Jean Baudrillard and the Disappearance of Resistance: Indifferent Masses and the Implosion of the Social

That Jean Baudrillard's thought has offered one of the sharpest diagnoses of the contradictions shaping late twentieth-century societies is hard to dispute. However, once central to debates on consumption, media culture and politics, his work has, since his death in 2007, largely receded from critical discussion. A ‘disappearance’ that uncannily mirrors one of the main characteristics of his thought. However, despite the fact that certain facets of his thought undoubtedly remain prescient as ever, in a world increasingly demanding concrete solutions, the irony, bleakness and peculiar tone of most of his arguments often sit uneasily with contemporary political expectations. This article examines a specific and often overlooked dimension of Baudrillard's thought, namely the stakes of political resistance, an aspect for which he is by no means best known. In fact, if anything, in the decade following 1968, the period that this article mostly focuses on, Baudrillard elaborates a distinctive critique of modern politics in which resistance itself comes to appear increasingly untenable.

Marked by a profound sense of political disillusionment, Baudrillard's writings from 1968 to 1978 largely engage with the waning of political action and the prospect of the disappearance of resistance. In 1978, however, he puts forward a peculiar idea that critical thought should start seriously considering ‘indifference’ to power as a mode of resistance, which as he insists ‘demands to be analysed in its positive brutality’ (Baudrillard, 1983a, 13). The essay in which this suggestion is made, ‘In the Shadow of Silent Majorities, or the End of the Social’, published in 1978 in the final issue of Cahiers d’Utopie, is considerably less known than the infamous ‘Forget Foucault’ essay, published slightly earlier in 1977. At first glance, the essay seems a subtle yet purposeful extension of Baudrillard's critique of Foucault and other contemporary thinkers, challenging their attempts to reconceptualise power and resistance in the aftermath of May. However, Baudrillard's intervention proves to signal a deeper shift from the sphere of critical thought, largely reflected in his explicit refusal to offer theoretical alternatives aimed at revitalising the social or stimulating the political.

In this article, I wish to further explore Baudrillard's thought on resistance in his writings spanning the decade following May 1968, a theoretically rich decade in which the question of resistance became especially crucial, and during which the bulk of his most sustained reflections and critiques of resistance are concentrated. In doing so, I traverse two distinct periods of his career. First, what is known as his post-Marxist early period, circa 1968–1973, where he can be observed reflecting on themes such as strikes, political representation, the recuperative capabilities of power and the overall waning of political action. Second, the period spanning from 1973 to 1978, where Baudrillard notably becomes explicitly detached from Marxist thought. While in this period he continues to develop several previously explored themes, Baudrillard also introduces new and provocative notions, such as ‘mass’ and ‘implosion’, which will both be analysed in the context of him thinking resistance, or indeed its disappearance. A special focus is placed on the 1978 ‘In the Shadow of Silent Majorities’ essay, which is when he frames the ‘indifference’ of the masses as a mode of resistance, marking both the culmination of a decade-long inquiry into the disappearance of resistance and the announcement of its conceptual end. My analysis ultimately aims to find out whether Baudrillard's sombre critique of resistance forecloses all theoretical and practical possibilities, or whether it leaves open something that can still be reclaimed for a present in which the question of resistance is as pressing as ever.

The Disappearance of Political Action

A year prior to the events of May 1968, Baudrillard had joined the newly founded Utopie collective, which was formed by a number of French architects, sociologists and urbanists. ¹ The collective, active in Paris between 1967 and 1978, was founded at Henri Lefebvre's home and published its journal Cahiers d’Utopie under the editorship of Hubert Tonka. With regards to the context in which Utopie was set up, Baudrillard says that it is important to ‘remember that there was still a phobia about official political action and about parties, a refusal of all political and intellectual nomenclature’ (Baudrillard, 2006a, p. 17). The radical aim of the group was in his words

to surpass architecture as such, just as urbanism as such had been surpassed and as the Situationists had liquidated the space of the university as such…Everyone was trying to liquidate his own discipline. There was a mode of disappearance through excess in which each of us could rediscover himself. (Baudrillard, 2006a, p. 13)

The theme of ‘disappearance’ becomes increasingly seminal in Baudrillard's work from the very start and continues to practically play a crucial role throughout his whole oeuvre. ² Already in his early writings for Utopie, Baudrillard was deeply preoccupied with the disappearance of political action, a concern closely tied to his reflections on the changing nature of power. In for instance ‘Play and the Police’, originally published in 1969, this disappearance is characterised by the transformation of power from material and institutional forms to more diffuse and symbolic operations, which Baudrillard (2006b) identified as central to the emergence of postmodern societies. In the context of the changing nature of power, he consequently came to question whether an engaged form of resistance remained possible in an environment where power no longer relied on repression but operated through simulation and the management of signs and objects. As he observed, power now functioned less through repression and more through the extensive participation of consumers in their everyday modes of living (Baudrillard, 2006b). This much subtler version of power, which works also at the level of the image and the sign, according to him presented a ‘generalised repression’ that blurred the boundaries between freedom and control, and therefore it is ‘no longer a negation, an aggression, it is an ambiance’ (Baudrillard, 2006b, p. 37).

