from _DP_, pp. 27-28:
Perhaps, too, we should abandon a whole tradition that allows us to
imagine that knowledge can exist only where the power relations are
suspended and that knowledge can develop only outside its injunctions, its
demands and its interests. Perhaps we should abandon the belief that power
makes mad and that, by the same token, the renunciation of power is one of
the conditions of knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it
serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and
knowledge directly imply one another; that 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. These 'power-knowledge relations' are to be analysed,
therefore, not on the basis of a subject of knowledge who is or is not
free in relation to the power system, but, on the contrary, the subject
who knows, the objects to be known and the modalities of knowledge must be
regarded as so many effects of these fundamental implications of
power-knowledge and their historical transformations. In short, it is not
the activity of the subject of knowledge that produces a corpus of
knowledge, useful or resistant to power, but power-knowledge, the
processes and struggles that traverse it and of which it is made up, that
determines the forms and possible domains of knowledge.
To analyse the political investment of the body and the
microphysics of power presupposes, therefore, that one abandon -- where
power is concerned -- the violence-ideology opposition, the metaphor of
property, the model of the contract or of conquest; that -- where
knowledge is concerned -- one abandons the opposition between what is
'interested' and what is 'disinterested', the model of knowledge and the
primacy of the subject. Borrowing a word from Petty and his
contemporaries, . . . one might imagine a political 'anatomy'. This would
not be the study of a state in terms of a 'body' (with its elements, its
resources and its forces), nor would it be the study of the body and its
surroundings in terms of a small state. One would be concerned with the
'body politic', as a set of material elements and techniques that serve as
weapons, relays, communication routes and supports for the power and
knowledge relations that invest human bodies and subjugate them by turning
them into objects of knowledge.
Perhaps, too, we should abandon a whole tradition that allows us to
imagine that knowledge can exist only where the power relations are
suspended and that knowledge can develop only outside its injunctions, its
demands and its interests. Perhaps we should abandon the belief that power
makes mad and that, by the same token, the renunciation of power is one of
the conditions of knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it
serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and
knowledge directly imply one another; that 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. These 'power-knowledge relations' are to be analysed,
therefore, not on the basis of a subject of knowledge who is or is not
free in relation to the power system, but, on the contrary, the subject
who knows, the objects to be known and the modalities of knowledge must be
regarded as so many effects of these fundamental implications of
power-knowledge and their historical transformations. In short, it is not
the activity of the subject of knowledge that produces a corpus of
knowledge, useful or resistant to power, but power-knowledge, the
processes and struggles that traverse it and of which it is made up, that
determines the forms and possible domains of knowledge.
To analyse the political investment of the body and the
microphysics of power presupposes, therefore, that one abandon -- where
power is concerned -- the violence-ideology opposition, the metaphor of
property, the model of the contract or of conquest; that -- where
knowledge is concerned -- one abandons the opposition between what is
'interested' and what is 'disinterested', the model of knowledge and the
primacy of the subject. Borrowing a word from Petty and his
contemporaries, . . . one might imagine a political 'anatomy'. This would
not be the study of a state in terms of a 'body' (with its elements, its
resources and its forces), nor would it be the study of the body and its
surroundings in terms of a small state. One would be concerned with the
'body politic', as a set of material elements and techniques that serve as
weapons, relays, communication routes and supports for the power and
knowledge relations that invest human bodies and subjugate them by turning
them into objects of knowledge.