Schizophrenia

Definition

Schizophrenia is Baudrillard's term, in Fatal Strategies (1983), for the pathology of proximity — the condition that succeeds hysteria and paranoia in a saturated, networked world. "If hysteria was the pathology of the exacerbated drama of the subject… if paranoia was the pathology of the rigid and jealous organization and structuring of the world… with communication, information and the immanent promiscuity of all networks… we would instead be inside a new form of schizophrenia." What characterizes it "is less his light-years distance from the real, a radical break, than absolute proximity, the total instantaneousness of things, defenseless, with no retreat; end of interiority and intimacy, overexposure and transparency of the world that traverses him without his being able to interpose any barrier." The schizophrenic "is only an absorbant screen, a spinning and insensible plate for all the networks of influence"; he "is himself obscene, the obscene prey of the world's obscenity." The concept belongs to Baudrillard's ecstasy of communication and to his theory of obscenity as the loss of the scene (the protective aura): the schizophrenic is the limit-case of a world without distance. See ecstasy-of-communication, obscenity, transpolitical, the-masses.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: the "new form of schizophrenia" of proximity; "the obscene prey of the world's obscenity" (1983).
• Sigmund Freud — psychoanalysis's hysteria/paranoia nosology that Baudrillard updates (and contests).
• Gilles Deleuze — the schizophrenia of Anti-Oedipus (with Guattari) as a distinct, more positive genealogy.

Related Concepts

• Ecstasy of Communication — the condition that produces the new schizophrenia.
• Obscenity — the schizophrenic is "himself obscene."
• The Transpolitical — the loss of the scene.
• The Masses — the mass as absorptive screen (a neighbouring figure).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Fatal Strategies (Baudrillard 1983) — "The Obscene": the new form of schizophrenia; "absolute proximity"; the "absorbant screen."
• 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 a stub; the wiki should distinguish Baudrillard's schizophrenia from Deleuze & Guattari's and from the clinical term.