Postmodernity, according to Baudrillard, is distinguished from modernity by the dehumanizing phenomena in the proliferation of simulacra. Contemporary society, his argument follows, has become so dependent on representations, symbols, signs, and images that people have severed their link with the reality preceding representation. Reality itself has begun to simply mimic representational forms, which now precede and shape the real world: “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” (1). According to Baudrillard, the boundaries between concrete and abstract, natural and artificial, have collapsed. In the pre-modern era, images played the role of discernible counterfeits of reality and of aiming “for the restitution of the ideal” (151). In the Industrial Revolution and the following modern era, “a Promethean aim of a continuous globalization and expansion” (151) effected an early albeit incomplete collapse between such boundaries through mass production and the multiplication of copies. In the postmodern era beginning in the mid twentieth century, images and information expressed through mass media precede the determination of reality; representation and reality now indistinct, the predominant social and cultural experience is that of the simulacrum, or the copy without an original. Experiences are limited to and defined by prepared realities and regenerations of the historical, chimerical, and legendary phantasms of children and adults: for example, Disneyland, which is “presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real” (12); edited war footage [“all these things arrived…with a history of delay…that they long ago exhausted their meaning and only live from an artificial effervescence of signs” (38)]; and the recycled simulations of reinvented “penury, asceticism, vanished savage naturalness” (13) in the popularity of natural food, health food, and yoga. Empty, commercialized abstractions communicated through television, magazines, billboards, movies, and the Internet exert so great a hegemony over individuals in defining human needs, desires, and perceptions that people have effectively become removed from the reality of their senses and bodies and from external reality. The operation of contemporary mass culture by simulacra that overwhelm human identity and perception distinguishes postmodernity as a period of mass-scale dehumanization.
The dehumanization of society bridges the conditions in The Grapes of Wrath with postmodern cultural dynamics such as advertising. To Steinbeck, the substance of man is in his social and physical creations, as perceived by sense experience. “The last clear definite function of man—muscles aching to work…minds aching to create beyond the single need—this is man….For man…walks up the stairs of his concepts,” regardless of the vicissitudes of “theories…schools, philosophies” (204-5). Reflecting the dialectical materialism of Marxism, Steinbeck places the abstract at a level subordinate to the social existence and labor products of man. His discourse asserts that capital is the first cause of the chain of growing abstraction that divorces man from sense experience and self-respect – and, by his definition of human value, dehumanizes man. Nevertheless, man perpetually “emerges ahead of his accomplishments” (204).Baudrillard likewise avers capital to be the cause of postmodern alienation. “Through its history it was capital that first fed on the destructuration of every referential….Capital was the first to play at…abstraction, disconnection, deterritorialization” (22). Late capitalism’s advancement through advertising compounds dehumanization, particularly by Steinbeck’s understanding of man’s value as producer, not product. Advertising absorbs all languages, linguistic devices, and original cultural forms in the instantaneous, superficial assignment of commodities to signifiers. For Baudrillard, it is vague seduction (87) into this new structure of meaning where all contents are transcribed into each other, “whereas what is inherent to ‘weighty’ enunciations, to articulated forms of meaning (or of style) is that they cannot be translated into each other” (87). Furthermore, by creating a simulated sociality that is “more real than real” (81) – that is, the realization of ideal body image, status, and personality attributes in the advertised image – the actual social sphere loses its meaning. Mass production, Baudrillard concludes, is no longer for the masses, but of the masses (68). This psychological reversal of the production dynamics that characterized modernity subverts
Whereas capital in The Grapes of Wrath dissociates the bourgeoisie from their physical humanity, Steinbeck’s ideal remains intact. In Simulacra and Simulation, however, Baudrillard carries the causal chain to man’s inessentiality in postmodern culture.
Works Cited
Baudrillard, Jean. Glaser, Sheila Faria, trans. Simulacra and Simulation. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Penguin Books, 1992.
