Foucault and the Freshman Writer: Considering the Self in Discourse

Abstract

During an interview five months before his death, Michel Foucault used the term of describe the various forms of knowledge. About these games he made the following observation, which expresses what might well be the central theme of his entire career: There is always a possibility, in a given of truth, discover something else and more or less change such and such a rule and sometimes even the totality of the game (Ethic 17). Through his analogy games Foucault underscores the nature of knowledge-of philosophy, for example, or biology-as an activity rather than a body of information. He suggests, however, that the activities we call knowledge involve more than compliance with rules or conventions. To play a of truth we must also devise strategies for problematization, for changing the rules as we go along (Use 11-13; Flynn 533). Although we might ordinarily imagine the history of any discourse or discipline be a continuum, each truth succeeding the next predictably, even automatically, Foucault characterizes the formation of knowledge as a series of discontinuities or redirections. Players in a of truth-as opposed powerless spectators-participate by learning differently, repeatedly seeking an outside the existing confines of the (Use 7-8; Thought 21-26; Deleuze 86-87). But if knowledge is neither a body of information nor a system of unchanging rules, what should teachers of writing teach? By what method can students learn think differently? Foucault himself may provide at least part of the answer when he refers his and apprehension in completing The Use of Pleasure, a project which required him to attempt and be mistaken, go back and rework everything from top bottom, and still find reason hesitate from one step the next. Instead of associating uncertainty with the miscarriage of