3 - Jean Baudrillard: Media Places

Summary

Mastery of space now leads to control in space.

Baudrillard, The System of Objects

Humans are distributed spatially, that is, by economics.

Baudrillard, The System of Objects

America has to be thought in terms of space and not of an existential territory.

Baudrillard, “L'Amérique et la pensée de l'espace”

“Cover the Earth”: like the red liquid that drips over our globe in Sherwin-Williams' emblem advertising its brand of house paint, it can be said that a globalizing consumer culture covers the northern hemisphere and extends on to the sea and land below the Equator. The famous logo is a fitting allegory for the state of the world that theorists in the line of Lefebvre and Certeau in the post-war years, anticipating globalization, had called the effect of the bourgeois and the impact of the disciplinary society. In Chapter 2 I suggested that familial and ethnic networks lose their character when transnational economies redefine them. At a microlevel, argued Certeau, stories and myths that had been vital to everyday life and ecological spaces are now compressed into slogans and advertisements for the ends of economic development. We have seen more directly that his writings deal with ruses and resistances to what he and Lefebvre perceived to be the controls that the state imposes on its citizens through technology and consumerist ideology. Using psychoanalysis, in which the language of the unconscious plays a determining role in human activities, Certeau focuses on questions of existence in relation to place.