\(cover art: Robert Irwin) (not the Animal guy, the artist haha)**
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The arc: REALITY → PERCEPTION → SUBJECT → RELATION → POWER → POSSIBILITY
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We begin with the problem underneath the entire course: what makes something real? Baudrillard asks what happens when representations stop merely describing the world and begin producing it. Fanon grounds that problem in the body, showing how social meaning can precede and structure lived experience. Deleuze gives us a different vocabulary for reality altogether—one organized around becoming and events rather than fixed identities.
Read these texts against one another rather than trying to reconcile them. The question is not simply whether reality is socially constructed, but how symbols, bodies, institutions, and material conditions interact to make some realities feel inevitable and others impossible.
Read: “The Precession of Simulacra”
Read for: simulation · hyperreality · representation · signs
Keep in mind: At what point does a representation stop referring back to an underlying reality? What changes when signs begin organizing the reality they supposedly describe?
Read: “The Fact of Blackness” / “The Lived Experience of the Black Man”
Read for: racialization · embodiment · recognition · gaze
Keep in mind: What happens when meaning is assigned to a body before the person gets to define themselves?
Read: Chapter 1, “Religion and World-Construction”