During the 1980s, Jean Baudrillard has been promoted in certain circles as the new McLuhan, as the most advanced theorist of the media and society in the so-called postmodern era.[1] His theory of a new, postmodern society rests on a key assumption that the media, simulations, and what he calls "cyberblitz" constitute a new realm of experience and a new stage of history and type of society. To a large extent, Baudrillard's work consists in rethinking radical social theory and politics (...) in the light of developments of the consumer, media, information, and technological society. Baudrillard's earlier works focus on the construction of the consumer society and how it provides a new world of values, meaning, and activity, and thus inhabit the terrain of Marxism and political economy. From the mid-1970s on, however, reflections on political economy and the consumer society disappear almost completely from his texts, and henceforth simulations and simulacra, media and information, science and new technologies, and implosion and hyperreality become the constituents of a new postmodern world which -- in his theorizing -- obliterate all the boundaries, categories, and values of the previous forms of industrial society while establishing new forms of social organization, thought, and experience. (shrink)

An introduction to and critique of the latest trends in critical theory.

Poststructuralism--as a name for a mode of thinking, a style of philosophizing, a kind of writing--has exercised a profound influence upon contemporary Western thought and the institution of the university. As a French and predominantly Parisian affair, poststructuralism is inseparable from the intellectual milieu of postwar France, a world dominated by Alexandre Kojève's and Jean Hyppolite's interpretations of Hegel, Jacques Lacan's reading of Freud, Gaston Bachelard's epistemology, George Canguilhem's studies of science, and Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism. It is also inseparable from (...) the structuralist tradition of linguistics based upon the work of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jacobson, and the structuralist interpretations of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, and the early Michel Foucault. Poststructuralism, considered in terms of contemporary cultural history, can be understood as belonging to the broad movement of European formalism, with explicit historical links to both Formalist and Futurist linguistics and poetics, and with aspects of the European avant-garde, especially André Breton's surrealism. Each essay in this unique collection by and for educators is devoted to the work and educational significance of one of ten major poststructuralist philosophers. (shrink)

This paper explores the value of the eros motif for critical pedagogy and citizenship education. The conceptual affinities between eros and democracy are identified and integrated into a theory of democratic political education. Long recognized as vital to the process of self knowledge, the ancient Greek concept of eros has nevertheless been largely erased from contemporary educational debate. By retrieving eros from the fringe of academic discourse and integrating it with critical pedagogy, the aims of radical democracy can be more (...) fully achieved. The essay emphasizes the civil society or cultural dimensions of democracy as against its legal or procedural aspects. Renewed emphasis on the associational qualities of democracy underscore the importance of eros as an educational principle. The ancient pedagogical motif of educating the desires is posited as an alternative to the liberal/modernist paradigm of education which de-values affective domains of knowledge. (shrink)