Knowledge

Definition

Knowledge, in Foucault's analytics, is inseparable from power — "power/knowledge" names the dual character of the human sciences: the act of knowing a population (its health, its crime rates, its housing) is simultaneously an act of power. Foucault's archaeological and genealogical methods are the historical investigation of how knowledges (medical, penal, psychiatric, architectural) form, transform, and are institutionally embedded. For architecture, knowledge figures in two ways: first, architecture is itself a knowledge — a disciplinary body of techniques, theories, and histories that operates as a "truth game" (Spencer); and second, the study of architecture draws on other knowledges (sociology, economics, philosophy) in the way this wiki exemplifies. Gadamer's hermeneutics provides a counterpoint: knowledge in the human sciences is not the objective knowledge of method but the situated understanding that comes through dialogue and the fusion of horizons.

Key Thinkers

• Michel Foucault — power/knowledge; archaeology and genealogy as methods.
• Gordana Fontana-Giusti — knowledge and power in architectural thought.
• Hans-Georg Gadamer — knowledge as understanding, not method.

Related Concepts

• Power — knowledge's inseparable partner in Foucault's analytics.
• Discipline — the field of power/knowledge targeting individual bodies.
• Hermeneutics — the alternative account of knowledge as understanding.
• Truth and Method — the Gadamerian thesis that knowledge exceeds method.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Foucault for Architects — power/knowledge and architecture.