Reflections on Modernity and Postmodernity

in McLuhan and Baudrillard1

Douglas Kellner
(http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/)

In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan emerged as a guru of the emergent electronic media
culture. His book Understanding Media (1964) was celebrated as providing key insights into the
role of the media in contemporary society and McLuhan became one of the most discussed and
debated theorists of the time. During the 1980s, Jean Baudrillard was promoted in certain circles
as the new McLuhan, as the most advanced theorist of the media and society in the so-called
postmodern era. His analysis of a new, postmodern society rests on a key assumption that the
media, simulations, and what he calls "cyberblitz" constitute a new realm of experience and a new
stage of history and type of society.
Both McLuhan and Baudrillard provide provocative theses on the role of the media and
new technology in constituting the contemporary world. They provide important and influential
models of the media as all-powerful and autonomous social forces that produce a wide range of
effects. In this study, I first explicate McLuhan’s media theory and how it can be deployed to
produce analyses of modernity and postmodernity that connect McLuhan’s work with
Baudrillard. I then explore how McLuhan’s media theory shaped Baudrillard’s theory and the
similarities and differences in their work. I lay out what I consider the important contributions of
their work, but am also concerned to delineate the political implications of their media theory and
to point to alternative theoretical and political perspectives on the media and the contemporary
moment.

McLuhan, Modernity, and Postmodernity

Marshall McLuhan was acclaimed in the 1960s and 1970s as one of the most influential
media theorists of our time and is once again becoming widely discussed and debated in the
computer era. His 1960s writings dramatized the importance of television and electronic
broadcasting and entertainment media on contemporary society.2 The eventual decline of
influence of McLuhan’s work perhaps resulted in part from his exaggeration of the role of
television and electronic culture in effecting a break from the print era and producing a new
electronic age. Yet McLuhan in retrospect anticipated the rise and importance of computer
culture and the dramatic emergence and effects of personal computers and the Internet that
provide even more substance to McLuhan’s claim that contemporary society is undergoing a
fundamental rupture with the past.
Indeed, McLuhan can be read in the light of classical social theory as a major theorist of
modernity, with an original and penetrating analysis of the origins, nature, and trajectory of the
modern world. Furthermore, he can be read in retrospect as a major anticipator of theories of a
postmodern break, of a rupture with modernity, of leaving behind the previous print-industrial-
urban-mechanical era and entering a new postmodern society with novel forms of culture and
society. McLuhan's work proposes that a major new medium of communication changes the ratio

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of the senses, the patterns of everyday life, modes of social interaction and communication, and
many other aspects of social and individual life that are often not perceived.
“Understanding media,” for McLuhan therefore requires understanding the form of the
media and its structural effects on the psyche, culture, and social life. McLuhan offers an entire
vision of culture and history based on analyses of transitions within stages of history unfolding
from one dominant medium of communication to another. He describes the move from an oral
culture based on the spoken word to print culture generated by the written word to electronic
culture produced by electronic media of communication. Oral culture is highly participatory and
involves all the senses. It corresponds for McLuhan to “tribal culture” with fixed roles, relatively
stable and unchanging values and institutions, and a highly integrated culture and social order.
This stage, roughly extending from premodern times to the Renaissance, is followed by print
culture that is based on the written word and is codified in the book.
With the development of the printing press and wide-spread dissemination of the book
and print media, a whole new “Gutenberg Galaxy” of cultural forms emerged characterized by
detachedindividualismand the valuesof logic,rationality,and argumentation; linear modes
of thought and social organization; the mechanization of labor and assembly lines; centralized
social and economic organization; nationalism and a system of competitive nation states; and
highly specialized and fragmented culture.
In McLuhan’s thematics, print culture is succeeded by electronic culture and technology.
For McLuhan, this era exhibits a new tribalism and play of all the senses in a “global village”
where individuals all over the world experience the same events and spectacles and come to share
a new media and global consciousness and experience. Fragmentation and alienation of the
individual is allegedly overcome in the new tribal culture as individuals deeply participate in
media forms and events, generating a new sensibility beyond the abstract individualism and
rationalism of the earlier era and the nationalism and xenophobia’s of the modern era.
McLuhan’s analyses of print technology, newspapers, books, roads, modern industry
and mechanization, war, and other modern technologies and phenomena all illuminate the
constitution of the modern world and provide new insights into modernity. His description of
specific technologies and how they produced the modern era and anticipation of how new
emergent electronic technologies are fashioning a new postmodern era are often highly
illuminating. McLuhan, like Baudrillard, Jameson, and other theorists of the postmodern presents
an ideal type analysis in which modernity is marked by linearity, differentiation, explosion,
centralization, homogenization, hierarchy, fragmentation, and individualism. Postmodernity, by
contrast, is marked by implosion or dedifferentiation, decentralization, tribalism, synasthesia, and
a new media and computer culture that would be called cyberspace and which would be theorized
by Baudrillard and other postmodern theorists.3 McLuhan opens Understanding Media writing:
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 space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly,
we approach the final phase of the extensions of man -— the technological
simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be

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 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 (UM 3-4).
For McLuhan, the modern era is characterized by an “explosion” of technologies, cities,
states and empires, cultural forms, specialization, forms of transportation and communication,
and, of course, media. The beginning and generating force of the process was produced by the
book and technology of the printing press that made possible individualism with individual
subjects reading books silently and cultivating their own subjectivity, as opposed to the rote
collectivism of medieval education and religious ceremonies. The book gave rise to national
cultures and literatures, breaking with the hegemony of Latin, and the new national states used
print technology to generate propaganda and ideology, linear modes of accounting and writing,
and the rational organization of production bound up with the rise of capitalism.
In UM, McLuhan presents brilliant insights into specific cultural phenomena and
particular media, such as his insight that the linear nature of print technology helped bring about a
differentiation of poetry, song, rhetoric, prose, and news at the beginning of the modern era that
in turn helped generate societal differentiation, specialized jobs, the modern university, and
fragmentation and divisions within culture and society (UM 175). McLuhan notes (UM 81ff)
that print technology and the written word was the first mass technology, the first teaching
machine, and helped generate modern education, culture, and society. Compared to the Chinese
ideogram or Medieval illustrated handwritten manuscripts, the book and print technology was
highly abstract, linear, and homogenized, helping produce distinctive Western and modern modes
of thought.
For McLuhan, “printing from movable types was the first mechanization of a complex
handicraft and the archetype of all subsequent mechanization” and helped generate the capitalist
mode of production (UM, 170ff). In addition, “typography ended parochialism and tribalism,
psychically and socially, both in space and time” (UM 170), by enabling and exchange of ideas
and cosmopolitanism. Typography made possible detachment and non-involvement, producing
rational abstraction and critique, but also fragmentation and specialization (UM 173). Further
“correct” spelling, behavior, and thought is a result of mechanization and the linear organization
of experience, knowledge, and work, producing a need to be clear and precise (UM 175). Religion
too shifted from ritual and literary to proclaiming and assimilating the Word with the mass
production of the Bible. Supplementing McLuhan, one might note that Descartes reproduces this
structural necessity of typography technology in his grounding of philosophy in “clear and
distinct ideas,” an orderly progression of thought, and abstract and rational concepts, thus giving
rise to a distinctive form of modern Western philosophy.
In McLuhan’s thematic, the rise of new media are not an addition, or supplement, to
previous media and forms of culture, but an explosive force that competes with other media.
McLuhan uses the metaphor of war to describe the process through which print replaced the
oral tradition of learning and education, displacing rhetoric for the new regime of reading and
writing. Yet while McLuhan provides brilliant insights into the role of the media within
modernity and how the media function as key constituents of culture and society, it is probably
his notion of a rupture with modernity and advent of a new postmodern era, signaled in the
passages in UM on pages 3 and 4 quoted above, that constitute his most important and
provocative insight. I suggested that McLuhan is indeed perhaps more important and relevant

