“Finally, there is a fourth characteristic of power - a power that, in a sense, traverses and drives those other powers. I’m thinking of an epistemological power-that is, a power to extract a knowledge from individuals and to extract a knowledge about those individuals -who are subjected to observation and already controlled by those different powers. This occurs, then, in two different ways. In an institution like the factory, for example, the worker’s labor and the worker’s knowledge about his own labor, the technical improvements - the little inventions and discoveries, the micro adaptations he’s able to implement in the course of his labor - are immediately recorded, thus extracted from his practice, accumulated by the power exercised over him through supervision. In this way, the worker’s labor is gradually absorbed into a certain technical knowledge of production which will enable a strengthening of control. So we see how there forms a knowledge that’s extracted from the individuals themselves and derived from their own behavior.”
