To say that the famous pessimist Augustine wrote prolifically because of his hope in the power of the word is not to speak rashly. Words, Augustine thought, illuminate the ontology of human existence. Contrastingly, the French postmodern philosopher and cultural theorist, Jean Baudrillard, conceived existence as a hyperreality hopelessly overrun by signs that, because of advertisers’ excessive fecundity, can point only to other signs. These signs obscure access to the real world and have no correspondence with material reality. Comparing Augustine’s and Baudrillard’s positions, this article asks, “Who is right?”
Words Are Signs of Reality (Or Hyperreality)?
A 4th-century philosopher and theologian, Augustine thought meaning manifests when the reality a sign points to is known. In his semiotics, signs enable knowledge of reality and how language works. Reality (or an object) is recognized through signs, and any disconnection of the sign from reality is superficial because, according to Augustine, as soon as the intention of the person using the sign is understood, the apparent disconnection is removed. Words (signs) function when they are understood and can be understood once they are given meaning by rational, intending beings.
Baudrillard disagreed. Following Ferdinand de Saussure, he argued that separated from its signified (the concept that ‘closed’ applies to), the signifier (the word ‘closed’) only arbitrarily connects to ideas or objects. Consequently, the sign is self-referential and gets its meaning from its difference to those within a network of signs (‘cat’ is ‘cat’ because it is not ‘dog’ or ‘bird’ etc.).
In his 1981 seminal work, Simulacra and Simulations, Baudrillard presented signs as tools used unremittingly by advertisers to produce façades of “the real.” Advertising (which Baudrillard saw soaking up all media and cultural forms) encourages the meaninglessness of society today. In postmodern (or post-postmodern) society, there’s incessant buying and selling of needless products. Artificiality characterized by floating nonreferential signs and symbols, ‘simulacra’ (which in the Neoplatonism that Augustine adhered to) is defined as copies of copies of the ideal and real. These copies are simulated and wholly disconnected from reality to the extent that, for example, “fashion [becomes] more beautiful than the beautiful” and “the model truer than the true.”
Impact of Sign on Culture
Baudrillard described culture as a hotbed of captivating but empty constructs with more form than substance, more style than depth. When we follow a sign, we find only other signs—a hyperreal “universe of signs,” each non-corresponding with the thing it is meant to point to.
In hyperreality, a mishmash of disordered and false signs stands for reality. These hyperreal signs (which Baudrillard called simulacra) make it impossible to differentiate between real and unreal. As Baudrillard explains, “The unreal is no longer that of dream or fantasy, of a beyond or a within, it is that of the hallucinatory resemblance of the real itself.”
Take Leonard da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. This famous painting, Baudrillard argued:
“satellized around the planet as absolute model of earthly art, no longer a work of art but a planetary simulacrum where everyone comes to witness himself (really his own death) in the gaze of the future.”
Mona Lisa is a collective hallucination that we want to be real so we can say we know it; we’ve been to view it at the Louvre in Paris. In making that claim, we witness to ourselves—to our culture, our finesse, our knowledge, wealth, education, and taste. In Mona Lisa, the smile is both our life and death—our evolution from real to hyperreal, from the depth of being to what is without depth, i.e., persona and counterfeit self-image. As Baudrillard explains:
“When things, signs, or actions are freed from their respective ideas, concepts, essences, values, [they] embark upon an endless process of self-reproduction … reality itself […] disappears in the game of reality.”
Meaningless Selfhood: Baudrillard vs Advertising
Advertisers who consider their discipline art—indeed, many would agree that a 30-second ad done well can be iconic and a breath of fresh air (think of the widespread impact of Budweiser’s “Whassup!” ads)—would appreciate the analogy between an advert and the Mona Lisa. However, Baudrillard intends it pejoratively. He says advertisers reduce meaning to “the ability to produce contrasting reactions to a growing series of adequate stimuli.” Messages, tag lines, logos, channels … display “not so much an ostensible product as [advertisers’] power to turn a thing into a sign.”