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today as the theorist of a new mode of culture and history in the contemporary era because
television could not really bear the burden of constituting a break the transition to a new
historical era that he postulated. TV was obviously a crucially important media and had
tremendous effects, some of which are not yet apparent, but arguably did not create an entire
new culture, sensibility, way of seeing, relating, communicating, and so on (although I would
imagine that it had much more significant effects than most people were aware.
Hence, McLuhan arguably exaggerated the role of TV and other forms of electronic
communication in the 1960s which could not legitimate his claim that we were moving into a new
electronic culture, a new stage of history, and a decisive rupture with the past. More harshly, one
could argue that McLuhan’s categories were not that useful for theorizing the complexity of
television and its imbrication in the economy, politics, and social life. McLuhan’s claim that TV
was an extension of the central nervous system was opaque and vague; his media hot and cool
distinction did not always work well and were hotly contested; his disregard for content short-
circuited detailed reading and critique of media content; and his failure to theorize the place of
television within the corporate economy was a blind spot. Although one could find insights into
all of these thematics in McLuhan, his concepts often blocked developing a critical theory of
television that theorized its relations to the economy, state, social institutions, and culture.4
But reading McLuhan anew in the context of the computer era enables him to be seen as a
prophet of the cyberspace and valuable for anticipating the revolutionary effects of the new
computer culture, for providing concepts that help us grasp the enormity of the transition, for
focusing attention on how important new media can be, and for helping us understand the
transformation going on.5 In UM (80) he writes:
Our new electric technology that that extends our sense 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 a 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 promises 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. The next logical step would seem to be, not to translate, but to by-pass
languages in favor of a general cosmic consciousness which might be very like the
collective unconscious dreamt of by Bergson. The condition of ‘weightlessness,’
that biologists say promises a physical immortality, may be paralleled by the
condition of speechlessness that could confer a perpetuity of collective harmony
and peace.
This remarkable passages anticipates the revolutionary effects of the digitization of
culture and the new languages of computerization. It points to the rise of artificial intelligence and
even the fantasies of immortality through virtualization and cloning that Baudrillard would

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critically engage time and again. It provides an audacious vision of how computer culture might
produce new forms of universal consciousness and global understanding and harmony,
exaggerated claims that have been rightly polemicized against but which point to the enormous
potential as well as current impact of the computerization of the world.
I will suspend further critique of McLuhan until the end of my discussion of Baudrillard.
To set up the encounter between the two: McLuhan presents media and technology as major
forces of history and no one has provided more penetrating insights into media and technology
and their roles in modern Western society and culture and the transition to a new postmodern era.
Indeed, McLuhan not only provides brilliant insights into specific media -– the printing press,
electric lights, cars, airplanes, highways, radio, television, and so on --, but has important general
insights into the media, Western modernity, and the broad patterns of historical change in the
modern era, as well as insight into the force of new information and communication technology in
the passage to a new stage of culture and history. Baudrillard would take up McLuhan’s
emphasis on the form of the media, his insight into the centrality of media in the contemporary
era, his vision of stages of history, his analysis of the emergence of electronic media as the
constituent force of a new stage of history, and particular concepts like implosion, as well as
McLuhan’s method of probes, explorations, fragments, and a mosaic shotgun approach that
illustrate general theses and specific phenomenon under investigation.

Baudrillard's Postmodern Media Theory

In 1967, Baudrillard wrote a review of Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media in

which he claimed that McLuhan's dictum that the "medium is the message" is "the very formula
of alienation in a technical society," and he criticized McLuhan for naturalizing that alienation.6
At this time, he shared the neo-Marxian critique of McLuhan as a technological reductionist and
determinist. By the 1970s and 1980s, however, McLuhan's formula that “the medium is the
message” eventually became the guiding principle of his own thought.
Baudrillard begins developing his theory of the media in an article "Requiem for the
Media" in Toward a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972). The title is somewhat
ironic for Baudrillard is really only beginning to develop theoretical perspectives in which the
media will play crucial roles in constituting a new postmodernity. Thus Baudrillard is writing a
requiem here for a Marxist theory of the media arguing: "McLuhan has said, with his usual
Canadian-Texan brutalness, that Marx, the spiritual contemporary of the steam engine and
railroads, was already obsolete in his lifetime with the appearance of the telegraph. In his candid
fashion, he is saying that Marx, in his materialist analysis of production, had virtually
circumscribed productive forces as a privileged domain from which language, signs and
communication in general found themselves excluded" (CPES, p. 164).
Baudrillard's critique of Marx here begins a radical interrogation of and eventual break
with Marxism that would culminate in The Mirror of Production (1973). Baudrillard begins
distancing himself from Marxism in "Requiem for the Media," and in particular attacks Marx's
alleged economic reductionism, or "productivism," and the alleged inability of the Marxian theory
to conceptualize language, signs, and communication (Habermas at the time was developing a
parallel position within Critical Theory).7

