File spoon-archives/foucault.archive/foucault_1999/foucault.9911, message 20


Date: Sun, 7 Nov 1999 11:45:43 -0800
From: "mike king" <slothrop-AT-sfdt.com>
Subject: RE: Knowledge and Power


>Hi, can anyone tell me more about Foucault's theory on the interconnection
>between Knowledge and Power? 

well, the two assume and produce each other.  they're inseparable.  knowledge is power in that its possession brings power (eg, a priest)and that knowledge is the power to apply it.  conversely, there are no exercises of power without legitimating knowledge.  there is a reason for exercises of power.  

here's an example:

physicists were working on certain problems in atomic theory, which, when solved, gave the power to produce nuclear weapons.  those in power needed a weapon, so they aided the physicists in producing certain knowledges.  in turn, this knowledge became the power of the US military, who deployed the weapons, with the legitimating knowledge that it would be a deterrent, and/or stop the war, and/or increase US power.  the events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki also led to certain knowledges that nuclear weapons are indefensible.  

also, the insane were an inconvenience to the dominant power structure.  the discourse of psychiatry was produced in order to legitimize their normalization.  much later, the unabomber hit upon some ideas regarding industrial-technological society, and used these ideas, as well as personal revenge, to justify his bombings and the publication of his manifesto, "industrial society and its future."  in turn, he was labelled "paranoid schizophrenic," in a diagnosis shady even for modern psychiatry.  this psychiatric knowledge justified his incarceration, and a mass inattention to his ideas.  more on the unabomber, including the manifesto and his psychiatric evaluation, is available at http://www.cs.umass.edu/~ehaugsja/unabom/top.html



The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it.
                                  --Jean Baudrillard

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