The Ecstasy of Communication. Critical remarks on Jean Baudrillard

The socio-cultural criticism of Jean Baudrillard (born 1929), spans from the political turmoil ofFrance in the late-1960s, to the mediatised world of the 1990s and early 21st century.1 In thisprocess his provocative work on the socio-political role of signs, symbolic exchange, simulation,and hyperreality has important implications for communication studies – and more specificallycommunication theory. The point is that with the “… greater mediatization of society … we arewitnessing the virtualization of our world.”2 This contribution briefly reconstructs, firstly, two phasesin Baudrillard’s intellectual career – phases that shifted from an early neo-Marxist critique of themodern consumer society to a post-Marxist or postmodern view of society (which includeengagements 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 section2 the implications of these two shifts in Baudrillard’s intellectual career are contextualized in thefield of media and communication studies – and specifically his concept of the “ecstasy ofcommunication”. Finally (in Section 3) some critical remarks are made on Baudrillard’s fascinating,but problematic, project.