The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon

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It is really in this political perspective that the notion of “human nature” must be entirely historicized and led back to the work of a culture. By taking into account the body, life, and death, Foucault sought precisely to discuss and destabilize the natureculture and the nature-history oppositions established in our civilization.

Luca Paltrinieri

See Also

Abnormal

Human Sciences

Madness

Man

Structuralism

The Ancients (Stoics and Cynics)

Xavier Bichat

Immanuel Kant

Suggested Reading

Daston, Lorraine, and Francisco Vidal, eds. 2004. The Moral Authority of Nature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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of rules for “the House of young prisoners in Paris” (EDP, 6), drafted in the 1830s. Foucault directs his readers’ attention to the contrast in these two “penal styles” (EDP, 7). Whereas Damiens was vanquished, vastly and deinitively overpowered by the sovereign he had attacked, Faucher’s young prisoners were caught up and inserted into a system of tight control. Unlike Damiens, they were not eradicated; rather, their time, bodies, and conduct were carefully scheduled and regulated, and they were kept under constant surveillance so that the slightest deviation in protocol could be noticed and immediately corrected. This effort to “correct” involved the exercise of a power quite different from the prohibitions and extractions typical of a sovereign regime. It was less centralized, more pervasive, largely detached from any single authority igure, and intimately connected to a new experience of what Foucault calls “evolutive” time (EDP, 160), the temporality of living development.

Damiens came into direct conlict with a king. Faucher’s young prisoners were absorbed into a disciplinary system that sought not only to oppose and neutralize them as threats but also to transform them into something that system deemed useful. The point of Damiens’s elaborate execution was to make a stunning and awe-inspiring display of sovereign excess. Nothing could be further from the point a century later; punishment was to be eficient (only as expensive as necessary for effectiveness), and, where possible, it was to be productive (it was to add to the regime’s capacity in some way so as to offset any necessary expenditure). By the end of the nineteenth century, Foucault tells us, the techniques of disciplinary eficiency had triumphed in penal practice and elsewhere, displacing the deductive techniques of sovereign power. And in the process – in the gradual coalescence of techniques and tactics into extensive strategies – disciplinary power had become normalizing power.

Just as it is important to distinguish disciplinary power from sovereign power, it is important to distinguish disciplinary power per se from normalizing disciplinary power. Disciplines are collections of techniques for acting on bodies not just to extract some “product” such as labor or gestures of fealty (as sovereign power seeks to do) but to change those bodies, to train them to do something they otherwise would not have done as eficiently or at all. Foucault’s classic example (EDP, 163) is the training of soldiers to use riles, which, unlike the muskets that preceded them, had to be loaded, rightly aimed, ired, and reloaded in the heat of the battle very quickly (because the enemy was also able to reload and ire very quickly). Hence, military discipline sought to instill a new capacity in soldiers. In this and similar capacity-cultivating endeavors, disciplines require repetitive exercise or drills, which, in order to bring about improvement in speed, aim, or any other skills an oficer, teacher, or factory supervisor might want to develop in a soldier, pupil, or laborer, must be graduated, not simply repetitive, so that the body is challenged and moved to improve. The effect of graduated disciplinary exercises is to slowly change the “natural” behavior of bodies subjected to them, to create new habits or a “second

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nature.” Such techniques had been used in monasteries and convents for hundreds of years before they found their way into secular institutions. But in the eighteenth century, with the invention of new weaponry and wealth-production technologies, new divisions of labor in industry, and the pressure of rapidly rising populations in schools, hospitals, and elsewhere, religious disciplinary techniques were adapted to solve secular management problems and to use resources more eficiently.

