In French theorist Jean Baudrillard’s postmodern world, individuals flee from the ‘desert of the real’ for the ecstasies of hyperreality and the new realm of computer, media, and technological experience. In this universe, subjectivities are fragmented and lost, and a new terrain of experience appears, which for Baudrillard renders previous social theories and politics obsolete and irrelevant. Tracing the vicissitudes of the subject in contemporary society, Baudrillard claims that contemporary subjects are no longer afflicted with modern pathologies like hysteria or paranoia, but exist in “a state of terror which is characteristic of the schizophrenic, an over-proximity of all things, a foul promiscuity of all things which beleaguer and penetrate him, meeting with no resistance, and no halo, no aura, not even the aura of his own body protects him. In spite of himself the schizophrenic is open to everything and lives in the most extreme confusion”. For Baudrillard, the “ecstasy of communication” means that the subject is in close proximity to instantaneous images and information, in an overexposed and transparent world. The subject “becomes a pure screen, a pure absorption and resorption surface of the influence networks”.

Baudrillard's 1983 book Fatal Strategies presents a bizarre metaphysical scenario concerning the triumph of objects over subjects within the ‘obscene’ proliferation of an object world so completely out of control that it surpasses all attempts to understand, conceptualise, and control it. His scenario concerns the proliferation and growing supremacy of objects over subjects and the eventual triumph of the object. In a discussion of ‘ecstasy and inertia’, Baudrillard argues that objects and events in contemporary society are continually surpassing themselves, growing and expanding in power. The ‘ecstasy’ of objects is their expansion to the Nth degree, to the superlative; ecstasy as going outside of or beyond oneself; the beautiful as more beautiful than beautiful in fashion, the real more real than the real in television, sex more sexual than sex in pornography. Ecstasy is thus the form of obscenity (fully explicit, hiding nothing) and of the hyperreality described by Baudrillard earlier taken to a higher level, redoubled and intensified. His vision of contemporary society exhibits a careening of growth and excrescence (croissance et excroissance), expanding and excreting ever more goods, services, information, messages, or demands – surpassing all rational ends and boundaries in a spiral of uncontrolled growth and replication.

Baudrillard's world is fully realised in Donald Trump’s America where the President reveals his every thought, aggression, and inanity in his daily Twitter feeds and ecstatic media performances where he lets it all hang out, revealing his hatreds, insecurities, and mendacities, often abstracted from the consensual reality of the mainstream media which has documented thousands of flat-out lies, absurdities, outrages, and outrageousness. The Access Hollywood tape, spun over and over in the ecstasy of the media, obscenely presented The Real Donald Trump, a vulgar sexual predator whose Star creds allowed him to do what he wanted with women, “grab ‘em by the pussy.”

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"We exist in 'a state of terror which is characteristic of the schizophrenic, an over-proximity of all things'"

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