The proliferation of models of the real inevitably produces a saturation that accelerates the system into inertia, culminating in implosive violence that poses a constant threat of collapse.

Baudrillard’s account of a functionally-obsessed code does not conclude with a smoothly functioning totality. The system which results depends on the constant maintenance of a regime of control. Such a system is very unstable, open to collapsing at the slightest rupture. For instance, systems of power depend on a master-signifier, which is ultimately arbitrary and contingent. (There is no longer a master-signifier of the entire system, but agencies such as states and companies still have leaders for example). When it is obvious that it is arbitrary and contingent, power is unpinned from its apparent obviousness. It comes to seem purely arbitrary, and this interferes with its functioning. When power occupies the empty place of power, it comes to seem obscene, impure and ridiculous, and eventually collapses. Baudrillard refers to this instability as implosion. This means that he sees the system collapsing from within. The system is no longer expanding – hence the turn to deterrence instead of war. It is in ‘involution’ – collapsing in upon itself. For Baudrillard, the system has reached its culmination. It is accelerating towards its limit, which today is expressed as implosion (rather than explosion or revolution). The growing density of simulations is destroying it. Implosion is swallowing all the energy of the real. Implosion is similar to the idea of ‘internal contradictions’ in Marxism. It refers to a tendency to collapse arising from the system’s own dynamics. Implosion arises from the destruction of meaning and the reality-effect due to the precession of simulacra. The problem for the system is that signs need a separate reality in order to refer to something, and hence to function as signs. In the current regime of simulation, social realities are generated from signs and models which precede them. The model produces the “real”, the medium, and the message all at once. Reality separate from the regime is either destroyed, denied, or incorporated. As a result, the signs stop referring to anything. At the same time, therefore, a total system of meaning is created, and its meaningfulness is destroyed. All signs or referentials are combined in a vicious circle or Moebius strip. Truth, equivalences, rational distinctions break down. Without a clear outside or referent, the reality-effect breaks down. Without a focus of intensity, meaning breaks down. Meaning can no longer be pinned-down in particular places. It circulates at increased speed, without any referent or guarantee. For instance, economic growth is increasingly unstable. Economic bubbles form and burst, commodities (such as Internet companies or real-estate) are immensely valued and then collapse, emerging “tigers” from Korea to Ireland to Mexico suffer sharp collapses. Baudrillard sees the same thing happening with everything from fashion to art to politics. The problem is structural. Once the system reaches saturation, it starts to fall in on itself, like a black hole. Saturation leads to inertia. For Baudrillard, global cities have already become black holes, eating up past social phenomena and meanings. They are entirely functional zones, arranged around sites such as hypermarkets (massive supermarkets), shopping centres and transport networks. The system is based on functionality. Yet in hypermarkets and modern universities, functions seem to become indeterminate – hence cities seem to disintegrate. This is because they have lost their distinct purposes or use-values. They become polyfunctional black-boxes with different input-output combinations. Usefulness is itself an ideology, which relies on the simulation of shortage or the creation of artificial scarcity. It is actually a moral convention, not a fact of nature. Today, supermarkets are also insurance companies, banks, pharmacists, government information dispensers, home-delivery services; today’s universities are also corporate research subcontractors, vocational trainers, immigration monitors, producers of brand-name merchandise, profiteers on debts, affiliates of regional development councils, housing providers, monitors of student dissent… This kind of hyper-functionalism renders them almost functionless – they can no longer be defined by a particular core function. They become a means without end. An operationalism without specific functions. All the different functions become simultaneous, without past, future or distinction. All mental, temporal, spatial and signalled coordinates become interchangeable in the simulated world. Hence, institutions cease to be related to specific functions, and cease to be believable as guarantors of meaning. This has social effects. Power has ceased to believe in the university. Degrees no longer have the value they once did. Like work, they persist on the basis of a dead referential, as a simulation. The real function of these functionless institutions is deterrence (see below). Their hyperreality, their simulation of functions, neutralises the surrounding territory. People won’t notice the absence of education when there’s a “world-class” university next-door. And if they do, they won’t feel they can compete with such a monolith. There are, of course, exceptions, but on the whole, such simulations shut down social life. For Baudrillard, the system is haunted by a constant sense of crisis. And this crisis is not simply a limit. It is ever-present. The system constantly presents its own crisis as spectacle. It juxtaposes its ideal (the advert) to its crisis (news, disaster movies, crime dramas, action films). But it is distributed in ‘homeopathic doses’ – in tiny amounts absorbed in other things. Hence, it doesn’t explode. It is constantly drip-fed to us