Re-published after twenty-five years, Ecstasy is, in many ways, a difficult book to recommend. It is a primary text, which asks to be read in the context of Baudrillard’s other work. The author’s corpus is elsewhere the subject of in-depth scholarship and contested interpretations, and summarizing the text, let alone claiming to have discerned an authoritative reading of it, seems presumptuous. It can be said, nonetheless, that the book operates, at times, a seeming willful lack of clarity, an internal logic of its own, and a number of sweeping, grandiose claims, all of which serve to test the reader’s generosity. Yet this is by no means an empty text. While at times the vocabulary frustrates, at other times it succeeds in drawing to the surface otherwise nebulous details of consciousness. Particularly provoking is Baudrillard’s uncovering of the preconscious or background experience of a mind immersed in what we might call ‘information culture’, and the unfolding consequences of such an immersion for the mind itself, for meaning and for human flourishing, albeit that this is not the language that he himself uses. This has a particular resonance in our over-technologized present, and for these insights the book is worth its effort, particularly as it is a work of relative brevity. This text offers itself as a springboard for further discussion to most readers patient enough to wrestle with Baudrillard’s terminology. While background knowledge of certain psychoanalytic and philosophical discourses serves a reading of the book, the somewhat ‘unacademic’ nature of Baudrillard’s writing opens it up to a wider readership, and may be relevant and useful to anyone interested in how culture shapes the mind.

 

Baudrillard seeks to identify the forces which characterize and govern contemporary Western culture, and the consequences for the human subject. His ultimate analysis claims that culture, as it has developed, descends inevitably towards the loss of subjectivity.The two key cultural forces he identifies are those which he terms simulation and seduction. Together, these constitute a ‘double spiral’ (66), which determines the nature and fate of culture and subjectivity in the present age.

 

‘Simulation’, in Baudrillard’s lexis, pertains to a particular relationship with reality; it is, as the term suggests, a hyper-reality, an experience that is entirely constructed, rather than discovered. Simulation is originally ‘mentally projected’, fantastical and ‘at an infinite distance’ from the original universe. (22) Simulation is, then, a distancing from the real. Simulation is a human phenomenon, yet in its emergence it turns back on human subjectivity and shapes it. Baudrillard uses Roland Barthes’ example of the experience of driving a car as a simulation which then molds subjectivity, transforming ‘the subject himself into a driving computer’. (20) 

 

Baudrillard claims that culture has reached a point of saturation by simulation. Simulation has pervaded every aspect of our subjectivity, becoming ‘more real than the real’ (69). The subject therefore no longer pursues or even desires reality, but rather, pursues simulation.

 

It is this onslaught of information from all angles at all times that Baudrillard refers to as communication within our culture. This ‘communication’ is not dialogical, but monological: unrelenting mass of information which engulfs the subject. This ‘superficial saturation’ (28) induces a state of ‘fascination and giddiness’ (29) in the subject, and it is this ‘giddiness’ that constitutes the ecstasy which gives the book its title. Baudrillard summarizes: ‘Ecstasy is all functions abolished into one dimension, the dimension of communication. All events, all spaces, all memories are abolished in the sole dimension of information: this is obscene.’ (28)

 

He claims connectedly that ‘Obscenity begins…when everything becomes immediately transparent, visible, exposed in the raw and inexorable light of information and communication.’ (26) This ‘transparency’ of the ecstasy of communication robs us of all experience of transcendence: ‘There is no longer any transcendence or depth’ (20)…’While here everything is of equal visibility, everything shares the same shallow space.’ (33)

 

It seems like a tired cliché to venerate writers past as prophetic voices warning of our dystopian present, but it does take some reminder that Baudrillard wrote these words to a pre-twitter, pre-youtube, pre-smartphone world. Twenty-five years on, Baudrillard’s articulation of the subject’s compulsion and behavior resonates most uncomfortably in his discussion of the nature of ‘transparency’. Indeed, this early section of the book, a largely phenomenological description of the ecstasy of communication as a giddiness which pervades the subject, is one of the most insightful and compelling pieces of the whole text.

 

This saturation of simulation, Baudrillard then tells us, cannot be maintained. Frenetically we pursue a transparency of total information in laboring under the motivation of fulfillment in acquiring truth. Yet this onslaught of information cannot provide this. As such the phenomenology of information and culture at this point becomes one of ‘plunging back into the secret’ (35): a disappearance of meaning. Baudrillard’s articulation of this point is difficult to follow, but in essence his observation is that in being so over-saturated with meaning, meaning is lost — that is, information becomes meaningless. Although the language is somewhat imprecise, Baudrillard still paints a vivid picture of the experience of information and image overload which ultimately becomes vacuous. This ‘disappearance’ of meaning that follows saturation involves the ‘dispers[ing] of oneself in appearance’ (44). To this new ‘disappearance’ of meaning, Baudrillard attaches the term ‘seduction’. Seduction then keeps at a distance that which simulation tries frantically to attain.

 

Baudrillard claims that seduction is just as illusory as simulation. Of its nature, saturation by image and information does not fulfill us, even though they fill everything. In the pursuit of fulfillment in our relationship to the world, this information must ‘disappear’, it must once again become hidden from us, at least — this is our experience — but it is a lie, a pretense. All the information is there, blazing its harsh, bright light, but the mind is so over-saturated that it can but pretend that it is there is something hidden, something still to discover. Seduction is the pretense of transcendence in a world of transparency.

 

We have here, therefore, another important dimension of Baudrillard’s work, for although we may want to interpret his idea of simulation as a distortion of the real, this is not quite right, as he also wants to state that there is no ‘real’. Simulation and seduction are all we have, and all we can have. On this latter point Baudrillard is less convincing. The passages in which he denies the possibility of truth and asserts a kind of Kantian inaccessibility to a noumenal that doesn’t even exist, are not convincingly argued. Further, such a claim threatens to make incoherent the truth-and-value claims that his thesis seems to make. Baudrillard is aware of this tension, and claims that the seeming contradiction can be held. Why and how this is to be, however, remains a less captivating aspect of Baudrillard’s convictions.

 

The two ‘spirals’ of simulation and seduction give the two key movements of culture. We must understand that simulation and seduction are two sides of the destruction of the symbolic order, and so both are playing the role of a drive towards meaninglessness. Baudrillard allows himself a normative claim when he tells us that the loss of symbolic order is ‘profoundly immoral’ (67), and that cultural revolution would be a ‘movement striving to restore a symbolic order assimilated to a superior authenticity of exchanges.’ (66) In concluding the text, Baudrillard suggests that the theoretical disciplines can work in service of such a revolution, although, as already indicated, exactly what this might entail is not made sufficiently clear, particularly in the light of his claims that access to the reality is in principle, impossible. While the picture human fallenness to some extent rings true on Baudrillard’s picture, his modified redemption is not so compelling.

 

 

 

© 2013 Sarah Pawlett Jackson

 

 

 

Sarah Pawlett Jackson has an MPhil Stud in Philosophy from Heythrop College, University of London.