Knowledge in Motion: Power, Media, and Circulation
The circulation of knowledge—its production, distribution, and reception—is rarely neutral. Across history and disciplines, thinkers have interrogated who controls knowledge, how it travels, and the power structures it embodies. Examining these dynamics illuminates not only the mechanics of information but also the ethical and political stakes of knowledge itself. Three interconnected questions guide this inquiry: who controls circulation, how media shape what circulates, and what power structures govern knowledge.
Who Controls Circulation? Marx, Gramsci, Bourdieu
The question of control lies at the heart of the political economy of knowledge. Karl Marx argued that knowledge is intimately tied to material relations; the ruling class, by controlling the “means of mental production,” shapes ideology to reflect and perpetuate its interests. Knowledge, in this framework, is not a neutral repository of truth but a tool of social domination, entwined with economic power.
Antonio Gramsci refined this insight with the notion of cultural hegemony. Beyond overt coercion, elites maintain dominance by circulating ideas that appear natural, universal, and commonsensical. Education, literature, and popular culture thus operate as channels for knowledge that reproduces existing social hierarchies. Circulation becomes an instrument of consent, not merely a vehicle for information.
Pierre Bourdieu deepens the analysis by exploring symbolic power in academic and institutional fields. Knowledge is circulated unevenly, privileging those with the appropriate credentials, networks, and cultural capital. Universities, journals, and professional institutions are not neutral arbiters; they mediate who is authorized to speak and whose knowledge is considered legitimate. In this sense, control is exercised subtly through recognition, authority, and institutional gatekeeping rather than solely through economic or coercive power.
How Media Shape What Circulates: Lippmann, Chomsky, McLuhan
Even when knowledge exists, its journey is mediated by forms of communication. Walter Lippmann famously described a world in which individuals encounter only “pseudo-environments”: representations of reality filtered and simplified by media, shaping public perception. Knowledge circulation, therefore, is not merely about access but about distortion, framing, and selective visibility.
Noam Chomsky, in collaboration with Edward S. Herman, formalized this insight in Manufacturing Consent. News, they argue, passes through structural filters—corporate ownership, advertising dependency, reliance on official sources—which systematically privilege elite perspectives. Circulation is engineered to reinforce existing power dynamics, with media acting as both conduit and constraint.
Marshall McLuhan complements these perspectives by emphasizing the medium itself. In “the medium is the message,” McLuhan contends that the form of communication—print, radio, television, digital—shapes not only how knowledge travels but also how it is experienced and understood. The circulation of knowledge is inseparable from the technological and sensory frameworks that carry it, with each medium imprinting its own logic upon information.
Knowledge as Inseparable from Power: Foucault, Haraway, Spivak
Control and mediation intersect with broader structures of power, which determine the legitimacy, authority, and epistemic weight of knowledge. Michel Foucault introduced the notion of “power/knowledge,” showing that knowledge is both an instrument and effect of power. Institutions—from prisons to hospitals to schools—produce and circulate truth in ways that enforce norms, surveil populations, and discipline behavior. Knowledge is thus inseparable from governance and social control.
Donna Haraway, by contrast, interrogates embedded epistemic assumptions. In Situated Knowledges, she critiques the illusion of disembodied, universal knowledge, arguing that knowledge circulates through specific positions, bodies, and contexts. Recognizing the situatedness of knowledge challenges the authority of supposedly neutral forms of circulation, revealing the partiality and contingency of what travels as truth.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak extends the critique to global hierarchies. She emphasizes that knowledge about marginalized communities often circulates in ways that silence or misrepresent subaltern voices. Knowledge is not only filtered by institutions and media but also structured through colonial and postcolonial epistemic hierarchies. Circulation, in this sense, is not neutral: it reproduces inequalities even as it appears as universal or objective.
Conclusion
Across these frameworks, a coherent pattern emerges: knowledge is never free-floating. It is controlled by economic, cultural, and institutional powers; mediated by technologies and media; and structured by epistemic hierarchies that define what counts as legitimate. Marx, Gramsci, and Bourdieu reveal the social forces controlling circulation; Lippmann, Chomsky, and McLuhan show how media shape perception; and Foucault, Haraway, and Spivak illuminate the power-laden structures that govern what knowledge is recognized, shared, and internalized. Together, these perspectives highlight the ethical and political urgency of critically examining not just what we know, but how it moves through the world.
