In critical theory, power-knowledge is a term introduced by the French philosopher Michel Foucault (French : 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. [1] 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. [2]
Foucault was an epistemological constructivist and historicist. [3] 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 is historically contingent. To Foucault, even the idea of absolute knowledge is a historically contingent idea. This does not, however, lead to epistemological nihilism; rather, Foucault argues that people "always begin anew" when it comes to knowledge. [4]
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.
While in most of the 20th century the term ‘knowledge’ has been closely associated with power, in the last decades ‘information’ has become a central term as well. [5] With the growing use of big-data, information is increasingly seen as the means to generate useful knowledge and power.
One of the recently developed model, known as the Volume and Control Model , [2] describes how information is capitalized by global corporations and transforms into economic power. Volume is defined as the informational resources—the amount and diversity of information and the people producing it. Control is the ability to channel the interaction between information and people through two competing mechanisms: popularization (information relevant to most people), and personalization (information relevant to each individual person).
According to this understanding, knowledge is never neutral, as it determines force relations. The notion of power-knowledge is therefore likely to be employed in critical, normative contexts. One example of the implications of power-knowledge is Google’s monopoly of knowledge, its PageRank algorithm, and its inevitable commercial and cultural biases around the world, which are based on the volume and control principles. A recent study shows, for example, the commercial implications of Google Images algorithm, as all search results for the term 'beauty' in different languages predominantly yield images of young white women. [2]
Cultural imperialism comprises the cultural dimensions of imperialism. The word "imperialism" describes practices in which a country engages culture to create and maintain unequal social and economic relationships among social groups. Cultural imperialism often uses wealth, media power and violence to implement the system of cultural hegemony that legitimizes imperialism.
Discourse is a generalization of the notion of a conversation to any form of communication. Discourse is a major topic in social theory, with work spanning fields such as sociology, anthropology, continental philosophy, and discourse analysis. Following pioneering work by Michel Foucault, these fields view discourse as a system of thought, knowledge, or communication that constructs our world experience. Since control of discourse amounts to control of how the world is perceived, social theory often studies discourse as a window into power. Within theoretical linguistics, discourse is understood more narrowly as linguistic information exchange and was one of the major motivations for the framework of dynamic semantics. In these expressions, ' denotations are equated with their ability to update a discourse context.
Paul-Michel Foucault was a French historian of ideas and philosopher who was also an author, literary critic, political activist, and teacher. Foucault's theories primarily addressed the relationships between power versus knowledge and liberty, and he analyzed how they are used as a form of social control through multiple institutions. Though often cited as a structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels and sought to critique authority without limits on himself. His thought has influenced academics within a large number of contrasting areas of study, with this especially including those working in anthropology, communication studies, criminology, cultural studies, feminism, literary theory, psychology, and sociology. His efforts against homophobia and racial prejudice as well as against other ideological doctrines have also shaped research into critical theory and Marxism–Leninism alongside other topics.
The sociology of knowledge is the study of the relationship between human thought, the social context within which it arises, and the effects that prevailing ideas have on societies. It is not a specialized area of sociology. Instead, it deals with broad fundamental questions about the extent and limits of social influences on individuals' lives and the social-cultural basis of our knowledge about the world. The sociology of knowledge has a subclass and a complement. Its subclass is sociology of scientific knowledge. Its complement is the sociology of ignorance.
The concept of a carceral archipelago was first used by the French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault in his 1975 publication, Surveiller et Punir, to describe the modern penal system of the 1970s, embodied by the well-known penal institution at Mettray in France. The phrase combines the adjective "carceral", which means that which is related to jail or prison, with archipelago—a group of islands. Foucault referred to the "island" units of the "archipelago" as a metaphor for the mechanisms, technologies, knowledge systems and networks related to a carceral continuum. The 1973 English publication of the book by Solzhenitsyn called The Gulag Archipelago referred to the forced labor camps and prisons that composed the sprawling carceral network of the Soviet Gulag.
Constructivism is a view in the philosophy of science that maintains that scientific knowledge is constructed by the scientific community, which seeks to measure and construct models of the natural world. According to constructivists, natural science consists of mental constructs that aim to explain sensory experiences and measurements, and that there is no single valid methodology in science but rather a diversity of useful methods. They also hold that the world is independent of human minds, but knowledge of the world is always a human and social construction. Constructivism opposes the philosophy of objectivism, embracing the belief that human beings can come to know the truth about the natural world not mediated by scientific approximations with different degrees of validity and accuracy.
Relevance is the concept of one topic being connected to another topic in a way that makes it useful to consider the second topic when considering the first. The concept of relevance is studied in many different fields, including cognitive sciences, logic, and library and information science. Most fundamentally, however, it is studied in epistemology. Different theories of knowledge have different implications for what is considered relevant and these fundamental views have implications for all other fields as well.
The History of Sexuality is a four-volume study of sexuality in the Western world by the French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault, in which the author examines the emergence of "sexuality" as a discursive object and separate sphere of life and argues that the notion that every individual has a sexuality is a relatively recent development in Western societies. The first volume, The Will to Knowledge, was first published in 1976; an English translation appeared in 1978. The Use of Pleasure, and The Care of the Self, were published in 1984. The fourth volume, Confessions of the Flesh, was published posthumously in 2018.