The enmeshing of power in every facet of everyday life is something that according to Baudrillard the May movement did not grasp at all, hence its failure:

This repression is imponderable because it operates through signs. It won’t be warded off in the street, nor through street fighting, because it is inscribed even in the arrangement of the street, not panning the windows, not in the spectacle of the street fighting. (Baudrillard, 2006b, pp. 37–38)

Still, at this stage in Baudrillard's early phase of his career one can sense a dual movement, characterised by both the exploration of the disappearance of traditional forms of political and direct action on one hand, and on the other hand, an interest in modes of resistance in which some marginal movements were engaged. In his 1971 essay, ‘Strike Story’ from the Utopie journal, Baudrillard (2006c) briefly considered the wildcat strikes led by immigrants, women and queer communities. He framed the strikes as new forms of struggle marked by a radical refusal of work and organisation, driven instead by a pursuit of happiness, unimpeded play and other liberatory impulses (Baudrillard, 2006c). Crucially, in their efforts he began to recognise the importance of becoming indifferent to traditional representative bodies, such as parties and unions, since they were increasingly capable of recuperating and neutralising radical critiques. At the same time, in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, originally published in 1972, Baudrillard also entertained the faint possibility of political action through the practice of urban graffiti, while nonetheless distancing himself from the Situationist International's advocacy of media manipulation, or détournement, as a subversive tactic (Baudrillard, 2019). Graffiti, for Baudrillard, did not operate through the strategic reappropriation of media messages, but through a more immediate disruption of the urban semiotic order. Interestingly, this position endures in Symbolic Exchange and Death, where he continues to affirm what he calls ‘the political significance of graffiti’ (Baudrillard, 1993, p. 80). Indeed, he suggests that ‘there is no need for organised masses, nor for a political consciousness to do this: a thousand youths armed with marker pens and cans of spray-paint are enough to scramble the signals of urbania and dismantle the order of signs’ (Baudrillard, 1993, p. 80).

Nonetheless, it seems that in this early phase what he pursued most passionately was the importance of worker movements becoming indifferent towards traditional power structures. This becomes clearer in 1973, when Baudrillard (2006d) returned to the theme of wildcat strikes in another piece also titled ‘Strike Story’, this time focusing on the actions of skilled immigrant workers at the Renault plant in Billancourt during the spring of that year. Defined as strikes occurring outside the sanction of recognised unions, these direct actions for Baudrillard were not ‘a test of strength between the organized (unionized) proletariat and the bosses, but of a test of representation for the union’ (Baudrillard, 2006d, p. 181). Yet this challenge to the union's authority created a deep sense of confusion among the workers, which according to Baudrillard was now ‘a question of confronting one's own repressive authority, of chasing the unionised, delegated, the responsible, the speakers from one's head’ (Baudrillard, 2006d). What Baudrillard identifies here is not merely a political rupture but a deeper crisis of representation itself, characterised by a moment in which the traditional structures that once mediated collective identity and struggle lose their legitimacy and symbolic power. The workers are not simply confronting external representatives but are forced to reckon with how those figures and the very logic of delegation and representation have become internalised, woven into their subjective and political life. In this sense, the confusion reflects a more profound disorientation, the collapse of representational frameworks through which power and resistance were once organised. It is within this frame of reference that traditional forms of political action and representation start to be deemed obsolete, or even seen as complicit, since for Baudrillard they unfold within the same logic of visibility that power itself now inhabits.

This diagnosis of the waning of political action is accompanied by a growing awareness of the capacity of power to absorb, neutralise and recuperate critique itself, rendering opposition increasingly indistinguishable from the mechanisms it seeks to contest. A metaphor found in the last page of The Consumer Society, originally published in 1970, encapsulates what Baudrillard was starting to conclude early on about critique and its impact in the aftermath of May ‘68. He writes:

counter-discourse, which establishes no real distance, is as immanent in consumer society as any of its other aspects. This negative discourse is the intellectual's second home. Just as medieval society was balanced on God and the Devil, so ours is balanced on consumption and its denunciation. Though at least around the Devil heresies and black magic sects could organize. Our magic is white. No heresy is possible any longer in a state of affluence. (Baudrillard, 1998, p. 196)

This metaphor reflects the idea that critical discourse, in this case specifically concerned with the critique of capital, appears to have dissolved into the very structures it seeks to oppose. Just as consumption and its denunciation form two sides of the same coin, critique itself becomes absorbed within consumer society, deprived of the external standpoint from which genuine contestation might arise. Critique is in other words rendered harmless, its ‘white magic’ incapable of engendering rupture or collective political organisation. In Baudrillard's view, this

endlessly repeated indictment is part of the game: it is the critical mirage, the anti-fable which rounds off the fable – the discourse of consumption and its critical undermining. Only the two sides taken together constitute the myth. We have, therefore, to allot to the ‘critical’ discourse and the moralizing protest their true responsibility for the elaboration of the myth. (Baudrillard, 1998, p. 195)

The consequence of critique being fully recuperated, for Baudrillard marks the disappearance of such a possibility, which ultimately reflects not simply the decline of oppositional forces after May ‘68, but their structural impossibility in a world where critique is already internalised and neutralised by the system it seeks to resist.

