ABSTRACT
The real protagonist, the true subject and object of the late 20th-century technological revolution in the field of communication, is the human body. It has become a fluctuating and hybrid entity, and has lost whatever it had of the unknowable and incommunicable. It is no longer a monad in search of a place, word, or gesture, but a terminal that is never switched off. The human body is endowed with communication, not by subjective choice, but as the result of an objective condition: its status in a world where the forms of social reproduction themselves (production, exchange, consumption) have been completely absorbed into communications systems. The concept of communication no longer refers merely to the transference of information from sender to recipient. Theories of communication based on the notion of “sign” have shown that communication always involves a process of interpretation; messages are reciprocal. Signs, and even signals, produced, exchanged, and consumed, imply shifts in social identity, more extensive levels of connotation, myth making, and meta-communicational awareness.
