The Ecstasy of Communication. Critical remarks on Jean Baudrillard by Pieter Duvenage

“…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”. …”
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From Science to Utopia: Marcuse and Critical Utopianism by L. A. Agamalova

“…The article examines the concept of utopia in its post-Marxist context. Since the 1970s—against the backdrop of the failures of May 68, the self-exposures of the USSR, and the decline of the workers’ movement, as well as in accordance with the immanent history of the logic of the history of philosophy itself—the concept of utopia has been running through new areas of meaning and is extremely dialectical in two modes: temporal and ontological. …”
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