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 As an example of the failure of Marxian categories to provide an adequate theory of the
media, Baudrillard criticizes the German activist and writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger's media
theory and his attempts to develop a socialist strategy for the media.8 Baudrillard dismisses this
effort as a typical Marxian attempt to liberate productive forces from the fetters of productive
relations that fails to see that in their very form the mass media of communication "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).... they are what always prevents response, making all
processes of exchange impossible (except in the various forms of response simulation, themselves
integrated in the transmission process, thus leaving the unilateral nature of the communication
intact). This is the real abstraction of the media. And the system of social control and power is
rooted in it" (CPES, pp. 169-170).
It is curious that Baudrillard, interpreted by many of his followers as an avant-garde,
postmodern media theorist, manifests in this passage both technophobia and a nostalgia for face-
to-face conversation which he privileges (as authentic communication) over degraded and abstract
media communication). Such a position creates a binary dichotomy between "good" face-to-face
communication and "bad" media communication, and occludes the fact that interpersonal
communication can be just as manipulative, distorted, reified, and so on, as media communication
(as Ionesco and Habermas, among others, were aware). Denouncing the media tout court in a
Baudrillardian fashion rules out in advance the possibility of "responsible" or "emancipatory"
media communication, and indeed Baudrillard frequently argues that there can be no good use of
media.
Thus Baudrillard presents a rather extreme variant of a negative model of the media that
sees mass media and culture simply as instruments of domination, manipulation, and social
control in which radical intervention and radical media or cultural politics are impossible. He
shares a certain theoretical terrain on theories of the media with the Frankfurt school, many
Althusserians and other French radicals, and those who see electronic media, broadcasting, and
mass culture simply as a terrain of pure domination.9 Hence, Baudrillard’s generally negative and
dismissive attitude toward the media could be contrasted with McLuhan’s more “neutral” stance.
Yet following McLuhan’s analysis of the centrality of television in contemporary culture,
Baudrillard noted how the "TV Object" was becoming the center of the household and was
serving an essential "proof function" that the owner was a genuine member of the consumer
society (CPES, pp. 53ff.). The accelerating role of the media in contemporary society becomes
for Baudrillard equivalent to THE FALL into the postmodern society of simulations from the
modern universe of production. Modernity for Baudrillard is the era of production characterized
by the rise of industrial capitalism and the hegemony of the bourgeoisie while postmodern
society is an era of simulation dominated by signs, codes, and models. Modernity thus centered
on the production of things -- commodities and products -- while postmodernity in his optic is
characterized by radical semiurgy, by a proliferation of signs, spectacle, information, and new
media.
Furthermore, following McLuhan, Baudrillard interprets modernity as a process of
explosion of commodification, mechanization, technology, and market relations, while

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postmodern society is the site of an implosion of all boundaries, regions, and distinctions
between high and low culture, appearance and reality, and just about every other binary
opposition maintained by traditional philosophy and social theory. Furthermore, while
modernity could be characterized as a process of increasing differentiation of spheres of life (Max
Weber as interpreted by Habermas),10 postmodernity could be interpreted as a process of de-
differentiation and attendant implosion.
The rise of the broadcast media, especially television, is an important constituent of
postmodernity for Baudrillard, along with the rapid dissemination of signs and simulacra in every
realm of social and everyday life. By the late 1970s, Baudrillard interprets the media as key
simulation machines which reproduce images, signs, and codes, constituting an autonomous realm
of (hyper)reality that plays a key role in everyday life and the obliteration of the social.
“Simulation” for Baudrillard denotes a situation in which codes, models, and signs are the
organizing forms of a new social order where simulation rules.11 In the society of simulation,
identities are constructed by the appropriation of images, and codes and models determine how
individuals perceive themselves and relate to other people. Economics, politics, social life, and
culture are all governed by the mode of simulation, whereby codes and models determine how
goods are consumed and used, politics unfold, culture is produced and consumed, and everyday
life is lived.
In addition, his postmodern universe is one of hyperreality in which entertainment,
information, and communication technologies provide experiences more intense and involving
than the scenes of banal everyday life, as well as the codes and models that structure social
interaction. The realm of the hyperreal (i.e. media simulations of reality, Disneyland and
amusement parks, malls and consumer fantasylands, TV sports, and other excursions into ideal
worlds) is more real than real, whereby the models, images, and codes of the hyperreal come to
control thought and behavior. Yet determination itself is aleatory in a non-linear world where it is
impossible to chart causal mechanisms in a situation in which individuals are confronted with an
overwhelming flux of images, codes, and models, any of which may shape an individual's thought
or behavior.
In this postmodern world, individuals flee from the "desert of the real" for the ecstasies of
hyperreality and the new realm of computer, media, and technological experience. Baudrillard's
analyses of simulations and hyperreality constitute his major contributions to social theory and
media critique. During an era when movie actors and toxic Texans simulate politics and charlatans
simulate TV-religion, the category of simulation provides an essential instrument of radical social
critique, while the concept of hyperreality is also an extremely useful instrument of social
analysis for a media, cybernetic, and information society.
Baudrillard's analyses point to a significant reversal of the relation between representation
and reality. Previously, the media were believed to mirror, reflect, or represent reality, whereas
now the media are coming to constitute a hyperreality, a new media reality -- "more real than
real" -- where "the real" is subordinate to representation leading to an ultimate dissolving of the
real. Interestingly, the concept of reversal is also a major notion in McLuhan’s theoretical arsenal
that Baudrillard makes his own. For McLuhan, in a discussion of “Reversal of the Overheated
Medium,” “the stepping-up of speed from the mechanical to the instant electric form reverses
explosion into implosion” (UM 35). This is, of course, the very formula that Baudrillard adopts

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to describe the contemporary situation of the implosion of culture in the media.
In his article "The Implosion of Meaning in the Media," Baudrillard claims that the
proliferation of signs and information in the media obliterates meaning through neutralizing and
dissolving all content -- a process which leads both to a collapse of meaning and the destruction
of distinctions between media and reality. In a society supposedly saturated with media
messages, information and meaning "implode," collapsing into meaningless "noise," pure effect
without content or meaning. Thus, for Baudrillard: "information is directly destructive of
meaning and signification, or neutralizes it. The loss of meaning is directly linked to the
dissolving and dissuasive action of information, the media, and the mass media.... Information
devours its own contents; it devours communication and the social.... information dissolves
meaning and the social into a sort of nebulous state leading not at all to a surfeit of innovation but
to the very contrary, to total entropy" (SSM, pp. 96-100).
Baudrillard thus follows McLuhan in making “implosion” a key constituent of
contemporary postmodern society, in which social classes, genders, political differences, and
once autonomous realms of society and culture collapse into each other, erasing previously
defined boundaries and differences. In Baudrillard’s society of simulation, the realms of
economics, politics, culture, sexuality, and the social all implode into each other. In this implosive
mix, economics is fundamentally shaped by culture, politics, and other spheres, while art, once a
sphere of potential difference and opposition, is absorbed into the economic and political, while
sexuality is everywhere. In this situation, differences between individuals and groups implode in
a rapidly mutating dissolution of the social and the previous boundaries and structures upon
which social theory had once articulated and critically interpreted.
Like McLuhan’s stages of history, Baudrillard offers an analysis of the stages of
simulacra. In a study of “Simulacra and Science Fiction,” Baudrillard offers a summary of his
theory, delineated in detail and with copious examples in Simulations:
Three orders of simulacra:

Simulacra that are natural, naturalist, founded on the image, on imitation and
counterfeit, that are harmonious, optimistic, and that aim for the restitution or the
ideal institution of nature made in God’s image;

Simulacra that are productive, productivist, founded in energy, forces, its

materialization by the machine and in the whole system of production—a
Promethean aim of a continuous globalization and expansion, of an indefinite
liberation of energy (desire belongs to the utopias related to this order of
simulacra);

Simulacra of simulation, founded on information, the model, the cybernetic

game—total operationality, hyperreality, aim of total control (S&S 121).
Baudrillard’s first stage relates to McLuhan’s premodern society where words
corresponded to things and there was a natural harmony between individuals, culture, and the
world. The second stage refers to modernity and the production of a society in which there was a
proliferation of commodities, images, and ideas, expanded globally, producing conflicts of ideas

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and culture, with debates over relations between concepts and the world, theory and reality. In
the third stage of simulation, there is an operational order, like McLuhan’s global system, that is
functional and operational, with a hyperreal computer and media system that seamlessly forms a
realm of simulation that models everyday life and eventually absorbs its energy, power, and
control. In this stage, the media overpower everyday life and unlike McLuhan’s more beneficent
vision, create information overload, meaninglessness, and the collapse of distinctions between the
virtual and the real.
Baudrillard presents a vision of the media as a black hole of signs and information which
absorb all contents into cybernetic noise which no longer communicates meaningful messages in a
process of implosion where all content implodes into form. While McLuhan claims to present a
“neutral” portrayal of the media in contemporary society, which was read by some as a
celebration, Baudrillard has a more negative optic on the media. Yet Baudrillard eventually adopts
a key postulate of McLuhan's media theory as his own, claiming that:
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 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. Strictly speaking this is what implosion
signifies: the absorption of one pole into another, the short-circuit between poles
of every differential system of meaning, the effacement of terms and of distinct
oppositions, and thus that of the medium and the real. Hence the impossibility of
any mediation, of any dialectical intervention between the two or from one to the
other, circularity of all media effects. Hence the impossibility of a sense
(meaning), in the literal sense of a unilateral vector which leads from one pole to
another. This critical -- but original -- situation must be thought through to the
very end; it is the only one we are left with. It is useless to dream of a revolution
through content or through form, since the medium and the real are now in a single
nebulous state whose truth is undecipherable (SSM, pp. 102-103).
Baudrillard argues that the media and "reality" implode such that it is impossible to
distinguish between media representations and the "reality" which they supposedly represent.
He also suggests that the media intensify massification by producing mass audiences and
massification of ideas and experience. On the other hand, he claims that the masses absorb all
media content, neutralize, or even resist, meaning, and demand and obtain more spectacle and
entertainment, thus further eroding the boundary between media and "the real." In this sense, the
media implode into the masses to an extent that it is unknowable what effects the media have on
the masses and how the masses process the media.
Consequently, on this view, the media pander to the masses, reproducing their taste, their
interest in spectacle and entertainment, their fantasies and way of life, producing an implosion
between mass consciousness and media phantasmagoria. In this way, Baudrillard short-circuits
the manipulation theory that sees media manipulation imposed from above producing mass
consciousness, yet he seems to share the contempt for the masses in standard manipulation
theory claiming that they want nothing more than spectacle, diversion, entertainment and escape,

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and are incapable of, or uninterested in, producing meaning.
For Baudrillard, since the media and the masses liquidate meaning, it is meaningless to
carry out ideological critiques of media messages since the "medium is the message" in the sense
that media communication has no significant referents except its own images and noise which
ceaselessly refer back and forth to other media images and spectacles. In On Seduction (1979),
Baudrillard utilizes McLuhan's distinction between "hot" and "cool" media to describe the ways
that media devour information and exterminate meaning. According to Baudrillard, the media take
"hot" events like sports, wars, political turmoil, catastrophes, and so on and transform them into
"cool" media events, which he interprets as altogether another kind of phenomena and experience.
Concerning the difference between a televised and attended sports event, Baudrillard writes: "Do
not believe that it is a matter of the same game: one is hot, the other is cool -- one is a contest
where affect, challenge, mise en scene, and spectacle are present, whereas the other is tactile,
modulated (visions in flash-back, replays, close-ups or overhead views, various angles, etc.): a
televised sports event is above all a televised event, just as Holocaust or the Vietnam war are
televised events of which one can hardly make distinctions" (SED, p. 217).
For Baudrillard, eventually, all the dominant media become "cool," erasing McLuhan's
(problematical) distinction between hot and cool media. That is, for Baudrillard all the media of
information and communication neutralize meaning and involve the audience in a flat, one-
dimensional media experience which he defines in terms of a passive absorption of images, or a
resistance of meaning, rather than the active processing or production of meaning. The electronic
media therefore on this account have nothing to do with myth, image, history, or the
construction of meaning (or ideology). Television is interpreted instead as a media "which
suggests nothing, which magnetises, which is only a screen, or is rather a miniaturized terminal
which in fact is found immediately in your head -- you are the screen and the television is
watching you. Television transistorizes all neurons and operates as a magnetic tape -- a tape not
an image" (SED, p. 220).

Baudrillard, McLuhan and the Ecstasy of Communication

We see here how Baudrillard out-McLuhans McLuhan in interpreting television, and all
other media, primarily as machines which produce primarily technological effects in which
content and messages, or social uses, are deemed irrelevant and unimportant. We also see how,
like McLuhan, he anthropomorphizes the media ("the television is watching you"), a form of
technological mysticism (or mystification) as extreme as McLuhan. Like McLuhan, Baudrillard
also globalizes media effects making the media demiurges of a new type of society and new type
of experience.
Baudrillard practices as well McLuhan's method of probes and mosaic constellations of
images and concepts that take on an experimental and provisional nature. Consequently, whereas
he sets forth theoretically articulated theses about the media in "Requiem," in his studies of
simulations and later writings he tends to cluster images, concepts, and descriptive analyses,
within which media often play a key role, rather than systematically articulating a well-defined
theoretical position, thus adopting a key McLuhanite literary strategy.
Like McLuhan, Baudrillard’s work is implosive, breaking disciplinary boundaries and

