Knowledge and its Enemies: Towards a New Case for Higher Learning ...

embodied in the institution was, to varying degrees, circumscribed by the supervisory authority of the state (1960, 133–135). This proposition contains the basis of a working hypothesis to help explain the intrinsic nature of the relationship between the academy and the state; this will be outlined in the section titled ‘Aims and Methods’.

By this formulation, power and knowledge are distinct, at least in regard to the functional purposes of the state and the university, if not more generally. Each relates to truth claims in ways that create interdependency and complexity between the two. Nonetheless, Foucault saw the intensity and closeness of power-knowledge relations when he noted that truth is ‘not outside power, or deprived of power’, rather, truth is ‘of the world’ produced by virtue of multiple constraints, so that societies have ‘general politics of truth’ and the role of the intellectual is to contribute to the production of truth. This provides a way of seeing knowledge as conditional and ‘of human existence’, rather than in any way existing somehow in itself, which is also Whitehead's point. However, for Foucault, truth and power work together and merge conceptually within a particular social context to produce a ‘regime of truth’. This defines the type of ‘discourse that is created’ (Foucault 1997, 13). When this is taken to mean that true knowledge relates to a ‘privileged discourse’, it impoverishes notions of objective truth, making it only relevant to a particular social context.

A more pragmatic approach derives from the Greek notion of techne , originating from what is the essence of knowledge embodied within a crafted object. The meaning was gradually extended through to higher forms of transferable skill and knowledge, such as those required for the practice of astronomy and medicine. Ultimately, this led to a philosophical conundrum for Plato about whether the concept could also extend to the art of rhetoric and moral reasoning (Roochnik 1996, 10–12), which he ultimately rejected. This present inquiry encounters this very same problem in regard to the ethical and moral dimensions of human technology⁴ as they come into play in relations between knowledge and politics. It is argued that techne, or ‘human technology’, must be conceptualised broadly as the vast technical enterprise that is commonly thought of