If the move from “orality” to “writing” gave the once-momentary poetic quality of language a way of being fixed, gathered, and accumulated, so that poetic language gradually grew into a relatively stable system of expression rich in poetic flavor, then what will the media revolution brought by electronic media do to poetic language? Will it drive poetic language toward yet greater flourishing, or announce its end? No one can accurately predict or judge. One point, however, is certain: poetic language is facing pressures and shocks of an unprecedented scale, and although the toughness given to it by a thousand-year tradition and the inertia of history endow it with a stubborn life-force, it has no choice but to retool itself — even to undergo a thorough metamorphosis and to reconstruct its own character anew.
1. The “Age of Reading by Image”: The Predicament of the Written Word
With the development of modern technology, and above all with the large-scale invasion of the public’s leisure time by electronic media led by television, literature and the arts — and the whole of everyday life — have been struck a heavy blow. Television, with overwhelming force, crowds out reading and many other cultural-leisure activities. A study of American television in the early 1990s reports that in the United States 92 million households possess at least one television set (98 percent of the population), and that nearly 70 percent of households own more than one set. On average, sets are switched on for over seven hours a day per household. In the prime hours between seven and eleven in the evening, Americans of every demographic group and every social and economic stratum spend most of their time watching television. Worldwide, some 3.5 billion hours a day are spent watching television. [1] In China, the audience has reached one billion; CCTV alone has nearly 800 million viewers. By the end of 1999, 97 percent of urban residents in China were watching television. [2] Television, in all manner of ways, has insensibly forced its way into every household, into every individual’s daily life, and has become an indispensable part of that life. For young people who have grown up with television, the medium has come to occupy the great majority of their entertainment time and to be their closest companion in exchange. The dependence on television built up in this way has gone so far that some young people now feel that “television is my life.” [3]
Compared with the “holographic illusion” made by television’s blend of sound and image, what literature uses is the single, unmoving written word. Compared with the easy, gratifying, and widely accessible entertainment of television, literary reading is by a fair margin a more demanding mental labor. And compared with television’s rousing and immediate satisfaction of the viewer’s desires by direct sensory image, the sensory pleasure that literary reading offers is always indirect and dim. In a society full of competition — and therefore with the potential for personal crisis always lurking — people who can manage some leisure are naturally inclined to choose modes of entertainment that let them relax completely and that satisfy desire at once. So television, with the advantages it has as a mass medium, has in a short time toppled the print empire built up across centuries, has driven literature toward the periphery, and has caused the poetic quality of language to grow ever paler.
Beyond television, other signs of the visual — design, advertising, and the like — under the double pressure of the commodity economy and modern reproduction technology, have come pouring in to fill every corner. Every product is wrapped in dazzling artistic packaging; every field has been entertainmentized; and culture itself has become a “commodity for consumption.” Even literature, bending low, busies itself flattering the image in the hope of recovering its former dignity through it. Hence the rise of photo-literature, of television prose; “old photographs” and various illustrated editions have become eye-catching bestsellers on the bookshelves. All of this surely indicates that “the age of reading by image” has arrived.
On the question of the “visual” and “pictorial” turn in art and culture, Adorno and Marcuse touched on it long ago, and they expressed grave reservations about and made severe criticism of a “‘cultural essence’ with a dominant and visual character.” In the 1960s, Guy Debord went further with his critique of the “society of the spectacle.” Subsequently, Baudrillard was the first to develop in analytic terms a relatively complete theory of contemporary image-society, and to disclose an oncoming society of simulacra. In the 1980s and 1990s, the discussions in Western academic circles were many, and many theorists agreed with one view: “Whether we like it or not, we ourselves now live in a society in which the visual image has become the dominant form of social reality.” [4]
In Image Time, Aleš Erjavec went on to elaborate: in the course of Western civilization, “image” and “visuo-centrism” have a long history and have been bound up with idol worship. Historically, God was set before people’s eyes in the form of an image; the unlettered came to understand the Bible through images; so the image has always had extraordinary value in the development of public culture. Yet along with idol worship there also came the smashing of idols and a horror of idols. The reason was that God is invisible and cannot be represented visually; to represent God in an image is in fact to drag him down to the human shape, which is a desecration of God. Worship of idols, smashing of idols, idol-phobia, and fetishism: this paradox exists within history. Its expression in the modern age is that, on the one hand, video, cybernetic technology, and electronic reproduction technology have developed unprecedentedly powerful new forms of image-simulation and the art of phantasm; on the other, there is a fear of the image and a deep anxiety that the “power of the image” may ultimately destroy its creators and operators. Despite this paradox, the historical course does not slow or change direction because of human worry. Under the combined action of highly developed markets and technology, visual and media culture is bound to heat up rapidly.
