![]() ![]() Strictly, this is what implosion signifies. There are no more media in the literal sense of the word (I'm speaking particularly of electronic mass media) - that is, of a mediating power between one reality and another, between one state of the real and another. “Finally, the medium is the message not only signifies the end of the message, but also the end of the medium. The melancholy of societies without power: this has already stirred up fascism, that overdose of a strong referential in a society that cannot terminate its mourning.” When it has totally disappeared, we will logically be under the total hallucination of power-a haunting memory that is already in evidence everywhere, expressing at once the compulsion to get rid of it (no one wants it anymore, everyone unloads it on everyone else) and the panicked nostalgia over its loss. And in the end the game of power becomes nothing but the critical obsession with power-obsession with its death, obsession with its survival, which increases as it disappears. The whole world adheres to it more or less in terror of the collapse of the political. And at the same time, another figure of power comes into play: that of a collective demand for signs of power-a holy union that is reconstructed around its disappearance. “Power itself has for a long time produced nothing but the signs of its resemblance. That is-and this is where McLuhan’s formula leads, pushed to its limit-there is not only an implosion of the message in the medium, there is, in the same movement, the implosion of the medium itself in the real, the implosion of the medium and of the real in a sort of hyperreal nebula, in which even the definition and distinct action of the medium can no longer be determined.” If all the content is wiped out, there is perhaps still a subversive, revolutionary use value of the medium as such. Because beyond this neutralization of all content, one could still expect to manipulate the medium in its form and to transform the real by using the impact of the medium as form. But there is something even more serious, which McLuhan himself did not see. ![]() A serious problem for all counterinformation, pirate radios, antimedia, etc. Only the medium can make an event-whatever the contents, whether they are conformist or subversive. This means that all contents of meaning are absorbed in the only dominant form of the medium. This implosion should be analyzed according to McLuhan’s formula, the medium is the message, the consequences of which have yet to be exhausted. And this is only the macroscopic extension of the implosion of meaning at the microscopic level of the sign. “Thus the media are producers not of socialization, but of exactly the opposite, of the implosion of the social in the masses. …Such is the last stage of the social relation, ours, which is no longer one of persuasion (the classical age of propaganda, of ideology, of publicity, etc.) but one of deterrence: “YOU are information, you are the social, you are the event, you are involved, you have the word, etc.” An about-face through which it becomes impossible to locate one instance of the model, of power, of the gaze, of the medium itself, because you are always already on the other side.” ![]() There is no longer any imperative of submission to the model, or to the gaze “YOU are the model!” “YOU are the majority!” Such is the watershed of a hyperreal sociality, in which the real is confused with the model, as in the statistical operation, or with the medium. “You no longer watch TV, it is TV that watches you (live),” or again: “You are no longer listening to Don’t Panic, it is Don’t Panic that is listening to you”-a switch from the panoptic mechanism of surveillance ( Discipline and Punish ) to a system of deterrence, in which the distinction between the passive and the active is abolished.
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