THE ECSTACY OF COMMUNICATION by Jean Baudrillard

THE ECSTASY OF COMMUNICATION Jean Baudrillard $7 | paper | 128 pp. Semiotext(e) ISBN: 0936756365 Cultural Writing. Criticism and Theory. First published in France in 1987 as L'Autre par lui-meme, THE ECSTASY OF COMMUNICATION was Baudrillard's attempt to summarize his work for a doctoral degree at the Sorbonne, a degree he never received. But more than a summation of Baudrillard's work, ECSTASY is the most decisive, compact description of what it means to be wired, a perspective that is virtually impossible to recapture since advanced communications technologies have become totally normalized. "Our private sphere," he writes, "has ceased to be the stage where the drama of the subject at odds with his objects and with his image is played out: we no longer exist as playwrights or actors but as terminals of multiple networks ... Private telematics: each individual sees himself promoted to the controls of a hypothetical machine, isolated in a position of perfect sovereignity ... in perpetual orbital flight ...." ECSTASY is the swansong of 20th century alienation: a flashback to pre-techno amnesia by one of France's last living humanists.