Research Paper on:
Why Is Power Productive For Foucault?

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a springboard from various social mandates and opportunities. According to Michel Foucault, power is a productive tool because it evolves from knowledge, a possession of information that feeds upon  itself as a perpetually advancing mechanism for progress. Foucaults power/knowledge concept defines the relationship inherent to having power and possessing knowledge.  This coupling - while perhaps more obvious than it actually seems - illustrates how gaining knowledge in a particular area (such as in medicine or criminology) inevitably leads to the  presence of power by virtue of the way each facet augments the others presence. In short, this marriage of power and knowledge has a synergistic impact that far surpasses  the ability of either on its own. Foucault utilizes the turning point of the Enlightenment to illustrate why he considered power a productive tool, which was one of the central  events whereby major thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries established themselves. The Enlightenment is recognized as a time when all of mankind could break free from  the confines of what had heretofore been accepted as a universal recognition of existence; with each individual following in the footsteps of those who went before, without any question as  to why things are accomplished in any certain order, the time for the Enlightenment symbolized the chance to break free from such constraints.  A representation of the need to break free, the Enlightenment was a philosophic movement instrumental in questioning - and ultimately rejecting - what had come to be conventional social, religious  and political ideas to make way for a new, more modernistic approach. During this period, there was a particular emphasis placed upon rationalism, a theory asserting that reason -