procrastinating

What I am trying to do is grasp the implicit systems which determine our most familiar behavior without our knowing it. I am trying to find their origin, to show their formation, the constraint the impose upon us; I am therefore trying to place myself at a distance from them and to show how one could escape. But what are students doing when they address a professor in the familiar idiom, or when the come in dressed as hoboes, or when they kiss in classrooms or whatever? What are they doing if not deriding by parody a certain number of elements that are part of the system of our bourgeois life and that we accept as if they came naturally, as if they were a part of human nature? If it is “shocking” to kiss in a classroom, it is because our whole educational system implies the desexualization of youth. And by what right does our society ask students to wear bourgeois clothes if not because education is supposed to transmit the modes of behavior of bourgeois society? …. We must uncover our rituals for what they are: completely arbitrary things, tied to our bourgeois way of life; it is good—and that is the real theater—to transcend them in the manner of play, by means of games and irony; it is good to be dirty and bearded, to have long hair, to look like a girl when one is a boy (and vice versa); one must put “in play,” show up, transform and reverse the systems which quietly order us about. —Foucault, A Conversation with Michel Foucault (“Partisan Review”)