10
bringing together material from a variety of disciplines. Over the decades, Baudrillard’s style in
some ways is more and more McLuhanesque, deploying short essays to provide constellations of
ideas, images, stories, quotations, and references to contemporary events to capture the novelty
and significance of contemporary events. Like McLuhan, Baudrillard likes to shock and be
irrelevant, developing witty puns, paradoxes, and provocations to stir up his readers. Baudrillard
sees the “symbolic” as the only refuge of critical thought and only source of alternatives to the
operational world of postmodernity, while McLuhan sees artists as the “antennae” of society,
with their work constituting ”distant early warning” (DEW) systems that provide forecasts of
coming events and register changes in society and culture, with art providing counter-
environments that provide insight into the contemporary era (UM 65ff).
Yet, in terms of their specific perspectives on the media, we might contrast McLuhan's
ecumenical Catholicism with Baudrillard's somewhat puritanical Protestantism.12 McLuhan
fantasized a new type of global community and even a new universal (media) consciousness and
experience through the dissemination of a global media system, the global village. McLuhan also
believed that the media could overcome alienation produced by the abstract rationality of book
culture that was being replaced by a new synaesthesia and harmonizing of the mind and body, the
senses and technologies. Baudrillard, by contrast, sees the media as external demigods, or idols of
the mind -- to continue the Protestant metaphor --, which seduce and fascinate the subject and
which enter subjectivity to produce a reified consciousness and privatized and fragmented life-
style (Sartre's seriality).
Thus while McLuhan ascribes a generally benign social destiny to the media, for
Baudrillard the function of TV and mass media is to prevent response, to isolate and privatize
individuals, and to trap them into a universe of simulacra where it is impossible to distinguish
between the spectacle and the real, and where individuals come to prefer spectacle over "reality"
(which both loses interest for the masses and its privileged status in philosophy and social
theory).
The mass media are instruments for Baudrillard of a "cold seduction" whose narcissistic
charm consists of a manipulative self-seduction in which spectators enjoy the play of lights,
shadows, dots, and events in our own mind as we change channels or media and plug into the
variety of networks -- media, computer, information -- that surround us and that allow us to
become modulators and controllers of an overwhelming panoply of sights, sounds, information,
and events. In this sense, all media have a chilling effect (which is why Baudrillard allows
McLuhan's "cool" to become downright "cold") that freeze individuals into functioning as
terminals of media and communication networks who become involved as part and parcel of the
very apparatus of communication. The subject, then, becomes transformed into an object as part
of a nexus of information and communication networks.
The interiorization of media transmissions within the screen of our mind obliterates, for
Baudrillard, the distinction between public and private, interior and exterior space -- both of
which are replaced by media space. Here Baudrillard inverts McLuhan's thesis concerning the
media as extensions of the human, as exteriorizations of human powers, and argues instead that
humans internalize media and thus becomes terminals within media systems -- a new theoretical
anti-humanism that might amuse Louis Althusser. The eye and the brain, on this model, replaces
both the other sense organs and the hand as key instruments of human practice, as information

11
processing replaces human practice and techne and poesis alike.
In "The Ecstasy of Communication" Baudrillard describes the media as instruments of
obscenity, transparency, and ecstasy -- in special sense of these terms.13 He claims that in the
postmodern mediascape, the domestic scene -- or the private sphere per se -- with its rules,
rituals, and privacy is exteriorized, or made explicit and transparent, "in a sort of obscenity where
the most intimate processes of our life become the virtual feeding ground of the media (the Loud
family in the United States,14 the innumerable slices of peasant or patriarchal life on French
television). Inversely, the entire universe comes to unfold arbitrarily on your domestic screen (all
the useless information that comes to you from the entire world, like a microscopic pornography
of the universe, useless, excessive, just like the sexual close-up in a porno film): all this explodes
the scene formerly preserved by the minimal separation of public and private, the scene that was
played out in a restricted space" (p. 130).
In addition, the spectacles of the consumer society and the dramas of the public sphere
are also being replaced by media events that replace public life and scenes with a screen that
shows us everything instantaneously and without scruple or hesitation: "Obscenity begins
precisely when there is no more spectacle, no more scene, when all becomes transparence and
immediate visibility, when everything is exposed to the harsh and inexorable light of information
and communication" (p. 130). The ecstasy of communication: everything is explicit, ecstatic (out
of or beyond itself), and obscene in its transparency, detail, and visibility: "It is no longer the
traditional obscenity of what is hidden, repressed, forbidden or obscure; on the contrary, it is the
obscenity of the visible, of the all-too-visible, of the more-visible-than-visible. It is the obscenity
of what no longer has any secret, of what dissolves completely in information and
communication" (p. 131). One thinks here of such 1980s US media obscenity concerning the
trials and tribulations of Gary Hart and Donna Rice, of Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, of Ron
and Nancy Reagans' cancer operations and astrology games, or the sleazy business deals of his
associates, and the dirty transactions of Iran/Contra, -- all of which have been exposed to the
glaring scrutiny of the media in which what used to be private, hidden, and invisible suddenly
becomes (almost) fully explicit and visible.
The 1990s saw an intensification of the ecstasy of communication with the Clinton sex
scandals that displayed intimate details of his private life, the O.J. Simpson trial that depicted the
minutiae of his tormented relation with his murdered wife Nicole, and countless other revelations
of private affairs of the powerful and infamous in an increasingly tabloid infotainment culture.15
In the “ecstasy of communication,” everything becomes transparent, and there are no more
secrets, scenes, privacy, depth or hidden meaning. Instead a promiscuity of information and
communication unfolds in which the media circulate and disseminate a teeming network of cool,
seductive and fascinating sights and sounds to be played on one's own screen and terminal. With
the disappearance of exciting scenes (in the home, in the public sphere), passion evaporates in
personal and social relations, yet a new fascination emerges ("the scene excites us, the obscene
fascinates us") with the very universe of media and communication. In this universe we enter a
new form of subjectivity where we become saturated with information, images, events, and
ecstasies. Without defense or distance, we become "a pure screen, a switching center for all the
networks of influence" (p. 133). In the media society, the era of interiority, subjectivity, meaning,
privacy, and the inner life is over; a new era of obscenity, fascination, vertigo, instantaneity,

12
transparency and overexposure begins: Welcome to the postmodern world!
In his post1980 writings, Baudrillard continues to call attention to McLuhan as the great
media theorist of our epoch and continues to subscribe to the positions that I explicated above,
though occasionally he goes even further in denying that the media are producers of meaning, or
that the media content or apparatus is important. In Baudrillard’s later writings, the “information
society” produces noise and an acceleration of meaninglessness, implosion flips into a new realm
of virtuality, and reality itself disappears in my Baudrillard calls the “perfect crime.” Baudrillard
continues to see the media, and especially television and computers, as producing a proliferation
of information that erases meaning and further eroding distinctions between the media and the
real.16 What, then, does Baudrillard contribute to our understanding of the media in the
contemporary moment and what problems are there with his perspectives?

