The metaphor of the black hole: from mass society to the contemporary dystopian imagery

The philosopher almost seems to grasp the paradox according to which mass society asserts itself precisely when the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm enters a crisis. Thus, in spite of a positivist sociology from which the idea of ​​a society, of a market, of mass media derives, our vision is much more complex. The myth of an objective observer, the atomization of individuals, social physics, economic and technological determinism, etc., are all examples of the attempt to apply an obsolete paradigm to a phenomenon, which in terms of complexity, competes with or surpasses the physical ones, which is an aspect that even the classical sociologists, from A. Comte to T. Parsons, had understood. Baudrillard’s ability lies in playing with a substantial ambiguity of the term ‘mass’ which, on closer inspection, is suspended between a corpuscular and a wave dimension. Thus, from the first chapter it is clear that the term ‘mass’ does not indicate so much a mechanistic quality of the social, but above all an electromagnetic conception.