Definitely Foucault! The everything is a social construct perspective is exactly how I think, plus his geneologies are fascinating. Plus I try to make up for his weakness on gender with a smattering of feminists theorists. This: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Read-Foucaults-Discipline-Punish-Theory/dp/0745329802 Is a really good way to get a lot out of Discipline and Punish without much prior knowledge.
I took a gender in politics course, and my professor had this deep interest in Foucault and his ideals on gender. I took the class a while ago, but what I remember Foucault was very much about the fluidity of structure. He believe that we constructed almost everything in reality, and because of this need to structure/categorize we were holding ourselves down. Although I don't remember us ever deciding what Foucault's end goal was. I'm wondering if you could shed some light on anything I've missed, and your perspective on Foucault. I mean in the class we studied gender and its place in different societal structures across the ages, and I remember distinctly that no one in my class had any idea how Foucault would structure society.
Well you're not massively far off. The need to structure/categorise isn't holding us down, it makes us possible. Imagine life or knowledge with no categories of anything at all. It's senseless chaos. So in that sense you can't throw it out, but Foucault did believe human bodies were subjected to this process to a greater and more deliberate degree in the late modern era than ever before. As an example, older notions of good soldiers emphasised personal bravery or prowess, but in the restructuring of more recent militaries discipline and machine-like consistency are emphasised. He says something in Discipline and Punish about how after the Napoleonic reforms there were 22 discrete muscle movements performed in proper sequence to bring one's rifle to the firing position. So we can see the body being more tightly controlled than brave heart swinging a claymore over his head and hollering about freedom. You were right to miss seeing how Foucault would structure society. He was curiously reticent about a lot of political issues. He was noted for his blase response to the '68 uprisings. He was broadly leftist, but squeamish about party affiliations and pretty idiosyncratic generally.
So, what were his views on lets say morality? Did he find that it was purely structured by the society it resided in? Would he condone what the majority would define as moral? Or would he value all moral codes regardless if it was believed by the majority or not? I mean I know he talks a lot about how he observes society, but it never seemed like he was ultimately deciding on a specific action of the individual to follow. Are we supposed to combat some categories? Are we suppose to accept categories? I wish I still had my notes, and thanks for the responses.
Morality, like all social constructs (I.e., like almost everything) is structured by the society is resides in, mostly non-deliberately. Insofar as morality is one construct at all. That word means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and a lot of things which clearly bear on morality aren't marked as such. That doesn't mean you just embrace cultural relativism. Surely it's possible to critically and politically engage with the various moralities you find out in the world, although Foucault's work (and post structuralism in general, really) kind of begs the question of what perspective you do that from. He wouldn't have committed to a moral code, in my opinion (and I'm talking out of my ass even more so now than I have been) because it's such an inflexible thing to do, and typically it's an uncritical thing to do (I.e., you just accept a socially constructed position without fully appreciating how it came about it what it does, though of course you don't necessarily make that mistake). Better to be primarily an analyst or a historian of modernity as Foucault called himself, taking pragmatic but well researched positions where political issues you find significant arise.
I think I understand a bit more now. Some of what you say already feels familiar, but some of it not so much. I'm not sure I'm in agreement with his thinking especially on an individual level. Things just seem too fluid in his perspective. It seems like at a certain point he doesn't really believe anything is concrete or even approaching concrete. How do you begin to define the self, if at all in that case? Thanks so much for responding so thoughtfully btw.