Limitations of McLuhan’s and Baudrillard’s Media Theory

Undoubtedly, the media are playing an ever greater role in our personal and social lives,
and have dramatically transformed the contemporary economy, polity, and society in ways that
we are only now becoming aware of. Living within a great transformation, perhaps as significant
as the transformation from feudalism to industrial capitalism, we are engaged in a process of
dramatic mutation, which theorists are barely beginning to understand, as global societies enter
the emergent world of media saturation, computerization, proliferating technologies, and novel
discourses. Baudrillard's contribution lies in his calling attention to these novelties and
transformations and providing original and innovative concepts and theories to understand them.
Yet in many ways Baudrillard follows McLuhan in envisioning the centrality of the media
and technology in contemporary society and in some ways their theories share certain insight and
blindness. While both brilliantly see the power and importance of new media and the impact of
the very forms of media in terms of profoundly altering life, there are questions concerning
whether their theories provide adequate concepts to analyze the complex interactions between
media, culture, and society today. In this section, I suggest that Baudrillard's media theory is
vitiated by three subordinations which undermine its theoretical and political usefulness and
which raise questions as well about the status of his version of postmodern social theory. I argue
that the limitations in Baudrillard's theory can be related to his uncritical assumption of certain
positions within McLuhan's and that therefore earlier critiques of McLuhan can accurately and
usefully be applied to Baudrillard. This critique will suggest that indeed Baudrillard is a "new
McLuhan" who has repackaged McLuhan into new postmodern cultural capital.17
First, in what might be called a formalist subordination, Baudrillard, like McLuhan,
privileges the form of media technology over what might be called the media apparatus, and thus
subordinates content, meaning, and the use of media to its purely formal structure and effects.
Baudrillard -- much more so than McLuhan who at least gives some media history and analysis of
the media environment -- tends to abstract media form and effects from the media environment
and thus erases political economy, media production, and media environment (i.e. society as
large) from his theory. Against abstracting media form and effects from context, the use and
effects of media should be carefully examined and evaluated in terms of specific contexts.
Distinctions between context and use, form and content, media and reality, all dissolve, however,

13
in Baudrillard's one-dimensional theory where global theses and glib pronouncements replace
careful analysis and critique.
Baudrillard might retort that it is the media themselves which abstract from the
concreteness of everyday, social, and political life and provide abstract simulacra of actual events
which themselves become more real than "the real," that they supposedly represent. Yet even if
this is so, media analysis should attempt to recontextualize media images and simulacra rather
than merely focusing on the surface of media form. Furthermore, instead of operating with a
model of (formal) media effects, it is preferable to operate with a dialectical perspective which
posits multiple roles and functions to television and other media.
Another problem is that Baudrillard's formalism vitates the project of ideology critique,
and against his claims that media content are irrelevant and unimportant, one should see the
importance of grasping the dialectic of form and content in media communication, seeing how
media forms constitute content and how content is always formed or structured, while forms
themselves can be ideological, as when the situation comedy form of conflict/resolution projects
an ideological vision which shows all problems easily capable of being resolved within the
existing society, or when action-adventure series formats of violent conflict as the essence of
reality project a conservative view of human life as a battleground where only the fittest survive
and prosper.18 For a dialectical theory of the media, television would have multiple functions
(and potential decodings) where sometimes the ideological effects may be predominant while at
other times a medium like television functions as mere noise or through the merely formal effects
which Baudrillard puts at the center of his analysis.
Consequently, there is no real theory or practice of cultural interpretation in Baudrillard's
media (increasingly anti-)theory, which also emanates an anti-hermeneutical bias that denies the
importance of content and is against interpretation.19 This brings us to a second subordination in
Baudrillard's theory in which a more dialectical position is subordinated to media essentialism and
technological determinism. For -- according to Baudrillard -- it is the technology of, say,
television that determines its effects (one-way transmission, semiurgy, implosion, extermination
of meaning and the social) rather than any particular content or message (i.e. for both Baudrillard
and McLuhan "the media is the message"), or its construction or use within specific social
systems. For Baudrillard, media technology and semiurgy are the demiurges of media practices
and effects, separated from their uses by specific economic and political interests, individuals and
groups, and the social systems within which they function. Baudrillard thus abstracts media from
social systems and essentializes media technology as dominant social forces. Yet against
Baudrillard, one could argue that capital continues to be a primary determinant of media form and
content in neo-capitalist societies just as state socialism helps determine the form, nature, and
effects of technologies in certain state socialist societies.
Baudrillard, like McLuhan, often makes essentializing distinctions between media like
television or film, ascribing a particular essence to one, and an opposed essence to the other. Yet
it seems highly problematical to reduce apparatuses as complex, contradictory, and many-sided
as television (or film or any mass medium) to its formal properties and effects, or to a
technological essence. It is therefore preferable, for theories of media in the capitalist societies, to
see the media as syntheses of technology and capital, as technologies which serve specific
interests and which have specific political and economic effects (rather than merely technological

14
ones). It is also preferable to see the dialectic between media and society in specific historical
conjunctures, to see how social content, trends, and imperatives help constitute the media which
in turn influence social developments and help constitute social reality.
For Baudrillard, by contrast, the media today simply constitute a simulated, hyperreal,
and obscene (in his technical sense) world(view), and a dialectic of media and society is
shortcircuited in a new version of technological determinism. The political implications of this
analysis are that constituting alternative media, or alternative uses or forms of existing media, is
useless or worse because media in their very essence for him militate against emancipatory
politics or any project of social transformation. Such cynical views, however, primarily benefit
conservative forces who presently control the media in their own interests -- a point to which I
shall soon return.
Thirdly, there is a subordination of cultural interpretation and politics in Baudrillard to
what might very loosely be called "theory" -- thus constituting a theoricist subordination in
Baudrillard. In other words, just as Louis Althusser subordinated concrete empirical and
historical analysis to what he called "theoretical practice" -- and thus was criticized for
"theoreticism," -- Baudrillard also rarely engages in close analysis or readings of media texts, and
instead simply engages in abstract theoretical ruminations. Here, his arm-chair or TV screen
theorizing might be compared with Foucault's or Virilio’s archival theorizing, or to more detailed
and systematic media theory and critique, much to, I'm afraid, Baudrillard's detriment.
Baudrillard also rigorously avoids the messy but important terrain of cultural and media
politics. There is nothing concerning alternative media practices, for instance, in his theorizing,
which he seems to rule out in advance because on his view all media are mere producers of noise,
non-communication, the extermination of meaning, implosion, and so on. In "Requiem for the
Media," Baudrillard explicitly argues that all mass media communication falls prey to "mass
mediatization," that is "the imposition of models": "In fact, the essential Medium is the Model.
What is mediatized is not what comes off the daily press, out of the tube, or on the radio: it is
what is reinterpreted by the sign form, articulated into models, and administered by the code (just
as the commodity is not what is produced industrially, but what is mediatized by the exchange
value system of abstraction)" (CPES, pp. 175-176).
All "subversive communication," then, for Baudrillard has to surpass the codes and
models of media communication -- and thus of the mass media themselves which invariably
translate all contents and messages into their codes. Consequently, not only general elections but
general strikes have "become a schematic reducing agent" (CPES, p. 176). In this (original)
situation: "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" (CPES, pp. 176-177).
In this text, Baudrillard conflates all previously revolutionary strategies and models of

