Jean Baudrillard Did Not Take Place: What Poststructuralism’s Least Respected Theorist Can Teach Us About Social Studies Education

• In Event: Everybody but Foucault: How Alternative Poststructuralisms Operate in Educational Theory, Policy, and Practice

Abstract

This paper engages with the once darling of poststructural theory in the 1980s, Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard, once lauded by Ron Silliman as “the drag queen of theory” (quoted in Dumm, 2000), and his ideas have suffered (prematurely) what he himself ironically called for all of reality to ultimately experience: disappearance. However, this paper aims to reclaim Baudrillard’s analysis of the Other for a necessary critique of contemporary social studies education that other poststructural notions of “difference,” posited by Deleuze, Derrida, and Foucault, fall short of achieving; for one thing, these non-Baudrillardian lenses do not go far enough in naming what Baudrillard called “the perfect crime”: the death by production—not simply the sublimation or erasure—of the Other. In addition, this paper extends Baudrillard’s thinking of the death/production of the Other through his exploration of signs and signals, so that we might acknowledge the ways in which this means, in effect, that the Other did not take place, is not taking place, and will not take place. Using the popular website WebQuest, a free online program that allows social studies teachers at all levels to create public internet-based pedagogical and heuristic tools, and which is increasingly ubiquitous in social studies teacher education syllabi, the mode of inquiry for this paper considers the effects of this type of teaching on the construction, and ultimate destruction, of the Other. Indeed, the interplay of signals and simulacra here seems to realize Baudrillard’s nightmarish vision, one in which the Other, including her/his culture, language, belief systems, and worldviews simply disappear into an interchangeable, and therefore inescapably contingent, series of ethno-anthropological phantasms. As Baudrillard put it, “In order for ethnology to live, its object must die; by dying, the object takes its revenge for being ‘discovered’ and with its death defies the science that wants to grasp it” (Baudrillard, 1994). The cultural Other, that is, is relegated to mere content, and perhaps not even that, since all of the “content” produced in a WebQuest is merely a configuration of digital signals that require only that the signals, and not actual persons or societies, exist. In this way, the death of the Other is executed by the production of the Other, so that “their myths have become comparable under the aegis of structural analysis” (Baudrillard, 1996). What, then, are the effects of this production, of the Other as merely one form of digital, and therefore “universal,” ethnology; and what are the effects of producing the Other in this way on social studies teacher education? Are teacher education programs in fact encouraging the spread of so-called “diversity” and “multicultural” curricula, or are they simply ensuring that the Other exists as a signal of noise, or rather does not need to exist in the first place? The scholarly significance lies in revisiting Baudrillard, rather than forgetting him (as he admonished us to do), so that we can begin to unpack the various ways in which teachers and students think about the Other, and each other.

Author

• David W. Kupferman, University of Hawaii West Oahu