Post-Modernism

"The university is in ruins ... Power ... no longer believes in the university. It knows fundamentally that it is only a zone of the shelter and surveillance of a whole class of a certain age, it therefore has only to select – it will find its elite elsewhere, or by other means. Diplomas are worthless ..."

Jean Baudrillard is the philosopher I seem to always forget.

I don't know which one came first into my hands, whether it was The System of Objects (Radical Thinkers) (Radical Thinkers) or For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. All I know is that Baudrillard (along with Roland Barthes) was one of the first people to show me how to think about humanity not as a given but as a deliberate construction stemming from our desire, fear and lust for Power.

Baudrillard, through his look at American culture, his ponderings on advertising and his photographic musings, taught me to look at Man and Woman literally as auto (self-made) nomies (signs). I learned with him that History becomes in this quest for autonomy, a matrix of Power through meaningful domination.

I learned with Baudrillard, far before the creation of the web and the proliferation of the anonymous personae that litter the blogosphere, that we are fictions battling to be taken on as truths. Twenty years ago and before we even heard of blogs as noise machines, I learned from hims that it is not truth we seek to unravel through writing, punditry or blogging but the spectacle of being truthful.

I have much to thank Baudrillard for his gift of knowledge even if it is a knowledge that I always seem to forget. He has inspired my distrut of cultural absolutes (truth, evidence) and its perpetuation institutions (academia, media) through his piercing discussions of American culture. Ironically, he made very real and accessible the Marxist and Nietzschean philosphies that inform my creations. He ended up making real the unreal reality of reality makers.

After the jump you'll find Arthur Kroker's euology forwarded to me from the C-NET listserve.

Hey gang. I'm feeling a bit daughter-of-Israel-ish this morning. I woke up with a hankering of Matisyahu.

Yah.

Even though I talk about my being atheist, religion and spirituality have always been important in my life. I take seriously people's claims of a life of divinity. It's why I come down so harsh on x-tian fundamentialist dominionists who use the name of Jesus not just in vain but for Power.

It's also why, when I come across people like Matisyahu, I stand in awe.