Knowledge is power
My savvy roommate Khaled always quoted the French philosopher Michel Foucault that "Knowledge is power". The same statement resonated on few hiphop and rap songs..For my simplistic world view, I understood Khaled by drawing this little graph in my mind:
posted by Tarik @ 8:56 PM
1 Comments:
Just a comment about the quote from Foucault - I don't think he talked about knowledge as a "thing in itself" in the particular context of the quote. I take his ideas to be more about the relation of knowledge to power structures which, while existing because of a monopoly on some knowledge, also are the avenues for enabling/disabling the "recognition" of new pieces of knowledge. For example, widely accepted medical knowledge in the Western world cannot exist without clinics and hospitals. Odd old lady living out in the mountains and healing with herbs has a lot of knowledge but no power. At the same time, a medical specialist has power to diagnose a certain condition, and because the person belongs to a specialist discourse (psychiatry, cardiology, etc), their decisions are considered authoritative and not disputed. It follows that they have power.
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