In philosophy, episteme is knowledge or understanding. The term epistemology is derived from episteme.
Governmentality is a concept first developed by the French philosopher Michel Foucault, roughly between 1977 and his death in 1984, particularly in his lectures at the Collège de France during this time.
Biopolitics is a concept popularized by the French philosopher Michel Foucault in the mid-20th century. At its core, biopolitics explores how governmental power operates through the management and regulation of a population's bodies and lives.
In social theory and philosophy, antihumanism or anti-humanism is a theory that is critical of traditional humanism, traditional ideas about humanity and the human condition. Central to antihumanism is the view that philosophical anthropology and its concepts of "human nature", "man" or "humanity" should be rejected as historically relative, ideological or metaphysical.
Paul M. Rabinow was a professor of anthropology at the University of California (Berkeley), director of the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory (ARC), and former director of human practices for the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC). He worked with, and wrote extensively about, the French philosopher Michel Foucault.
Knowledge organization (KO), organization of knowledge, organization of information, or information organization is an intellectual discipline concerned with activities such as document description, indexing, and classification that serve to provide systems of representation and order for knowledge and information objects. According to The Organization of Information by Joudrey and Taylor, information organization:
examines the activities carried out and tools used by people who work in places that accumulate information resources for the use of humankind, both immediately and for posterity. It discusses the processes that are in place to make resources findable, whether someone is searching for a single known item or is browsing through hundreds of resources just hoping to discover something useful. Information organization supports a myriad of information-seeking scenarios.
In philosophy, genealogy is a historical technique in which one questions the commonly understood emergence of various philosophical and social beliefs by attempting to account for the scope, breadth, or totality of discourse, thus extending the possibility of analysis. Moreover, a genealogy often attempts to look beyond the discourse in question toward the conditions of their possibility. It has been developed as a continuation of the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Genealogy is opposed to the Marxist use of ideology to explain the totality of historical discourse within the time period in question by focusing on a singular or dominant discourse (ideology).
Individuals often maintain different versions of themselves in different types of relationships, such as in familial, romantic, and professional relationships. Within each type of relationship, the way an individual acts can change because of the varied nature of each of these relationships. Many describe these different behaviors as "fake selves" used to maintain certain impressions. The term Crystallized Self states that if there are no fake or real selves, then the self must be crystallized, and doesn't change based on who the individual is interacting with. This concept is the preface to the idea of crystallized behavior. The nature of this type of behavior is fluid, multidimensional, and complex. Described experientially, it is when an individual alters their behavior, language, and identity depending on the context with which they are interacting. The Crystallized Self includes ideas of (1) disciplining; (2) multiple facets of identity; (3) the gendered work involved in boundary-spanning; critical intersectionality; and (5) qualitative research. These bring into question how "fluid" our selves can possibly be. Understanding the different dimensions of identity and self has been a continuously researched topic. Dr. Peter Burke, a professor in Cambridge University, stated, "Identities tell us who we are and they announce to others who we are... Identities subsequently guide behavior, leading "fathers" to behave like "fathers" and "nurses" to act like "nurses.""
In critical theory, philosophy, sociology, and psychoanalysis, the gaze, in the figurative sense, is an individual's awareness and perception of other individuals, other groups, or oneself. Since the 20th century, the concept and the social applications of the gaze have been defined and explained by phenomenologist, existentialist, and post-structuralist philosophers. Jean-Paul Sartre described the gaze in Being and Nothingness (1943). Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), developed the concept of the gaze to illustrate the dynamics of socio-political power relations and the social dynamics of society's mechanisms of discipline. Jacques Derrida, in The Animal That Therefore I Am (1997), elaborated upon the inter-species relations that exist among human beings and other animals, which are established by way of the gaze.
World disclosure refers to how things become intelligible and meaningfully relevant to human beings, by virtue of being part of an ontological world – i.e., a pre-interpreted and holistically structured background of meaning. This understanding is said to be first disclosed to human beings through their practical day-to-day encounters with others, with things in the world, and through language.
Within academia, the history of knowledge is the field covering the accumulated and known human knowledge constructed or discovered during human history and its historic forms, focus, accumulation, bearers, impacts, mediations, distribution, applications, societal contexts, conditions and methods of production. It is related to, yet separate from, the history of science, the history of scholarship and the history of philosophy. The scope of the history of knowledge encompass all the discovered and created fields of human-derived knowledge such as logic, philosophy, mathematics, science, sociology, psychology and data mining.
On the proposal of Jules Vuillemin, a chair in the department of Philosophy and History was created at the Collège de France to replace the late Jean Hyppolite. The title of the new chair was The history of systems of thought and it was created on November 30, 1969. Vuillemin put forward Michel Foucault to the general assembly of professors and Foucault was duly elected on 12 April 1970. He was 44 years old, and at the time was relatively unknown beyond the borders of his native France. As required by this appointment, he held a series of public lectures from 1970 until his death in 1984. These lectures, in which he further advanced his work, were summarised from audio recordings and edited by Michel Senellart. They were subsequently translated into English and further edited by Graham Burchell and published posthumously by St Martin's Press.
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