![]() Stability was the game in town in the past. What you refer to as the truth is really just the current, temporary dominant narratives of your culture’s way of making sense of things, narratives that are constantly being redefined as they interact with other cultural discourses that interpret reality in a different way.” In other words, this is a 20th-century, post-structuralist critique of a hopeful, 17th-century, Enlightenment-era belief about how stable everything is. But all that we as human beings can ever hope to have access to is a set of cultural and scientific constructions that were created in an attempt to understand reality. I mean, of course there’s a way that things are out there. I mean, there’s a reality out there, right? Scientific rationality is the way that we’re going to arrive at that reality.” But a post-structuralist would say, “No, that’s not the case. There certainly is a way that things are. You know, these Enlightenment thinkers thought, “Okay, well, one thing’s for sure. Not only, to Foucault, are there no stable identities or categories written into the universe that can be arrived at like sane versus insane but, more generally to the post-structuralists, there is no stable point from which anyone can ever assert that they’ve arrived at the Truth with a capital T, because it would be delusional to think that you somehow have access to it. And, just how these other ways of categorizing people in the past have come and gone, our methods without question will come to pass as well. There have been countless other ways of categorizing mental health in the past based on different criteria, countless other words used, countless other ways it could be done. Sanity and insanity are two terms that we use in a modern, cultural discourse to be able to describe the mental health of people. I mean, it wasn’t like, you know, “And on the first day the Lord created the heavens and earth, and on the second he created the scientific category of sanity and insanity.” No. Sane versus insane is not a property of the universe. ![]() But Foucault would say, something we all have to realize is that there’s nothing about these new scientific categories that’s somehow written into the universe. ![]() Science did this in an attempt to make sense of and understand the world that we live in. And we can see that those terms had huge effects on the way these groups were treated within those societies.īut, aside from pointing out that our new scientific categories similarly affect the way people are looked at in our modern world, Foucault would just want us to consider for a second, the sciences one day just created these categories that we use to define people. They had their own terms they used to categorize people. Nobody ever used to classify people in these terms. 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 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. But, for the sake of right now, we just talked about Foucault’s work, his famous genealogies and archaeologies of the way we’ve looked at madness and criminal punishment and sexuality. 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. 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. ![]() We’re looking at the book Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard. 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.
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