15
"subversive communication" to "schematic reducing agents" and manifests here once again a
nostalgia for direct, unmediated, and reciprocal speech ("symbolic exchange") which is denied in
the media society. Haunted by a disappearing metaphysics of presence, Baudrillard valorizes
immediate communication over mediated communication thus forgetting that all communication is
mediated (through language, through signs, through codes, etc.). Furthermore, he romanticizes a
certain form of communication (speech in the streets) as the only genuinely subversive or
revolutionary communication and media. Consistently with this theory, he thus calls for a (neo-
Luddite) "deconstruction" of the media "as systems of non-communication," and thus for the
"liquidation of the existing functional and technical structure of the media" (CPES, p. 177).
Against Baudrillard's utopia of immediate speech -- which he himself abandons in his
1980s writings--, I would defend the project of structural and technical refunctioning of the media
as suggested earlier by Brecht, Benjamin, and Enzensberger. Baudrillard, by contrast, not only
attacks all forms of media communication as non-revolutionary, but eventually, by the late
1970s, he surrenders his commitment to revolutionary theory and drops the notion of
revolutionary communication or subversive cultural practices altogether. Moreover, Baudrillard
becomes a bit testy and even nasty in his later writing when considering alternative media. In a
symptomatic passage in "The Ecstasy of Communication," Baudrillard writes:
the promiscuity {note the moralizing coding here -- D.K.} that reigns over the
communication networks is one of superficial saturation, of an incessant
solicitation, of an extermination of interstitial and protective spaces. I pick up my
telephone receiver and it's all there; the whole marginal network catches and
harasses me with the insupportable good faith of everything that wants and claims
to communicate. Free radio: it speaks, it sings, it expresses itself. Very well, it is
the sympathetic obscenity of its content. In terms a little different for each
medium, this is the result: a space, that of the FM band, is found to be
saturated,... Speech is free perhaps, but I am less free than before: I no longer
succeed in knowing what I want, the space is so saturated, the pressure so great
from all who want to make themselves heard.

I fall into the negative ecstasy of the radio (“Ecstasy,” pp. 131-132).
Against this snide and glib put-down of alternative media, I would argue that alternative
television, radio, film, and now Internet movements provide possibilities of another type of
media with different forms, content, goals, and effects from mainstream media.20 A radical media
project would thus attempt to transform both the form and the content of the media, as well as
their organization and social functions. In a genuinely democratic society, mass media would be
part of a communal public sphere and alternative media would be made accessible to all groups
and individuals who wished to participate in media communication. This would presuppose
dramatic expansion of media access and thus of media systems which would require more
channels, technology, and a social commitment to democratic communication.
To preserve its autonomy, alternative television systems could be state funded but not
controlled -- much like television in several European countries, while public access television and
community radio could provide more local programming. Eventually, all of this will be available

16
on the Internet which proliferates the possibilities for alternative media tremendously. An
alternative media system would provide the possibility for oppositional, counterhegemonic
subcultures and groups to produce programs expressing their own views, oppositions, and
struggles that resist the massification, homogenization, and passivity that Baudrillard and others
attribute to the media. Alternative media allow marginal and oppositional voices to contest the
view of the world, values, and life-styles of the mainstream, and make possible the circulation
and growth of alternative subcultures and communities. Baudrillard's theoreticism, however,
eschews cultural practice and becomes more and more divorced from the political struggles and
issues of the day -- though the question of Baudrillard's politics would take another long and very
tortured paper to deal with. Reflecting briefly on Baudrillard's media theory leads me to conclude
that his media theory is rather impoverished qua media theory and reproduces the limitations of
McLuhan's media theory: formalism, technological determinism, and essentialism. John Fekete's
critique of McLuhan might profitably be applied to Baudrillard, as might some of the other
criticisms of McLuhan once in fashion which may need to be recycled a second time for the new
McLuhan(cy). The theory of autonomous media also return with Baudrillard; thus the critiques
of autonomous technology can usefully and relevantly be applied to Baudrillard, and, more
generally to certain forms of postmodern social theory.21
While both McLuhan and Baudrillard are important in calling attention to the power of
the media in contemporary society, the question arises as to whether an implosive theory that
collapses the boundaries of previous social theory is in a position to carefully and rigorously
work out the complex relations and contradictions between the media, economy, state, culture
and society. McLuhan and Baudrillard thus challenge us to develop critical theories of the media
that build on their insights and overcome their limitations. McLuhan and Baudrillard are
extremely valuable in calling attention to the centrality of the media in contemporary society and
provide important insights tools to further advance our understanding media but more work
remains to be done.

