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Jean Baudrillard
The Ecstasy of Communication
| Obscenity
begins when there is no more spectacle, no more stage, no more
theatre, no more illusions, when everything becomes immediately
transparent, visible exposed in the raw and inexorable light
of information and communication. We no longer partake of the
drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication. |
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| 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. |
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