Hi Mark
I guessed someone might ask that one day. Here is my confession. Yes, I
translated pouvoir-savoir as power/knowledge in the title of the volume of that
name (which I also chose). I said I had done that in my Afterword to that volume
(p 233), which Foucault read before publication. Whether it's a better
translation than 'power-knowledge' as Robert Hurley renders it in Discipline and
Punish, p 27-8 - 'pouvoir-savoir' also appears in Foucault's back-cover text of
the French edition - is for others to judge. I haven't had any complaints,
but then some undoubtedly terrible mistakes go unnoticed for years (cf the
exhibits in Clare's site). I think my reasoning was, and is, that the hyphen has
different semantics in French and English, and that use of the slash connective
in English is slightly more likely to make it evident that this was a
neologism, an original conceptual assemblage, and not (the easy and obvious
misreading, which has of course still inevitably occurred) a term affirming that power
and knowledge are one and the same. I may have thought a distant echo of the
then recent 'S/Z' would tilt understanding towards the sense of a
differential coupling rather than an equivalence relation. And I was probably also
influenced by how it would work as a book title.
What do you think? Sounds like you don't find it so intuitive.
Although it may be agreed that the term (however translated) works as a
leitmotif for a period of Foucault's work, it's notable that he doesn't actually
choose to re-use it much after the first prominent occasion; in La Volonte de
Savoir it appears once the other way round as 'savoir-pouvoir'. I'm not even
sure that it occurs in the texts of Power/Knowledge! If I had the chance of
updating a future reprint of that volume, the thing I would most like would be to
add that by the time the book was published in 1980 Foucault had said in a
lecture that he now thought the governmentality perspective as much preferable to
'pouvoir-savoir' as the latter had been to the theory of ideology.
regards
Colin
In a message dated 13/03/04 13:32:29 GMT Standard Time, mgekelly@xxxxxxxxxxx
writes:
> Subj: Power/Knowledge
> Date: 13/03/04 13:32:29 GMT Standard Time
> From: mgekelly@xxxxxxxxxxx
> Reply-to: foucault@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> To: foucault@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Sent from the Internet
>
>
>
> hi list
> another question. I was wondering today about the origin of the term/phrase
> 'Power/Knowledge', which a seems to circulate a bit in connection with
> Foucault. It doesn't seem to me to occur in Foucault's own work, where the phrase
> is 'power-knowledge', with a hyphen. It doesn't seem to me that these terms
> are equivalent in meaning. It seems likely to me that the origin of
> power/knowledge is the title of Colin Gordon's collection of that name. I'd be
> particularly interested to here Colin's own thoughts about this.
> Mark
>
> P.S. thanks to Stuart for that extremely useful review of l'hermeneutique,
> and also Clare for the very valuable ready-translated quotes.
>
>
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Colin Gordon
Director, NHSIA Disease Management Systems Programme
Health Informatics Manager, Royal Brompton Hospital
Chair, British Medical informatics Society
http://www.bmis.org
07881 625146
colinngordon@xxxxxxx
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