In postmodernism, literature has quickly drifted offstage, while the center stage is lit by the bright glow of visual culture. Moreover, this center stage has become more than a stage — it has become the whole world; in public space, this aestheticization is everywhere.
[5] Image and visual culture are everywhere; they permeate every space and eat away at the real world. History has irrevocably undergone the “pictorial turn” and is entering the “age of the image.” On this point Leavis and many other scholars have voiced deep concern: “They worry that mass culture, in its visual aspect . . . is taking the place of what the cultural minority elite knew best and was most professionally at home in — the reading-based, sober and reasoning culture, which (they felt) had once ensured for them the authority of cultural and academic life and placed them at its center.” [6]
The question is not that the rule of the image, the pictorial, and electronic media is driving literature and poetic language toward a small, cramped island and attempting to drown it. One may believe that the manifoldness of human existence, the human pursuit of self-richness, and the unbreakable links that have built up between man and tradition all call for the long-term endurance of literature and poetic language. The question is the extent to which the transformation of the media — and especially the avalanche of mass-produced video-images, simulacra, and the resulting image-age — will shape human desire, the modes of perception, of cognition, of thought. The new sensuous demands that this places on the poetic quality of language: can they drive the evolution of poetic language? And what is the scope of their force?
Jean Baudrillard wrote:
The “message” brought by the railway is not what it carried — coal or passengers — but a worldview, a new state of combination, and so on. The “message” of television, likewise, is not the images it sends; it is the new relations and modes of perception, the changes in the structure of family and group, that it brings about. To put it further: in the case of television and contemporary mass media, what is received, absorbed, and “consumed” is not so much a particular scene as the potentiality of all scenes. [7]
Among the changes in modes of perception that Baudrillard names, the most important is the closing of the sense of distance and the construction of the sense of being-on-the-spot. As Scott Lash puts it:
Modern sensibility is mainly discursive: it gives priority to the word over the image, to consciousness over the non-conscious, to meaning over non-meaning, to reason over the irrational, to the ego over the id. By contrast, postmodern sensibility is figural: it gives priority to visual sensibility over the stiff sensibility of the word, to image over concept, to feeling over meaning, to a direct mode of knowledge over an indirect mode. [8]
The pictorial turn is one of the important markers of entry into the postmodern. Compared with linguistic writing, the image dispenses with the intermediary of linguistic-conceptual mediation, leaps over that intermediary, and addresses the human senses directly.
The construction of language has gone hand in hand with the development of human reason; the two are always intertwined. Literary work cannot do without language and so cannot break loose from rational concept either: even to express feeling, even to express the flow of the unconscious, it always relies on the prompting, hinting, and triggering of linguistic concept, calling forth the unnameable deep mind by means of visible letters, building concrete images by means of abstract concept. The written word, the linguistic concept, is always the mediator between man and literary image, between man and the realm of the literary work — set across between them. For this reason distance is hard to leap across in literary reading. Closely tied to this: the conceptuality of literary language makes it impossible for the work to re-present the scene directly; however delicate and lifelike the writing, it must depend on the reader’s imagination, which has to reconstruct a hazy, simplified scene through that imagination. Television and modern video-image, by contrast, directly create a lifelike sense of being-on-the-spot. The immense reproducing power of the culture industry has soaked everyday life with mass-reproduced simulacra and has worked its way into every facet of reality — Disneyland, the antique-reproduction television-and-film cities, the new “Song-dynasty cities” being built everywhere, and so on. Imitation, fabrication, replication blur the line between true and false, between the real and the illusory, disturb people’s judgment of reality, and endow visual images with a sense of being-on-the-spot and a lifelikeness. As Zhou Xian puts it:
In modern mass media or mass culture, the production and reproduction of images of all kinds has long since crossed the boundary of reality, so that what is imagined and what is real become hard to tell apart. [9]
Nan Fan also points out:
Images have removed the screen formed by the written word; the spatial logic of the image makes one feel that the object of desire is co-present with oneself. This greatly induces an identificatory psychology to occur. People imagine themselves as a role in the surroundings of the object of desire, and even dimly construct vivid scenarios between themselves and the object of desire. The great majority of these daydreams carry an ambiguous sexual undertone. [10]
The image, the moving image, lays the object of desire stark before the eye, calling forth the wish to possess by the very force of its allure, sweeping the viewer into a world of phantasm, drowning him in the ecstasy of sensory enjoyment and the satisfaction of desire.
