Fuentes de información: Primarias y secundarias

Foucault theorizes a complex interaction between power and knowledge whereby the observed individual becomes a source of knowledge: both in terms of what they know and in the context of what can be known about them (Foucault, 2002: 83-84).

Disciplinary power provides the foundation for the productivity of the power/knowledge relationship in its embodiment of practices of observation that makes knowledge about individuals possible and in the way it constitutes skilled, knowing and productive individuals who become sources of knowledge (Foucault, 2002: 83-84). Foucault illustrates the overlapping functions of disciplinary techniques and knowledge in

reference to institutions such the factory, where workers develop a knowledge concerning their labor which is then obtainable through their visibility (Foucault, 2002: 83-84). The power of disciplinary surveillance that arises from observation in these types of

institutions allows further documentation, ordering and the possibility of comparing and contrasting individual workers, thus enabling a further form of knowledge which includes information “about” the individual (Foucault, 2002: 84).

The mechanisms of modern power and their many methods of constituting bodies of knowledge about individuals through observation, measurement, documentation and comparison have allowed power and knowledge to circulate throughout society

(Foucault, 1980: 102). According to Foucault, in modern society there is an encounter between the normalizing effects of disciplinary power, informed by the human sciences

and their associated knowledge, and the traditional juridical discourse of laws associated with sovereign power (Foucault, 1980: 106-107). Foucault explains how disciplinary power has exploited the language of rights and law to gain legitimacy for its norms, creating through this encounter a new role for scientific discourse as a supposedly impartial mediator (Foucault, 1980: 107).

In identifying the significance of the relationship between power and scientific discourse, Foucault has in mind the accumulated knowledge of the social, psychiatric and medical sciences and their increasing importance to politics and the state. In particular Foucault points out that throughout the eighteenth century, the art of medicine gained an increasingly important foothold within the administration of the state, leading to a “medico-administrative” knowledge concerning society and an increasing power of the medical profession (Foucault, 1980: 176). This is important for human life because the individual comes to understand themselves as an object of scientific knowledge. As Foucault argued in The Birth of the Clinic, the clinical practice of medicine became a form of knowledge through transformations that included a re-structuring of the hospital system, a new relation between “medical experience” and “public assistance” and the appropriation of the patient in an enclosed, organized and stable space (Foucault, 1994: 196). Foucault develops the notion of the hospital as a normalizing institution in

prison and factory. Consider the following statement:

Hence, no doubt, the importance that has been given for so long to the small techniques of discipline, to those apparently

insignificant tricks that it has invented, and even to those ‘sciences’ that give it a respectable face; hence the fear of abandoning them if one cannot find any substitute; hence the affirmation that they are at the very foundation of society, and an element in its equilibrium, whereas they are a series of

mechanisms for unbalancing power relations definitively and everywhere; hence the persistence in regarding them as the

humble, but concrete form of every morality,whereas they are a

set of physio-political techniques. (Foucault, 1995: 223)

This passage from Discipline and Punish emphasizes that the status of scientific knowledge in modern society supports the techniques of power, as it is difficult to resist the power that is validated through scientific knowledge with traditional sovereign rights and disciplinary techniques intertwining to form the framework of power in modern society (Foucault, 1980: 108). Arrangements of power/knowledge in modern society have ensured the success of political control of individuals without any need for overt coercive tactics (Allen, 1991: 426). One example of this is the modern workplace. Think of the set

of knowledge and skills that we must achieve to enable us to participate in our

professional roles. As individuals we must acquire the knowledge to meet the standards set by our chosen profession and information about us is acquired by the organization of workplace to ensure we meet the standards. There is little need for outside coercion to ensure that individuals achieve these skills: we judge ourselves according to our capacity to achieve the standards set and how we progress in our professions depends upon it.

Normalization constitutes effective control of human conduct, through the general power of norms characterized by continual visibility and the categorization of individuals in relation to hierarchical limits (Foucault, 1996: 197). For Foucault, subjective

experience corresponds to a multiplicity of subjective states that relate to different aspects of our experiences in the world and this becomes apparent when Foucault argues that subjectivity is a “form” rather than a “substance” (Foucault, 2003a: 33). Foucault also argues against trying to establish a particular identity in favor of forging relations with our selves through creativity and invention (Foucault, 1996: 385).

The History of Sexuality

From a Foucauldian perspective, it is important for every individual to recognize the relationship between knowledge and disciplinary power in order to recognize the possibilities inherent to the character of our lived experience. Foucault alerts us to the dangers of ignoring this relationship with his analysis of the links between power, scientific knowledge and sexuality in modern society. In The History of Sexuality,

by traditional practices of confession, whose truth-producing aims were supported by an intricate relationship with power (Foucault, 2008: 58-59). In the Christian tradition, sex was the favored subject matter of confessional practice situated within the framework of a power relationship with constitutive effects on the confessing subject (Foucault, 2008: 61-62). Because the individual is absolved or pardoned through their confession, they are effectively transformed by the relations of power immanent to the confessional discourse, which extracts from them a disclosure of truth (Foucault, 2008: 62). By confession, Foucault refers to the measures through which individuals are driven to create and express to others, a “discourse of truth” about their own sexuality that embodies significant consequences for subjective experience (Foucault, 1980: 215-216).

Foucault argues that modern society has “…pursued the task of producing true discourses concerning sex, and this by adapting—not without difficulty—the ancient procedure of confession to the rules of scientific discourse.” (Foucault, 2008: 67-68). This opened up human sexuality to standards of normalization, to be classified as normal or abnormal in terms of deviance from the accepted standards of society (Foucault, 2008: 68). Foucault argues:

Thus sex gradually became an object of great suspicion; the general and disquieting meaning that pervades our conduct and our existence, in spite of ourselves; the point of weakness where evil portents reach through to us; the fragment of darkness that

we each carry within us: a general signification, a universal secret, an omnipresent cause, a fear that never ends. (Foucault, 2008: 69)

Foucault’s reflections of normalizing power will be taken up again within my applied analysis of power Section Two, where I will examine the notion that the socio- political responses to the drug and crime problems in Cabramatta worked to shape the way in which members of the community interpreted their subjective experiences. Foucault’s insights on the constitutive processes of power/knowledge reveal how aspects of the response to the crime and drug problems can be understood as discursive practices that were constitutive of constrained forms of subjectivity for members of the Cabramatta community. Within my Foucauldian analysis of the way in which power mediated the lived experience of the Cabramatta community, I will draw extensively on Foucault’s key points about the significance of the relationship between power and knowledge.