Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION AND POSTMODERNITY
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Baudrillard and like-minded thinkers go much further than just saying that
there is a lot more communication going on. Indeed, their suggestion is that there
are other characteristics of postmodern culture which mark it out as a break with
the past.
We can understand these better by reminding ourselves how a modernist
might interpret the ‘emporium of signs’. Thinkers such as Herbert Schiller and
Jürgen Habermas, whom we encountered in earlier chapters, acknowledge the
explosive growth of signification readily enough, but they insist that, if used
adroitly, it could serve to improve the conditions of existence. Such approaches
perceive inadequacies in signs that, if rectified, could help to facilitate a more
communal society or more democratic social relationships. What is evident in
such modernist interpretations is that critics feel able to identify distortions in the
signs that, by this fact, are in some way inauthentic, thereby holding back the
possibility of progressing to more genuine and open conditions. For example, it
is usual in such writers to bemoan the plethora of soap operas on television
on grounds that they are escapist, trivial and profoundly unreal depictions of
everyday lifestyles. Tacit in such accounts is the view that there are more
authentic forms of drama that may be devised for television. Similarly, modernist
scholars are at pains to identify ways in which, say, news media misrepresent
real events and issues – and implicit in such critiques is the idea that authentic
news coverage can be achieved. Again, a modernist perspective on fashion might
raise concerns about the young being misled in their choices of styles by inappropriate
role models and commercial venality – and, again, there is in evidence
here an unstated belief that more authentic fashions can be found.
Baudrillard, however, will have neither this hankering after ‘undistorted
communication’ nor any yearning for the ‘authentic’. In his view, since everything
is a matter of signification, it is unavoidably a matter of artifice and
inauthenticity because this, after all, is what signs are. Modernist critics will insist
that there is some reality behind signs, perhaps shrouded by unreliable signs, but
real nonetheless, but to Baudrillard there are only signs. As such one cannot
escape inauthenticity, and there is no point in pretending that one can. For
example, viewers of television news may watch with the presumption that the
signs indicate a reality beyond them – ‘what is going on in the world’. But on a
moment’s reflection we can appreciate that the news we receive is a version of
events, one shaped by journalists’ contacts and availability, moral values, political
dispositions and access to newsmakers. Yet, if we can readily demonstrate
that television news is not ‘reality’ but a construction of it – a task frequently
undertaken by academic researchers and evident to anyone who cares to review
recordings of news with benefit of hindsight – then how is it possible that people
can suggest that beyond the signs is a ‘true’ situation? To Baudrillard the ‘reality’
begins and ends with the signs on our television screens. And any critique of
these signs offers, not a more authentic version of the news, but merely another
set of signs that presume to account for a reality beyond the signs.
Baudrillard takes this insight a very great deal further by asserting that nowadays
everybody knows this to be the case, the inauthenticity of signs being an
open secret in a postmodern culture. In other words, when once it might have
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