Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication.

Abstract

Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication. New Edition. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2012, 128 pp. $14.95 paper(9781584350576) It is somewhat unsettling to find oneself writing a retrospective piece on the 25th anniversary reissue of The Ecstasy of Communication. Jean Baudrillard would smell a rat right away. After all, this text was already retrospective in itself, serving as his habilitation thesis meant to review the assumed coherence and trajectory of his published work (and promote him to the lofty status of research director in the academy). As he explains at the beginning of the book, this is an impossible contradiction because it retroactively imposes unity on the texts. He proposes instead to approach his own work as a traveller who stumbles upon the texts and must try to make sense of them. For a generation of graduate students (of which I was a part), stumbling, discovering, and trying to make sense are familiar experiences of encountering Baudrillard, as his translated work first began to make its way into the Canadian classroom. But this encounter was also exhilarating--it meant submitting our most basic sociological assumptions to the assault of his logic. Baudrillard forever disrupted our simple notions of representation built on the false/true image or word, along with sociological totems like stereotype, false consciousness, and manipulation (and their social correlatives--the silently oppressed, mass man, and cultural dupe). In their place came a serious consideration of the world saturated with the play, pleasures, and terrors of images and words--so saturated that the notion of the became threatened by its own overrepresentation. If we ever believed that the real could exist outside of its representation, this fantasy became more and more untenable as media and technology developed through the 20th century. Baudrillard is perhaps a little disingenuous when he claims no coherence to his work preceding Ecstasy. Baudrillard's earliest work grappled with the problem of Marx's exchange/use value distinction, with use value revealed as a construction of human need unmediated by signification and systems of the circulation of meaning. By adding the semiotic levels of symbol and sign to the mix, Baudrillard allowed readers to begin to see the world of contemporary capitalism. The symbol was an object still linked into a system of sacred meaning and irreplaceability (he gives the wedding ring as an example), and a sign was an object that got its meaning only in the unending movement of signification itself and is essentially replaceable (he gives rings as fashionable jewellery as an example). The symbolic realm functions outside of utility and production. Instead it is a wasteful, irrational, and excessive world--that of gift, potlatch, sacrifice. It is for this reason also profoundly social. A quarter of a century after the first publication of Ecstasy, it is time to acknowledge that Baudrillard is not a strange, exotic foreigner--a French theorist, a postmodern, or as the book cover insists, a provocateur. It is no mere coincidence that so much Baudrillard scholarship happens in Canada, as thinkers like McLuhan and Innis are his intellectual ancestors. In Ecstasy we find Baudrillard's McLuhanesque description of the car as total system that monitors itself and the driver, speaks to the driver, informs, advises, controls--and into which we are wired. (Like McLuhan, Baudrillard is often wrongly considered an advocate for the brave new world he so accurately analyzes.) Innis too haunts these pages, with the monumental, durable form of political domination and representation being replaced by the fleeting, incessant, and light world of the hyper-real. Monuments and buildings, Baudrillard explains are no longer testaments to memory and time, but are now machines for advertising, fashion, and the sign system. The dominant trope animating all of Baudrillard's work is that of keeping up with the social phenomena around him. …