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Liam McNamara

Document Type

Article

Abstract

[First paragraph]

One of the central problems of contemporary society is that of “the social”: how it is defined, constituted, conjured into existence, and supported. Jean Baudrillard has employed the term “the social” in his work, but it is never explicitly defined; it is best understood as a form of simulation that has sprung into existence in the absence of symbolic social relations. The social is constituted of all the phenomena that are generally studied by sociology, so is therefore ideologically conceived of as an organic structure that is waiting for analysis. The “social” is society, both as it stands in the present but also in the future, in that it has a “destiny” of its own. The “social” is the “real” hypostatized by sociological discourse. Baudrillard has pointed out that the masses are always stronger than the messages broadcast to them, since they unequivocally absorb them [1]. Baudrillard says: “they haven’t waited for future revolutions nor theories which claim to ‘liberate’ them by a ‘dialectical’ movement. They know that there is no liberation, and that a system is abolished only by pushing it into hyperlogic, by forcing it into an excessive practice which is equivalent to a brutal amortization” (Baudrillard 1983, 46). A way emerges of subverting the dialectical finalities of Reason through taking the logic of mass consumption to the Nth power. In the face of this the social becomes difficult to sustain, and ironically it recedes as swiftly as it is instantiated, meaning that the fundamentalists of the social who seek to employ this form of social legitimation must continually fight a losing battle. So the social as a macro-formation becomes untenable, something embodied in the Lyotardian decline of Grand Narratives, and there is a shift of focus to social micro-practices.

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