Heroin Chic and the Politics of Seduction

Abstract

In the postmodern world described by philosopher Jean Baudrillard daily life consists of an endless series of simulations that lack any concrete referents. Disneyland becomes a model for a sanitized society purged of politics, a society in which representations become increasingly homogenized and cease to be read critically as part of a broader strategy of understanding, struggle, and intervention.¹ In this mediascape, images bombard the senses, identities become transparent and one-dimensional, space and time collapse and displace traditional understandings of place and history, and concrete reality slips into a virtual society where “there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.”²

It is the fear of what Jean Baudrillard calls simulations without referents, a Disneyland society in which unanchored desires float from object to object at the dictate of consumer capitalism. The body in such a society loses its material reality; pain ceases to be a teacher, and pleasure is degraded to mere stimulation.

—Richard Sennett, “The Social Body”