The Ecstasy of Communication. Critical remarks on Jean Baudrillard
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- Submited: October 18, 2022
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Published: October 20, 2022
Abstract
The socio-cultural criticism of Jean Baudrillard (born 1929), spans from the political turmoil of
France in the late-1960s, to the mediatised world of the 1990s and early 21st century.1 In this
process his provocative work on the socio-political role of signs, symbolic exchange, simulation,
and hyperreality has important implications for communication studies – and more specifically
communication theory. The point is that with the “… greater mediatization of society … we are
witnessing the virtualization of our world.”2 This contribution briefly reconstructs, firstly, two phases
in Baudrillard’s intellectual career – phases that shifted from an early neo-Marxist critique of the
modern consumer society to a post-Marxist or postmodern view of society (which include
engagements with socio-anthropology; psychoanalysis, sociology, semiology and media theory),
and eventually ends in a kind of anti-theory with an extreme fatal vision of the world.3 In section
2 the implications of these two shifts in Baudrillard’s intellectual career are contextualized in the
field of media and communication studies – and specifically his concept of the “ecstasy of
communication”. Finally (in Section 3) some critical remarks are made on Baudrillard’s fascinating,
but problematic, project.
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