By rejecting both representation and the possibility of any substantive political antagonism to power and capital, Baudrillard brings Utopie's radical strategy of disappearance to its most uncompromising expression. Throughout the early 1970s writings examined here, power and resistance are no longer opposed but locked into a closed circuit in which each presupposes and reflects the other, culminating in their mutual neutralisation. Resistance no longer confronts the system from an external point but is immediately recuperated as one of its internal functions, reinforcing the very dynamics it seeks to disrupt. In this configuration, critique loses its capacity to unsettle power, instead becoming a predictable moment within its reproduction. What clearly emerges is not Baudrillard's call for some form of renewed political action but a deepening scepticism towards the very grammar of politics itself, which will only continue to intensify moving forward.

Forget Resistance: ‘Masses’ and ‘Implosion’

It was certainly the question of power, rather than resistance, that placed Baudrillard (2007a) at the centre of critical attention and controversy, following his notable attempt to articulate the disappearance of power through a critique of Foucault's newly published first volume of the History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge. In the review essay, published in 1977 and provocatively titled ‘Forget Foucault’, Baudrillard openly challenges Foucault's notion of power, suggesting that power has disappeared into its own signs and now functions through the circulation of representations rather than through its diffusion: ‘if it is possible at last to talk with such definitive understanding about power, sexuality, the body, and discipline, even down to their most delicate metamorphoses, it is because at some point all this is here and now over with’ (Baudrillard, 2007a, p. 30, emphasis in original). Since its publication, the essay has been the subject of sustained debate (Butler, 2022). So much so that his subsequent essays from the same period are severely underappreciated.

The first of these essays is The Beaubourg-Effect: Implosion and Deterrence, published that same year in 1977. Baudrillard (1982) can be seen following the theme of disappearance, certainly of both power and resistance, but through new concepts, namely a renewed conception of the ‘masses’ and an emphasis on ‘implosion.’ If Baudrillard could have made any building disappear, it would have been the Centre Pompidou, which from its opening in 1977 came to be known by the name of its site, the Beaubourg. For him the building represented a miniaturised model of the wider flawed social system. He writes that the:

Beaubourg is nothing but a huge mutational operation at work on this splendid traditional culture of meaning, transmuting it into a random order of signs and of simulacra that are now (on this third level) completely homogeneous with the flux and tubing of the facade. And it is really to prepare the masses for this new semiurgic system that they are summoned —under the pretext of indoctrination into meaning and depth. (Baudrillard, 1982, p. 6, emphasis added)

It is in this context that the ‘masses’ for Baudrillard come to play an important new role: they are no longer merely victims or pawns, but active participants in the system's collapse. Rather than resisting from the outside, the masses exert pressure from within by over-consuming the cultural spectacle, accelerating its breakdown. The overwhelming presence of the masses is here not a sign of engagement, but of an excess that short-circuits the system itself. It is through this excessive participation that the symbolic logic of the building, and by extension the cultural institution, reaches a point of saturation, leading to what Baudrillard refers to as an implosion of meaning: ‘the complete disappearance of a culture of meaning’ (Baudrillard, 1982, p. 5).

Even if Baudrillard's work has always been vaguely concerned with the subject of the masses (mass consumption, mass media, mass object, etc.), the use of the term ‘mass’ or ‘masses’ gains significant and specific importance in this moment of the late 1970s. Baudrillard begins to ascribe a protagonist role to the masses, rather than merely an alienating one, as they are now seen tasked with finishing ‘off mass culture’ (Baudrillard, 1982, p. 7). In other words, they are afforded the ability to resist, though not in the sense of direct political opposition. Resistance is reconfigured as something subtler and more enigmatic, without contradicting Baudrillard's earlier claims about the disappearance of political action and the end of resistance that emerges as a result of the end of power. In his Beaubourg essay, through the masses, Baudrillard begins to hint at another disappearance, which is that of the social:

The mass(es) is now a final product of all societal relations, delivering the final blow to those relations, because this crowd that they want us to believe is the social fabric, is instead only the place of social implosion. The mass(es) is that space of ever greater density into which everything societal is imploded and ground up in an uninterrupted process of simulation. (Baudrillard, 1982, pp. 8–9, emphasis in original)

He continues, the contemporary mass is now ‘a center of inertia and thus a center of a wholly new violence: inexplicable and different from explosive violence’ (Baudrillard, 1982, p. 9). Unlike the explosive collective action of May 1968, where the masses acted as a powerful force for social change, Baudrillard argues that contemporary masses are marked by a different type of violence, characterised by social implosion rather than visible rupture. In his view, the masses should rush to the Beaubourg not because they yearn for culture, but because they have the ‘chance to participate, en masse, in this immense work of mourning for a culture they have always detested’ (Baudrillard, 1982, p. 7). The imaginary or ‘pataphysical’ solution that Baudrillard puts forward in the essay is that of the masses stampeding their way into the building to destroy it under their weight – ‘No need to torch it or to fight it; just go there! That's the best way to destroy it’ (Baudrillard, 1982, p. 9). Thus, through this imagined act of destruction, the Beaubourg becomes a metaphor not just for the death of culture, but for the emergence of a new kind of mass that works through the saturation, irony and symbolic collapse of the social.