Distance is the necessary condition of aesthetic contemplation, and is also the very ground on which the poetic quality of language stands. The poetic enfolds the freedom of human creation, the search for unending savor, the experience of a boundless realm, and intimacy and communion with the things of the world. All of these are built on the foundation of distance. This is an “approachable distance” and a “distanced approach” — that is, “the aesthetic distance of contemplation.” With this aesthetic distance of contemplation comes the independent human self, the freedom of man, and distinctive creation, search, and experience. By contrast, the disappearance of distance means at the same time the loss of freedom and of the independence of every kind of activity — that is, the loss of the poetic. Plainly, the image-age esteems sensory enjoyment; it ravages human experience of, and sensitivity to, the poetic, and so casts a generation of “flat persons” who lack the poetic. By the same token, will it not bring the loss of the poetic in literature and the absence of poetic language?
The vogue of photo-literature also seems to attest to the predicament of literature and poetic language in the “image age.” Some hold that the success of photo-literature lies in an “aesthetic compounding”: that it combines the strengths of photographic art with those of the art of language, that it truly realizes “poetry in painting, painting in poetry,” and reaches a realm in which feeling and scene fuse without limit. [11] Yet the proponents of this view have precisely avoided a more fundamental fact: photo-literature often produces a “double dispossession,” dispossessing photographic composition of its strength and language of its medium. When a photograph thick with implication, opening onto endless reverie, is paired with a literary text of relatively definite meaning, the meaning of the photograph does become clearer, but its inexhaustible savor is thereby narrowed and constrained. The same goes the other way: a literary text rebuilds its image through the reader’s creative imagination; it is just this imagination that gives the literary work an infinitely free space, that makes literary reading an unending process of creation, so that the reader can hardly exhaust the image and its implications that the language has built. The marriage of photograph and literature deprives the viewer of the right of free creation: the image is already laid out before the eye, the meaning is already clear — what further effort is called for? Imagine: had Leonardo composed a poem onto the canvas of the Mona Lisa, however fine the poem, would the result have been “aesthetic compounding” or “double dispossession”? Would there still have been room for one generation after another to keep on interpreting? The mystery of the smile would have been laid bare from the start, and the crown of the rare masterwork could never have been set on that woman’s head.
In Laokoön, Lessing already discussed at length the differences among painting, sculpture, and poetry. He held that painting and sculpture are plastic arts; their medium is color and line, and they unfold in spatial juxtaposition. So they are suited only to the depiction of one instant of a thing; this means that excellent works must choose the moment most pregnant with suggestion, the moment that leaves the widest room for the imagination, and so transmute the still into the moving, the finite into the infinite. Poetry, on the other hand, is the art of language; its medium is language, and it unfolds in successive temporal flow. So it is better suited to narrating action and, through indirect suggestion, to using motion to figure stillness. [12] For example, in the yuefu poem “Mulberry by the Path,” to set off the beauty of Luofu, the poet borrows the impressions of bystanders, leaving the reader an unbounded space of imagination. The media of painting and of poetry each have their own strengths; if the two are forcibly pulled together, the result is often not “aesthetic compounding” but the strangling of both strengths, so that both become mediocre.
