Obscenity

Definition

Obscenity, in Fatal Strategies (1983), is Baudrillard's name for the condition that replaces the scene when illusion, distance, and the secret are lost. "The mode of apparition of illusion is that of the scene; the mode of apparition of the real is that of the obscene." Its formula is the "more visible than visible": "More visible than the visible — this is the obscene." Crucially, Baudrillard reverses the traditional (repressive) account: "obscenity today is, on the contrary, that of over-representation. Our own radical obscenity is no longer that of the hidden and the repressed, it's the transparency of the social itself." His periodization of the secret's fate: "In the beginning was the secret… Then there was the repressed… Finally comes the obscene… White obscenity." The first (hot, dark) obscenity was the Hell of Representation — the repressed, the visceral, the charnel; the second (cold, white) is "the obscenity of what is entirely soluble in communication" — "pornography of information and communication, circuits and networks." The obese body, the hostage, the poll, the talk-show confession, and the stripping of the face to "a sexual organ" are all its figures. Obscenity is thus the transpolitical's negative theology of surface: "Obscenity is the absolute proximity of the thing seen, the gaze stuck in the screen of vision." Its only counter is seduction: "Seduction against terror: these are the stakes. There are no others." See transpolitical, ecstasy, the-secret, seduction, nihilism-of-transparency.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: "More visible than the visible — this is the obscene"; "White obscenity"; "the end of any scene" (1983).
• Karl Marx — on "the obscenity of the commodity": its abstraction and readable price against the object's secret; Baudrillard extends this "to decipher the universe of communication."
• Sigmund Freud / psychoanalysis — the repressive model of the obscene (the unconscious, repression) that Baudrillard declares superseded by over-representation.

Related Concepts

• The Transpolitical — the obscene is the transpolitical's register ("the erasure of all scene… the triumph of promiscuity").
• Ecstasy — obscenity is the ecstatic form of the visible and of the scene.
• The Secret — what obscenity destroys: "the end of the secret — the irruption of transparency."
• Seduction — the antidote: "the falser than false" against the "truer than true."
• Nihilism of Transparency — the adjacent terminal condition in Simulacra and Simulation.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Fatal Strategies (Baudrillard 1983) — the defining source: "More visible than the visible — this is the obscene"; "White obscenity"; "The hostage is himself obscene"; "the obscenity of over-representation"; the periodization of secret → repressed → obscene.
• Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard 1981/1994) — the end of the panopticon and the four phases of the image: the image that masks "that there is nothing."
• Structures of Atmosphere (Baudrillard 1968/2006) — the interior's "obscenity" of total functional visibility is an earlier register.
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the pornographic register (ch. 2 on Seduction): the "vaginal cyclorama" (S, 31) as the attempt to strip away all distance and see "the thing itself" — an effort Butler suspects "only arises on the basis of a fundamental fear that something is missing… its hyper-visibility is haunted by the fear of blindness" (p. 104); "Obscenity has an unlimited future" (S, 32); the hostage's obscenity "because he no longer represents anything" (FS, 42–3, quoted p. 89); and the Philip K. Dick dialogue through which the anti-seduction of pure directness "opens the path to desire" (S, 42–3, p. 105). See seduction, the-hostage, the-real.

Open Questions

• Is "white obscenity" a successor to the nihilism of transparency, or the same condition named for its visibility rather than its affect?
• If the scene (stage, distance, illusion) is the condition of politics and art, does its disappearance make any critical or aesthetic act impossible — or does ceremony supply an alternative to the scene?