Knowledge as Oppression: M. Foucault | Power/Knowledge | #Philosophy

Michel Foucault was one of the most famous thinkers of the late 20th century, achieving celebrity-like status before his untimely death in 1984.
Foucault's theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions.
Born in Poitiers, France, into an upper-middle-class family, Foucault was educated at the Lycée Henri-IV, at the École Normale Supérieure, where he developed an interest in philosophy and came under the influence of his tutors Jean Hyppolite and Louis Althusser, and at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), where he earned degrees in philosophy and psychology.
From 1966 to 1968, Foucault lectured at the University of Tunis before returning to France, where he became head of the philosophy department at the new experimental university of Paris VIII.

Michel Foucault. Goodreads
Foucault was interested in power and social change. In particular, he studied how these played out as France shifted from a monarchy to democracy via the French revolution.
He believed that we have tended to oversimplify this transition by viewing it as an ongoing and inevitable attainment of “freedom” and “reason”. This, he said, had caused us to misunderstand the way that power operates in modern societies.
Power/knowledge
Foucault argued that knowledge and power are intimately bound up. So much so, that that he coined the term “power/knowledge” to point out that one is not separate from the other.
Every exercise of power depends on a scaffold of knowledge that supports it. And claims to knowledge advance the interests and power of certain groups while marginalising others. In practice, this often legitimises the mistreatment of these others in the name of correcting and helping them.
What has made Foucault so appealing to such a broad range of scholars is that he didn’t just look at abstract theories of philosophy or of historical change.
The power problem is central to his thinking regarding the relations between
society, individuals, groups and institutions. He investigated this problem from a critical
and historical viewpoint in books
, the power is more like something that acts and
operates in a certain way, it's more a strategy than a possession Foucault sees it as co-
extensive with resistance, as a productive factor, because it has positive effects such as
the individual's self-making, and because, as a condition of possibility for any relation,
it is ubiquitous, being found in any type of relation between the mem
Foucault thinks that it is wrong to consider power as something that the institutions possess and use oppressively against individuals and groups, so he tries to move the analysis one step beyond viewing power as the plain oppression of the powerless by the powerful, aiming to examine how it operates in day to day interactions between people and institutions.

Usually, #power is understood as the capacity of an agent to impose his will over the will of the powerless, or the ability to force them to do things they do not wish to do. In this sense, power is understood as possession, as something owned by those in power. But in Foucault's opinion, power is not something that can be owned, but rather something that acts and manifests itself in a certain way; it is more a strategy than a possession: „Power must be analyzed as something which circulates, or as something which only functions in the form of a chain . . . Power is employed and exercised through a netlike organization . . . Individuals are the vehicles of power, not its points of application”.9 This way of understanding power hat two key features: a) power is a system, a network of relations encompassing the whole society, rather than a relation between the oppressed and the oppressor; b) individuals are not just the objects of power, but they are the locus where the power and the resistance to it are exerted

Conceiving power as strategy and not as possession means to think of it as something that has to be exerted and not something that can simply be acquired
For Foucault, the state is not mainly something that owns power, but rather something which builds a system of relations between individuals so that the political system works.
In conclusion, Foucault analyses the relations between individuals and society without assuming that the individual is powerless compared to institutions, groups or the state. He doesn't minimize the restrictions imposed to individuals, but thinks that power is not concentrated, but diffuse throughout the whole society.
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