Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 13:08:19 -0800
From: "mike king" <slothrop-AT-sfdt.com>
Subject: RE: KP


>Could someone please explain to me the premise of the idea of 
>Knowledge/Power?  I understand that the two are coexistant, but I am a little 
>confused of the dynamics of the "spreading of power through >knowledge".

As I understand it, the point isn't that the two are co-existent, but that they are co-productive, and cannot ever be separated.  Knowledge is produced by constraint and regulation.  Power is legitimated through knowledge.  In "Two Lectures," in "Power/Knowedge," pages 93-94, Foucault explains it thus:

"What i mean is this:  in a society such as ours, but basically in any society, there are manifold relations of power which permeate, characterize, and constitute the social body, and these relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated, nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation, and functioning of a discourse.  There can be no possible exercise of power without a certain economy of discourses of truth which operates through and on the basis of this association.  We are subjected to the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth.  This is the case for every society, but i believe that in ours the relationship between power, right and truth is organized in a highly specific fashion.  If i were to characterize, not its mechanism itself, but its intensity and constancy, i would say that we are forced to produce the truth of power that our society demands, of which it has need, in!
 order to function:  we must speak the truth; we are constrained or condemned to confess, or to discover the truth.  power never ceases its interrogation, its inquisition, its registration of truth:  it institutionalizes, professionalizes, and rewards its pursuit.  in the last analysis, we must produce truth as we must produce wealth, indeed, we must produce truth in order to produce wealth in the first place.  in another way, we are also subjected to truth in the sense in which it is truth that makes the laws, that produces the true discourse which, at least partially, decides, transmits, and itself extends upon teh effects of power.  in the end, we are judged, condemned, classified, determined in our undertakings, destined to a certain mode of living or dying, as a function of the true discourses which are the bearers of specific effects of power."

hope that helped to explain it.




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

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