instead. The world becomes non-representational through lack of signs. After meaning, we are left with manipulation, touch, circulation, ventilation. It becomes a world of panic. Explosions are foreseen and foreclosed. But implosion, the death of the cybernetic combinatory world, is a constant threat. Some social institutions collapse more quickly than others. Law is in crisis because it is a power of the second order. It is undermined by parody, which makes submission and transgression equivalent. Indeed, the social order prefers to opt for the real, taking simulations for reality. Power is disempowered by the slippage of significations and the lack of referentiality. It is turned into an empty simulation of power. It is at risk of collapse from being dissolved in the play of signs. At one point Baudrillard argues that power no longer produces anything but the signs of its resemblance, the appearance of power. (Real power, perhaps, requires a symbolic aspect). This crisis of law is the condition for a particular transition. Law is replaced by the norm. Rather than explosions which escape the law, the present period deals with deviance as anomalies which deviate from the average. People are now anonymous, subject to an anonymous terror. People can be exterminated, not to achieve their death, but because they are statistically indifferent. Power tries to defend itself against the collapse of meaning by reinjecting the real and the referential everywhere. It tries to convince people that the social world is still objectively real. It prefers to refer to crisis, or even to desire, than to admit its own collapse. Historically, it combated threats from the real by recuperating them in equivalent signs. Now, it combats the threat from simulation by playing at crisis. It embraces theories of ideology, and even radical critiques, as ways to maintain the appearance of truth. The responsible subject is in a similar situation of crisis. The system rests on responsibility. But in a system based on bureaucratic programming, irresponsible actors are required – figures like Eichmann who simply obey orders or perform functions. The system is left constantly trying to exhort people to be responsible subjects while producing them as simple conductors of social power. Subjects are put into drift, into something like a constant unconscious state. Without fixed relations, everything turns into flows of transference. The replacement of meaning with functions makes people expect everything to work all the time. A few seconds’ delay in a webpage loading becomes an inexplicable source of immense frustration. Causes have disappeared, but effects have become immense – as when a local disaster causes a global shutdown. And with the responsible subject no longer there (because it is an effect of the old subject-object split), people try desperately to impute responsibility. The excessive reservoir of ‘floating responsibility’ through finding scapegoats or guilty parties is just waiting to be invested in any particular incident. The Katrina or Christchurch disasters get projected onto looters; Chilean forest fires are targeted as ‘terrorism’; social insecurity is projected onto Muslims, immigrants, minorities. Social problems of increasing triviality are subjected to immense crackdowns and moral panics. In a wave of disproportion, mitigation and even innocence are cast aside in the search for someone to blame. Meanwhile, people are repeatedly subject to tirades to ‘take responsibility’ for problems (from unemployment to alcoholism to post-traumatic stress) which the experts know very well are not really self-caused. We are subject to a blackmail by identity, condemned for what we are labelled as in the code, not for what we are. For Baudrillard, this is a consequence of the disappearance of causes and the power of effects. It reflects something deeper: the world is held collectively responsible for the system. If the system is infringed, the world will have to be destroyed. Or rather, we are ‘psychologically programmed to destroy ourselves’ if the system collapses. We could think of this as the code blackmailing reality. Though the code is tautological and does not depend on reality, it holds reality responsible for itself, and punishes reality if it collapses or crashes. This generalisation of responsibility can be traced back to the loss of symbolic exchange. Generalised, unlimited responsibility occurs because nothing is exchanged anymore, the terms of exchange are simply exchanged among themselves. The system produces nothing but vertigo and fascination. Generalised responsibility becomes the same as generalised irresponsibility and the collapse of social relations. Values such as responsibility, justice and violence continue to circulate only as simulations imposed by the state. This in turn is fatal for the ‘scene’ of politics. On a similar note, there is an ideology of exhuming, documenting, rediscovering the real – from reality TV to the preservation of historical artefacts and indigenous groups – which according to Baudrillard, simply reinforces the process of killing and then simulating. What is preserved is never what it would have been without intervention. We constantly recreate and relive bits of the past and present which are now simulated. The real has become our utopia, that we dream of as if of a lost object. An entire culture now labours at counterfeiting itself. This only exacerbates the problems. Inertia gets worse and worse as simulations of past forms, frozen in time, proliferate and overgrow their uses. Production and meaning are replaced by simulation and fascination. The content – information, culture, commodities – is now simply the support for the operation of the code, the medium. The function of the code is simply to reproduce the masses. Information devours its own contents by turning the real into the hyperreal.