ABSTRACT
Science is, as Jean-François Lyotard reminds us, ‘a force of production a moment in the circulation of capital’. What he means by this is that technology creates wealth by making production more efficient. This gives companies an edge over their competitors so that the scientific knowledge that drives the production of new technologies is valuable inasmuch as it contributes towards adding value to the product. Understanding the way in which categories like ‘deviant’ and ‘normal’ are constructed is of vital importance in any study of the effects of scientific power because some of the most pernicious applications of scientific theory have emerged from studies that assumed that the elimination of a behaviour or a set of persons identified as deviant was a morally justifiable proposition. One of the most sustained studies of the concept of deviance and how it can be understood in connection with the history of scientific thought appears in the work of Michel Foucault.
