"Find a spectrum, a course of obscene figures, situations and effects, bearing no relation to one another, and if possible, without any direct sexual connotation. Then connect these common points, as in the well-known children's game, and watch the enigmatic, modern figure of obscenity emerge—a figure far vaster than the one familiar to us, which would simply be that of the prostitution of all illusion, the collapse of all metaphor, the verification of all truth, and the blackmail of the visible. Our obscenity is no longer the vile and hidden face of the visible; it is the overstepping of the visible into the annihilation of the gaze. Idiocy, stupidity, madness, violence were merely the obscenity of a bourgeois world devoted to the enlightened judgement of critique, while our obscenity is that of an operational universe: it is the mirror of our technologies—not only those of sex, but those of information, microbiology, networks—insofar as all aim to force the constellation of secrecy. Obscenity is no longer palpable, it is transparent, it covers the whole expanse of our over-communicational world. It is a cold obscenity, a white obscenity, nothing lewd, sensual, repressed or perverse about it; it answers to the immanence of the real and to its nullity.
jean baudrillard, "what are you doing after the orgy?" in traverses, n°29. éditions de minuit, 1983. p.2.
