Fase 3: preparación de la cadena para la producción del bien 54

For Foucault, an analysis of knowledge and perceptions cannot be achieved just through the examples of knowledge (about terrorism) in themselves, because “it is not the activity of the subject of knowledge that produces a corpus of knowledge, useful or resistant to power, but power-knowledge, the processes and struggles that traverse it and of which it is made up, that determines the forms and possible domains of knowledge” (Foucault 1991:28). Therefore, the knowledge disclosed by the participants was subject to the processes involved in knowledge formation, and expressed according to the struggles associated with divulging such information: what Foucault categorised as power-knowledge.

Within the context of this thesis, it was assumed that some awareness of terrorism had been formed and integrated into the pupils' memories due to the “micro-physics of power” (Foucault 1991:26) at play within society. The individuals who expressed the ideas, the ideas in themselves, and the modalities of knowledge, were regarded “as so many effects of these fundamental implications of power-knowledge and their historical transformations” (Foucault 1991:28). This is important because it demonstrates that it is not the content of the pupils' knowledge that is being analysed, but rather the expressions of the power-knowledge processes that were recalled and exercised during

the research process that is under scrutiny.

Within the remit of exploring the effects of this exercised power-knowledge, Foucault suggested that it was through the “dispositions, manoeuvres, tactics, techniques, functionings… [that the] effects of domination are attributed” (Foucault 1991:26). By interpreting these effects of domination as knowable facets of the power-knowledge dynamic, it became possible to produce a framework by which an understanding of this aspect of the data could begin. Therefore, the participants' behaviour, language and inhabited silences did not simply express knowledge about terrorism, but rather the effects of the power-knowledge process, and each of the knowable facets provided a particular insight into how this process functioned within the participant's perceptions of terrorism. However, these facets did not function independently: they formed part of an entire “network of relations” (Foucault 1991:26), that functioned as a whole to produce the perceptions uncovered (and developed) during the research process.

2.4.1 School Discipline

One power-knowledge process identified prior to undertaking the research events was the functionality of school discipline. Foucault provided some initial insights into how discipline was expressed within schools: by the layout or environment of the school; the timetabling and administrative processes; the partitioning and ranking of pupils (according to a hierarchy of knowledge of ability); lesson planning; the classroom layout (such as the use of tables); and the expected behaviours of the pupils towards their teachers (such as putting one's hand up to get attention; see Foucault 1991:141- 154). The 'School' “became a machine for learning” (Foucault 1991:164), thus the activities, behaviours and knowledge exhibited by pupils highlight the success (or

failure) of the disciplinary mechanisms at work. However, each school manipulated the various disciplinary mechanisms to suit their specific needs, thus the specific nature of this power-knowledge process will be discussed in more detail within the context of the initial data collection events (see Chapter 5).

2.4.2 State Power and Surveillance

Another process that affected the pupils' disclosure of perceptions about terrorism (and terrorists) were the mechanics of State power and surveillance. According to Foucault, there are certain strategies used to enforce State power over the population (Foucault 1991:26). Historically, the State would use spectacles of power, such as public executions, to arouse “feelings of terror” (Foucault 1991:58) within the population. However, over time, these spectacles became “intolerable… [because they were perceived as] the thirst for revenge” (Foucault 1991:73), thus forms of punishment were altered from the “attack on bodies to… the seizure of goods” (Foucault 1991:76). This change also affected perceptions of criminality: it was no longer just acts of violence, but rather a broader spectrum of criminal acts that became incorporated into the judicial system. However, such changes had wider repercussions on society because extensions to the scope of criminal acts meant that an increased amount of surveillance was required. Such surveillance would need stricter methods or “new tactics” (Foucault 1991:89) by which to uncover criminals, including “a tighter partitioning of the population” (Foucault 1991:77) and “a new economy and a new technology of the power to punish” (Foucault 1991:89).

In short, Foucault speculated that the new methods of surveillance had led to criminal offences becoming objects of revulsion and that any perpetrators of such crimes were

not simply perceived as wrong but rather as individuals opposed to an entire social body: “in order to punish him, society has the right to oppose him in its entirety... the right to punish has been shifted from the vengeance of the sovereign to the defence of society” (Foucault 1991:90). Thus the physical penalty may have become moderate or 'humane', but the criminal himself would be ostracised from society, an “image of the monster” (Foucault 1991:91) who existed “outside nature” (Foucault 1991:91). In those instances where the crime was deemed extreme, “produced in circumstances so extraordinary, in such profound secrecy... the injury that a crime inflicts upon the social body is the disorder that it introduces into it... the example that it gives, the incitement to repeat it... the possibility of becoming widespread” (Foucault 1991:92). In those circumstances, Foucault speculated that such crimes would not just be punished in their own right, but rather that “prevention was expected as an effect of the punishment” (Foucault 1991:93).

Perhaps this is where the power-knowledge functioned within the pupils' perceptions of terrorism. Terrorist attacks are generally considered examples of extreme criminal acts, that are subject to the punishment and prevention techniques suggested by Foucault. However, to prevent the repetition of such acts, the “profound nature of the criminal himself, the presumable degree of his wickedness” (Foucault 1991:98) needs to be taken into account. Thus, the perpetrators (those defined as terrorists) undergo scrutiny: their images, actions and justifications became part of the “play of representations and signs circulating discreetly but necessarily and evidently in the minds of all” (Foucault 1991:101).

difference, is part of the power of normalization. Hegemony “introduces, as a useful imperative and a result of measurement, all the shading of individual differences” (Foucault 1991:184). Extreme acts of criminality are most noticeably outside the “norm”: they “produce a reality” (Foucault 1991:194) by which perceived representations of this criminality become part of the “normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish” (Foucault 1991:194). However, this power of normalisation also has implications for the pupils themselves: they are not only active participants in using this social surveillance, but they also become subject to the same level of scrutiny, since others will be applying similar forms of surveillance to their mutual surroundings.

In a later series of lectures, Foucault expands on the idea that power-knowledge cannot be exercised “unless a certain economy of discourse of truth functions in, on the basis of, and thanks to, that power” (Foucault 2003:24). This “truth” is expressed and conveyed by laws and justice systems, because it is there that the order of society “has been imposed, the forgotten past of real struggles, actual victories and defeats which may have been disguised but which remain profoundly inscribed” (Foucault 2003:56). Thus the law is a mechanism that has been shaped by the politics of war, and is used to legitimise the exercise of disciplinary power, be that on an international, State, local or even individual level (Foucault 2003:37). It is a case of normalization: normalizing sovereignty and discipline within the scope of some moral and legal “truth” of disciplinary power, to ensure that the mechanisms of power remain active within society (Foucault 2003:39): thus the legal definitions of terrorism should be considered essential to the initial comprehensions of State-defined terrorism, as will be discussed in Chapter 3.