What does Foucault say about knowledge and power?

Foucault uses the term ‘power/knowledge’ to signify that power is constituted through accepted forms of knowledge, scientific understanding and ‘truth’: ‘Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power.

What is a criticism of Foucault’s approach to power?

Abstract: A common criticism of Michel Foucault’s works is that his writings on power relations over-emphasized the effects that technologies of power have upon the subjection of humans, rendering any attempt of resistance futile and reducing the subject to a mere passive effect of power.

How are power and knowledge related?

According to Foucault’s understanding, power is based on knowledge and makes use of knowledge; on the other hand, power reproduces knowledge by shaping it in accordance with its anonymous intentions. Power (re-) creates its own fields of exercise through knowledge.

How does Michel Foucault examine the relationship of discourse with knowledge and power?

Power, in Weedon’s (1987) interpretation of Foucault is: a dynamic of control and lack of control between discourses and the subjects, constituted by discourses, who are their agents. Power is exercised within discourses in the ways in which they constitute and govern individual subjects (p. 113).

What role does knowledge play in power?

Knowledge is power means that a person has education and a complete control on his life by using that knowledge. Educated persons can easily handle the things in life. Knowledge gives power to the human beings to know how to control the forces of nature and use them for getting benefits.

Is knowledge is power a cliche?

“Knowledge is Power” – it’s a cliché, isn’t it? Though there is no known evidence that Sir Francis did coin that phrase in any of his English or Latin literary works, even today people believe in this very concise yet powerful phrase. Knowledge and Power are two very abstract and strong words.

What does Michel Foucault mean by power and knowledge?

Power-Knowledge: A Political Strategy. The position adopted by Foucault, that knowledge is not independent of power, is articulated in several studies which outline the precise relations of power within which particular human sciences have emerged, and the contribution made by the human sciences to the development of technologies of power.

Why did Michel Foucault write discipline and punish?

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault reached an understanding of punishment and the prison as components of a political technology from revolts and resistances occurring in prisons throughout the world in the late 1960s and early 1970s, against a particular technology of power exercised over mind and body.

Why are there so many problems with reading Foucault?

Many problems in reading Foucault originate because we come to him with the whole framework of modernist social science, and we want to know where he fits, even though he spent plenty of energy avoiding fitting. This leads to another fundamental problem in reading Foucault, because he is studiedly anti-modernist and studiedly anti-humanist.

What did Foucault mean by chastise the rebellious body?

Chastise the rebellious body, the body unruly. Deter him from again. In addition, this micropénalité should not be confused with the great state judicial mechanisms, as if there was only one power, state power and political power.