Why is this a bad thing? Well, Baudrillard said, in such a “simulated order”:
“reality … captures every dream even before it takes on the appearance of a dream … schizophrenic vertigo of these serial signs …”
“Schizophrenia” comes with an “explosion” of brands and products we unconsciously want or desire for ourselves, with these revealing more of our disordered thought patterns and psychosis than our needs and values. Thus, Baudrillard says:
“The spectator of TV participates in the creation of a reality that was only presented to him in dots: the television watcher is … an individual who is asked to project his own fantasies on inkblots that are not supposed to represent anything. TV as perpetual Rorschach test.”
With Rorschach tests (designed initially to diagnose schizophrenia), subjects project their emotional (dis)function onto inkblots. Similarly, consumers project their myriad personas, hopes, and possibilities into ads and the products and brands they buy and use.
Access to Reality
Advertisers’ (inclusive of media and cultural forms) transmission of endlessly reproduced signs to geographically dispersed viewers and listeners produces what Baudrillard calls collective solipsism, i.e., when reality is seen as subjective and internal. When “the real doesn’t exist,” and it “is not an objective status of things ….” When “things no longer meet head on, [but] slip past one another … [and] nothing happens in the real.”
Augustine disputed solipsism. The notion that there is no truth beyond the individual’s private experiences, that the self and her consciousness exist alone, or from an epistemological viewpoint that only one’s own consciousness can be known was plain nonsense for him.
In De Dialectica (On Logical Reasoning/On Dialectics), Augustine, a realist, describes a word as:
“A sign of any kind of thing which can be understood by a hearer and is uttered by a speaker … A sign is what shows both itself to the senses and something beyond itself to the mind.” [And is meaningful insofar as “the interpreter knows the convention of its use”].
A sign is a testament to reality, a contradiction of solipsism. Furthermore, in De Christiana (On Christianity), he defines a sign as “a thing causing someone else, beyond the impression which it presents to the senses, to come into thought from it.” And he explains, “There are other signs whose whole function consists in signifying. For example, nobody uses words except to signify something.”
Augustine on the Possibility of Meaningfulness
Although we have no overt comments from Augustine about contemporary advertising, we do know that he described its ancient equivalent, rhetoric, as peddling words and his professorship in the field as a “chair of lies.” Therefore, Augustine would agree with Baudrillard that advertising works to falsify existence, no matter its facilitation of capitalism or its important contribution to the economy.
At least ostensibly. Because Augustine would fundamentally contest Baudrillard’s argument that advertising eclipses reality. In his view, people cannot be wrong about their mental impressions, even if they are wrong about sensible things. They may lie or misrepresent them, but ultimately, an impression is what it appears to be.
As Gareth Matthews explains, “if I call ‘the world’ what appears to me to be the world, then [Augustine says] I can know that the world exists… so contrary to skepticism there are things that can be known,” truths that can be grasped even amidst the simulacrum in Baudrillard’s hyperreality.
But can a word be without a signifier or reference? According to Augustine, a word without meaning or object cannot, strictly speaking, be a word. However, speakers put together words in utterances without meaning, but such utterances will be understood when their intention is recognized. Such as with neologisms, hybrids, or generonyms; meaningless words (or self-referential signs) that become meaningful through the communication of advertisers’ intentions, i.e., when they convey the contents of their mental states, their intentionality, to viewers or listeners.
Augustine (and Advertising) vs Baudrillard
What should we make of this? In Baudrillard’s position, advertising is credited with the presence and proliferation of simulacrum. This latter forms a hyperreality, which occurs when consciousness fails to extricate reality from its simulation. However, in Augustine’s (ancient) writings, the negative impacts of advertising can be overcome because of the structure and function of the sign: its inability to signify nothing.
While advertisers may not always use words to communicate truth, those who buy what they advertise do so believing in the impressions they get from ads.
Even if hyperreality is the reality in which we exist, we still really do exist and can know something about our “hyperreal” existence, which, despite its superficiality, is very real. That is, our superficiality is real and true. Therefore, from an Augustinian perspective, Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality works against itself: words are signs of something of reality, even if Baudrillard prefers to label that something hyperreal.
