How can I be a post-structuralist?

One thing overwhelmingly sways me towards post-structuralism; I strongly, strongly believe that knowledge, insofar as it is static, comprises and is comprised of discourses supported by power. To me that's almost a truism (which worries me, on several fronts, these being that it's had to believe a bunch of very clever people would get so worked up by a truism and also, truisms aren't, by their nature, very interesting. If something is a truism, either it's not understood, or it's not interesting.).

In fact, I much prefer the idea of knowledge as a dynamic knowing, although strangely, it wasn't until I got into the education industry on the teaching side, that I discovered that was in question. I was shocked to discover that knowledge was a monolithic thing that had to be acquired - although it did explain in retrospect why my initial tertiary education, which comprised increasingly desperate and ultimately futile attempts to find someone to discuss knowing with, was so far from my expectations of it.

But, but, but, the more I read about it, the more confused I get. Post-structuralism attacks positivism for hiding the theory-dependence of its data - fair enough, in so far as it is true, although there are plenty of examples of positivist anguish over how to deal with this question. I mean, it's certainly true that there are a large number of practising empiricists who are both blase & smug about the immutability of their data, but they are not positivism, not theorists of positivism. It wouldn't really be fair on Foucault to mock hm because I don't understand his theories. Anyway, if we want smug, how does Creswell sound when he says that post-structural research will collect the data first & then consider the theory - what data? Without theory there is no data...isn't there? Or is it only positivists who aren't allowed to hide their theories during data collection?

I'm not at all sure that positivism & post-structuralism shouldn't or couldn't co-exist. I mean, it seems pretty churlish to dis the entire positivist project while I sit at my desk typing on a laptop into a blog on the Internet, whilst planning my nighttime astronomy project with free software. In fact, Lather said (I believe) that post-structuralism (in the form of feminism) was a way towards a better empiricism. True, that was 1991 & perhaps she was taken out and shot.

It's also frequently said that P-S acts against the "totalising" of positivism. It should, no doubt, but I read a lot of P-S that seems pretty damn totalising to me. The tyranny of the "Excluded middle" replaced with the tyranny of the "Binary opposition". I know of many positivist attempts to redefine logic to eliminate the excluded middle - I can't find a single P-S attempt to create a "ternary" opposition, or explore the idea o a continuum from identity to not.

I don't see how the P-S project isn't generalising - isn't it the meta-generalisation that renders all others obsolete? Doesn't that make it as tyrannous as any other generalising project? And what of the meta-narratives that are allegedly common to all discourse? Are they really not totalising?

OK, maybe I can learn to ape the mechanisms of a specific paradigm on a paper-to-paper basis, but I'd like to work in a paradigm I feel both emotionally and intellectually comfortable with. What is it? How many papers am I going to have to read to find it, or worse, how many papers am I going to have to contradict to establish my own practice?