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I think we have all heard: “you need knowledge, you need an excellent education to get to a good university, and that a good university and a good education lead to a brilliant career”. In other words, if you have more knowledge, if you know more about the world, then you have a greater power to manipulate. Michel Foucault argues that knowledge and power are so linked that they end up being the same thing. I completely agree with him, and I think power and knowledge combine to influence, manipulate and create people. However, knowledge from his interpretation doesn’t mean knowing a bunch of facts because facts don’t mean knowledge in Foucault’s opinion. Knowledge is power, but not in a sense that the more facts you know, the more relevant you are to society. Furthermore, knowledge is only considered knowledge if it has relevance to a dominant discourse in a given social structure. In other words, you have to speak as the group speaks to gain popularity within that group and power is the unequal distribution of such dominant discourses.
Foucault also had a notion of man not as a subject (which transforms the environment in which we live), but as an object (which is controlled by the institutions of power). As much as schools, hospitals, prisons, military barracks aim to protect citizens, in a way, I think they also control them through a mechanism of surveillance and punishment. Foucault called these mechanisms “technologies of domination” to refer to these controlling forces, which manage people’s time and space, and hierarchy is the unifying element. In this sense, Foucault approaches that, in a society, there are certain “disciplinary institutions,” where individuals are taken out of their social environment and hospitalized for a long time, so that their conduct becomes disciplined. In his book called Discipline and Punish (1995), he discussed the history of the penal system and how the use of power was used in the penal system by the government to control prisoners or people’s actions. Moreover, according to his book, discipline is an instrument of domination and control dedicated to excluding or domesticating divergent behaviors.
To better understand the relationship between knowledge and power, we need to consider Foucault’s concept of freedom. For him, freedom is like a protective weapon. Weapon because it is a natural instrument of defense and struggle, and protection, because it justifies the need for security. Freedom as a weapon of protection is strange since the common-sense mentality is that power increases the responsibility of free will. Overall, we are often unaware of how our actions are being influenced and thus end up easily manipulated by power. I think it is possible to fight against the domination represented by certain patterns of thought and behavior. However, it is not possible to be immune and to completely escape from power relations.
Sources:
Foucault, M., & Gordon, C. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977. New York: Pantheon Books.
Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York: Vintage Books.