Normalization emerged when the reinement and spread of secular disciplinary technologies began to occasion development of new technologies of recordkeeping, techniques both for tracking disciplinary practices and for assessing their effectiveness. A century earlier, the science of statistics had made data analysis possible in unprecedented ways. Eighteenth-century institutional authorities and management theorists adopted statistical analysis, inding it to be a very useful tool for measuring the progress of their charges and comparing them to one another. In time, out of these various management practices and the kinds of knowledge they enabled and incorporated, analysts produced norms – that is, average or typical temporal trajectories for the acquisition of various skills or capacities in various populations of individuals. In other words, statistical analysis of disciplinary records made it possible to project a normal developmental course for virtually any given type of acquisition, to measure an individual’s progress against this “norm,” and, inally, to categorize some individuals as off course or deviant in relation to their cohort.

Normalizing disciplinary techniques are therefore disciplinary techniques that operate in accordance with such norms, measuring individuals and classifying them with regard to standards of normality. In some cases, normalizing disciplines also generate and deploy techniques for disciplining deviation to bend individuals’ developmental trajectories back to a normal developmental path. But they need not do so. In fact, Foucault argues that normalizing regimes of power require the continued existence of a certain amount of abnormality or deviance both to give deinite sense to norms in the irst place and to justify continued imposition of discipline (that is, to support their maintenance and expansion).

In several important senses, moreover, normalizing disciplines actually create deviation. For example, in Discipline and Punish, Foucault argues that normalizing disciplines create the igure of the criminal or delinquent (as opposed to the lawbreaker) (EDP, 101). In his lecture courses of 1973–1974 (psychiatric power) and 1974–1975 (abnormal), he examines the ways in which normalizing regimes of power/knowledge continually produce a “residual” or “residue” (ECF-PP, 53–54), a set of individuals who cannot be assimilated into a given disciplinary system and thus for whom a new set of disciplinary mechanisms must be devised. Thus, for example, modern pedagogical techniques identiied children who did not and seemingly could not learn in response to current teaching practices and within existing institutional frameworks. These became the “idiots” or the “retarded,” pupils for whom

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new pedagogical techniques, new disciplinary structures and mechanisms, had to be invented (ECF-PP, 203–214). In this way, pedagogical normalization created the conditions for its own expansion.

In comparison with sovereign power and its technologies of deduction, normalizing disciplinary techniques are demonstratively eficacious in projects of organizing and managing people and of cultivating new resources for exploitation. As a result, they have proliferated. Such techniques, along with the normalizing conceptual frameworks and kinds of knowledge they produce, take hold not only in areas of society where earlier regimes of power had not penetrated but also in what were once strongholds of the older sovereign power such as the courts and penal system. In the process, what Foucault calls “the Psy function” (ECF-PP, 85), meaning the techniques and assumptions characteristic of psychiatry and related ields, increases tremendously in social authority and political and economic clout. But developmental thinking is not conined to psychology; it pervades all of the human or social sciences as well as biology, medicine, and even politics. People begin to think in terms of development, to understand themselves in terms of developmental categories and deviant identities, to understand the world in general as a series of temporally structured, normable occurrences. As a consequence, we see the emergence of a normalized society where everyone and almost everything (from economic trends to crop production) is understood as normal or deviant from some norm in some measurable degree.

Crucial to the spread of normalizing disciplines are close and constant surveillance techniques, for without careful observation of individuals, norms cannot be generated and deviations cannot be noted, classiied, or corrected. Surveillance is costly in terms of time as well as material resources, however, so every effort must be made to generate techniques that are minimal in material cost without any compromise of epistemic productivity. In this connection, Foucault points to Jeremy Bentham’s architectural design for a model prison, the Panopticon, as the embodiment of the general principle of normalizing (as opposed to sovereign) power (EDP, 208). The Panopticon was to consist of a central tower surrounded by a multistory circle of prison cells. Each cell was barred rather than walled on both its interior and exterior sides, although completely walled off from adjacent cells. This design allowed for natural illumination of cell occupants through the course of the day, so that a supervisor in the tower could monitor all prisoners’ behavior at all times. The tower itself was to be afforded no such natural illumination. On the contrary, its windows were narrow, and the interior contained angled partitions to prevent backlighting of the tower’s occupant. Thus the prisoners were rendered completely visible, whereas the supervisor was rendered completely invisible. In this architectural arrangement, prisoners might be watched constantly with but the smallest imaginable staff of prison oficials. In fact, since prisoners could never be sure when they were or were not being watched, it was possible not to staff the tower at all at

