Foucaultstp

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it is necessary to show that the relationship of the law to the norm does in fact indicate that there is something that we could call a normativity intrinsic to any legal imperative, but this normativity intrinsic to the law, perhaps founding the law, cannot be confused with what we are trying to pinpoint here under the name of procedures, processes, and techniques of normalization. I would even say instead that, if it is true that the law refers to a norm, and that the role and function of the law therefore – the very operation of the law – is to codify a norm, to carry out a codification in relation to the norm, the problem that I am trying to mark out is how techniques of normalization develop from and below a system of law, in its margins and maybe even against it.


Discipline, of course, analyzes and breaks down; it breaks down individuals, places, time, movements, actions, and operations. It breaks them down into components such that they can be seen, on the one hand, and modified on the other. Second, discipline classifies the components thus identified according to definite objectives. What workers are best suited for a particular task? What children are capable of obtaining a particular result? Third, discipline establishes optimal sequences or co-ordinations: How can actions be linked together? How can soldiers be deployed for a maneuver? How can schoolchildren be distributed hierarchically within classifications? Fourth, discipline fixes the processes of progressive training (dressage) and permanent control, and finally, on the basis of this, it establishes the division between those considered unsuitable or incapable and the others


Disciplinary normalization consists first of all in positing a model, an optimal model that is constructed in terms of a certain result, and the operation of disciplinary normalization consists in trying to get people, movements, and actions to conform to this model, the normal being precisely that which can conform to this norm, and the abnormal that which is incapable of conforming to the norm.

what is involved in disciplinary techniques is a normation (normation) rather than normalization

apparatuses of security?

For each individual, given his age and where he lives, and for each age group, town, or profession, we will be able to determine the risk of morbidity and the risk of mortality

differential risks that reveal, as it were, zones of higher risk and, on the other hand, zones of less or lower risk. This means that one can thus identify what is dangerous.