Jean Baudrillard: "The Ecstasy of Communication"
in The Anti-aesthetics

Provider: Liu Wanli
1998/10/22

  1. Thesis:

    There is no longer any system of objects, for this is the era of obscene and ecstasy of communication.

  2. Background:

    The first book of Baudrillard, le Systeme des objects, contains a critique of the object as obvious fact, substance, reality, use value. In this critique two principal logics interfered with each other:
    a phantasmatic logic that referred principally to psychoanalysis; and a differential social logic by referring to sociology. Behind these logics, it is a sacrificial logic of consumption, gift expenditure, potlatch, and the accursed portion.

    ¡@

  3. Scene:

    This was the era of the discovery and exploration of daily life, this other scene emerging in the shadow of the historic scene, with the former receiving more and more symbolic investment as the latter was politically disinvested.

    Today the scene and mirror no longer exist; instead, there is a screen and network. In the place of the reflexive transcendence of mirror and scene, there is a nonreflecting surface¡Xthe smooth operational surface of communication.

     

  4. the characteristic of our era:
  • the proteinic era of networks, the narcissistic and protean era of connections
¡÷¡÷our own body and the whole surrounding universe become a control screen
  • Roland Barthes indicated this in regard to the automobile: little by little a logic of "driving" has replaced a very subjective logic of possession and projection. But instead a tactic of potentialities linked to usage.(cg., the example of Japanese car)
  • Private "telematics": each person sees himself at the controls of a hypothetical machine, isolated in a position of perfect and remote sovereignty, at an infinite distance from his universe of origin.
  • "hyperrealism of simulation": the elevation of the domestic universe to a spatial power, to a spatial metaphor, with the satellitization of the two-room-kitchen-and-bath put into orbit in the last lunar module.
¡÷¡÷The very quotidian nature of the terrestrial habitat hypostasized in space means the end of metaphysics. What was projected psychologically and mentally, as metal or metaphorical scene, is henceforth projected into reality, without any metaphor at all, into an absolute space which is also that of simulation.
  • Simulator of leisure or of vacations in the home¡Xlike flight simulators for airplane pilots--become conceivable.
  • The decisive mutations of objects and of the environment in the modern ear, have come from an irreversible tendency towards three things:
  • an ever greater formal and operational abstraction of elements and functions and their homogenization in a single virtual process of functionalization,
  • the displacement of bodily movements and efforts into electric or electronic, commands.
  • the miniaturization, in time and space, of processes whose real scene is that of infinitesimal memory and the screen with which they are equipped.
    • The body, landscape, time all progressively disappear as scenes. And the same for public space.
    ¡÷¡÷Advertising in its new version invades everything, as public space disappears. ¡÷¡÷It is the same for private space. Now this opposition (public/ private) is effaced in a sort of obscenity where the most intimate processes of our life become the virtual feeding ground of the media.
    • The relationship of private space and alienation: the Other exists, and that otherness can fool you for the better or the worse. (* cg. Kafka's novels)
    ¡@
    1. obscenity: All secrets, spaces and scenes abolished in a single dimension of information.
    Obscenity begins precisely when there is no more spectacle, no more scene, when all becomes transparence and immediate visibility, when everything is exposed to the harsh and inexorable light of information and communication. ¡÷¡÷We live in the ecstasy of communication. And this ecstasy is obscene. The obscene puts an end to every representation.

    ¡÷¡÷There is a whole pornography of information and communication of circuits and network.
    • Marx set forth and denounced the obscenity of the commodity, to the abject principle of free circulation, beyond all use vale of the object.
    • The commodity is readable: in opposition to the object, which never completely gives up its secret; the commodity always manifests its visible essence, which is its price.( vs. Jamerson's critique)
    ¡÷¡÷The commodity form is the first great medium of the modern world. But the message that the objects deliver through it is already extremely simplified: their exchange value. It is the medium that imposes itself in its pure circulation. This is what Baudrillard's ecstasy.

     

    1. The ecstasy of communication: All functions abolished in s single dimension, that of communication.
    7.The hot, sexual obscenity of former times is succeeded by the cold and communicational, contactual and motivational obscenity of today. The whole tendency of our contemporary "culture" will lead us from a relative disappearance of form of expression and competition to the advantages of forms of risk and vertigo.

    (external) Literary Criticism Databank: Postmodernism and Urban Space ;
    Postmodern Theories and Texts