Power/Knowledge

Power/knowledge is a concept developed by the French philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault across several of his major works, including Discipline and Punish, published in 1975. Foucault argued that power and knowledge are not separate from one another, with knowledge existing as a neutral body of truth that power might later distort or suppress, but instead directly imply and produce each other: relations of power generate and organize what counts as knowledge in a given historical period, while regimes of knowledge in turn constitute and exercise real power over people's bodies, behavior and self-understanding. Foucault traced this connection through his studies of institutions such as prisons, hospitals, schools and asylums, arguing that the professional bodies of knowledge developed around criminality, illness, madness and normal development did not simply describe pre-existing objective facts about individuals but actively helped constitute the categories, and often the very individuals, they claimed only to describe, while also legitimizing the authority of the experts and institutions that produced that knowledge. This account rejected the traditional view that the pursuit of knowledge could ever be fully separated from the power relations surrounding it, or that expanding knowledge simply means expanding freedom, and it became one of the most widely cited and influential concepts within poststructuralist social theory.