Power-knowledge

In critical theory, power-knowledge is a term introduced by the French philosopher Michel Foucault (le savoir-pouvoir). According to Foucault's understanding, power is based on knowledge and makes use of knowledge; on the other hand, power reproduces knowledge by shaping it in accordance with its anonymous intentions. Power creates and recreates its own fields of exercise through knowledge. The relationship between power and knowledge has been always a central theme in the social sciences. In his 1934 play ‘The Rock’ T. S. Eliot wrote: ‘Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?’. This division between information, knowledge and wisdom inspired many generations of information scientists later on. In the field of political economy, Harold Innis wrote extensively on the "monopoly of knowledge", in which empires over the history exploited information and communication resources to produce exclusive knowledge and power. In 1943, C. S. Lewis wrote that power granted by knowledge was not power over nature, as commonly supposed, but was instead power that some men wielded over others, using nature to do so. Foucault was an epistemological constructivist and historicist. Foucault was critical of the idea that humans can reach "absolute" knowledge about the world. A fundamental goal in many of Foucault's works is to show how that which has traditionally been considered as absolute, universal and true in fact are historically contingent. To Foucault, even the idea of absolute knowledge is a historically contingent idea. This does however not lead to epistemological nihilism; rather, Foucault argues that we "always begin anew" when it comes to knowledge. Foucault incorporated mutuality into his neologism power-knowledge, the most important part of which is the hyphen that links the two aspects of the integrated concept together (and alludes to their inherent inextricability). In his later works, Foucault suggests that power-knowledge was later replaced in the modern world, with the term governmentality which points to a specific mentality of governance.