totally random posting

hey all. in lieu of my usual anecdotes, songs and stories, i thought i'd post a little critical thinking today. p-diddy has requested assistance with foucault's 'will to truth'/'will to knowledge' thing (good god, who can blame him). remembering very little of foucault, and processing what i was able to find with google, i came up with the following:

p-diddy -

christ, i'm glad i'm done with grad school.

okay, so taking what little i remember of foucault, and regurgitating/paraphrasing some web sites, i'll attempt to ramble for a moment:

the continuities/discontinuities in modes of thought that occur over the ages, as well as the social contexts in which these thoughts and practices occur, are what foucault would consider major discourses.

foucault is concerned with how some discourses attain the status and currency of truth, while others are marginalized.

i'm taking the following quote from a web site, which i'll link to below:"Foucault argues though, in The Order of Discourse, that the 'will to truth' is the major system of exclusion that forges discourse and which 'tends to exert a sort of pressure and something like a power of constraint on other discourses', and goes on further to ask the question 'what is at stake in the will to truth, in the will to utter this 'true' discourse, if not desire and power?' (1970, cited in Shapiro 1984, p. 113-4)."

the way i see it, foucault is making a distinction. does truth equal power for foucault? i think so. has he deconstructed the word 'truth' to simply mean discursive constructs that give their masters power? makes sense to me. is truth always knowledge? absolutely not.

sometimes, knowledge can be limited by whatever truths are in place. sometimes, a truth is accepted without any knowledge to support it. sometimes, when a truth is in place, no knowledge is sought. it seems to me that foucault's 'will to truth' is a somewhat disdainful subversion of power and intellectual constructs, whereas 'will to knowledge' remains pure.

that was fun. let me know if i'm completely off.

http://www.massey.ac.nz/~alock/theory/foucault.htm

willis