Mythic Operators: Jean Baudrillard and the Rhetoric of Designation

This chapter focuses on the “rhetoric of designation” probed by Jean Baudrillard in reference to the media narration and informative strategies featured in the consumer society. In the era of “machinic snobbism”, objects gain a semiotic impact and semantic complexity that social actors have the duty to decipher. Hence the communicative role played by mainstream media in the public sphere: “Journalists and advertisers are mythic operators: they present the object or the event as drama, as fiction” (Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures, Sage, 1998, p. 127). The new rhetoric of designation built by the convergence of old and new media is pivoted on metalepsis, palindromes and tautologies, thanks also to the replacement of objects with their simulacra. Therefore, media metaphorization of daily experience is founded on the symbolic fluctuations of virtuality, in line with the immaterial representation of the infinite objects influencing our expressive capabilities. The fetish-object is the emblem of such an informative standardization, whose function is to mould new forms of social and aesthetic discourses. Television ascendancy has rapidly transformed the way social meanings and collective images settle in daily experiences: this tendency entails a permanent process of depletion and renewal of objects deprived of their archetypical images. To the fore is the relationship between art, myth and communication, inasmuch as the “rhetoric of designation” complies with the evolution of symbolic consumption and informative tenets.