Notes
1
This study draws on an article "Resurrecting McLuhan? Jean Baudrillard and the Academy of
Postmodernism," in Communication for and against Democracy, edited by Marc Raboy and Peter
A Bruck (Montreal/New York: Black Rose Books, 1989), 131-146, and my book Jean
Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond (Cambridge, UK and Palo Alto:
Stanford University Press and Polity Press, 1989). I am grateful to Arthur Kroker for penetrating
critical remarks on an earlier version of this text, to Steve Best for incisive critiques of several
versions of the text, to Peter Bruck who proposed expansion of the political implications of my
critique, and to Rhonda Hammer who provided useful comments for editing the revised text. In
this study, I shall use the following abbreviations in the text for Baudrillard's work:
CPES=Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (St. Louis: Telos Press,
1978); SSM=In the Shadows of the Silent Majorities (New York: Semiotext(e),
1983); SIM= Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983); SED=De la seduction
(Paris: Galilee, 1979); and S&S Simulacra and Simulations Ann Arbor: The
 University of Michigan Press.
2
See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: McGraw-Hill 1964; reprint MIT
Press, 1994 [hereafter UM]).
3
On the different analyses of postmodernity and the postmodern turn, see Steven Best
and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations. London and New York:
MacMillan and Guilford Press, 1991; The Postmodern Turn. New York: Guilford Press,
1997; and The Postmodern Adventure. New York: Guilford Press, 2001.
4
For my own attempts to theorize television, see the texts cited below in Notes 13, 15, 26, and
17.
5
In his book McLuhan and Baudrillard. The Masters of Implosion (New York and London,
Routledge: 1999), Gary Genosko writes: “I consider the McLuhan renaissance to be a result of
postmodern theory and the enormously influential role played by French social and cultural
theory as it has been, and continues to be, translated into English and disseminated across and
beyond the disciplines” (p. 3). I would argue instead that it is the force and significance of
computer culture and the ways that McLuhan’s concepts articulate its significance and effects
that account for the renewed interest in McLuhan. There is, moreover, overlap between computer
culture and the theorizing of postmodern theory, as Mark Poster and Sherry Turkle have noted.
See Mark Poster, The Second Media Age (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1995) and Sherry
Turkle, Life on Screen (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995). Genosko is also off mark when he
claims “McLuhan and Baudrillard are the key thinkers to whom postmodernists turn to situate
their deviations from them” (p. 3) As argued in the books cited in Note 3, as well as in Poster and
Turkle, there are many competing key postmodern theorists, McLuhan is often neglected in
discussions of postmodern theory, and Baudrillard is often considered an extreme and ultranihilist
variant. For a detailed albeit generally uncritical attempt to demonstrate McLuhan’s importance
for understanding digital culture, see Paul Levinson, digital mcLuhan. a guide to the information
millennium (New York: Routledge, 1999).
6
Baudrillard, Review of Understanding Media in L'Homme et la Societe, Nr. 5 (1967), pp. 227ff.
7
See Jurgen Habermas, Theory and Practice (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), and the critique in
Rick Roderick, Habermas and the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: St. Martin's Press,
1986).
8
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, "Constituents of a Theory of the Media," in The Consciousness
Industry New York: Seabury, 1974.
9
For my critique of the Frankfurt school media theory, see Critical Theory, Marxism, and
Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989).
10
See Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge Mass.: The MIT
Press, 1987.
11
In Simulacra and Simulation,” Baudrillard writes: “To dissimulate is to feign not to have what
one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one hasn't. One implies a presence, the other an
absence. But the matter is more complicated, since to simulate is not simply to feign: "Someone
who feigns an illness can simply go to bed and pretend he is ill. Someone who simulates an illness
produces in himself some of the symptoms" (Littre). Thus, feigning or dissimulating leaves the
reality principle intact: the difference is always clear, it is only masked; whereas simulation
threatens the difference between "true" and "false", between "real" and "imaginary". Since the
simulator produces "true" symptoms, is he or she ill or not? The simulator cannot be treated
objectively either as ill, or as not ill.” (1994a, 3).
12
On McLuhan's catholicism, see John Fekete, "McLuhancy: Counterrevolution in Cultural
Theory" (Telos 15, Spring 1973), pp. 75 123 and Arthur Kroker, Technology and the Canadian
Mind (Montreal: New World Press, 1984); and Genosko 1999: 13f).
13
Jean Baudrillard, "The Ecstasy of Communication," in Hal Foster, editor, The Anti-Aesthetic
(Port Washington, N.Y.: 1983). Page references from this source will be inserted in the text.
14
The Loud family was portrayed in a 1970s US Public broadcasting System (PBS)
documentary series that anticipated reality TV; during the filming of the series, one of the sons
came out gay and the parents split up.
15
For an exploration of these phenomena, see Douglas Kellner, Media Spectacle, London and
New York: Routledge, 2003.
16
On the later Baudrillard see Kellner 1989a and my entry “Jean Baudrillard” in the Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (forthcoming 2004) at http://plato.stanford.edu/.
17
My reading and critique of McLuhan and Baudrillard have been influenced by the work of
John Fekete and Arthur Kroker (see note 11 above). While Genosko (1999) is correct that the
above authors have influenced my readings of Baudrillard and McLuhan, he is dead wrong in
arguing that I claim that “semiurgy” and “television” are “evil” (pp. 67f). Rather, I have always
seen the media as a contested terrain and unlike Baudrillard who sees no good use of the media, I
have been involved in the alternative media movement for decades and even had a public access
TV show in Austin, Texas, for 18 years. In the passages discussed by Genosko, I am explicating
Baudrillard’s position, not indicating my own. Interestingly, in the light of the primacy of the
concept of “evil” in the later Baudrillard, one could argue that Baudrillard himself does ascribe
demonic force and power to the media that he puts on the side of “evil.” I would myself avoid
such moralistic concepts unless I was describing the Bush administration. On Baudrillard and
philosophy, see my entry (forthcoming 2004) in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at
http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html.
18
For further elaboration, see Douglas Kellner, "TV, Ideology and Emancipatory Popular
Culture," Socialist Review 42 (Nov-Dec 1979), pp. 13-53 and "Television Images, Codes, and
Messages," Televisions, Vol. 7, No. 4 (1980), pp. 2-19.
19
See Steven Best and Douglas Kellner "(Re)Watching Television: Notes Toward a Political
Criticism," Diacritics (Summer 1987), pp. 97-113 for elaboration of the project of developing a
political hermeneutics against postmodernist (mostly formalist and anti-hermeneutical) modes of
criticism.
20
This argument is elaborated in Douglas Kellner, "Public Access Television: Alternative Views,"
Radical Science Journal 16, Making Waves (1985), pp. 79-92; Television and the Crisis of
Democracy. Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1990; “Globalization, Technopolitics, and
Revolution” (2003) in John Foran, ed. The Future of Revolutions. Rethinking Radical Change in
the Age of Globalization. London: Zed Books: 180-194; Steve Best and Douglas Kellner,
"Watching Television: The Limitations of Post-Modernism," Science as Culture 4, (1988), 44-
70; and Richard Kahn and Douglas Kellner, “Virtually Democratic: Online Communities and
Internet Activism” in Community in the Digital Age: philosophy and Practiced, edited by
Andrew Feenberg and Darin Barney. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefied: 183-200.
21
See Fekete, op. cit., and Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology (Cambridge, Mass: The
M.I.T. Press, 1977).

20