(mobile thoughts) Power & Knowledge

Ignoring Foucault's thoughts about power and knowledge for just a minute (because they are more subtle than I have the energy to parse right now), is this really true,
"The truth may set us free or it may not, but it remains truth all the same. The point in each case is the same: power can influence our motivation to achieve knowledge and can deflect us from such achievement, but it can play no constructive role in determining what knowledge is."

The salient point is that knowledge is true. This is a big point, but without becoming too skeptical about truth, and adopting something of a pragmatic view of truth, if meaning is created from power, doesn't this mean power has a constructive role in knowledge? On my view, power is _the_ determining factor in creating meaning.

Comments

[Edward G. Nilges]

I think Foucault meant that the two words confuse us and that power and knowledge are the same thing, or a continuum from sheer force (something that doesn't exist among people insofar as the merest pretense of suasion, myth, or religion is used to legitimize: a limiting case) to Enlightenment suasion-all-the-time as seen in the Monty Python skit "Marching Up and Down the Square" (in that skit the British sergeant is apparently constrained, perhaps by higher authority, to let any man go and do what he would rather than march up and down the square).

Americans like Stanley Fish seem to stop a bit short of the pure Enlightenment end-state with Fish's (and Rorty's) attempts to define the rules as a community language game which is the only game in town...in which we conform to the expectations of the (typically academic) community so as to be able to use certain words in reference to ourselves such as "professor".

Unfortunately, this itself is based on a remythologisation of the 1960s as a dreamtime in which "we tried to be completely Enlightened and were left alone, marching up and down the square".

This myth has lasted much, much longer than the Sixties. I was around then and the reality was, quite simply, a widening of access to people who followed the rules for the most part. The representative figure was Adorno, who simply sought to continue to teach and do research under democratic conditions as opposed to Nazi conditions. The media figures were the rather few students who thought it was cute to reduce everything to everything else and break down all divisions between disciplines.

I conclude that as one term at one extreme of a continuum, power is power and has no part of knowledge, and knowledge isn't power, any more than hydrogen or oxygen are themselves water.

But that wasn't your question, it was whether power constructs knowledge and whether power as you feel creates meaning. I'd agree as long as you can apportion power between individual power and social power. In Kant, the social construction of reality accepted unquestioningly pre-enlightenment gives way to the power of the Enlightenment subject to actively create meaning (but only if he creates an intercommunicative meaning).

But: enough. I saw you on the New York Times discussion, your blog is very interesting, but at this point my contributions may be, with some justice, be perceived as spam. If you're doing time management using Internet filters, clearly you need to not have me waste it, or to perceive my contributions as a time sink. I shall wait for any reply if you wish to dialog.