Thank you very much Professor van der Ree. You have helped a very anxious Norwegian who has attempted to get a grip on poststructuralism and Focault for a year now.
Thank you sooo much. This was super helpful for me. I believe that it is better to listen to lectures about any difficult theory or term before reading text books about it.
Thanks for the very clear and lucid explanation of poststructural thought and its various iterations with respect to international relations. The section on Foucault is particularly illuminating. Thank you Professor van der Ree.
Thank you. I've been waiting my whole life to hear a video with this amount of hiss. I'd previously assumed that Western Imperialist standards of hiss would prevail forever, but you have opened my eyes to a whole new level of hiss.
Excellent. Thanks. I know quite enough about postmodernism/poststructuralism but I wasn't sure how it'd be applied in IR. But I do have a question about Foucault, not related to IR: I have a friend who keeps on saying that Foucault is still structuralist, because by believing we are produced by history Foucault is arguing that we are a reflection of our structure. Now I've tried to tell him that he's not wrong, but that what Foucault does is precisely point out that our social/historical construction is that of a structure that doesn't exist beyong meta-narratives. Still can't convince him though, I don't know if I'm stupid or he's not seeing the point.
"Piaget termed Foucault’s work, conversely, ‘a structuralism without structures’." The cambridge introduction to michel foucault p. 16 What is the use of labeling though? What is morally relevant to understand is that we, as subjects, are historically produced, that we, as subjects, are repositories of a multitude of variegated discourses that converge in our manifest consciousnesses, albeit we are not aware of its constructedness, and as such, these discourses being present in our minds as beliefs we have about the world, beliefs that strike us as natural and self-evident, are principles of action. As such, discourses converge in their consequences. If you think there is an afterlife, you act accordingly, if you think a man has to conquer and a girl has to marry to find him- herself, you act accordingly, if you think there is free will, you see no harm in the current penal system or neoliberalism, and act accordingly. What, then, does it matter to label Foucault's philosophy as structuralist or not, or quibble over the definition of it? Isn't that just pedantic intellectualism? Or am I missing something crucial here?
Are meta-narratives the reason for institutionalization? Is the phenomenon in question here that of ingrained attitudes and presupposed metaphysical structures which are postulated to overarch over a relative context and thus exist as the lived out categorizations and roles of individuals and of the overall milieu?
Great lecture but I'm kind of disappointed when the baudrillard point got explained , all I heard were the same clichés throwing off at baudrillard time and again , the gulf war , reality disappearing , for media purposes only , for god sake it would have been more interesting to hear why baudrillard said those things in the first place, it would have been more insightful to learn how baudrillard used saussure mRoland Barthes and Foucault to build a semiotic theory analyzing late neoliberal capitalism , complementing that of Marx in order to dismissing him completely later. anyways great talk
Just KNEW there will be moment "free trade individualism - BAAD" and "Force - GOOOOOD". Classic attempt to, yet again, argue for authoritarianism, by blaming the sea if you can`t swim. You use language yourself, man, jeez...
"You dont use language" doesnt mean what you think it does. Sure we all use language when communicating. But the thing is that linguistic categories that we happen to be born into shape the way we think about the world and to a certain extent language constitutes the things we think we merely describe by using language.
I wasted all that time reading a book that rambles on and on and on and on and on and doesn't explain anything, when I could have just come here and listened to this lecture. Oxford books are the worst by the way! The worst. American books are just so much better
I'm reading 'The globalization of world politics' by Baylis, Smith and Owens (Oxford). This video seems to summarize the chapter on poststructuralism quite well.
