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.

A third, design-reform sense — knowledge as visible art-quality. In the Victorian design-reform discourse the wiki ingests through Christopher Dresser, "knowledge" names a manifestation: a property the designed object itself displays, legible in its proportions and combinations. Dresser's chapter on repose makes the designed surface's epistemic character the criterion of its success: "In the absence of a manifestation of knowledge, and in the absence of harmony, there cannot be repose" (p. 86) — knowledge not possessed but shown, and shown so the eye can rest on it. The best effects are "attained by the expenditure of special skill or knowledge" (p. 87), and exact knowledge is citable, written, teachable (the referral to Principles of Decorative Design, 1873, "pp 40, 47, 48"). Here knowledge functions as an aesthetic quality and a professional claim — the decorator's warrant to judge — rather than as a power-formation; the two senses share only the assumption that knowing and making are inseparable.

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.
• Christopher Dresser — the design-reform register: knowledge as the "manifestation" a decoration must display to achieve repose, and the professional's citable science of proportion and colour (1876).

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.
• On the Means by which Repose is Attainable in Decoration (Dresser 1876/2006) — the design-reform sense: "In the absence of a manifestation of knowledge, and in the absence of harmony, there cannot be repose" (p. 86); effects "attained by the expenditure of special skill or knowledge… are the best" (p. 87); exact proportions delegated to a citable treatise (Principles of Decorative Design, 1873, pp. 40, 47, 48, p. 88) — knowledge as the decoration's visible, professional, teachable quality.