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"... The private universe was certainly alienating, insofar as it is separated one from others, from the world in which it acted as a protective enclosure, as an imaginary protector. Yet it also contained the symbolic benefit of alienation (the fact that the other exists) and that otherness can be played put for better or for worse.
Thus the consumer society was lived under the sign of alienation; it was a society of spectacle - but at least there was spectacle, and the spectacle, even if alienated, is never obscene.Obscenity begins when there is no more spectacle, no more stage, no more theatre, no more illusion, when everything becomes immediately transparent, visible, exposed in the raw an inexorable light of information and communication.
We no longer partake of the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication.And this ecstasy is obscene. Obscene is that which eliminates the gaze, the image and every representation. Obscenity is not confined to sexuality, because today there is a pornography of circuits and networks, of functions and objects in their legibility, availability, regulation, forced signification, capacity to perform, connection, polyvalance, their free expression...
It is no longer the obscenity of the hidden, of the obscure, but that of the visible, the all-too-visible, the more-visible-than-visible; it is the obscenity of that which no longer contains a secret and is enitrely soluable in information and communication."
j. baudrillard