In this sense, Baudrillard proposes ‘implosion’ as a main characteristic of the masses, which must not be understood ‘as a negative, inert, regressive process, as language tends to force us to do by glorifying the inverse terms of evolution or revolution. Implosion is a specific process with incalculable consequences. Undoubtedly May 1968 was the first implosive episode’ (Baudrillard, 1982, p. 12). Despite the fact that ‘the events of ‘68 could still be a function of revolutionary dynamism and explosive violence’, Baudrillard argues that

other things began to happen at the same time: the violent involution of society around this focal point: the consequent sudden implosion of power, beginning after a brief lag in time, but never stopping once it began. That is what continues underground; the implosion of social structure, institutions, power…revolution, or rather the idea of revolution has imploded with far heavier consequences than revolution itself. (Baudrillard, 1982, p. 13)

Baudrillard's interpretation of May 1968 as the first implosive episode signals a decisive transformation in the dynamics of power and resistance. Traditionally, revolutionary events such as May ‘68 have been understood as explosive moments, in which social and political energy is projected outwards to disrupt established orders, confront authority and initiate visible transformation. ‘Explosion’ thus represents the classical model of resistance, where the oppressed act upon power through direct and oppositional force. Baudrillard's conception of ‘implosion’, however, fundamentally reconfigures this relationship. Rather than expressing an outward release of revolutionary energy, the social begins to fold inwards, collapsing the distinctions between power and resistance. The implosion of power that follows ‘68, he argues, does not signify its destruction but its absorption. Power no longer encounters an external adversary, since opposition itself has been internalised and assimilated within the very structures it seeks to contest. In this sense, resistance becomes an internal, simulated function of the system, neutralised through its incorporation. This explains why Baudrillard contends that the idea of revolution has imploded with consequences far more profound than those of revolution itself. When resistance becomes a component of the system it once opposed, when critique, rebellion and dissent are absorbed into the logic of power, the possibility of genuine rupture effectively disappears. What implodes is not only institutions and authority but also the very space of negation.

Baudrillard claims that in the Italian context of 1977, ‘something of the same type’ was occurring, and that ‘the actions of students, Metropolitan Indians, radio-pirates’ are no longer linked to politics as an expression of universal solidarity or as participation in a broader revolutionary discourse (Baudrillard, 1982, p. 13). ³ Instead, such groups operate within what Baudrillard calls a limited, circumscribed sphere or a concentrated microcosm that exhausts itself in its own intensity. This inward turn is the social and political manifestation of implosion. Just as the implosion of power after 1968 absorbed resistance into the system, here the implosion of universality absorbs the very forms of collective or universal political struggle that once structured social change. The radio-pirates of Radio Alice and other local movements are not explosive agents that expand into a global revolutionary front, but implosive nodes that defy both centralisation and the logic of diffusion: ‘multiple points of implosion, points in an ungraspable swarm’ (Baudrillard, 1982, p. 13). Crucially, Baudrillard does not celebrate these movements as putting forward new forms of resistance. Their ‘peculiar violence’ stems from their detachment from the universal and their resistance to incorporation into systems of expansion (Baudrillard, 1982, p. 13). Due to the fact that they are not explosive, they signify the collapse of the revolutionary model itself. Implosion here thus names both the breakdown of traditional power structures and the internal exhaustion of resistance, which marks the transformation of revolution into a self-contained, self-consuming intensity.

It is however in ‘In the Shadow of Silent Majorities’, published the following year in 1978, where Baudrillard best elaborates his renewed notion of the mass, as well as what he means by it being an implosive force. Baudrillard starts off his essay by writing that the post-May masses metaphorically absorb all the energy ‘of the social and political’ and ‘do not radiate’ the least bit of energy, which is why ‘they are inertia, the strength of inertia, the strength of the neutral’ (Baudrillard, 1983a, pp. 1–2). As noted by the English translator of the essay, in the original French context, faire masse (to form a mass) can signify both forming a majority and an (electrical) earth (Baudrillard, 1983a, 1). In relation to this metaphor, what Baudrillard seems to suggest is that the contemporary masses absorb the electric impulses of power and the social, only to end up neutralising their ability to charge, which is ultimately detrimental to society's charge altogether. Even though Baudrillard makes virtually no explicit reference to the events of May ‘68 throughout the silent majorities essay, it is difficult to ignore the historical proximity. The fact that the text was published in 1978, exactly a decade after the uprisings, is highly suggestive of the fact that the term ‘mass’ may indeed carry a residual charge from that moment. Reflecting in a 1984 interview on the revolutionary energy of May, Baudrillard asked ‘where has all that energy gone?’ (Baudrillard, 2007b, p. 101), a question that the essay can be read as critically staging through its account of the subsequent fate of the energy of the masses.

Since the early twentieth century, the notion of ‘the mass’ has functioned as a central analytical and political category, deployed by social scientists and movements across the political spectrum. On the political left, the masses are often cast as both the victims of ideological manipulation and as latent agents of revolutionary transformation. When mobilised successfully, they are seen as the engine of social change, and when they fail to act, they are deemed alienated, apathetic or complicit in their own domination. On the political right, the masses are equally ambivalent, often deemed as potential supporters of national or populist projects, yet also feared as unruly, irrational and prone to destabilising disorder unless properly guided and disciplined. As put by Gane, for Baudrillard, the mass

is an important and particular image…but it is necessary to disassociate it from implications possibly derived from two earlier uses. One from Marxism, which suggests that it is the masses who make history (a term and a concept revived by Althusser). In Marxist theory the masses are the oppressed who form the exploited classes. There is, as Raymond Williams once pointed out in a notable discussion (1961), another connotation where the mass (now equivalent to the working classes) is confused with the ‘mob’, or the crowd as conceived in the work of Le Bon. (Gane, 1991, p. 132)

Against this background, Baudrillard's assertion that the ‘term “mass” is not a concept’, and even more provocatively, that it marks an endpoint rather than a foundation for political thought, represents a radical departure (Baudrillard, 1983a, p. 4). His formulation unsettles the dominant ways in which the mass has been conceived. Especially in the aftermath of May, when the role and agency of the masses were hotly debated, Baudrillard's claim reorients the conversation entirely. That is, either as a political subject to be awakened or a force to be controlled.

