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Be well, and I hope you love the show today.
Today's episode is the beginning of a look into what at the time was a new attitude that's emerging in the post-structuralist world.
We're looking at the books Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard.
So for the sake of time at the beginning here,
I need to move pretty quickly through several points we've already covered on the show without re-explaining them.
So if any of this seems like it needs more explanation,
you can always go back and listen to all the episodes we've done so far on structuralism and post-structuralism.
But for the sake of right now, we just talked about Foucault's work.
His famous genealogies and archaeologies are the way we've looked at madness and criminal punishment and sexuality.
And while there's a lot of subtext to these works,
one of the major points Foucault's making with these books overall is that terms like sanity versus insanity,
heterosexual versus homosexual, a criminal mind versus a mind that's been properly reformed.
These are just three of hundreds of different new ways in our modern world that science categorizes human beings and labels them normal or abnormal in an attempt to classify and understand them.
And that just in the relatively short period of recorded human history that we have access to,
there's no shortage of examples Foucault can point to of societies that just never used these terms to categorize people.
Nobody ever used to classify people in these terms.
They had their own terms they used to categorize people,
and we can see that those terms had huge effects on the way these groups were treated within those societies.