BAUDRILLARD'S TELEVISION

Abstract

Due to technical-electronic procedures, the TV viewer experiences events as though they are happening here and now, in front of his/her eyes, and not perhaps a thousand miles away, in a different time and place. But relying on this almost physical contact between the viewer and television, the contact which will rouse the world, turned out to be, in the case of the events in Yugoslavia (particularly in Bosnia), an outstanding theoretical construct, and at the same time an erroneous empirical nexus. When we are insisting on the consciousness of the TV viewer (relying on this almost physical contact between the viewer and television, the contact which will rouse the world !) maybe we count to much on the privileged position of the social as a positive. But what is showing us an other position of the television in relation of the war is precissely according to Baudrillard "the collapse of the normalizing, expanding, and positive cycle of the social into its opposite: an implosive and structural order of signs". The triumph of signifying culture means the eclipse of genuine social solidarities.