Furthermore, Baudrillard leaves little room for spontaneity in his characterisation of the masses, unlike for instance Sartre (1970), who when reflecting on May and its aftermath, emphasised their central role in revolutionary politics and the significance of their spontaneous actions. Nonetheless, to be sure Baudrillard's position also differs from discouraging views of the masses in the aftermath of May. For example, in his comments on how the spectacle evolved over the years, Debord (1990) was quick to point out the powerlessness of the masses in the face of its ever-increasing domination. This domination, according to him, is largely perpetuated by way of eradicating the memory of significant events, especially those that involved the masses: ‘The more important something is, the more it is hidden. Nothing in the last twenty years has been so thoroughly coated in obedient lies as the history of May 1968’ (Debord, 1990, pp. 13–14). Baudrillard would beg to differ only because his position is more extreme. According to him, power has no hold over the masses anymore, it ‘manipulates nothing, the masses are neither misled nor mystified’ (Baudrillard, 1983a, p. 14). Rather than being passive victims of manipulation, the masses become complicit in their own disengagement, responding to the saturation of meaning not with revolt but with silence and inertia, which for Baudrillard, render traditional forms of domination obsolete and signal a deeper form of implosion within the social.

The field of sociology is in this context declared irrelevant, since according to Baudrillard it ‘can only depict the expansion of the social and its vicissitudes. It survives only on the positive and definitive hypothesis of the social. The reabsorption, the implosion of the social escapes it’ (Baudrillard, 1983a, p. 4). Baudrillard holds that any attempt to study society and human life collides with the impenetrable nature of the masses, which represents an unidentifiable subject for analysis. Thus, even if critical sociology tries its utmost to differentiate the masses into ‘categories of class, cultural status, etc.’, he affirms that ‘the mass is without attribute, predicate, quality, reference… it lacks definition. It has no sociological “reality”’ (Baudrillard, 1983a, pp. 4–5). This lack of identifiability is precisely what according to Baudrillard allows the masses to undo the very categories upon which sociological inquiry and political intervention rely. Against the dominant sociological tradition that conceptualised crowds and masses as noisy, volatile and inherently political actors – from Le Bon's barbarous crowds to Tarde's imitative collectives – Baudrillard therefore develops a markedly different image of the masses (Borch, 2012). In this context, Baudrillard suggests that the masses, rather than sustaining social structures, simultaneously absorb and neutralise them. In this paradoxical process, social life is both produced and undermined, as collective activity mirrors and cancels out the very institutions it enacts. On how the ‘social regresses to the same degree as its institutions develop’, Baudrillard insists that this process of regression

accelerates and reaches its maximal extent with mass media and information. Media, all media, information, all information, act in two directions: outwardly they produce more of the social, inwardly they neutralise social relations and the social itself. But then, if the social is both destroyed by what produces it (the media, information) and reabsorbed by what it produces (the masses), it follows that its definition is empty, and that this term which serves as universal alibi for every discourse, no longer analyses anything, no longer designates anything. Not only is it superfluous and useless - wherever it appears it conceals something else: defiance, death, seduction, ritual, repetition - it conceals that it is only abstraction and residue, or even simply an effect of the social, a simulation and an illusion. (Baudrillard, 1983b, p. 14)

In this sense, the social becomes a ghost of itself, an effect without substance, sustained by appearances even as it disappears from reality. For Baudrillard, its apparent vitality masks an emptiness, leaving only the simulation of collective life rather than life itself.

Indifference as Resistance: Accelerated and Nihilistic Conformity as a Lethal Weapon

What merits further exploration and analysis is how in the context of the end of power, proclaimed in ‘Forget Foucault’, and the conception of an anti-sociological implosive mass, which he introduced in the Beaubourg essay, and continued to elaborate in the silent majorities essay, Baudrillard seems to simultaneously suggest the end of thinking resistance and a peculiar notion of resistance that the masses seemingly adopt against contemporary power.

In the ‘silent majorities’ essay, Baudrillard declares that for contemporary power ‘the only genuine problem today is the silence of the mass, the silence of the silent majority’ (Baudrillard, 1983a, pp. 23–24). The term ‘silent majorities’ was popularised by U.S. President Richard Nixon in the late 1960s to describe Americans who neither protested the Vietnam War nor joined countercultural movements. Their silence was interpreted by him as either tacit support for his administration or as passive indecision. Crucially, although the opacity of the masses made their silence politically useful, they remained fundamentally ambiguous. Baudrillard maintains that the silent majority is the least indecisive in its lack of response, since its strategy is precisely to absorb and simultaneously extinguish any messages directed at it: ‘it isn’t a silence which does not speak, it is a silence which refuses to be spoken for in its name’ (Baudrillard, 1983a, p. 22). He insists on the fact that this might explain why power continuously strives to interact with the masses through surveys, statistics and opinion polls, precisely in an attempt to grasp them more clearly, although unsuccessfully so because:

the silent majority (or the masses) is an imaginary referent… It means that their representation is no longer possible. The masses are no longer a referent because they no longer belong to the order of representation. They don’t express themselves, they are surveyed. They don’t reflect upon themselves, they are tested. The referendum (and the media are a constant referendum of directed questions and answers) has been substituted for the political referent. Now polls, tests, the referendum, media are devices which no longer belong to a dimension of representations, but to one of simulation. (Baudrillard, 1983a, p. 20)

