Knowledge And Power Essay

Theories of knowledge and power, and the exploration of the relationship between these two intangibles, are not nascent to the field of political philosophy. Francis Bacon first stated that ‘Knowledge is Power’, suggesting that to possess an understanding of something was to exert power over it. However, this also implies that knowledge is subservient to power, and exists as an implement or expression of power. For Michel Foucault, the relationship between power and knowledge is much more intimate and inseparable. While Foucault would certainly accept that to possess knowledge is to exercise power, he uniquely suggests that the corollary also contains truth; namely, the act of exerting control or power provides knowledge. Moreover, our modern society represents a paradigm shift away from (but not the elimination of) the exercise of juridical power, ‘the right to death’, and in turn has come to embrace the exercise of biopolitical control, ‘the power over life’. In other words, Foucault contends that modern systems of control, particularly neo-liberal ideologies, operate to micromanage biopolitical power in order to gain knowledge of, and therefore power over, humanity. Juridical power is best understood as the power of repression, or the power exercised traditional by the Monarch in Classical Liberal societies. The power relations discussed in the works of early Social Contract theorists like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau explore juridical power; the power to prohibit and punish, to subtract, deduct and supress. For example, legal strictures that seek to extoll a custodial punishment or monetary fine are an expression of juridical power. This also illustrates further the subtractive nature of juridical power,...

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...o do only serves to vindicate the systems of control that Foucault works to uncover. Though this non-juridical ‘power over life’ does not operate in a deductive fashion, the ability to resist power structures through opposition and disobedience is no less diminished. In my opinion, Foucault’s analysis is strikingly similar to Marxist theories of superstructure and hegemony, particularly the works of Ralph Miliband and Antonio Gramsci, lacking only the underlying acceptance that the motivation for the existence of biopolitical control mechanisms lies in the need to manufacture consent for the exploitative behemoth of Capitalist ideology. Indeed, the necessity of a system that requires the domination of proletarian society in order to facilitate the theft of labour without promoting the conditions for revolution seems to fit the modern supercapitalist model perfectly.