Of course, inscribing poetry onto a Chinese painting has been a long-standing practice. Two factors are at work here. First, the poem appears first as written character — as calligraphy — and forms one visual whole with the painting. Second, because Chinese painting carries an abstraction and a pattern-like quality, when it is paired with an equally restrained inscribed poem that gives it a finishing point, savor is genuinely added. With Western painting and with photography it is altogether different. Although in photo-literature there are some genuinely fine works in which “aesthetic compounding” does occur, on the whole, in photo-literature, the textual work has often been demoted into a caption for the image. The flourishing of photo-literature is inseparable from the rise of mass culture and from the universalization of photographic technology — and above all from the “pictorial turn” of culture. As the image keeps strengthening its dominant position, as people’s feeling grows used to easy “consumption” rather than to effortful appreciation and interpretation, photo-literature flourishes “as the times require.” And as the textual work falls into the place of caption, where then is the poetic quality of language? Does this not foreshadow a fate of decline for poetic language?
The poetic is constrained both by the distance of contemplation between man and object and by the gap between sign and reality. Without the gap there is no poetic. When the image carries a sense of being-on-the-spot that imitates the real, or when image and reality become indistinguishable — when image even takes the place of reality — then the image-sign loses the capacity to bear the poetic. The space built up by the gap between sign and reality is precisely a calling out to man, an inviting in. The poetic needs just such a space: a space without boundary, drifting and endless, a space inviting the viewer to enter freely. The greatest difference between poetic language and applicative language lies precisely here: poetic language always keeps a free space between itself and the real. With this space, the human spirit and feeling find their truly proper dwelling, and the soul and imagination seem from it to glimpse mysterious, far-off mansions and shrines. Yet the over-reproduction of postmodern video-image stops up every free space and strangles the creative capacity — and even the creative wish — of the human being in the aesthetic space. Does this then lead to the withering of the poetic and the early death of poetic language? Or, more frightening still, will it be, as many publishers worry, that
by the next century perhaps no one will be interested in reading our publications, or perhaps no one will even be able to read them; historians are at a loss as to whether the end of history is near. [13]
2. The Fading of the Aura and the Banishment of the Poetic
In “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility,” Benjamin advanced the question of the “aura” of traditional artworks, defining the aura as “the unique appearance of a distance, however close it may be.” [14] Benjamin held that the aura of the artwork is rooted in ritual — first in magical ritual, later in religious ritual. Since art was originally one component of ritual, taking root in rite — for example, the elk that Stone Age cave-people painted on cave walls were a magical device, made for the spirits; their existence mattered more than their being looked at. Hence “the beginning of artistic creation is the production of plastic figures for the service of worship.” Because such plastic figures are tied to ritual activity and to the spirits, they appear sacred and mysterious; they themselves are the “unique appearance” of the spirits — however close to man they actually are, they remain remote and unattainable. Man can only look up to them and worship them with devotion. A mysterious atmosphere then forms around them, and the “aura” comes into being. So, as Benjamin says,
Art as an aura-laden mode of existence has never been able to detach itself fully from ritual function; that is, the unique value of the “authentic” artwork has its ground in ritual, and its distinctive, original use-value lies precisely here. [15]
Yet
as the various artistic practices liberated themselves from ritual, the chances to exhibit their products grew likewise. [16]
Apart from cult value, then, another value of the artwork — exhibition value — began to form, and the reception of artworks now contained two extremes: one stressing the cult value of the work, the other its exhibition value.
As the modes of technical reproduction of the artwork multiplied, its capacity for exhibition was greatly enhanced, so that the quantitative shift between the two extreme values — as in primeval times — suddenly became a qualitative change in the very essence of art. Technical reproduction has made the aura of the artwork fade and wither, for the unique original no longer exists; it has been replaced by uncountable technical reproductions, which detaches the reproduced artwork from ritual, from the spirits. The reproduction no longer holds the unique sacredness and mystery; it has even become a commodity for everyday distraction. Within this process, the development of photography and film has played the decisive role: it is the mechanical reproduction technology of photography and film that ensured that
art, in the age of its technical reproducibility, has detached itself from the ground of cult, and the appearance of its autonomy has vanished forever. [17]
Technical reproduction has strangled and undone the aura of the artwork.