Thus, what Baudrillard articulates here is not simply the muteness of the masses, but a kind of ‘active’ passivity, characterised by a refusal to participate on the terms offered by systems of representation. This enigmatic silence constitutes a form of resistance that is all the more radical for being opaque, and therefore for evading capture by the very apparatuses designed to interpret and quantify social meaning.

In this context, Baudrillard argues that whereas previously the strategy of power ‘seemed founded on the apathy of the masses’, due to the fact that the ‘more passive they were, the more secure it was’, nowadays this same passivity ‘turns against it: the inertia it has fostered becomes the sign of its own death. That is why it seeks to reverse its strategies: from passivity to participation, from silence to speech’ (Baudrillard, 1983a, p. 23). For Baudrillard, this therefore explains why the masses are constantly ‘encouraged to speak’ and ‘are urged to live socially, electorally, organisationally, sexually, in participation, in festival, in free speech, etc.’ (Baudrillard, 1983a, p. 23). For Baudrillard, this compulsion towards urging the masses to participate does not merely mark a shift in political strategy but signals a deeper crisis of power when confronted with mass indifference. What appears as apathy, however, is in his view a form of silent resistance that undermines traditional modes of engagement by refusing to play the game altogether. Sarcastically, Baudrillard consequently declares that while ‘banality, inertia, apoliticism used to be fascist; they are in the process of becoming revolutionary’ (Baudrillard, 1983a, p. 40). It is in this context that he frames the emergence of the silent majorities within a broader genealogy of resistance: ‘Resistance to work of course, but also resistance to medicine, resistance to schooling, resistance to security, resistance to information’ (Baudrillard, 1983a, p. 41). This reversal suggests that in a media-saturated society, the refusal to participate, which was once seen as politically regressive, can now be interpreted as a radical withdrawal from the circuits of meaning and control, an opaque silence that resists capture, and ultimately, recuperation.

The ‘indifference of the masses’ is therefore deemed by Baudrillard as ‘their true, their only practice’ and that therefore ‘there is no other ideal of them to imagine, nothing in this to deplore, but everything to analyse as the brute fact of a collective retaliation and of a refusal to participate in the recommended ideals, however enlightened’ (Baudrillard, 1983a, p. 13). Indifference morphs into a mode of resistance, with Baudrillard insisting that ‘far from being a form of alienation, it is an absolute weapon’ (Baudrillard, 1983a, p. 22). Moreover, he suggests that indifference deserves ‘to be analysed in its positive brutality, instead of being dismissed as white magic, or as a magic alienation which always turns the multitudes away from their revolutionary vocation’ (Baudrillard, 1983a, p. 13, emphasis in original). At this point it becomes clearer how Baudrillard begins to stage indifference not as a lack of engagement but as a peculiar form of resistance. The mass’ refusal to care, to react, to signify becomes an antagonism more profound than any revolutionary programme, which is why he insists on taking indifference seriously. It is in other words resistance by disappearance. The refusal to respond might itself be the only gesture left that escapes recuperation. Indifference becomes a space where power cannot take hold because it cannot locate a subject to act upon. In Baudrillard's view, the silent indifference of the masses is the only thing that power cannot digest. As pointed out by Jon Baldwin (2012), indifference can be indeed deemed as ‘a new form of “class-struggle” with active indifference to consumption, work, and dominant ideology…One becomes indifferent to interpellation and the call of capital – one refuses to be subject of, and subject to, capital’ (Baldwin, 2012, p. 12). By suspending responsiveness to these calls, the subject interrupts the processes of subjectivation that render exploitation intelligible and acceptable, producing a form of political opacity that resists capture and instrumentalisation. Nevertheless, the silent indifference as resistance that Baudrillard has in mind is not geared towards any emancipatory project.

Baudrillard distinguishes this type of resistance from any ‘frontal resistances’, since ‘the mass does not at all constitute a passive receiving structure for media messages, whether they be political, cultural or advertising’, such as in the case of ‘the “two-step flow of communication” which American sociology has analysed’ (Baudrillard, 1983a, p. 42). Thus, this also includes any attempt by the masses to subvert the dominant code by decoding ‘messages in their own way’ (Baudrillard, 1983a, p. 42). Notably, this view goes directly against what fellow French thinker, Michel de Certeau, thought of the individual's ability to subvert dominant discourses. ⁴ In his well-known The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau emphasised the inventive strategies of resistance employed by ordinary people to navigate and subvert the system's norms and limitations in their everyday lives (De Certeau, 1984). For Baudrillard, this would still have counted as ‘the feat of groups traditionally structured by identity and significance’, so he emphasised that ‘quite different is the refusal of socialisation which comes from the mass; from an innumerable, unnamable and anonymous group, whose strength comes from its very destructuration and inertia’ (Baudrillard, 1983a, p. 43). In contrast to de Certeau's valorisation of the individual's tactical agency, Baudrillard sees in the silent mass a more radical, if paradoxical, form of resistance that does not seek to outmanoeuvre or reinterpret power, but to nullify it altogether through sheer opacity. Where de Certeau reads everyday practices like walking in the city, cooking or storytelling as creative appropriations of dominant structures, Baudrillard sees such practices as already recuperated within the system's semiotic and productive logic.

