ABSTRACT
Power and Science are two principles1 resulting from and constitutive of the struggles that societies face when they attempt to govern themselves. Self-governance necessarily requires the attribution of meaning to social and natural facts. The attribution of meaning is based on the identification, manifestation and justification of regularities and recurrent modes of relationship between object and subject; the structural context and agency, knowledge and power. In this regard, governing an object always entails governing a social relation, including relations with the natural environment (‘societal nature relations’, Görg 2003). Such processes necessitate knowledge, both as a precondition and a result of social action and societal nature relations. According to Görg, ‘the societal mediatedness of facts of nature’ (‘gesellschaftliche Vermitteltheit aller Naturtatsachen’) (Görg 2003:11) also results from a dialectical negotiating process between existing patterns of perception of what can be known, and the equally selectively arranged establishment of the conditions and rules under which knowledge about the ‘facts of nature’ develop. These conditions and rules that regulate knowledge about nature cannot be considered or analysed without taking into account the conditions and rules for the regulation of nature, that is, the societal nature relations themselves. Somehow, this is nothing particularly new. Since Plato we have known that knowledge cannot exist independently from power. This does not simply mean that knowledge is subordinated to political power, because real knowledge can only develop under these circumstances (Foucault 1994/2005: 146). Here the cat bites its own tail as the German proverb says whilst sitting in Schrödinger’s box and thinking about the chicken-and-egg causality dilemma.
