Accounts of knowledge and power have taken two broad forms. On the first, knowledge is content, and power is a contamination that a well-ordered epistemic practice excludes. On the second, associated with Foucault and with the sociology of knowledge, power conditions what may count as knowledge, so that the two are historically inseparable. This paper proposes a third account. Knowledge is a relational structure through which interpretation is coordinated, and every such structure generates asymmetry among its participants. Upon that asymmetry the tendency of a position to maintain itself is itself generative: it produces the conditions of its own continuation. Power in knowledge is this self-maintaining generativity, which places it within generation rather than in opposition to it. Five channels through which an epistemic asymmetry maintains itself are distinguished, following the life of an interpretation (proposal, admission, validation, revision, attribution), together with the cost of exit that prices them. The paper argues that a configuration degrades when the generativity issuing from a position turns to the production of its own conditions, and that the criterion of this turn is the closure of the revision loop: whether an exercise of revision alters the conditions under which the next interpretation is generated. Generative power is treated as power rather than as its benign alternative, marked by the erosion of the conditions on which the exercising position depends. The account is developed across education, intimate relation, international practice, and academic knowledge production, which are taken as instances of one mechanism.
Wanhong HUANG (Mon,) studied this question.