Baudrillard's argument is however further complicated, which is where his irony becomes more explicit. In the same breath he suggests that the masses’ refusal ultimately amounts to a strategy of compliance, a passive form of resistance enacted through over-acceptance (Baudrillard, 1983a). This accelerated form of conformity, which Baudrillard terms ‘hyperconformity’, marks a clear departure from his earlier post-Marxist critiques, insofar as he now regards ‘excessive fidelity’ as what is truly lethal for power and the socio-political system in general (Baudrillard, 1983a, p. 33). Just as he envisioned the masses rushing to the Beaubourg, in the hope of causing the building to collapse underneath their weight, Baudrillard bleakly pictures the collapse of the whole social system by writing that the masses

haven’t waited for future revolutions nor theories which claim to ‘liberate’ them by a ‘dialectical’ movement. They know that there is no liberation, and that a system is abolished only by pushing it into hyperlogic, by forcing it into an excessive practice which is equivalent to a brutal amortization. ‘You want us to consume – O.K., let's consume always more, and anything whatsoever; for any useless and absurd purpose’. (Baudrillard, 1983a, p. 46)

This ‘accelerationist’ drive stands in contrast to other French ‘accelerationist’ efforts from the 1970s, which according to Noys (2014) sought to theorise strategies that would accelerate through and beyond capitalism. In contrast to Baudrillard's fatalist tone, such efforts hoped that acceleration would lead to a breaking point, which rather than cause the destruction of the system, would create the necessary conditions for radical political and social transformation. As argued by Noys, Baudrillard's undertaking out-accelerated any of these attempts (Noys, 2014). ⁵ Indifference is precisely the fatal accelerator Baudrillard has in mind: ‘if the world is fatal, let us be more fatal than it. If it is indifferent, let us be more indifferent. We must conquer the world and seduce it through an indifference that is at least equal to the world's’ (Baudrillard 1988, p. 101).

Baudrillard continued to emphasise this nihilistic aspect of indifference until much later. For instance, in 2004, against the backdrop of intensified technological development, which he describes as a ‘sociality of accelerated circulation’, Baudrillard draws an explicit parallel with the passive refusal embodied by Bartleby the scrivener, the enigmatic figure from Herman Melville's (1995) short story. More specifically, he links this figure to the ‘disillusioned indifference’ that increasingly characterises contemporary subjects’ relationship to machines (Baudrillard, 2005, p. 90). He writes:

Perhaps we would rather be dominated by machines than by people, perhaps we prefer an impersonal, automatic domination, a domination by calculation, to domination by a human will? Not to be subject to an alien will, but to an integral calculus that absorbs us and absolves us of any personal responsibility. A minimal definition of freedom perhaps, and one which more resembles a relinquishment, a disillusioned indifference, a mental economy akin to that of machines, which are themselves also entirely irresponsible and which we are coming increasingly to resemble. This behaviour is not exactly a choice, nor is it a rejection: there is no longer sufficient energy for that. It is a behaviour based on an uncertain negative preference. Do you want to be free? I would prefer not to … Do you want to be represented? I would prefer not to … Do you want to be responsible for your own life? I would prefer not to … Do you want to be totally happy? I would prefer not to. (Baudrillard, 2005, p. 90)

Baudrillard's invocation of Bartleby's famous phrase crystallises his most paradoxical formulation of indifference as resistance, which points to a mode of refusal enacted not through opposition but through excessive conformity to the logics of domination themselves. In the contemporary context, this logic resonates uncannily with the expanding governance of life by algorithmic systems and artificial intelligence, where domination increasingly takes the form of impersonal calculation rather than identifiable human authority. In this sense, Baudrillard's Bartleby anticipates a depoliticised subject increasingly aligned with the mental economy of machines. Thus, the apparent preference for machinic decision-making over political deliberation or ethical responsibility mirrors an indifference that is a symptom of subjective exhaustion, in which individuals relinquish agency to automated systems that promise efficiency and the relief from any responsibility.

Still, a year before his death, in The Pyres of Autumn, Baudrillard (2013) reflected on the widespread rioting experienced in Paris in the wake of the tragic death of two teenagers being pursued by the police in the suburbs. ⁶ In reference to the marginalised youth who revolted, many of whom hailed from immigrant families, he wondered if as ‘the excluded’ can ever accept to conform to a society which does not recognise their struggles in the first place:

I am not so sure that the rioters want to be reintegrated…Perhaps they consider the French way of life with the same condescension or indifference with which it views theirs. Perhaps they prefer to see cars burning than to dream of one day driving them. (Baudrillard, 2013, p. 215)

The problem, Baudrillard argues, is not the failure to integrate those on the margins into an otherwise coherent French or Western model, but the prior collapse of that model itself. The riots are therefore not an external anomaly but a symptom of a more generalised condition of disaffiliation that extends well beyond the suburbs. Within such a context, indifference does not arise from a refusal of a meaningful social order, but from the erosion of belief in the order itself. The violence of the riots is not oriented towards reintegration, nor does it articulate demands for employment, security, or inclusion, but simply expresses a disdain for the very promises through which integration is imagined. Burning cars functions less as irrational destruction than as a nihilist rejection of the present order and its symbolic economy of aspiration. Baudrillard finally warns that it would be a mistake for politicians and intellectuals to interpret these events ‘as minor incidents on the road to a democratic reconciliation of all cultures’ when instead everything signals that ‘they are successive phases of a revolt whose end is not in sight’ (Baudrillard, 2013, pp. 215–216).

