week five_article eight_blog seventeen

Jean Baudrillard_The Ecstasy of Communication

Baudrillard’s closing paragraphs presents the reader with the metaphor of contemporary existence as schizophrenic, characterized by “too great a proximity of everything…the total instantaneity of things…the end of interiority and intimacy, the overexposure and transparence of the world.” Is this schizophrenic “new state of things” in which Baudrillard sees our universe as having shifted from hot (passionate, expressive, competitive) to cold (ecstatic, obscene, communicative), a fair and accurate depiction of our ‘quotidian’ existence? Is Baudrillard’s notion of schizophrenia cultural, personal, or both? On many levels it would seem one could agree with Baudrillard in so far as one can identify a general state of cultural schizophrenia, a cultural mindset where interiority becomes extroverted and exteriority is injected, where a state of confusion and terror exist, in contemporary times. But I am uncertain of whether or not such notions translate to the level of the individual. If Baudrillard’s notion of schizophrenia relates to the individual as well as the culture in which the individual resides, are we to understand ourselves as atoms within a system we have no control and influence over; a contemporary existence in which we are, essentially, pawns? Is the condition of the postmodern individual that of a schizophrenic existing within a world of obscenity and ecstasy? That of a “pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence? Is it fair to say, on the level of the individual, that interiority and intimacy are dead concepts? Are we to view ourselves as devoid of any control over our own trajectories within a system of ecstatic communication? If so, is ‘individualness’ no longer a relevant construct/concept? Is the contemporary individual dissolved into the systems of information and communication, forever lost vis a vis traditional notions of individualism?