Communicative decadence: the deadly effects of hedonism in the space of semiocapitalism and hyperrealism

The article examines the functioning of digital communication in the era of semiocapitalism (Franco Berardi) and hyperrealism (Jean Baudrillard), as well as its influence on the psycho-social situation of the modern subject (based on the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan). Obsessive neurosis, aggressiveness and depression are considered by the author not only as the dominant mental states in the 21st century, but as special types of interaction of the subject with the spheres of Symbolic, Real, Imaginary and as modern modes of relations of the subject with the world and society. It is assumed that political communication is a conductor of the dialectic of meaning and, empirically, a source of a “healthy” psyche, whereas semiocapitalism, influencing the sphere of cognitive work and communication, creates a situation of painful absence or “paralysis” of the Other (Lacan) and as a result provokes the subject to lose the meaning of life.

The paper demonstrates that digital communication is also moving in the direction of killing the Other, disintegration of personality and desocialization, because social networks are becoming a space where no one is truly united with anyone and nothing. The author develops Berardi’s idea that in the modern era there is a Third Unconscious — psychomutation, which is moving towards the autistic spectrum of disorders. In the conditions of semiocapitalism, the depressive subject, in his indifference to meaning, infinitely approaches the melancholic murder of the Other (although he structurally strives for this in a different way and, in principle, is unable to do so). The article concludes that digital communication in itself is not the cause of mental illnesses of our time, but today it is an instrument of hyperrealism/semiocapitalism/digital capitalism, merging with their principles and hindering the dialectic of meaning and symbolic exchange in communication.