Benjamin set forth with extraordinary insight both the source of the aura of the artwork and the dissolution of that aura in the age of technical reproduction, but he did not analyze concretely the evolution of the aura of artworks and literary works themselves. The aura of works of literature and art is rooted in ritual and tied closely to cult function, but this “aura” has gone through a historical evolution.
The aura that arose from ritual activity is the experience of “being-with-the-spirits.” It is full of the sense of the sacred and the mysterious, and this sense wraps around the whole ritual process, and likewise wraps around the “literature” and “art” that are organic parts of ritual.① As magical ritual gradually grew thin, and as literature and art became independent creative domains separated out of ritual, man and god grew steadily estranged. Outside religious activity, man steadily distanced himself from the gods and forgot them; reverence for the gods became only a deep-structure remnant lurking in the unconscious, a remote and nearly lost vague dream. Man’s defection from the gods not only added exhibition value to literature and art; it changed the nature of cult value as well, shifting it from worship of the gods to worship of human creative spirit and human creative power. Although the shadow of the spirits still lurks stubbornly behind that worship — Plato, for instance, held that the poet can commune with the gods and, in a state of divine madness, can recall the heavenly realm — this is utterly different from the direct worship of the gods within ritual. It has been transformed into a numinous, otherworldly experience of the sacred and the mysterious, and into an aspiration toward and longing for the far-reaching meaning held within the literary and artistic work. This transformed “aura” is what we today call the “poetic.” If the aura is intimately tied to the existence of the spirits, then in the poetic the spirits have gone far away and left only an empty shadow — an authentic being and a hazy meaning and savor that may not be glimpsed, much less reached; a metaphysical realm that ceaselessly tempts one to seek. Even if the pursuit of meaning, the pursuit of authentic being, the pursuit of a metaphysical spiritual realm is in the end a pursuit of “being-with-God,” the difference between the two is plain. The reverence of cult worship, the holding of a “vertical distance” and the “unapproachable,” has been transmuted into a “horizontal or equal distance,” that is, an “approachable distance,” and within this approachable “horizontal distance” — or “intersubjectivity” — one comes to enjoy aesthetic contemplation, aesthetic mystery, and the delight of aesthetic freedom. What once could only be worshiped and not appreciated (appreciation being itself a desecration of the gods) has now become a poetic object for free judgment and savor. This poetic, transmuted from the aura, is preserved within tradition, within works of literature and art, within poetic language (originally the language of the gods or the language of communing with the gods). Even after the rise of print culture and the great advance of reproduction technology, this poetic was not overturned. Print writing was still itself a privilege, and where there is privilege there must be mystery — print writing was inevitably “deified,” and the aura did not disperse.
Electronic media are different. With their enormous reproductive power and their rough invasion of every domain, they have torn off the veil of “being-as-such,” have “de-magicked” it; literature and art and poetic language have likewise been “de-magicked.” As Benjamin notes,
since reproductive technology makes the receiver able to appreciate reproductions in his own environment, it endows the reproduced object with reality. These two processes deeply shake the artworks that have come down to us — they shake tradition itself. Because reproduction technology can repeatedly produce copies, the unique birth of the reproduced is replaced by the mass appearance of copies. [18]
Horkheimer and Adorno, from the angle of the culture industry — tightly bound up with electronic media — discussed the same decline of modern art and predicted:
Sooner or later television will exert vast influence: it will quickly drive the aesthetic into a state of extreme poverty, so that in the future all the heavy veils thrown over the products of industrial culture will be lifted, and Wagner’s dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk will be fulfilled in a mocking way — all the arts merging into a single work. [19]
The culture industry has enormous capital at its disposal; it commands word, image, music, and other sensuous components for the production of television, and so gives television an extraordinary power to take over the market and possess the masses. In the whole process of production, the creator has no individual independence; the true “absolute master” is capital. Capital decides what plot to choose and which star to choose, and so brands the producer’s mind deep with its mark. The products that the culture industry makes in this way are bound to fall into being “models of a vast economic machine,” into being commodity-types purely for mass consumption; the viewer too is molded into a standardized consumer without individuality, into a “schematized” type without imagination, into a copy of an interchangeable “other,” so that aesthetic life finally falls into a state of extreme poverty.
