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CHAPTER TWO. Sleights of the Norm
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43 TWO SLEIGHTS OF THE NORM Michel Foucault’s arguments for the importance of the modern social technology of the norm have received much scholarly attention. But in most cases a philosophical explication of the supposed novelty of the norm on the level of its very basic conceptual operation is lacking. This chapter offers analysis of and speculation on the conceptual operation of statistical measure as a part of the political technology of biopower. It further aims to examine the ontological dimension of the social technology of the norm and of social statistical measure. Its starting point, then, is Foucault’s underexploited insight into the specificity of normalization as a central and novel element of the mutation in power that he calls “modern biopower.” This chapter is not a work in statistical theory or in the history of statistics; it seeks rather to articulate the conceptual level of the operation of normalization through a focus on the operation of statistical measurement as found in the normal curve and other like instruments of social statistics. It proposes that in order to sense fully the novelty and centrality of normalizing techniques, attention must be paid to the specific nature of statistical measurement. It is by such attention that we can seize the specificity and novelty of the continuous nature of the new power over life that Foucault analyzes. In particular, this attention helps to distinguish the norm from a law and from a rule, custom, or tradition. This chapter attempts several things: The first section argues for the importance to Foucault’s account of biopower of a statistical conception of the norm and of its role in the constitution of the continuities that characterize that form of power. A full conceptual analysis of the complex technology that is the normal curve is precluded here for reasons of space. But the second section seeks to apply the point about the importance of the norm in the creation of continuities to a simpler statistical notion implicitly included in the norm, namely, the ratio. It then extends Foucault’s argument to speculate that numerical continuities expressed in the ratios of social 44 SLEIGHTS OF REASON measure can obscure both ontological discontinuities and social relations. The third section discusses some problematic readings of Foucault’s notion of the norm. The fourth section sketches an application of the Deleuzian account of the concept to the conceptual sleights of the norm. Many of the criticisms of the statistical constitution of social continuities that are advanced in the second section are not unprecedented in themselves. Indeed, some commentators have critiqued the roles of statistics in state administration, law, and the social sciences as illegitimately homogenizing operations from the very time of their historical emergence.1 The purpose of introducing these criticisms into discussion of Foucault’s work is to shed light on Foucault’s own thought and to extract and amplify his epistemic claims about the operation of statistical tools in the crafting of continuities. MEASURES OF LIFE: BIOPOWER AND STATISTICS IN THE WORK OF FOUCAULT A normalizing society is the historical outcome of a technology of power centered on life. —Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction Foucault extends Georges Canguilhem’s largely biomedical, partially statistical , and marginally social accounts of normativity and normalization into a technopolitics that lends great significance to the role of the statistical norm.2 He argues that the emergence of normalizing practices characterizes the age of modern biopower, distinguishing this kind of power from the sovereign power of the previous age.3 On this well-known account, two forms of biopower have developed since the seventeenth century. These two forms are an anatomo-politics of the human body and a biopolitics of population. The first form Foucault identifies with the disciplinary practices perfected in armies, schools, and factories. The second form he identifies with the regulatory controls of state administrations and their knowledgeproducing bodies.4 According to Foucault, one of the characteristic features of biopower is the continuous nature of its application, in comparison to the discontinuous nature of sovereign power. But what is the nature and source of the continuity or continuities that are relevant to biopower? The suggestion offered in this chapter is that the continuities posited or created in statistical measurement are a source and support of the social continuities imposed in social standardization. To understand Foucault’s account of normalization as a crucial component of biopower, then, it will be useful to consider some of the basic...