Knowledge Essay, Research Paper

For Foucault, power produces knowledge and each one directly implies the other. It is impossible for power to be exercised without knowledge, and it is impossible for knowledge not to procure power. ?There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.? We must know what something is to have power over it, just as to know something is to have power over it. Knowledge, therefore, is power.

Though power comes through individuals, most often it is not under their control. Power creates subjects; it is not exercised by them. Efforts to rationalize or humanize power only result in an exercise of new forms of it by creating new ways of knowing what subjects are. New forms of both power (control) and knowledge go together.