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times without losing any punitive effect or social order; because prisoners would tend always to behave as if they were being watched, they would police themselves with no expenditure on the part of the regime. The Panopticon thus functioned as something like a surveillance machine, operating to inluence the conduct of prisoners whether or not it actually had a human operator at any given moment. Bentham suggested that this model could be adapted for use in a variety of other settings, including schools, factories, and hospitals. Indeed, although Bentham’s Panopticon itself was never actually built, similar designs have been used in the construction of some such institutions since Bentham’s time.

As already noted, normalizing disciplinary practices involve techniques for identifying deviations from normal developmental trajectories. Sometimes speciic deviations repeatedly identiied within a given population lead to the invention of a deviant identity category – such as the delinquent, the idiot, or the homosexual. These new “species” of abnormal individual are reiied both in the kinds of knowledge and practices within which they irst become identiiable and, frequently, in the minds and experiences of those to whom new category terms are applied. As individuals assume abnormal identities and understand themselves and their place in the world through those identities, they may join together and challenge the prevailing wisdom about their condition. Homosexuals, for example, may embrace their “abnormal” identity but challenge its pathologization by asserting it as a variant kind of developmental norm. The twentieth century saw several political movements founded on just such a reversal of a pathologized identity. Although such political reversals may alleviate much suffering and thus may have much to recommend them, they are not challenges to normalization per se but only to speciic knowledge claims within a given normalizing conceptual framework.

An important means of producing information about deviant individuals and for incorporating deviant identities into the lives of those who bear them is secular confession. Foucault therefore has a great deal to say about the genealogy and epistemological valence of confessional practices in volume one of The History of Sexuality, where he traces the formation of sexual identities. Practiced initially in the domain of the psychiatrist but eventually in all sorts of modern venues, confession allegedly externalizes what disciplinarians cannot observe directly, the psychic symptoms of pathology that manifest themselves in dreams, fantasies, and desires. But a major effect of confession is to attach an identity irmly to an individual in his or her own experience, to internalize an identity so to speak. Confession and related disciplinary practices can give corporeal reality not only to abnormal identities but also to normal ones – that is, they can help establish any normalized subjectivity, be it normal or deviant. It is for this reason that Foucault can call his work in Discipline and Punish and elsewhere “a history of the modern soul” (EDP, 23) and can view normalizing disciplinary techniques that transform people’s experiences of themselves by shaping their conduct as evidence that “[t]he soul is the effect and instrument of

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a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body” (EDP, 30). Our experience of ourselves as normable interiorities constrains the life of our bodies.

Once normalizing power effected widespread interiorization of sexual conduct and the formation of sexual identities on that basis, sexuality came to be seen as the foundation for who and what we are both as individuals and as a species. Efforts to control sexuality as the center of selfhood then became bound up, politically and intellectually, with efforts to control and direct the means for reproduction (and puriication and enhancement) of species life. A thoroughly normalized and normalizing phenomenon, sexuality serves as one of the anchor points for and mechanisms within the deployment of “biopower” (see EHS1, 140), the vast network of power/ knowledge regimes that emerged in the conluence of disciplinary normalization and population management (EHS1, 145).

As Foucault reined his analysis of biopower through the late 1970s, he revised his concept of normalization considerably. This is most evident in the third lecture of his 1978 course at the Collège de France, “Security, Territory, Population,” where he distinguishes disciplinary normalization from what he by this time sees as normalization more properly understood. Normalizing discipline classiies in accord with deinite objectives. It then creates optimal sequences for transformation and ixes those processes in its techniques. In its application of these techniques, it divides the normal from the abnormal. It thus starts with a model, a norm, and operates in ways that reinforce that norm (ECF-STP, 57). But in this lecture series Foucault is interested in techniques for managing and transforming not individual bodies but populations, and especially techniques for enhancing populations by altering their norms. Suppose, for example, that a given population, say the residents of a certain city, can be broken down into four subpopulations occupying different quadrants of their territory. Suppose further that it is discovered that residents of one quadrant succumb at a far higher rate to a given disease than do residents of the other quadrants. Efforts can then be made to discover differences in the different quadrants, elements within them that might be altered to effect a reduction in the rate at which residents of quadrant one succumb. And this effort, if successful, will have the effect of reducing the population’s overall death rate from that disease. These populationenhancement techniques do not discipline individual bodies to ixed norms; rather, by changing the conditions of life of a population, they cause changes in the norms themselves.

