"Knowledge Is Power": An explanation

Foucault analysed knowledge and power relationships. He believed that knowledge and power were interlinked, that they could not be separated and that there was no field of knowledge that did not presuppose power relationships. Aware that knowledge and power come from observing others, he was aware of the link between surveillance and power relationships in a society.

Observation

The panopticon Foucault was aware that knowledge and power come from observation, and he used Bentham's panopticon as a metaphor for how they work in a society. The panopticon was a prison controlled by an all seeing central governor. Foucault realised that the governor's knowledge and his power were interrelated. Direct commands were not necessary all the time, as the prisoners would internalise the system and submit to power systems, if not voluntarily but submissively. Knowledge and power Foucauldian thought believes that fields of knowledge and power relationships were correlative.There is no field of knowledge without a correlative field of power and no field of power that does not assume some field of knowledge and which does not imply or constitute power relations. For Foucault power is not necessarily physical, as it can be social power of several kinds. It is possible that power might be positive, such as the power of doctor using knowledge to treat a patient; but it can be coercive, the power of the blackmailer with a hold on his victim. Truth Foucault develops the view that knowledge not only assumes the authority of the truth but can create its own truth. What he means by this is that while truth has its own authority, what people believe to be true and have the power to put into effect creates truths about the reality of the social world.

Concerns

Foucault's view that knowledge is power can be taken to mean that possessors of knowledge gain power to perform acts. This might be technical power, e.g. the electrician can harness electricity; it might be social power, as the skilled advertiser manipulates those exposed to adverts. Foucault is realising serious concerns about how knowledge and power are distributed. The Foucault panopticon is a metaphor for a surveillance society. As surveillance rises and the state gains more knowledge of its citizens, so does the power of the state, be it the positive power to serve its citizens or the negative power of coercion. The recent furore of media "hacking" in Britain is from a Foucauldian perspective a way in which the media gain power over the public, as by intruding into privacy they achieve the power to control. Foucault tried to alert the people to these problems.