Examine the relationship between knowledge and power in modern society?

Discuss with
reference to the work of:
EITHER Bauman
OR Foucault

When examining modern society, we must first establish the definition of modern. In order
to do this, we must look at the timeline of society as a whole and how it has developed until
present-day this allows us to distinguish the key differences between the pre-modern,
modern, and post-modern society.

Reference Gidddens and Hall of what makes society

Although it may be considered an opinion, what defines a modern society has been
understood as by Hall () to be one that has political nation-states, a capitalist/market economy,
social class and patriarchy, and culturally is secular and individualistic. The institutional
dimensions of modernity have been as established by Giddens () to be surveillance, military
power, industrialism and capitalism.

The formation of modernity and enlightenment thinking has roots in 16 th Century, when
medieval worldviews primarily rooted in religious thought where being challenged by
developments in science and philosophy. The hierarchical, static and clerical relationship
between knowledge and power of pre-modern religious thinking, had been challenged by
contrasting ideas about knowledge, humans, society and nature.

Key aspects of Enlightenment thinking are rationalism, empiricism, science, and universalism.
Rationalism the idea that knowledge is based on abstract reasoning independent of
experience, is supported by empiricism the idea that knowledge is based on empirical facts
and can be apprehended through the senses. This rationality supported by empiricism enables
a development of the scientific method including a process of observation that included
describing and categorising and experimentation the systematic testing of a hypothesis.
Essential to enlightenment thought is universalism which underpins all other aforementioned
aspects. Universalism is the idea that the universe is governed by general laws or principles
and it was the role of reason and science to discover these universal truths.

Constituting the relationship between knowledge and power in modern societies is a quest
for order, argues Bauman. Specifically, the idea of a social and intellectual order in which
modernity is obsessively ordering a chaotic reality (Youtube Zygmunt Baumann The
Ambiance of Uncertainty, 29 Jan 2012). The changes leading to developments in the
intellectual orders in science and philosophy where accompanied by the developments in the
social order; what Bauman terms, the Gardening State. The modern nation state its unified
administrative infrastructure, monopoly of violence over a given territory and its technical
capacity for population control became the method in which modernity projected its ideals of
the good society. This quest for order, specifically the Gardening State, is a metaphor
portraying modernity as a garden culture. This quest for order therefore is a garden culture
in which the extermination of weeds is the destructive aspect of the gardeners productive
vision.

Aspiring to elevate science and reason above other modes of knowledge, the social order, the
Gardening State, was informed by the intellectual order, Legislative Reason. Legislative
Reason was used as the tool in which the social order, The Gardening State, was organised.
By applying scientific knowledge and rationality to the project of a good society, Reason in
the form of science or philosophy therefore would legislate, i.e. regulate via enact, the design
and content of the good society. Bauman notes that these underlying themes, the social and
intellectual orders of modernity vis--vis its quest for order incubated the conditions that gave
rise to the Nazis and the Holocaust. The relationship between knowledge and power here, the
universal ambitions of the modern mentality, can be seen to be a brutal one. The quest for
order, ordering the universe, time and space, and imposing order onto nature, supposedly
Examine the relationship between knowledge and power in modern society? Discuss with
reference to the work of:
EITHER Bauman
OR Foucault
justified on rational grounds, implemented, can lead to terrible consequences. The universal
ambitions of the Gardening State with its Legislative Reason can reasonably legisilate
genocide a kind of social weeding. Hitler was but one example of the most uninhibited
[expression] of the spirit of modernity., says Bauman.

The social consequences, often great, often terrible of the universal ambitions of the modern
mentality, can be seen in modern society. The knowledge of sixteenth century knowledge still
has the power to affect contemporary modern society today.

Looking at the social consequences of modern scientific forms of knowledge, we can see
the now discredited (although resurging?) science of eugenics as a prime example of
modernitys destructive aspect of the gardening vision. The social and intellectual orders,
orders of power and knowledge, relay together to weed out the "detrimental types and
characteristics", (Wells, H.G.) (http://www.newstatesman.com/society/2010/12/british-
eugenics-disabled). The knowledge of the intellectual order informed, supported and
reinforced the power of the social order. Eugenicists have had a role in the rationale of
survival of the fittest, of a welfare state for the disenfranchised, of legislature proposing
selective parenthood and the campaigning for the segregation of the unfit. The relationship
between knowledge and power here is one of domination, as well as its quest for order.

Consideration must be given to Foucaults understanding of power and its relationship to

knowledge, and further consideration must be given to their application to modern societies.

Bauman cites Foucaults emphasis on the ubiquity and pervasiveness, and therefore, the
invisibility of power. Bauman cites Foucault to remind the audience that power is akin to a
social organism, and not stored in state officials offices (contrary to popular imagery).
Foucault defines power as action upon an action, on existing actions or on those which may
arise in the present or future. ( ) Therefore, power is intrinsically linked to knowledge.
Knowledge, along with the various technologies used in its production, is a result of power,
and similarly, power is a product of knowledge. De facto, knowledge is power.

We should admit that power produces knowledge, that power and knowledge
directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative
constitution of a field of knowledge. (Foucault, 1980, p.27)

Foucault firstly develops the idea that power constitutes or produces knowledge within the
concept of discourse structures of knowledge and meaning as constructed by language.
Knowledge and power imply each other. Where power is knowledge is found also, and vice
versa. By implication discourse is predicated on explicit and implicit power structures which
are produced and reproduced. Discourse is not neutral but is imbued with power by the
statements and representations produced to create meanings.

Furthermore, Foucault states that power and knowledge directly imply one another, in such
a way that discursive practices i.e. conduct generated by discourse replicate power relations
embedded within any particular discourse and reinforce knowledge produced.

Finally, here, Foucault states there are no power relations without correlative constitutions of
fields of knowledge. He further develops the concept of discourse within regimes of truth
certain manners of conduct and fields of practice in which discourse comes to be established
as truth in a society at any such particular time.