Against a system demanding meaning-production, the masses’ passive conformity is the superior resistance.
Evidence
Neither strategy has more objective value than the other. The subject-resistance is today unilaterally valorized and viewed as positive - just as in the political sphere only the practices of freedom, emancipation, expression, and the constitution of a political subject are seen as valuable and subversive. But this is to ignore the equal, and without a doubt superior, impact of all the object practices, of the renunciation of the subject position and of meaning - precisely the practices of the masses - that we bury under the derisory terms of alienation and passivity. … To a system whose argument is oppression and repression, the strategic resistance is the liberating claim of subjecthood. But this strategy is more reflective of the earlier phase of the system, and even if we are still confronted with it, it is no longer the strategic terrain: the current argument of the system is to maximize speech, the maximum production of meaning. Thus the strategic resistance is that of the refusal of meaning and of the spoken word - or of the hyperconformist simulation of the very mechanisms of the system, which is a form of refusal and of non-reception. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 291
Categorization
- XREF: Directly opposes Jameson’s and the Marxist tradition’s valorization of emancipation and ‘consciousness raising’ — core to the reader’s stated Jameson-vs-Baudrillard comparison. — connects to: Mass passivity enables a power structure whose illusion resists objective unmasking. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 163; Mass culture rewards performers whose compliance is so complete they simulate resistance — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 132; Repetitive standardized mass culture automatizes reactions and weakens individual resistance. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 213 (+1 more)
- SEED: Essay angle: the passive-consumption critique reapplied to algorithmic feeds where ‘scrolling without absorbing’ becomes a deliberate refusal of meaning.
Broader Connections
- Mass passivity enables a power structure whose illusion resists objective unmasking.
#expands(0.85) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 163 - The system’s core necessity is keeping the customer from ever suspecting resistance
#contradicts(0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 110 - Mass culture rewards performers whose compliance is so complete they simulate resistance
#complicates(0.75) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 132 - Repetitive standardized mass culture automatizes reactions and weakens individual resistance.
#complicates(0.72) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 213