week five_article eight_blog sixteen

Jean Baudrillard_The Ecstasy of Communication

All functions abolished in a single dimension, that of communication. That’s the ecstasy of communication. All secrets, spaces, and scenes abolished in a single dimension of information. That’s obscenity.
-Baudrillard

In describing the creation of this condition of obscenity, Baudrillard argues that it is through the transistorizing and miniaturization of our circuits, energy, and environments that the traditional ‘scenes’ that defined our collective lives have been relegated to uselessness and consequently, gradual disappearance. The body (human scale), the physical landscape, time, public space (no longer a spectacle of the social and the political), and the private realm (no longer a secret but a virtual feeding ground for the media) have been collapsed and compressed by omnipresent, excessive information and communication networks and flows. With the loss of these scenes within the “more visible than visible” ecstasy of communication what new scenes (or rather scapes), if any, arise to take their place? What is the composition of these new scapes, their makeup, and how do they relate to one another within the established networks of communication and information; upon the “smooth operational surface of communication.” What new criteria are we to utilize in order to understand the newly unfolding “networks of influence” our world is composed of; their boundaries (if any), organization, structure, and interrelations? Or perhaps we are to discard the concept of scenes as no longer relevant within the ecstatic and obscene dimensions of information and communication flows? Baudrillard writes, “wanting to apply our old criteria and the reflexes of a scenic sensibility, we no doubt misapprehend what may be the occurrence, in this sensory sphere, of something new, ecstatic and obscene.” Do we discard our scenic sensibility for a new sensibility within the seemingly singular dimension of information/communication? And what would the framework for this new sensibility be, if no longer scenic?