Course Packet, pp. 22-27.
1. In your own opinion, why might intellectuals be understood as "the master of truth and justice" (22)?
2. How does Foucault contrast the "specific intellectual" with the "universal intellectual" (22)? Why would the former be more aware?
3. What might Foucault mean by "lateral connections across different forms of knowledge" (23)? List some of the forms of knowledge that Foucault discusses.
4. Why was the specific intellectual or "expert" more likely to emerge from disciplines such as biology and physics, according to Foucault (24)?
5. Draw a chart that compares the questions that used to engage universal intellectuals with those that now engage particular intellectuals (23-25).
6. Why, according to Foucault, must these specialists or experts become engaged with the kind of questions of general significance (25-26)?
7. List the five traits of the "political economy" of truth, according to Foucault (25-26).
8. How might the culture of poverty school's analysis of "the underclass" (discussed in Steinberg's article) be an example of an expert discourse in the service of power? Who or what benefits from the knowledges produced by these experts?
9. Foucault writes on page 26 that the regime of truth "is not merely ideological or superstructural...[and] operates in socialist countries." And on the final page of the reading he writes, "The problem is not changing people's consciousness--or what's in their heads--but the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth." How, then, is Foucault's analysis of "truth" not simply a reiteration of Marx's notion of ideology or the "third dimension of power"?