From the "Power of the Norm" to "Flexible Normalism": Considerations after Foucault

One of the most frequently quoted and thereby well-known dicta of Foucault is that his theory is a "toolbox"—this remark will certainly not be entirely perverted if I simply relate it, as it so often happens, to tinkering with theory. Even so, I would not like to spare you its rather cultural-revolutionary wording:

All my books, be it Madness and Society or this one here [Discipline and Punish], are—if you like—little toolboxes. If people want to open them, and use this or that sentence, this or that idea or analysis as a screwdriver or wrench [dessere-boulon] to short-circuit, dismantle, or explode the systems of power, including perhaps those systems from which these books of mine have emerged—all right, all the better.¹

Unfortunately, it appears to me that the subdued message of this passage is considerably less practiced than quoted. I say this right at the beginning, because this paper will deal less with the impressions of a (so-called) "study of Foucault" and more with the results of a "working with Foucault."

Now and then, there are views that see in Foucault a "philosophy of the norm"—or also of "normalization" or of "the normative." I will leave open the question of whether Foucault felt any pleasure in this "devenir-philosophe"—in any case, during his lifetime, he protected himself against such a pleasure. I am more interested in the genitive attribute: What is "norm," "normalization" (herein, it appears, also hide "normal" and "normality") and "normative"? Are they synonyms (if only approximately)? Is "normal" (outside of a purely formal etymological understanding) the appropriate adjective for "norm"? Is "the normal," therefore, in conformity with a "norm"? And does "normalization" mean "to make normal" in the sense of "to make according to a norm"? But is "to make normal" (in German anyway) at all the same as "to make according to a norm"? If I were to repeat all these questions in French (in which Foucault writes), English, and other languages, your head would surely spin, if it does not already. However, I believe that we cannot avoid first mapping out this semantic labyrinth more precisely. This became clear to me as of late, when I looked up the term normalisation in the Bibliothèque Nationale in advance of my studies on normalization: more than 95 percent of the titles applied to industrial norms; most were publications related to the AFNor, the French equivalent of the German Industry Norm [DIN]. The corresponding term in German would have to be Normung [standardization]—Normalisierung [normalization], clearly stated, would be an erroneous translation, a contre-sense. Dictionaries confirm this semantic nonidentity between normalisation and Normalisierung.² After checking these entries, I asked myself if Foucault really means, when he speaks of normaliser or normalisation, what corresponds to most German translations: "to make people normal" or "to make normal people," or rather, what in my opinion would not be at all the same, "to standardize people" (like industrial products), "to make standardized people." That Foucault's German translator Walter Seitter must have repeatedly arrived at the same doubt is shown quite clearly in the following (extremely important) passage from Discipline and Punish. I will give first the original, then the German version:

La pénalité perpétuelle qui traverse tous les points, et contrôle tous les instants des institutions disciplinaires compare, différencie, hiérarchise, homogénéise, exclut. En un mot elle normalise.³

[The perpetual quality that transverses all points and supervises every instant in the disciplinary institutions compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes. In short, it standardizes, normativizes, normalizes.]⁵

Here three German terms, which are absolutely not synonymous, serve to convey the one French term normalise. This is nice and intelligent—but the translator probably provides these meanings for Foucault instead of simply translating them. The context in Foucault's original calls for "to standardize" or at the most "to normativize."

In the course of this consideration, I hope to convince you that we are not dealing with...