ABSTRACT
Foucault is not an "epistemologist", but he does take up a philosophical point of view on knowledge, a kind of historical nominalism, and it is haunted by epistemological bias. Knowledge and social power are inextricable, continuous, facets of each other. Knowledge, for him, is prestigious discourse. It is the output of an institutional "discursive apparatus", generating the statements its authorities take seriously, and excluding the extra-institutional claims of subjugated knowledges. With this picture in place it becomes possible to inquire, as Foucault does, into the relation between "knowledge" and power, and there he discovers the reciprocity epitomized in his expression power/knowledge. His conception of knowledge is so biased toward institutionally sanctioned discourse that it is a foregone conclusion he will see no more to "knowing" than who gets to say what, and say it impressively enough to leave a trace, to have an effect, to make a legible difference in the archive.
