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nets of the media, by television (capturing 9 out of 10 people in France), by newspapers (8 out
of 10), by books (7 out of 10, of whom 2 read a great deal and, according to another survey
made in autumn 1978, 5 read more than they used to),3 etc. Instead of an increasing
nomadism, we thus find a "reduction" and a confinement: consumption, organized by this
expansionist grid takes on the appearance of something done by sheep progressively
immobilized and "handled" as a result of the growing mobility of the media as they conquer
space. The consumers settle down, the media keep on the move. The only freedom
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supposed to be left to the masses is that of grazing on the ration of simulacra the system
distributes to each individual.
That is precisely the idea I oppose: such an image of consumers is unacceptable.
The ideology of "informing" through books
This image of the "public" is not usually made explicit. It is nonetheless implicit in the
"producers claim to inform the population, that is, to "give form" to social practices. Even
protests against the vulgarization/ vulgarity of the media often depend on an analogous
pedagogical claim; inclined to believe that its own cultural models are necessary for the
people in order to educate their minds and elevate their hearts, the elite upset about the "low
level" of journalism or television always assumes that the public is moulded by the products
imposed on it. To assume that is to misunderstand the act of "consumption." This
misunderstand-ing assumes that "assimilating" necessarily means "becoming similar to" what
one absorbs, and not "making something similar" to what one is, making it one's own,
appropriating or reappropriating it. Between these two possible meanings, a choice must be
made, and first of all on the basis of a story whose horizon has to be outlined. "Once upon a
time...."
In the eighteenth century, the ideology of the Enlightenment claimed that the book was
capable of reforming society, that educational popularization could transform manners and
customs, that an elite's products could, if they were sufficiently widespread, remodel a whole
nation. This myth of Education4 inscribed a theory of consumption in the structures of
cultural politics. To be sure, by the logic of technical and economic development that it
mobilized, this politics was led to the present system that inverts the ideology that formerly
sought to spread "Enlightenment." The means of diffusion are now dominating the ideas they
diffuse. The medium is replacing the message. The "pedagogical" procedures for which the
educational system was the support have developed to the point of abandoning as useless or
destroying the professional "body" that perfected them over the span of two centuries: today,
they make up the apparatus which, by realizing the ancient dream of enclosing all citizens and
each one in particular, gradually destroys the goal, the convictions, and the educational
institutions of the Enlightenment. In short, it is as though the form of Education's
establishment had been too fully realized, by eliminating the very content that made it
possible and
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which from that point on loses its social utility. But all through this evolution, the idea of
producing a society by a "scriptural" system has continued to have as its corollary the
conviction that although the public is more or less resistant, it is moulded by (verbal or iconic)
writing, that it becomes similar to what it receives, and that it is imprinted by and like the text
which is imposed on it.
This text was formerly found at school. Today, the text is society itself. It takes urbanistic,
industrial, commercial, or televised forms. But the mutation that caused the transition from
educational archeology to the technocracy of the media did not touch the assumption that
consumption is essentially passive an assumption that is precisely what should be examined.
On the contrary, this mutation actually reinforced this assumption: the massive installation of
standardized teaching has made the intersubjective relationships of traditional apprenticeship
im-possible; the "informing" technicians have thus been changed, through the systematization
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