A Study Of Baudrillard 's Theory Of Popular Culture

The theory of Baudrillarde originated from Barthes, Lefebvre, Debord, Lacan, Mauss and Mcluhan. All of the theorists made contributions to the development of Baudrillarde’s structuralist semiotics and made the conversion between sign and its corresponding agent possible, which is the foundation of Baudrillarde’s understanding of mass culture. Lefebvre’s critical judgements of daily life expanded the field of philosophy. The expansion reconciled the mass culture into daily life, in addition, it offered the direction of the research of mass culture. As known to all Debord’s theory of Society of the Spectacle is the medium of the development of Marxism from Western Maxism to Post-Maxism, which provided views for the researches of mass culture. When symbols were used to investigate mass culture as a medium, the research field enlarged. At the same time, Lacan’s mirror theory, Mauss’ s symbol and transferring theory, and Mcluhan’s medium theory played an important role in constructing Baudrillarde’s theory. Two perspectives were investigated in mass culture theory: mass culture and mass medium. The era of abundant materials surrounded people and their daily life. People were lost in hedonism and were ruled and circled by materials. But at that time, people are not satisfied with the single developments of material substance. They pay more attention to the spiritual development, which made the consumption stepped in to the stage of symbols. The consumption activities became the accumulation of symbols. The value of using symbols took the absolutely dominating percentage compared with the symbolic values. The society in B’s theory is a symbol consuming society in which mass medium is transferred into symbol too; meantime, it existed everywhere of the whole society. Besides, the information of mass medium were recoded and reconstructed, which represented some kind of not-real mass things. The processing of development of medium made large amount of contributions in breaking the boundaries of different aspects of the society. Facing the situation, B didn’t fins the solutions, but he chose to be silent. He viewed that the only way to solve the problem is the whole population’s silence. And the silence could help people avoide the influences and restriction of mass culture. Baudrillarde’s theory revealed the nature of mass comsumption society, which deepened the criticizing of capitalism society. It also offered new viewpoints of Maxism. Baudrillarde’s wrong understanding of Maxism, and less analyis of history and background of each class made his theory limted to some aspects. The application of Baudrillarde’s mass culture theory does not only help us to know clearly about the cultural Hegemonism, but also to remind us of the coming economic crisis and possessing the correct consumption concept.