The whole culture industry molds humanity into types able to be continuously reproduced in every product. [20]
Once the culture industry and modern electronic media have stripped from man his individual independence, his creativity, and his imagination, does man still have the capacity to experience the poetic realm? Does he still need or yearn for the poetic?
When a five-year-old girl student was asked what her favorite television program was, her answer was unexpected: not cartoons, not science programs, not television drama — but commercials. The commercial most directly stirs the viewer’s desire and most easily satisfies it. Here is the pure exercise and indulgence of desire, with no need for disguise and no need for sublimation. The poetic is closely tied to human desire, but it is, after all, a sublimation of the unconscious. When man, through this repeated exercise, gradually loses the capacity for sublimation, is the spring that nourishes poetic language cut off at the source?
Horkheimer and Adorno hold that under the conditions of the culture industry, the advertisement has become culture and art, and culture and art have become advertisement — the two have already fused into one. The advertisement compulsively injects a particular reference into words and disseminates them blindly and rapidly, bombarding the masses; the result is the numbness of the masses to advertising language. When people form a conditioned reflex to advertisement and its words, the word as bearer of meaning is also degraded: it becomes a sign without meaning, becomes incapable of being understood and no longer needs to be understood. “The word is the brand.” The culture industry is the maiming of language: it forces language to serve commercial ends and to serve them alone — even the whispered words of love have been soaked with commercial air.
If reality is the foundation of language, then language has already rushed eagerly to chase after the commercial ends being continuously produced. If a word cannot serve as a means to that end, then it is meaningless; with respect to other words it is fictive and unreal. Value-judgments are either taken as advertisement or turned into empty talk. [21]
Between “advertisement” and “empty talk” no “third party” is allowed in; is poetic language then to be shut out, left without an inch of ground to stand on?
The poetic, or poetic language, is closely tied to human individuality. Only with an independent individual — though individual or subject is an ideological illusion rather than a substance — does there arise the longing for and pursuit of freedom; only then is the unfreedom of real existence deeply felt; and only then arises the strong wish to create a poetic kingdom alongside reality and the desire to create a poetic language that has shaken off everyday mediocrity. It is precisely within the poetic realm and the poetic language alongside reality that human freedom is most fully unfolded, that human individuality is nourished. Human individuality is the independence of the individual as distinct from the “other”; the poetic realm and poetic language are creations distinct from everyday existence. This independence was pushed to extremity in the high-modernist period, so that
each individual becomes a linguistic island; once outside the process of glossing and canonization, it leads to the breaking of communication. [22]
High modernism, in pursuing extreme individuality, at the same time pushed self-mystification and self-sacralization to extremity once more.
Under the conditions of commodity society and the culture industry, however, a substantive transformation has taken place within the field of cultural production. Traditional forms have given way to integrated media experiments; photography, film, and television have begun to seep into and migrate into all kinds of artworks, producing all manner of high-technology hybrids. This is a society in which visual images flood the world, and humanity is
facing daily a bombardment of more than a thousand images. Humanity has begun to live within a very different relation to space and time, to the experience of existence and to cultural consumption. [23]
At this stage, the scope of culture itself has been infinitely enlarged.
The expansion of culture is in substance the expansion of commerce. Once culture has become a commodity, it can seep into every field with unlimited reach and govern every person. The mark of this stage, accordingly, is “de-differentiation”: it erases the lines between all fields. Not only does the line between “high” and “popular” dissolve; the line among culture-art, economy, politics, and everyday life dissolves too. Commodified culture has “colonized” reality, and the “kingdoms of the poetic” that once kept their independence are no more. When the boundary between poetic kingdom and real world disappears, it is not the real that is soaked and lit by the poetic; it is the poetic that is drowned in the bland mediocrity of the real — the poetic is diluted and dissolved. Such commodified culture is
a flat, depthless culture, purely a new kind of surface culture. It is also a culture of images and representations without “depth” of possibility; it draws its interpretive force from other images, other representations, and from the play of intertextuality. The result, in postmodern cultural products and practice, is what he calls “the waning of affect.” [24]
Correspondingly, human individuality has been extinguished as well; the individuality of language has been extinguished. Language has become a generic, ready-phrase-collage “media language” with the marks of the impersonal. With the collapse of the high-modernist ideology of style,
the producer of culture has nowhere to turn but back to the past, to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and voices stored in the imaginary museum of what is now a global culture. [25]
It is a neutral “mediating language,” “a speech in a dead language.”
