# Model: Power-Knowledge (Michel Foucault)

**Author:** Michel Foucault (French philosopher, 1926–1984)

**Core Thesis:** Knowledge is never neutral — it arises in power relations and reproduces them. Truth regimes define what is allowed to count as true. Every claim to objectivity conceals a particular perspective and particular interests.

**Key Concepts:**

- **Pouvoir-Savoir (Power-Knowledge):** Power and knowledge are not separate domains where one influences the other — they are mutually constitutive. There is no knowledge outside power relations, and no power relation that does not simultaneously produce knowledge.

- **Régime de Vérité (Truth Regime):** Every society has its own regime of truth — the types of discourse it accepts, the mechanisms for distinguishing true from false, the techniques valued for attaining truth. Modern truth regimes are managed through scientific institutions, media, and increasingly: algorithms.

- **Epistemic Violence:** The destruction of knowledge forms, worldviews, and languages of marginalized groups. Not mere ignorance but active erasure. Epistemicide — the killing of knowledge systems.

- **Wissen ist situiert (Knowledge is Situated):** Every claim to knowledge comes from a position. The view from nowhere is a myth. Haraway (extending Foucault): "situated knowledges" — partial perspectives are not weaknesses but the condition of genuine knowledge.

- **Maschinelle Epistemologie (Machine Epistemology):** Foucault's framework extended to algorithmic systems: what becomes visible through recommendation algorithms, what disappears, what is amplified. Algorithmic truth regimes.

- **Disciplinary Society → Performance Society:** Foucault's analysis of the disciplinary society (surveillance, normalization, examination) was extended by Han: when discipline is internalized, external surveillance becomes unnecessary.

**Problems Addressed:** PR-00005 (Epistemic Power Concentration), PR-00006 (Platform Feudalism — as epistemic control), PR-00002 (Illegitimate Domination)

**Application:** When an institution claims truth, ask: whose truth? What knowledge forms does this render invisible? What power relations does this claim of objectivity serve?