A striking resonance between Baudrillard's (2013) late reflections and contemporary destituent thought can be discerned here, one that would merit fuller exploration beyond the limits of the present discussion. ‘Destituent power’, as opposed to ‘constituent power’, refers to a mode of political resistance that does not seek to found, seize or constitute a new order, but rather to engage in a process of indifference towards existing structures of power and authority. ⁷ In 2008, during an interview on the subject of ‘destituent power’, Mario Tronti, the Italian Marxist philosopher and a leading figure of the 1960s Operaismo movement, also reflected on the 2005 French banlieue riots. In his supportive view, the Paris suburban riots pursued no clear political goals or objectives, while further asserting that the ‘primacy lies not in building something, but rather in destituting what is already there, to place the existent into crisis’ (Tronti 2022, no page). As explained by Idris Robinson, for Tronti what defines such events as ‘destituent’ is that they precisely refuse ‘any program that strives to obtain an objective, goal, or ideal end’ and on the conditions they are ‘wholly negative and destructive’ (Robinson, 2023, pp. 138–139). Similarly, Baudrillard explicitly questions the assumption that political action must aim at reintegration, employment, security or inclusion within an existing social order. Instead, he suggests that the defiance of the excluded may stem from a profound indifference towards the very forms of life and aspiration offered to them (Baudrillard, 2013). It is when read in this light that Baudrillard tacitly gestures towards a conception of resistance that closely parallels destituent logics, in the sense of a politics of subtraction rather than appropriation, of deactivation rather than reform, in which the objective is not to found a new order or secure inclusion within the old one, but to withdraw from the social that is increasingly experienced as already exhausted.

Conclusion: Between a ‘Destituent’ Gesture and ‘Cool Fascism’

This article traced Baudrillard's thinking on resistance, showing how, from the immediate aftermath of May ‘68 onwards, he increasingly charted its disappearance, rather than pursuing its reconstruction or reimagining. Central to this trajectory is Baudrillard's increasingly explicit anti-critical stance, marked by his refusal of critique as a productive or emancipatory practice and his suspicion that critical interventions merely reproduce the very structures of power they claim to oppose. A highly ironic and bleak critique of critique emerges in which indifference is peculiarly framed as a mode of resistance, through which the masses evade, as much as conform, to power in an attempt to cause the social to implode. Baudrillard's scepticism regarding the possibility of any form of political resistance endured until the end of his life, and indifference remained a staple theme of his thought, sustained as ever by a heightened sensitivity to the seemingly inexhaustible recuperative capacities of power (Baudrillard, 1985, 1994, 2005, 2008). ⁸

The question that remains is whether anything at all can still be reclaimed from these reflections. Read against the backdrop of ongoing global struggles against racial violence, authoritarianism, ecological devastation and economic dispossession, Baudrillard's reflections can serve no more than as a critical lens through which to grasp a mutation in resistance itself. Evidently, even when read through the lens of destituent thought, Baudrillard's reflections remain politically bleak and impotent. As Tronti (2022) insists, the destitution of existing forms does not negate the necessity and capacity for collective organisation, which is completely dismissed by Baudrillard. Organisation marks the minimal condition under which resistance can become more than a gesture of indifferent withdrawal and begin to acquire political consequence. If not, it is certain that indifference risks hardening into inertia or being quietly absorbed by the very forces it seeks to evade. As known, in non-democratic or authoritarian contexts, the opacity that indifference helps facilitate functions less as a tactic of withdrawal than as a technology of governance. Contemporary regimes, particularly in moments of crisis, actively cultivate indifference by dismantling the infrastructural conditions of collective action, most visibly through the suspension of internet access, which isolates subjects, disrupts coordination and forecloses the circulation of counter-narratives. Rather than merely repressing dissent, such measures induce informational scarcity and social atomisation, eroding the possibility of sustained resistance.

In this sense, what can be reclaimed from Baudrillard is less a model of resistance than a heightened attentiveness to the ambivalence of indifference itself. As succinctly put by Gane (1991), in the context of Baudrillard's claim that ‘the strategy of the masses now is remote from fascism’, with fascism in this context understood as ‘a non-silent strategy of hyperactivity in an explosive period’, an inward implosion of meaning risks producing a form of ‘cool fascism’ or a mode of domination no longer reliant on mass mobilisation but on depoliticisation, fatigue and the exhaustion of political desire (Gane, 1991, 142). If nothing else, Baudrillard's anti-critique should be read as a timely reminder of just that and remains valuable insofar as it alerts us to this double bind: indifference can function both as a refusal of power and as the very condition of its contemporary efficacy.