Understanding Foucault, Baudrillard, and Postmodernity

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                Martin

The use of money evolved out of deeply rooted customs as is shown through past forms of money, e.g. cattle, shells, animal teeth, weapons, and jewelry.  Marx explains commodity as any good or service that is produced by human labor and distributed as a product for general sale (Wallace and Wolf 2006:84). The notion that money is a commodity is concrete. Like money, knowledge can also be used as a commodity.  Knowledge produced has become tangible, tamed, manipulated, and controlled—just as currency.  In the knowledge “factories”, who is in control of the “packages” of knowledge rolling off the assembly line ready for mass consumption?  How can we distinguish facts from belief, opinion or flaw? These are questions we will have to put off until later, because they involve us in controversies over authority and power. For our purposes we will assume that there is consensus that accepts something as knowledge even if only imprecisely expressed at shallow levels. Through the readings of current literature, knowledge “Is”.  Theorists have been quoted to state that knowledge is power or is policy, even, inherent or acquired.  Knowledge is universal, pre-eminent, and never static.

In this paper, I argue that knowledge is a form of comodification in that it is produced with intent for value to be attached, distributed, and sold.  The comodification of knowledge fosters the simulation present in contemporary American society. Baudrillard helps one realize that society has been socialized to a certain type of knowledge which may not be real.  An example of this is plotted in Wag the Dog (In order to deconstruct the simulacrum that is foreshadowed, four main points should be critical and analyzed. They are as follows: 1) acknowledging and understanding the simulation and/ simulacra formulated, 2) agency to contest the authorities, 3) the influence of discourse and discursiveness, 4) ability to reflect on the personal narrative intersecting history.  My principal methodology is the comparison and contrast of a set of postmodern theories asserted by Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Frantz Fanon, C.W. Mills, Bell Hooks, Patricia Hill-Collins, and Tracey Reynolds.

“Simulation becomes our Knowledge”

Jean Baudrillard (1929- 2007), a Frenchman, theorized the line between reality and fantasy or simulation. The layers of simulation create simulacra. Baudrillard was a significant theorist and compelling critical thinker that is notorious for his concepts of “hyper reality” and “simulation”. We live in a world dominated by simulated experience and feelings, Baudrillard believed, and have lost the capacity to comprehend reality as it really exists (Lemert 2004:475). He was strongly influenced by philosophers and sociologists. Baudrillard was a thinker who built on what was being thought by others like the classical modernists and Foucault of the postmodern bracket. He breaks through via an ironic reversal of rationale to make fresh analysis early in the 1980s. Interesting enough, although he was a postmodernist, his text on simulations and simulacra used a master narrative that contradicts the postmodern perspective.

In “Simulacra and Simulations: Disneyland”, Baudrillard begins with a short moral story of Borges tale (471). The tale describes how an overly detailed map takes over the actual territory.  According to John Caviglia, Borges “proposes that the mind is reality” and all other is the creation of simulation (219).   In academia, students learn geography primarily by way of maps. Prior to critical thinking, one may view these maps as valid and reliable.  In contrary, these maps reflect that of the creator—which is the European. But is it really? Initially, this question is difficult to cope with because it refutes all that is learned, taught, and practiced.  Baudrillard proposes four successive phases of simulation which latterly creates a simulacrum (474). Essentially, at this point knowledge has surpassed the first phase as a simple mirror of basic reality and graduated to phase two as it molds and exerts the face of reality.  Because knowledge is “covering the natural (reality)” as allegorized in Borges Tales, it is in the third phase of simulation.  Our reality has been replaced by the “look-a-like” image.  Knowledge has become the “map” that has not yet fallen to ruins but has taken the identity of the original.  The attainment of unquestioned ideas, thoughts, concepts, and language inevitably leads to a simulation that is beyond understanding, unrecognizable, to us, layers with a harmful overlapping that our mental agreeably accepts, yet should be violently resisted. Frantz Fanon presents this approach to resistance in “Decolonizing National Culture, and the Negro Intellect”.

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“Deconstructing Simulation through Resistance”

 Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) was a well-known figure and his ideas had significant influence. Today, Fanon is not as notorious as the dead, white male theorists, though his writings are frequently referenced in text and have become the subject of  advocacy of violence in third world revolutions (Lemert 2004: 358).    In his short life Fanon produced an impressive body of work. The fact that his personal narrative was being created during the time of decolonization (358); it is why his most prevalent concepts were “colonization/decolonization” and modes of revolution.

We are unprepared for the infinite extensiveness of ...

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