consuming 'the simulacrum of the world' and its 'alibi of
participation' in the comfort and security of the home.
This is a clear and complete reversal
of McLuhan, rejecting his claim of an electrically extended, organic
participation in the real as merely simulacral." (51)
22. "The consequence of the global village is indeed the instant
availability of all times, places and experiences, but for Baudrillard
this 'obscene' transparency leads to the erosion of all meaning,
relations and participation. The scene of the symbolic is replaced by
'the smooth and functional surface of communication,' reducing us to
'terminals of multiple networks,' unable even to define the limits of
our being and merged with our electronic connections." (57)
William Merrin, Baudrillard and the Media: A Critical
Introduction (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Polity Press, 2005),
17-21, 38-39, 40-41, 51, 57.
23. "Overall, it seems that there is a move to an increased emphasis on
the 'real' as it slips away. This occurs at the cultural level, and is
mirrored in Baudrillard's texts; the irony being that the writer most
hostile to reality is the one who uses (requires) it most ([Charles]
Levin [in Jean Baudrillard: A Study in Cultural Metaphysics]
calls Baudrillard a 'perverse Platonist,' for, as he sees it, echoing
Plato's critique of imitation). For Baudrillard, these different orders
or phases are entwined levels of simulation rather than a succession, and
would seem to follow on from the (retrospective) lack of symbolic exchange
that drives our culture to real-ize, i.e., all of the above phases are
'strategies of the real,' our attempts to constrain ambiguity. Although
not explicitly stated, our culture has not known (could it have?) a
real free of any system of simulacra." (50-51)
24. "We are all involved (at least potentially) in reality TV, in the
form of the 'participation' of the masses in mediatizing the world
through camcorders, mobile, image and videophones, and CCTV. Reality
itself has become screen, and this is a complete and total
reality . . . ." (113-14)
25. "[On the Internet,] in being called on to participate, we are
no longer given the chance to opt out or to maintain any distance.
The screen removes distance when we 'interact' with or through it,
and demands immersion. As a result, we become terminals in a creeping
virtualization. Curiously, Baudrillard rediscovers some pockets of
non-simulation that are threatened by 'interaction': first, above,
the notion that we were still capable of distance; second, the symbolic
aspect of language:
Today language is confronted by the hegemonic fantasy of a global
and perpetual communication—the New Order, the new cyberspace
of language—where the ultrasimplification of digital languages
prevails over the figural complexity of natural languages. With binary
coding and decoding the symbolic dimension of language is lost (Vital
Illusion, p. 69).
Is Baudrillard suggesting we still had some form of symbolic in language,
or communication in general? This would go against what he has written
for many years. Perhaps we could see this nostalgia as a commentary on
the feeling induced by the arrival of an increasingly digitalized world:
at that point, we notice the always already lost symbolic which only
exists as absence." (129)
Paul Hegarty, Jean Baudrillard: Live Theory (London: Continuum,
2004), 50-51, 113-14, 129.
C. Paris France May 1968 Grafitti and Slogans
1. YouTube Paris Uprising May 1968: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUJZgkhSCq8
2. France in 1968: http://www.rpi.edu/~zappenj/Rhetoric/RCT/Readings/Paris_France_May_1968.pdf
3. Bureau of Public Secrets May 1968 Graffiti: http://www.bopsecrets.org/CF/graffiti.htm
Latest Update: 2012-04-24