3. The Disappearance of the Center and the Play of Discourse
The rapid development of mechanical reproduction technology and the transformation of the means of communication have brought the present society into a new age. Baudrillard declares: we are now in a “new age of simulacra.” If modernity was an age of production controlled by the industrial bourgeoisie, then the age of postmodern simulacra is, in opposition, an age of information and signs dominated by the model, the code, and cybernetics. [26]
In this course, the appearance of television in particular is viewed by Baudrillard as a principal “simulation” machine of the media and as an important factor in postmodern society. Television and other electronic media have driven the mass proliferation of “codes” and “simulacra” and their rapid dissemination in everyday life. They not only invade every wrinkle of society and of daily life, but build up a new social order composed of codes and simulacra, dominating social life. [27]
The continuous reproduction of images has made it impossible to distinguish original from copy; the line between real and image or simulacrum has imploded, and the real has even been replaced by image or simulacrum. The so-called “real” is artificially produced by the model. The star in the television drama or the dress shown in the fashion magazine, the toy in the television or computer animation, often produces large-scale imitation in everyday life; the image of the lawyer or doctor on television is unconsciously taken as the model for judging lawyers and doctors in real life. The image or simulacrum on the screen determines people’s everyday experience and feeling, and so alters real life and constructs a new real. The real then vanishes into the fog of image and simulacrum. Hence Baudrillard holds that
the over-production of signs and the re-production of image and simulation have led to the loss of fixed meaning and have made reality appear in an aesthetic way. The masses, before this endless, accumulating kaleidoscope of signs and images, have been driven into bewilderment, unable to find any fixed connection of meaning within it. [28]
Electronic media not only blur the relation between the real and the virtual; they also reconstruct the rational subject.
The mode of information has driven a thorough reconstruction of language, a reconstruction that builds the subject outside the model of the rational autonomous individual. The familiar modern subject is replaced by the mode of information with a multiple, disseminated, decentered subject, and is continually interpellated into an unstable identity.
Mark Poster holds that the very thought-ground of Enlightenment carries a deep-rooted origin in print culture. The linear arrangement of the sentence, the stability of printed words, and the materiality of publications enable the reader to be distant from the author; the exchange between reader and author is conducted indirectly through the materialized printed object. This gap in space and time gives the reader the chance for critical reflection and at the same time forces him to make his own independent interpretation; this cultivates the reader’s independence and drives the formation of a critical, rational autonomous center. So, by contrast with the momentary character of speech in oral culture, the materiality of the printed page raised the authority of the author and the intellectual in an opposite yet complementary way, building the individual into a subject of stable identity.
When electronic media, with their massive images and simulacra, have blurred the boundary between the real and the fictive — have even covered over and replaced the real, turning reality into a “virtual world” — the traditional relation between man and the real has gradually been undone. Images and simulacra are continually copied, rapidly transmitted, and ever-shifting, placing people in a world of swift-changing phantasm. This is a series of flowing, indeterminate, unstable, scattered phantasmic fragments, utterly different from the integrated utopian realm of the modernist period. Such broken phantasmic fragments not only shatter human feeling and make it disordered, but cause man himself to lose the sense of stability and definiteness. Man no longer holds, as before, a relatively stable position and identity in reality; everything has become drifting and unreal. At the same time, the violent bombardment of images and simulacra borne in by electronic media has deprived man of the gap in time and space and the inner quiet that independent thought requires, and has been eating away at the rational subject built up by print culture. The viewer becomes the object of discourse — manipulated, passive, consumerist. If Althusser proposed that the modern ideological apparatus constructs an “illusory centered subject,” then Poster holds that television advertising and electronic media communication, because of the action of their non-referential structure, do the opposite:
they construct a decentered subject. This subject fundamentally destroys the distinction between the illusory and the real, and television advertising fundamentally destroys the distinction between science and ideology, between true and false consciousness, between the real and the imagined. [29]
Television, under the fine names of “communication” and “emotional space,” shamelessly puts people’s most private secrets up on the screen, performing them ritually before everyone’s eye, and uses this as a commercial selling point, wholesaling the enchanted viewer to the advertisers. Private space is the warmest home that nurtures human individual independence; when this space has been auctioned off by television commerce, when privacy has been fully exposed, when man no longer has a purely-his-own “private territory,” the boundary between man’s inner world and the outer world melts away. That is to say, man no longer holds his own inner territory; he is no longer an independent subject of self-completeness and uniqueness, but becomes
multiple, alterable, fragmented. [30]
The poetic realm is inseparable from a relatively independent individual and an awakening subject. Only when the human individual stands free of nature and detached from the group does man truly experience his own solitude and the pain that arises from alienation and conflict with nature and with the group. It is from this that man needs an aesthetic utopia that consoles the soul and warms the heart, and is driven to build a poetic realm — and even the older world of myth is converted into the place where man lodges his ideal and his feeling, driving forward the growth of poetic language. Man and the world correspond to each other: the form of the world is man’s own reflection; an organic and complete subject demands an organic and complete world, demands above all an organic and complete aesthetic utopia, a perfect and stable poetic realm.
