Georges Bataille famously compared thought’s provocative power, and the seductive manner with which it approaches the unveiling of truth, to a girl disrobing. He went further and suggested that, in addition, thought is ultimately impudent and obscene. However, these radical qualities that lie beyond Bataille’s initial sexual simile have, in our heavily mediated times, been undermined to an unprecedented degree. The totalitarian semiotic order Baudrillard’s theory so resolutely opposed, fosters a qualitatively different form of obscenity more akin to the gyrations of a lap dancer seeking a tip, than a girl provocatively disrobing. In this context, this article consists of heavily edited and adapted extracts from my book co-authored with Jan Harris, Critical Theories of Mass Media: Then and Now (Taylor and Harris, 2008), to highlight Baudrillard’s sustained critique of a society predicated upon excessive transparency, excessive explicitness. In contrast to the best efforts of Panglossian cultural theorists, this book uses past thinkers of then such as Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Theodor Adorno, Guy Debord, and Marshal McLuhan, to argue that Baudrillard’s brand of critical theory has never been more relevant as an aid to understand the existential banality of the contemporary mediascape and the profoundly negative social consequences – now.
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