SURROGATING BODIES, EMBODIMENT OF THEORIES - Essay Example

For instance, Hollywood serves as being a good laboratory for social scientists in order to discuss key elements, phenomena and possibilities or potentials of modern society. Similarly we will conduct an extensive analysis and hold relevant discussion especially through Surrogates and at the same time touching to some core concepts of Foucault, Deleuze, Baudrillard, Agamben and Zizek. The study sociology or social sciences particularly in theory form through popular culture is something familiar for the recent history of intellectual production.

However, in conjunction with the above mentioned names on a topic regarding body, life and power, it is entirely new in the ground of popular culture and it can cause a productive / fruitful discussion and thinking process if it is taken in an inter-active and trans-disciplinary academic approach. The Surrogates is one Hollywood movie directed by Jonathan Mostow, based on a comic book written by Robert Venditti and drawn by Brett Weldele (Venditti and Weldele, 2006). It provides us the opportunity to discuss several sociological-philosophical concepts of critical thinkers in the West.

in the same film the near future of the world and society is discussed in the film.at first the film was designed for military equipment and later it became readily available and affordable to members of the public. The technology enabled people to get involve in social life without limit and the users were kept safe from communicable diseases, crimes as well as discrimination, war among others. It was called as “a revolution in how we live.” Where people could remain their home and vicariously interacted with the real world through their robotic duplicates in other words their Surrogates and regardless of who you are, you could be anybody with these human-like machines.

In power and politics, Michael Foucault has inspired critical thinkers and social movements especially from the second half of 20th century until now by showing critical thinkers in the modern sense that power is a biological process and has deep connections on social constructions of “body”. He further went on by clarifying that body is not “individual” at all and in modern times it is marked and socialized through complicated and intertwined ways of domination. Reality in the 21stcentury philosopher Jean Baudrillard explained the meaning of reality.

His concept was based on accession of real rather than its destruction. He also criticized consumer society and the theory of body and politics. He claimed that, all contradictory currents are integrated in some circuits and transcription. He went further by accepting surrogates ideas by saying that bodies of people have become technical apparatuses themselves. In the invisibility of “real body” robots have taken places of real bodies, and in his words, they turned into the reality, or there is no reality apart from them.

The “thing” we call body today has become a huge brain / mind and the bedroom turned into the skull.In the case of Surrogates, physical body operating in the society is separated from inside entirely and all real or biological body became “inside” as a closed and invisible unity. This time technologies and their applications do not seem so “irreversible” at the first sight. The movie Surrogates is maybe a further expression of this