John Patrick wrote:
> his basic
> premise seems quite basic to me. The common expression "knowledge is power"
> seems to summarize his position.There doesn't seem to be anything
> revolutionary about that.
As that great American philosopher, W.J. Clinton, once put it, it depends on
"what the meaning of 'is' is"
We regularly use the verb in English, without having to think about what heavy
duty it does, how many shades of meaning it holds.
For ex, we say that "2+2 is 4" and, conversely, "4 is 2+2"
But "is" does not always entail this reversibility
For example: Those who make the statement
"Knowledge is power"
are rarely willing to turn it around to say
"Power is knowledge"
One of the things that makes Foucault interesting for many of us is that he was
willing to turn the phrase around. Foucault emphatically rejected the claim
that he had simply identified knowledge with power, so it's better to read his
claims as something like:
knowledge <generates> power [ho-hum]
power generates knowledge [more interesting, I think]
One of the themes running through Discipline and Punish, to take one work, is
how the prison and analogous institutions served to generate knowledge about
human beings. Foucault would often suggest that the whole "human sciences" were
informed by the knowledge flowing from such relations of power.
It's a striking thesis, for me at least, and is worth playing with, and applying
to different contexts to see how fruitful it is.
Hope that that "is" helpful.
Phil Ryan