Regimes of Truth

I will play it safe again and take Foucault's notion, as presented in class:

Normative conceptual systems that the state or an elite imposes on others in order to discipline them, defining the "normal" and the "deviant". Power/knowledge involves a particular kind of truth, which is located within the deep regimes of discourse and practice. The path to freedom requires us to detach ourselves from the regimes of truth associated with the human sciences, because these have become manipulative, if not dominating and enslaving.(Foucault 1980, p.153)

Bending the Discourse

Regimes of truth encompass much more than Foucault's notion of normative and deviant. The normative is constantly being checked and modified to through propaganda, beautifully illustrated by Aldous Huxley:

In Brave New World non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature (the feelies, orgy-porgy, centrifugal bumblepuppy) are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation. The other world of religion is different from the other world of entertainment; but they resemble one another in being most decidedly "not of this world." Both are distractions and, if lived in too continuously, both can become, in Marx's phrase, "the opium of the people" and so a threat to freedom.

In their propaganda today's dictators rely for the most part on repetition, supression and rationalization - the repetition of catchwords which they wish to be accepted as true, the supression of facts which they wish to be ignored, the arousal and rationalization of passions which may be used in the interests of the Party or the State (Huxley 1958)

In other words, the subtle practice of Discourse bending occurs in both directions.

The final "paper" for my Fall 2004 "Multicultural Perspectives in Education" class with Gloria Ladson-Billings.