This latter type of technique – techniques used to alter the norms of a population – is what Foucault by 1978 wants to call “normalization.” The target of these techniques is a population, not an individual body (even when they entail contact with or manipulation of individual bodies). Like disciplinary normalization, they produce norms through observation, but the operations that characterize population management produce norms only in order to surpass them. Having identiied this other set of governmental techniques, the means of population management that he

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now calls “normalization,” Foucault invents a new term to describe the work of modern bodily disciplines: “normation” (ECF-ETP, 57). In retrospect, then, Surveiller et punir is a book about technologies of “normation,” not normalization. However, most scholars and commentators continue to use the word “normalization” when discussing that work or drawing on it.

Ladelle McWhorter

See Also

Abnormal

Discipline

Homosexuality

Power

The Visible

Suggested Reading

Canguilhem, Georges. 1991. The Normal and the Pathological, with an introduction by Michel Foucault. New York: Zone Books.

Heyes, Cressida. 2007. Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies. New York: Oxford University Press.

McWhorter, Ladelle. 1999. Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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what he calls, in reference to Borges, a heterotopia. For Foucault, the experience of the unthinkable is one in which an established order of things is undone, and it is precisely the experience of the problematic, in the form of the heterotopia, that brings about such an undoing. The experience described in the preface to The Order of Things is one of difference and alterity: the subject and the epistemic order in which it is placed in a given epoch are put into question through their contact with what lies outside them.

It is signiicant that Foucault would begin what he himself describes as a “history of the Same,” a “history of the order of things,” with a discussion of the very alterity that undermines such an order (EOT, xxiv). If The Order of Things is, ultimately, a work concerned with thinking, then the preface, in conjunction with the closing moments of the book, can be read as a sort of manual that both indicates the direction for and announces the possible advent of new forms of thinking. This is apparent from the beginning, in Foucault’s discussion of Borges. Borges writes of a Chinese encyclopedia, The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, in which it is written that the animals are divided into various classes, the most incongruous and signiicant of which is the class “included in this classiication.”

Thus, the project of The Order of Things inds its roots in a paradox. The Chinese encyclopedia coerces us into encountering the limit of our own thought, thereby giving birth to the series of questions that lie at the heart of Foucault’s project: What is it possible or impossible to think? Under what conditions is it possible to think certain things and impossible to think others? From the start, The Order of Things concerns thinking and the conditions for the possibility of new forms of thought (EOT, xv). Borges puts us into contact with a thought entirely unlike our own, and it is precisely in the violence of that encounter that the possibility for new ways of thinking opens up. Foucault proposes to call these instances of disorder heterotopias, and they are inextricably tied to a thought of the outside.

One of the implicit theses of The Order of Things is that words and things (that is, language and being) are always placed into relation with one another in a speciic manner and according to a speciic law. Order itself is a constant, even if the manner in which discourses and their objects are empirically ordered changes along with the historical episteme. As such, there always exists within a given historical epoch a knot between words and things, a common space where language and being meet and are most at home with one another and with the mode of thinking of that epoch. This common space is a utopia, and it represents, in a sense, the very limit of our thought, precisely because utopias deploy themselves in “marvelous” and “smooth” spaces that “open up cities with vast avenues, well planted gardens, facile lands” (EOT, xviii). Utopias are not spaces of possibility for thinking because they are already spaces, or rather nonspaces, in which certain forms of thinking have been made impossible by the dominant play of order. They offer comfort because they can only place us into contact with what we already know; that is, with the Same.