Ecstasy of Communication

Definition

The ecstasy of communication is Baudrillard's name, in Fatal Strategies (1983), for the terminal state of a society saturated by networks, contact, and information. "We are no longer in the drama of alienation, we are in the ecstasy of communication." Where the earlier phase was a drama (subject against world), the present is an ecstasy: the self is "an absorbant screen," overexposed and transparent. Against the pathologies of the subject — hysteria (the drama of expression) and paranoia (the rigid organization of the world) — Baudrillard poses a "new form of schizophrenia": "the normal state that terrifies the schizophrenic: the too-great proximity of everything, unworldly promiscuity of all things… no protective aura… He is himself obscene, the obscene prey of the world's obscenity." The concept names the media-era replacement of interiority by interface, and is the ecstatic form of communication as obscenity is of the visible. It is developed at greater length in Baudrillard's later The Ecstasy of Communication (1987). See ecstasy, obscenity, transpolitical, schizophrenia, simulation-hyperreality.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: "We are no longer in the drama of alienation, we are in the ecstasy of communication"; the "absorbant screen"; the new schizophrenia (1983; book of 1987).
• Paul Virilio — the media/telepresence condition of the concept.
• Marshall McLuhan (not yet paged) — "the medium is the message" pushed to the medium's dissolution.

Related Concepts

• Ecstasy — the general form; communication is its social instance.
• Obscenity — the "solicitation, connection, contact" as white obscenity.
• The Transpolitical — the disappearance of the scene the concept describes.
• Schizophrenia — the pathology substituted for hysteria and paranoia.
• Simulation / Hyperreality — the media-saturation condition.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Fatal Strategies (Baudrillard 1983) — "The Obscene": "We are no longer in the drama of alienation, we are in the ecstasy of communication"; the new schizophrenia; "I fall into the negative ecstasy of radio."
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).

Open Questions

• The concept is named but not fully developed in Fatal Strategies; the wiki should attach it to the later book and to the media cluster.