The Shadow of the Silent Majorities summary paper

Continental Political Theory
The Shadow of the Silent Majorities summary paper
Terese Howard
11/18/09

“The whole chaotic constellation of the social revolves around that spongy referent, that opaque but equally translucent reality, that nothingness: the masses” (1).
This is the first sentence of Jean Baudrillard’s essay “In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities.” The tone is set, and the rest of the essay follows it. Fancy and messy. Written in 1982, this work confronts the powers which have created the masses and those who try to deny the masses their passivity. It is written for the politicians and the revolutionaries alike. The masses would get no meaning out of it. In this summary I will try to make clear the meaning of the title “In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities” word by word.

First, let us examine the word “majorities” which is related to the masses. The word majorities is related to the French term la masse which can mean physical mass or majority mass (1). Accordingly, majorities and mass are used somewhat interchangeably. However, majority has more of a quantitative meaning than masses, which is more about the phenomenon of the mass than its size. Baudrillard states, “To want to specify the term ‘mass’ is a mistake – it is to provide meaning for that which has none” (5). Even so, in order to get anything out of the essay one must want to specify the meaning of the term mass. The trick is to do so without giving to meaning to the masses. That is, to find its meaning through the meaning of that which it is not. While the social has particular referents – a population, a people, a class – the “mass is without attribute, predicate, quality, reference. This is its definition, or its radical lack of definition. It has no sociological ‘reality.’ It has nothing to do with any real population, body or specific social aggregate” (5). This lack of a referent gives the masses its neutral character – “neither one nor the other (ne-uter)” (6). This is also related to the abject (to borrow a term from Julia Kristeva) character of the masses, for the masses cannot be subject because that would require them to be capable of autonomous instigation (which is impossible because the masses have no distinction and cannot conduct meaning as such), and they cannot be object because every attempt to manipulate them is bound to fail (and it is the principle of an object that is can be manipulated) (30).

The relationship between the masses and the social is one of circling, enveloping, absorbing, freezing, and more. The social is the body from which the masses come – social is unspecific, while the masses are particular. Social envelops masses and the masses only absorb the social’s electricity not the whole social as such. As a black hole the masses suck up the social, but this is different than destroying or exploding the social. The masses implode not explode. They are not greater than the social. Yet, the masses remain when the social has been removed, because the masses become a mass through the absorption of the social. The mass has social energy but it is frozen. This is another way in which the masses are a counter partner to some other presence or absence – in this case the absence of the presence of the social (which is also a presence). The social is a body of reality that entails relationships of people. The masses are not a body or real, they are a shadow.

Next the question must be asked, whose shadow is the majorities? Is it the majority’s shadow – that is, does it belong to the majorities? Or does it belong to something else and the majorities are in that shadow? I believe it is possible to answer both of these questions in the affirmative. They both are a shadow and are the shadow of something else. The majorities are the shadow cast by the social, the real populations and peoples. The mass is not real like these social aggregates. It has no subjective character or objectafiable referent. Furthermore, it is the power acting in the social – power to mystify, power to survey, power to speak and pretend to be speaking for others – that creates the shadow which is the masses. It must be noted that, “all power silently flounders on this majority which is neither an entity nor a sociological reality, but the shadow cast by power, its sinking vortex, its form of absorption” (48). It is through the activity of power that the masses become present as a shadow.

Lastly, one must ask why the majorities are silent. There are a few reasons for their silence. One reason is that the majorities cannot be represented – “is isn’t a silence which does not speak, it is a silence which refuses to be spoken for in its name” (22). Media, politicians, surveys, in all their efforts none of these attempts to represent the masses ever do so. They are silent because the powers cannot speak for them. Another reason for their silence is the “ever inexpressible and unexpressed” nature of the social (21). The masses are bombarded with so much stimuli that speech, expression of that stimuli, becomes more and more impossible. One they speak they are no longer the masses, they become a power within the social. Silence their only way to deal with the unrepresentable neutralized absorption.

Baudrillard, Jean. “In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities” Semiotext(e) Inc: New York, 1983.