Just as Heidegger says, “Language is the house of being.” For Heidegger, poetry and poetic language have the power to open up the earth and to let man enter into poetic dwelling. He says:
Whence do we humans get the information about the nature of dwelling and of the poetic? Whence does humanity hear the call to attain to the nature of something? Humanity can hear that call only where it receives it. It receives it from the speaking of language. But this is so only if and so long as he thinks the nature of language. [31]
In Heidegger’s view, the nature of language is the poetic nature of language: it is poeticity that lets language hold to its ur-magic and authentic character. With poetic language, then, man and world enter into authentic being; man comes near to and into accord with the world; man at last truly has his home, an earth lush with the poetic, an eternal and perfect spiritual home.
But when man and world have both been shattered into fragments, when the aesthetic utopia is broken by “de-differentiation,” the stable poetic realm no longer exists.
Lost in the amusement park of the hyperreal, the postmodern self dissolves within an artificial kingdom of experience, becoming itself a set of altered signs, defining identity by appearance, style, and image. [32]
Reality is foggy and unsettled; man himself is “decentered”; language has therefore lost its referent and become the drift of signifiers. Everything is in indeterminacy; everything is in random combination — or rather, in willful collage. This is play — a play different from what Schiller called “play.” Man and the real, man and art, man and language are all in play. But the line between the real and the illusory has been lost. The real has sunk: it has been drowned among signs and images. Independent art in the traditional sense has likewise come to an end; what remains is only the signifier-sign — an ever-shifting phantasm composed of and covered by signs. So what remains is the play of man and the signifier. This is a play without an ending. With the receding of the signified, language has lost its depth altogether; language can no longer build a unified utopia, can no longer offer man a poetic kingdom; it has become only a chain of signifiers drifting on a flat surface. This is language without the poetic — or, the poetic quality of language has degenerated into a language-game. In an age in which the soul has lost its quiet and become anxious, language’s capacity to build poetic realms and to settle the soul is no longer what man seeks.
The great upheaval in everyday life that has accompanied the transformation of the media and the pictorial turn seems to have changed the color of the world and to have changed the color of man himself. This transformation is one of rupture; though cultural tradition tries by stubborn resistance to push back the change, to bridge the rupture and to keep tradition in continuity, in fact this is no longer possible. The historical fate of poetic language is thereby cast: it must thoroughly retool itself — turning the grave into the playful and the gaming, the still meditation into restless experience, the eternal stable balance into the random and accidental flow — and so flatten the deep realm and pull the metaphysical spirit back into the flesh. Language no longer has the power to build a Tower of Babel; it is like a torn-down pavilion of seven jewels — only fragments remain. Then: does poetic language in the traditional sense still endure? Perhaps the poetic realm and poetic language, pushed to the edge of sound, will still go on unbroken, but they will be only a thread of soft chanting within the postmodern noise of many voices.
Note
① Within ritual activity there is no independent literature or art proper; what exists is only the embryos of certain literary and artistic forms.