Fictional Case Studies of Harm from Obstructed Knowledge
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go
Ishiguro’s quietly devastating novel stages ignorance as the most intimate form of domination. The students at Hailsham are raised in a fog of omission: teachers skirt around the truth, euphemisms abound, and the children themselves sense but cannot articulate the horror of their future. By the time they “discover” their role as organ donors, their lives are already foreclosed — they have been written into death from the start. Here the link to Mbembe’s necropolitics is striking. For Mbembe, modern sovereignty often governs through abandonment and through the production of “superfluous humanity,” populations maintained only to be expended. Ishiguro makes this abstract insight painfully concrete: ignorance is not an accident but a governing technology, a way of scripting lives into slow-motion death without open violence.
George Orwell’s 1984
In Orwell’s world, ignorance is not passive but actively manufactured. The Party controls circulation itself: information is endlessly revised, contradictions are institutionalized, and memory is made unstable. Winston Smith’s tragedy lies not only in physical torture but in epistemic collapse — he can no longer distinguish truth from falsehood, or even his own memories from the Party’s fabrications. Where Ishiguro shows ignorance as absence, Orwell depicts ignorance as saturation: too much false knowledge, drowning out truth. Hannah Arendt might be a useful companion here; she argued that totalitarian systems thrive by making reality itself unstable, so that people cannot orient themselves. Winston’s annihilation is less about bullets than about the impossibility of knowing.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
Shelley frames ignorance as social exclusion. The creature is not born monstrous but made so by the absence of recognition and instruction. He learns language by eavesdropping, literature by chance, but never receives the social knowledge necessary to belong. Meanwhile, Victor Frankenstein hoards scientific knowledge, refusing to circulate it responsibly. The violence of the novel emerges from these asymmetries: the hoarding of dangerous secrets on one side, the deprivation of essential human learning on the other. The creature embodies “unhomeliness” — existing in the world but denied a place within it. His violence is the expression of a life structured by ignorance, imposed from without.
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale
Gilead institutionalizes ignorance. Women are denied literacy, forbidden to know their bodies, and excluded from any broader sense of history or politics. Knowledge is stratified, and the costs are immediate: the handmaids live in a condition of what Michel Foucault might describe as “biopolitical management,” their reproductive capacities controlled while their epistemic capacities are stripped away. Offred survives not by brute force but by scavenging scraps of illicit knowledge — a smuggled phrase, a whispered rumor. The novel suggests that knowledge itself becomes a form of resistance, and its deprivation, a form of violence.
Synthesis
These novels map the multiple forms harm-through-ignorance can take: Ishiguro’s slow necropolitical scripting of life into death; Orwell’s epistemic saturation and collapse; Shelley’s portrayal of exclusion and withheld recognition; Atwood’s institutionalized deprivation of literacy and autonomy. What unites them is their recognition that ignorance is rarely natural or neutral. It is shaped, cultivated, and enforced — a technology of power that can kill as surely as any weapon.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go: Necropolitics of Ignorance
Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go offers one of the most precise literary dramatizations of necropolitics: the way sovereignty manages death not through spectacular killing, but through quiet bureaucratic abandonment. The children at Hailsham are not lied to outright; instead, they are raised in a haze of omissions, hints, and euphemisms. Guardians refer to their futures obliquely, suggesting they will “donate” or “complete,” but never articulating the brutal truth that their lives are already written into death.
What makes the novel so devastating is not that the students never know, but that they know just enough. Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth all sense, from an early age, that something is profoundly wrong — yet they lack the full conceptual framework to name it. Their ignorance is cultivated, carefully managed, and never entirely eliminated. In this, Ishiguro captures exactly what Achille Mbembe identifies as the operation of necropolitics: populations are not merely killed but are condemned to a suspended existence, a “living death,” where they are kept alive only to be expended.
The mechanics of ignorance in Never Let Me Go serve this function perfectly. If the children were told nothing, they might rebel against the shock of revelation. If they were told everything, they might refuse to comply. But by being told just enough, their futures become inescapable. They are socialized into docile compliance, resigned to their fate before they can imagine an alternative. Knowledge here is not absent but dosed — administered like a drug, calibrated to produce obedience.
The harm is twofold:
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Physical harm — they are harvested and die young.
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Existential harm — their capacity to act, resist, or even fully grieve is foreclosed by ignorance. The novel’s most haunting feature is how calmly the characters accept their fate, not because they lack intelligence, but because they were never allowed to know in a way that could disrupt the system.
In this sense, Ishiguro does not simply write a dystopian allegory of cloning. He writes a parable of necropolitics in modern society, where “superfluous populations” are managed through systems of half-knowledge and bureaucratic opacity. What the students experience at Hailsham is the same logic that governs “organized abandonment” in real-world political economies: lives suspended between living and dying, trapped by the circulation of carefully restricted knowledge.
