Knowledge is inescapably linked to power because of its connection to “discourse.”...Practices and institutions produce those claims to knowledge that the system of power finds useful. Discourse brings objects into being by identifying, specifying, and defining them. As an example, Foucault cites psychiatry, which declares that schizophrenics exist and then views them as the objects of therapy....

According to Foucault, human knowledge does not merely allow us to exercise power over nature as Bacon had suggested; more significantly, knowledge is violence. The act of knowing, says Foucault, is always an act of violence.

-Stanley J. Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism