Ewald Norms, Discipline and the Law

Norms, Discipline, and the LawAuthor(s): Franois EwaldSource: Representations, No. 30, Special Issue: Law and the Order of Culture (Spring, 1990),pp. 138-161Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2928449 .Accessed: 22/04/2014 14:45

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FRAN(:OIS EWALD

Norms, Discipline, and the Law

IN THE TABLEAU THAT CONCLUDES the first volume of The History of Sexuality, "Right of Death and Power over Life," Michel Foucault develops the hypothesis that, ever since antiquity, new mechanisms for the exercise of "bio- power"-disciplines of the body and attempts to regulate the population-have developed in Western societies.' The juridical mode of governance, characterized by forcible seizure, abduction, or repression and usually culminating in death, is increasingly replaced by bio-power, "which aims to produce, develop, and order social strength," a power that exerts a more positive influence on life, undertaking to administer it, multiply it, and impose upon it a system of regulations and precise inspection. Having noted that this transformation in the mechanisms of power signifies "nothing less than the entry of life into history," Foucault concludes by suggesting that "another consequence of this development of bio-power was the growing importance assumed by the action of the norm, at the expense of the juridical system of the law."2

Foucault does not mean to suggest here that the development of bio-power is accompanied by a decline of law. His further commentary makes it clear that the formation of a normalizing society in no way diminished the power of law or caused judicial institutions to disappear. In fact, normalization tends to be accompanied by an astonishing proliferation of legislation. Practically speaking, legis- lators never expressed themselves as freely or as extensively as in the age of bio- power. The norm, then, is opposed not to law itself but to what Foucault would call "the juridical": the institution of law as the expression of a sovereign's power. If, as Foucault puts it, "the law cannot help but be armed," and if its weapon par excellence is death, this equation of law and death does not derive from the essential character of the law. Law can also function by formulating norms, thus becoming part of a different sort of power that "has to qualify, measure, appraise, and hierarchize rather than display itself in its murderous splendor."3 In the age of bio-power, the juridical, which characterized monarchical law, can readily be opposed to the normative, which comes to the fore most typically in constitutions, legal codes, and the constant and clamorous activity of the legislature."4

Foucault's ideas have a dual consequence for the philosophy of law. They encourage us to distinguish law and its formal expression from the juridical. The

138 REPRESENTATIONS 30 - Spring 1990 C) THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA


juridical served as a "code" that enabled monarchical power to constitute itself, formalize its structure, and reflect upon its own workings. However, such a code is not the only possible form the law can take. Neither the "regression of the juridical," which accompanies the rise of bio-power, nor the fact that the most typical mechanisms ofjuridical power can no longer be represented in legal form, necessarily signals the disappearance of the law.

We can and must imagine a history of law that would give meaning and function to the law's varying modes of formal expression. Foucault also compels us to reconsider what we mean by norm, which he places among the arts of judgment. Undoubtedly the norm is related to power, but it is characterized less by the use of force or violence than by an implicit logic that allows power to reflect upon its own strategies and clearly define its objects. This logic is at once the force that enables us to imagine life and the living as objects of power and the power that can take "life" in hand, creating the sphere of the bio-political.

Thus, in opposing the "action of the norm" to "the juridical system of law," Foucault suggests two possible paths of inquiry. The first, to borrow Foucault's terminology, is "ontological" and concerns modernity. It asks: What is modernity if we understand it as participating in the logic of the norm? What can we learn about the modern by approaching it in terms of the norm and the practices of power and knowledge organized around the norm? The second concerns the shift in the relationship between knowledge and power and its influence on the status and function of legal thought in modern societies. Within the framework of "the regresson of the juridical," what is the place of law? Is a theory or practice of law articulated around the norm possible? If so, what form would such theory or practice take, and what would be the risks and possibilities associated with them?

Georges Canguilhem has noted that etymology holds certain surprises and disappointments for our contemporary understanding of the word norm: "When we know that norm is the Latin word for T-square and that normalis means per- pendicular, we know almost all that must be known about the area in which the meaning of the terms norm and normal originated."5 Joachim Ritter's Historisches Wirterbuch der Philosophie recalls the technical origin of the term. Vitruvius used it in his treatise On Architecture to indicate the instrument used to draw right angles. Through metaphor, the term would be taken up to designate the rule of law. Cicero, in particular, relies on the Stoic reference to the architectural regularity of nature, speaking of nature as the "norm of the law" (norma legis). The norm had a long career as a synonym for the rule. Jean Calvin, for example, writes in his Institutes of the Christian Religion: "God has determined by His laws what is good and right, and by this means has meant to hold men to a certain norm."

Norms, Discipline, and the Law 139


However, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, there is a radical change in the relationship between the rule and the norm. Norm can no longer stand simply as another name for rule; rather, it comes to designate both a particular variety of rules and a way of producing them and, perhaps most significantly of all, a principle of valorization. Of course, the norm still refers to a standard measure that allows us to distinguish what is in conformity with the rule from what is not, but this distinction is no longer directly linked to the notion of rectitude. Its essential reference is no longer to the square but to the average; the norm now refers to the play of oppositions between the normal and the abnormal or pathological.

The vocabulary associated with the term expands as well: in French, normal is no longer the only word to derive from norme. It is joined by normalite (1834), normatif (1868), and normalisation (1920). This remarkable extension of the norm's domain will affect a wide variety of fields concerned with economics and technology. It will also have a major influence on the moral, juridical, and political sciences, which at the close of the nineteenth century will establish themselves (particularly in Germany) as "normative" sciences.

Thus, two centuries ago the word norm led a quiet, unremarkable existence, whereas today, along with its panoply of derivations and associated terms, it has become one of the most used and abused terms of our contemporary vocabulary, whether we speak colloquially or as social scientists. We are intimidated by norms and contemplate them suspiciously, feeling ashamed to consider ourselves simply normal. Psychologists and sociologists have made persistent efforts to establish norms whose constraining effects can be felt everywhere-even where we imagine our behavior to be least susceptible to determination. In a sense, virtue has become normalized: the virtuous individual can delude himself or herself into believing that he or she acts out of a sense of duty while in reality simply making his or her behavior conform to a particular norm. Similarly, health can be envisioned as the absence of illness, while in actuality it is merely a sign of normal organic functioning. Even taste, which appears to be a product of purely subjective aesthetic judgments, simply repeats internalized norms in the regularity of its assessments. Public hygiene, urban planning, safety measures against pollution or nuclear contamination, and quality control have all come about as the result of normative decisions of one sort or another. What is the significance of this extension of the normative, and what risks and potential benefits does it hold for the future?

One set of normative practices we might wish to examine in this context is what Foucault has described as "disciplinary society." In Discipline and Punish, Fou- cault suggests that the prison is in some sense the purest expression of the disciplinary order. But this is not to say that he believed disciplinary society to be based on generalized confinement. In fact, for Foucault the gradual spread of various disciplines (to the factory, the school, the hospital, or the barracks) indicates that

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discipline is not primarily concerned with confinement, nor with the segregation of its subject population. Rather, discipline tends not to divide or compartmen- talize society but works instead to create a homogeneous social space.

The norm is the principle that allows discipline to develop from a simple set of constraints into a mechanism; it serves as the matrix that transforms the negative restraints of the juridical into the more positive controls of normalization and helps to produce the generalization of discipline. The norm is also the means through which the disciplinary society communicates with itself. The norm relates the disciplinary institutions of production-knowledge, wealth, and finance-to one another in such a way that they become truly interdisciplinary; it provides a common language for these various disciplines and makes it possible to translate from one disciplinary idiom into another.

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault returns again and again to the idea that discipline "produces" individuals. It not only manages them and makes use of them but actively constitutes them as its object. Within the disciplinary framework, the norm participates in this logic of individualization while also serving as the force that joins together the individuals created by discipline and allows them to communicate with one another.

It is essential to avoid confusing the terms norm and discipline. Disciplines are concerned with the body and its training, while the norm is a measurement and a means of producing a common standard. Discipline is not necessarily normative. According to Foucault, modernity coincides with the coming of a normative age. The normalization of the various disciplines and the shift from discipline as constraint to discipline as a regulatory mechanism are symptomatic of this change, as is the formation of a disciplinary society founded on a new kind of social space that is supple, flexible, homogeneous, and entirely self-contained.

Within the disciplinary order, the influence of the norm is primarily local; norms remain attached to specific practices and institutions. With the appearance of insurance, the norm will serve as a means of managing different kinds of actuarial populations,6 while with the institution of a Social Security system it will become a way to manage the entire population of a given state. The shift here is from the level of the micro-instrumental to that of the bio-political. Risk plays the same role in insurance that the norm does in the constitution of disciplinary strategies. The conceptual category of risk, which makes insurance possible, is the precise homologue of the disciplinary norm.

Insurance is an equivocal term that comprises 1) a technique for estimating risk in actuarial terms; 2) the practices of restitution and indemnification of damages that set this technique in motion; and 3) the institutions that structure public and private insurance schemes. I intend to discuss only the first-the techniques of risk.

What is risk? In common parlance, the term is a synonym for danger, peril, or the unexpected misfortunes that might happen to anyone; it also implies an



objective threat of some sort. In insurance, risk refers neither to a specific occurrence nor to a kind of event that might take place but instead to a way of treating certain events that might happen to a particular group of individuals (a population). Nothing in itself is a risk-risks have no real existence. By an inverse logic, anything can be a risk-everything depends on the way the danger is ana- lyzed and the potential event is evaluated. To adopt Kantian terminology, the category of risk is a category of understanding; it cannot be derived from intuition or sensibility. As a technology of risk, insurance is first of all a rational out- line, a means of disassembling, reconstructing, and organizing certain elements of reality.

Insurance is the practice of a specific type of rationality that formalizes the calculation of probability. This explains why one can only be insured against risks, and why these can be as various as death, accident, hail, illness, childbirth, military service, a business failure, or litigation.7 The insurer does not passively make note of actual risks in order to insure people against them. Instead, he produces risks by making them visible and comprehensible as such in situations where the individual would ordinarily see only the unpredictable hazards of his or her particular fate.

Risk, then, is a principle of objectification. It confers a certain objective status on the events of private, professional, or commercial life: death, accident, injury, loss, or hazard. The task of insurance is to constitute a particular kind of objectivity; providing various familiar events with a real existence that changes their character. Insurance creates its own world; it confronts the world of lived experience (and all of its terrors) with the more neutral and predictable world of risk. When the first insurers boasted about the liberating effects of their statistical models, or explained that the dangers we fear are really nothing but risks we can take steps to protect ourselves against, they were, of course, speaking as adver- tisers. Still, their arguments rested on the idea of a very fundamental transformation of the world.

Risk is both objective and objectifying. This arises through the exercise of a rigorously positivistic attitude. Insurance has two bases: first, the statistical table or graph that testifies to the regular occurrence of certain events; second, the calculation of probabilities that are then applied to these statistics so that one can evaluate the possibility of these same events. The insurance view of the world is firmly grounded in probability and statistics. It is generally admitted that modern science took its definitive form at the time of the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century. One might also speak of an analogous probabilistic revolution of the nineteenth century, one that radically transformed contemporary notions of such familiar ideas as "fact," "law," and "cause."8 Like the Galilean revolution before it, the probabilistic revolution was received with its fair share of resistance, debate, and utter incomprehension. Some of the best-known examples of resis-

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tance were Auguste Comte's or Jean-Baptiste Say's opposition to the use of probability in the social sciences. Other examples include the general philosophical condemnation of probability on the grounds that it would introduce into history an element of determinism that was altogether incompatible with liberty, or the endless legal debates during the nineteenth century over the relative merits of fault and risk as causes of responsiblity.

By the standards of an earlier world (in which we still live, at least to some extent), the insurer, like the statistician, is most remarkable for his rigorous sus- pension of judgment. For him, events are facts with distinct boundaries in space and time-they are complete in themselves and have no cause, or past, or future. They are individuals, pure atoms that persistently leave their trace on the surface of the world. They do not signify; they simply are. They can barely be described, and their identity is reduced to the numerical quality that allows one to tabulate them as a point or a unit.

The statistician must begin by bracketing the usual systems of signification and should remain instead at that unclear boundary where a coherent vision of the world threatens to disappear beneath the infinite residues of facts and events. Similarly, the insurer who initially notes the fact of an accident or a death is altogether indifferent to its cause. It matters little that a specific accident might have been avoidable, or that a particular individual will bear historical responsibility for a given event. The important thing about events is that they occur, or rather that their occurrence is repetitive, multiple, and regular. They become purely accidental, and are rendered objective by comparison with themselves. For the purposes of statistics, they remain without victims and without a cause, at least initially.

To put the matter sceptically, what is at issue here is the possibility of freeing oneself from the usual play of signification by concentrating on the pure factuality of facts, the pure recording of occurrences. In Kantian terms, the task for the insurer and the statistician alike is to restrict himself or herself to a single level of intuition, locating and comprehending facts exclusively in terms of their tem- poral and spatial situation, without appealing to a more comprehensive system of understanding. The world as perceived for statistical ends makes no sense. It is reduced to a pure accumulation of facts, data that accumulate randomly with no prospect of ever signifying as individual bits of information. To the extent that the usual system of signification has been suspended, all facts, even the most insig- nificant, are worthy of note.

Only the science of probability allows these data to signify. In the logic of probability, sense can emerge from this undifferentiated mass of data without any need for reference to a world outside that of pure surfaces and pure factuality, where pieces of information of indeterminate value repeat and accumulate. For statistical thought, numbers by themselves create meaning. The notion



of mass replaces such evaluative concepts as nature or essence. In the social and moral world, presumably the sphere of free agency, there are observable regularities, constants of social life (marriage, crime, suicide, and so on) whose causes remain obscure. Before the triumph of statistics, it was still possible to invoke the workings of divine Providence, or to seek some other sufficient cause that would explain otherwise inexplicable phenomena, as though the regularity of certain events could be explained by recourse to some invisible logic of causality. But probabilistic thinking makes this specular doubling altogether unnecessary; in statistics, facts lose their status as natural signs or indices of some higher meaning. They refer back to nothing but themselves. The visible world is no longer a trans- lation of an invisible world of essences. Only the repetition of a particular social fact, its multiple occurrences, can give it meaning. According to this logic, the more frequently a particular sort of event occurs statistically, the more real it becomes. The weight and number of occurrences bring social facts into existence. Inversely, a single exceptional event counts for less in statistical terms because it occurs so rarely. The calculation of probability, then, functions as a ruse of reason: even though causes remain unknown and unknowable, they do translate into effect. By seizing upon effects, this kind of calculation allows us to determine the laws that govern the recurrence of events without ever grasping the causes behind them.

Facts are still organized in categories with distinct names: birth, death, accident, suicide, size. However, this is a particularly nominalist use of the category, for these categories make no reference to any explanatory principle. They are simply sets of groupings-open-ended collections of randomly occurring facts that are never identical to one another. The statistical category brings together diverse variables on the basis of their resemblance or potential equivalence; it serves as a principle of classification rather than as an identifying denomination.

According to the logic of statistics, then, an accident is no longer a simple misfortune that happens to someone; instead, it takes on a real existence of its own. Similarly, man no longer exists as an entity that can be explained in terms of human nature, nor does he exist anywhere within the multiplicity of living men. Rather, "man" appears in the qualities that can be attributed to him, which have taken on lives of their own: size, weight, or strength. The characteristics of a particular individual are lost in the midst of those of many other individuals. In a sense, the particular individual with a specific size and weight no longer exists. Only the standard size and weight of a population of individuals who constitute a pool of human qualities continues to have a real existence.

The meaning and import of this strange blending of traits, this peculiar statistical surgery is perhaps most evident in Alphonse Quetelet's attempts to con- struct a theory of the "average man," which he formulates in at least three places in his work. The project grows directly out of a sense of the significance of averages:

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By gathering together a number of individuals of the same age and sex and taking the average of a set of their constant measurements, one obtains a series of constant figures that I would attribute to a fictional entity I call the average man for this group. If we were to note, for example, the size of every twenty-five-year-old Frenchman and find the average, the number we obtained would be the size of the average twenty-five-year-old man.9

Thus defined, the average man is a "fictional entity": there is no actual twenty- five-year-old Frenchman who could be the average man. The average man can also be a typical example of man at a particular moment in time in a specific place:

Everything occurs as if there existed in nature particular types suited to a given country and the environmental circumstances in which they find themselves. Variants on these types come into being accidentally with equal frequency as augmentations or diminutions of the essential characteristics of a type. Suppose that we have a sufficiently large sample population: the average man for each age would find himself flanked on both sides by equal numbers of individuals, some larger and some smaller. Moreover, the groups would be distributed regularly in order of size. The largest groups would be composed of those who were closest to the mean, while the smallest groups would be those most distant from the mean. The further one gets from the average, the smaller the groups that represent this difference, and, at the extreme limits of the distribution, giants, like dwarves, are quite rare. However, these extreme cases are not anomalous-in fact, they are necessary to complete the ascending and descending series determined by the law of randomness. Each group has its own specific value and place. Thus when men are thrust together in society and their various sizes come together in the most unlikely combinations, there is between them a mysterious link that allows us to consider each individual as a necessary part of a whole which has no physical existence and escapes us in the individual instance, and which can only be perceived through the eyes of science.'0

We may note that in this second version, too, the average man remains a fiction: "Everything occurs as if . . . " writes Quetelet. Of course, the law of randomness makes it apparent that something corresponds to this fiction: not a real individual who incarnates the social mean but the typical man for that society; not a model or original that serves as the standard for all men but the reference point common to them all. This point of reference provides them with a kind of "natural" identity and suggests that laws of man do exist. Finally, according to Quetelet,

The man I am considering is, in society, the analogue of the center of gravity within a body; he is the mean around which various social elements move. He is a fictional being for whom all things occur in accordance with the average expectations for the society in question.... This determination of the average man is not merely an idle pursuit; knowledge of social averages can serve an important purpose for the human and social sciences. The study of averages is a necessary precursor to any research into social physics, for it serves as the foundation of such study.... Only by taking [the average man] into account can we truly appreciate the phenomena of social equilibrium and movement." I

The average man, then, is not an individual whose place in society is indeterminate or uncertain; rather, he is society itself as it sees itself objectified in the



mirror of probability and statistics. There is not a trace of realism in Quetelet's account of the average man. The average man is at once the entity that permits scientific judgment of man and the necessary correlate of that judgment. Once human nature loses its metaphysical status, individuals can be judged only with reference to the social and, more precisely, with reference to the average man.

The theory of the average man, then, is simply a new-and altogether modern-means of individualizing the members of a population. This is what we mean today when we make reference to norms and the normal. The notion of the average man corresponds to a new way ofjudging individuals-the only way that is scientifically possible, in fact: Quetelet writes,

I have always felt it to be impossible to estimate the degree of courage, or what we must regard as such, contained in the acts of an isolated individual, for what standard of measurement could we possibly adopt for such a quantity? Would we observe this individual for a long enough time and in sufficient depth to take into account all of his actions and estimate the relative value of these acts of courage? What tribunal could possibly pass judgment on these actions, and would there be a large enough number of them for us to reach a satisfactory conclusion? Who could guarantee that in the course of these observa- tions, the individual in question did not undergo some major change? When we work with a large number of individuals, these problems disappear almost entirely, particularly if we mean only to understand something about the relations between them and nothing of a more absolute nature.'2

With his theory of the average man, Quetelet proposes a means of specifying individuals with reference to their position within a group, rather than by paying close attention to their essence, their nature, or their ideal state of being. The theory of the average man, then, is an instrument that makes it possible to understand a population with respect only to itself, and without recourse to some external defining factor.

The insurer's "risk" (an objective principle based on calculation and distri- butions) corresponds directly with the notion of the average man outlined in Que- telet's social physics. The concept of risk makes no reference to nature (as in a metaphysics) or to morality (according to some ideal notion of what man should do or be). Instead it allows the group to make social judgments with respect to itself in a way that always reflects the current state of society and is based on normative, rather than prescriptive, evaluation.

Risk is at once calculable and collective, and these two characteristics are dependent upon one another. Accidents and misfortune are individual occurrences, but risk is a profoundly social phenomenon. Moreover, risk can only be calculated for an entire population. The task of the insurer is to constitute this population through a process of selection and division of risks. Insurance social- izes risk, transforming each individual into a part of a whole. The function of insurance is to constitute mutuality, consciously in the case of mutual societies and less consciously in the case of anonymous companies with premiums.

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Insurance is therefore more than a scheme that allows individuals to protect themselves against loss for a small fee because of the benefits of mutuality. Reducing it thusly makes it indistinguishable from more primitive forms of mutual aid and solidarity such as the confraternity or the corporation. The central characteristic of insurance is not that it spreads out the cost of individual damages over a large group, but that it provides a justification for this kind of division that has no basis in charity or fellow feeling and is based on a rule of justice, a rule of law. According to Eugene Reboul,

Insurance is the application to human affairs of the rule of possibilities that determines the fate of individuals apart from society before chance has made its own division among them and disposed of the common fund of property according to its own logic. So that equity is preserved, each person must take upon himself a proportional part of the risk that may bring him good fortune or mishap.'3

This "proportional part" defines risk for the insurer. The abstract principle behind this reasoning is that the natural distribution of luck and misfortune, i.e., chance, is fundamentally just. Chance must be allowed to play out its whims, and it is up to individuals to protect themselves as they are able to.

Legal judgments were traditionally based on an attempt to discover the cause of damages-it was essential to find out whether damages were the result of an unpredictable natural event or whether they could be attributed to a particular person or institution who would then be required to bear responsibility for the damages. The insurance system, by contrast, proposes an entirely different idea of justice: causality is superceded by the notion of a distribution of a collective burden according to a fixed rule that determines the contribution of each individual. Insurance then offers a new rule of justice that refers no longer back to nature but rather to the existence of the group, a social rule of justice that the group is free to determine for itself, and on its own terms.

At the close of the nineteenth century in industrial Europe, the technology of risk and the institution of social insurance form the basis for a new way of thinking about politics. Insurance becomes social, not so much because new kinds of risk have come into being but because society has come to understand itself and its problems in terms of the principles of the technology of risk. At the end of the nineteenth century, the term insurance designates both a set of institutions and the structure that orders the regulation and functioning of modern society.

This account presupposes the establishment of new relationships between the notions of insurance and the state. Insurance is not imagined simply as an institution or system within the state for which the state must provide an order or organizing principle; rather, the state can now be conceived of in terms of the actuarial view of society. Insurance is no longer a simple subordinate function of the state but an essential part of the state's organization that affects its very nature-the state itself becomes a vast system of social insurance.



The institution of the prison as the universal penalty for crime at the beginning of the nineteenth century marks, in Foucauldian terms, the birth of a "disciplinary society," one whose organization obeys the logic of the norm at the level of micro-power. Likewise, the growth of the insurance industry during the nineteenth century, along with the beginnings of social insurance and the development of large-scale social welfare systems, marks the birth of the "insurance society," in which the norm functions similarly.

In its technical sense, the term normalization does not refer to the production of objects that all conform to a type. Rather, it involves "providing reference documents for the resolution of standard technical and commercial problems that recur in the course of interchange between economic, technical, scientific and social partners."'4 Normalization, then, is less a question of making products conform to a standard model than it is of reaching an understanding with regard to the choice of a model. The Encyclopaedia Britannica stipulates in its article on standardization that "a standard is that which has been selected as a model to which objects or actions may be compared. In every case a standard provides a criterion for judgement." Normalization is thus the production of norms, standards for measurement and comparison, and rules of judgment. Norman F. Harriman writes, "A standard may be concisely defined as a criterion, measure or example, of procedure, process, dimension, extent, quantity, quality, or time, which is established by an authority, custom, or general consent, as a definite basis of reference or comparison."'5 Implicit within the concept of normalization is the notion of a principle for measurement that would serve as a common standard, a basic principle of comparison. Normalization produces not objects but procedures that will lead to some general consensus regarding the choice of norms and standards. This definition of normalization lends a certain paradoxical allure to the history of the term. Normalization is a practice that only became aware of itself as such at the start of the twentieth century; the term itself dates from this period (1928), as do the first national and international organizations concerned with the establishment of norms.'6

To those who first worked on normalization, the concept appeared as a sort of universal ordering principle. All the institutions that make society possible, no matter how primitive, such as language, writing, money, instruments of measurement, habits and customs, all suddenly seemed to derive, at least in retrospect, from practices of normalization."' The normalizing process had accompanied humanity in every stage of its development. It served a primary social function by regularizing human conduct and by facilitating both technical progress and communication. No social object could escape normalization, and society would be inconceivable without it, for norms and standardization had always played an essential role in social development. Above all, though, normalization played an

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essential part in the constitution of systems of communication-the norm is what transformed linguistic signs into a common language. There was thus a certain reciprocity between society and the norm, and between the norm and language. Thus, the modern exponents of normalization viewed normalization as a basic principle of socialization. There can be no society, they argued, without norms, codes, common standards of measurement, and basic principles of communication. Technical normalization was simply a question of constituting a society of producers and consumers and providing it with a common language and common institutions.

One basic difference between technical normalization and earlier forms of socialization lay in the fact that modern normalization was self-consciously and actively willed rather than simply tolerated or accepted, as in earlier periods. Where the population had once been passively subjected to the norm, now certain elements within it were actively seeking to direct and manage the process of normalization.'8 This was a global development that concerned not only individual producers or sectors of production but the activity of production itself and with it the activity of consumption.

The systematic character of technical normalization differentiates it from earlier processes to which it has some resemblance-for example, the Venetian ship-building industry, which from the sixteenth century onward was organized according to the principle of the division of labor.'9 Technical normalization has another genealogy entirely. Normalization is the language of the engineer, and its successful integration as a part of modern institutions marks the moment when this technical language could attain to the status of a common language. The institutions of normalization all grew out of associations of mechanical and elec- trical engineers that were founded during the second half of the nineteenth century in every industrialized nation.20 One line of ancestry for the idea of normalization therefore lies in the scientific and technological transformations that accompanied industrialization. Normalization took on a real institutional existence with the creation of the first official bureaus of norms and standards during the First World War.

The demands of wartime production were a second point of origin for normalization movements, since coordinated production, interchangeability of parts, and compatibility of products are all dependent on the establishment of norms.2' In the period immediately following the war, normalization appeared to be an inevitable requirement of production in the modern world, and seemed to imply a general peacetime mobilization of the population. Future industrial and economic productivity all seemed to depend on normalization, and industrial leaders saw it as an inescapable necessity.

Thus normalization became something more than a technique to be adopted or neglected at will. Instead, it began to appear as the essential structure that would provide the framework for production and exchange everywhere in the



world. Herein lies the third line of ancestry for normalization: it is both economic and sociological. The demand for normalization in industry indicates an increasing awareness among industrialists that they form a society, and that this society requires its own language, its own codes, and its own specific forms of regulation. The technical normalization movement in industry signals the moment when industrialists and government officials begin to recognize that industrial growth, the appearance of new needs, and mass consumption all con- tribute to the creation of a new productive system that is distinct from its prede- cessors not only in terms of its techniques and productive capacities but also in terms of its instruments of communication and its rules.

It is essential to distinguish between the functions and objectives of normalization and its techniques. The functions of normalization are well known: simplification, unification, and specification.22 Simplification involves reducing the number of models for objects, choosing between products that resemble each other too closely, and eliminating any superfluous models. Unification means establishing fixed characteristics of objects so that objects are compatible and interchangeable. Specification is a process of reaching a precise understanding about standards for the quality of manufactured products. All of these functions are part of a larger program for rationalizing production by reducing waste, regularizing production so as to minimize the effects of economic fluctuation, and adapting production to demand as efficiently as possible.23 In other words, one of the aims of technical normalization is to gain a certain measure of control over time.

Industrial normalization cannot be reduced to the pursuit of these objectives alone, however, for the essential thing here is the technique that makes it possible. Despite the tendency of contemporary authors to insist that there are many different kinds of norms-terminological norms, norms for spatial measurement, and qualitative norms-any one of these varieties of norm would be inconceivable without the others.24 This mutual interdependence of norms can be explained by the fact that what is really being normalized is language. Normalization begins with vocabulary:

The first thing to develop when one begins to examine a particular problem is a means of specifying terms precisely: there must be a single term for each thing and a single meaning for each term.... Equally, since the elaboration of norms clearly determines technical terminology, product nomenclature, and the forms of symbolic representation in dia- grams, establishing a set of standard terminological points of reference is the first task in the process of normalization.25

This normalization of vocabulary extends even to systems for notation and writing: the signs and locutions that characterize common usage are less than ideal for the purpose of precise technical expression. Words are soon joined by numbers and drawings that are themselves normalized.

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Linguistic normalization also encompasses syntax. The language of normalization has its own grammar and logic. This normalized language serves a specific mode of thought that it must both call forth and translate: it comprises a style of analysis, and a way of categorizing and breaking down objects, tasks, and needs, at once segmenting them and individualizing them. At the same time that it fab- ricates a language, normalization serves as a principle of objectification and a producer of objectivity.26 This artificial language serves to prevent ambiguities. It is a language of precision and certainty, a language without puns, stylistic figures, or interference-the language of perfect communication. However, the language of technical normalization also implies the institution of a new relationship between words and things.

Fundamentally, normalization is the process of turning this language, with its vocabulary and syntax, into a common language, a general principle of communication that functions in much the same way as the system of thought that it expresses. This language must function not only within the limited context of a single industry but within the sphere of relations between various industries, and in the field of relations between producers and consumers. Within this language, the demands of buyers, sellers, producers, and consumers must all be expressed, refigured, and readjusted with respect to one another. Normalization establishes the language that allows these different groups to understand one another and to form a society.27 Its central projects are to institute new common standards of measurement while searching for appropriate rules of analysis and expression, and to teach this language to all those who are involved in one way or another in the system of economic exchange.

Normalization is thus the institution of the perfect common language of pure communication required by industrial society. But what will this language say, and what will be its content? What makes these new norms anything more than a precise and perfected version of communicational tools that have already been in existence for some time? How does one evaluate the requirements of this language, and its performance in communication-in other words, what is the norm for industrial normalization? One of the specific characteristics of technical normalization is that requirements and performance are defined according to principles of relativity and solidarity. In terms of industrial normalization, the measure of a productive norm is a norm for consumption and vice versa.28 Nor- malization forces each individual to imagine the ordering principle behind his activity not only with respect to some ideal of perfection that he might attain in isolation (such an ideal isolation has no meaning in a normative system), but with respect to a determined need that must be satisfied. Normalization is a means of organizing that solidarity which makes each individual the mirror and measure of his fellow.

For Harriman, "The idea of perfection is not involved in standardization."29 In place of perfection is the "one best," or the relative best, with reference to



industrial capabilities and economic capacities, specific uses and requirements. Normalization is a means of assigning value that renders absolute standards of perfection meaningless.30 The good is figured in terms of adequacy-the good product is adequate to the purpose it was meant to serve. Within the normative system, values are not defined a priori but instead through an endless process of comparison that is made possible by normalization. The norm is the best rela- tional principle. It expresses a compromise: the compromise among norms in accord with the general principle of normative solidarity, the compromise between technical capability and industrial capacity, or the compromise between production and need. Technical normalization, or standardization, provides an example of valorization that makes no reference to universals, where equilibrium has replaced the absolute as the value of values. A standard may become stable or regular, but it is only temporarily so. The standard is a form of compromise, the common denominator, a point of reference that is destined to disappear-a measurement that expresses the relation of a group to itself, even that of a group as large as the entire population of the globe.

These different properties become apparent once again in the procedures for establishing standards. Standardization is not a form of legislation, nor is it a process that can be carried out by decree. In other words, standardization is not a state function. Rather, it presupposes the creation of associations where all interested participants-producers, consumers, engineers, scientists-can nego- tiate the common standard according to their respective requirements. There is a kind of democracy specific to the standardization process.3' In general, this democracy functions on two levels: on the first are the organizations that represent the various kinds of productive activity and are competent to decide upon standards; on the second are the organizations of standardizing associations that verify the compatibility of various norms among themselves according to the principle that "standards must form a perfectly unified whole."32 This principle makes standardization into an infinite task.

Discipline, insurance, and standardization ought not to be conflated. How- ever, all three practices can be subsumed under the term norm. How can we think about the relationships between them, then? How might comparison of them clarify our conception of the norm? It is worth noting at the outset that each of these three sets of practices is marked by a tendency to relentless proliferation: discipline becomes normative as it becomes generalized and as it shifts from negative to positive functioning, and the logic of the norm is what makes thi-s generalization possible.

Ever since its legally problematic debut at the start of the nineteenth century, the insurance industry and its spheres of influence have expanded almost inces- santly. Today there is scarcely a social problem that is not dealt with in terms of

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risk: public hygiene, health issues, pollution, social maladjustment, and delin- quency have all come to make sense in insurance terms. Social security has also helped to make insurance the essential form of social relations. Technical normalization, too, seems to require extensive development: normalizing a product means normalizing both production techniques and the needs to be satisfied by production.

These normative procedures are implicated in a process of expansion that only stops when each has exhausted the possibilities for further extending its jurisdiction. They are also related to one another, however, in such a way that each pulls the others into a kind of normative spiral. Modern techniques for managing accidents in the workplace provide a good example of this: the insurance industry's way of coping with accidents resulted in the birth of a science of workplace safety, ergonomics, which is clearly related to the development of scientific organization and management principles. The demands of social hygiene cer- tainly benefited the industrialization of construction, which was itself taken over and encouraged by the development of construction insurance. We might also chart the structure of normative networks, and in so doing we would gradually come to see how a norm on one level is related to a norm on another, a safety norm to a normative level of performance, for example, or a disciplinary norm to a productive norm, or a productive norm to a norm of population. "Norms," explains Canguilhem, "are relative to each other in a system, at least potentially. Their correlativity within a social system tends to make this system into an organization, that is, a unity in itself, if not by itself and for itself."33

Just as norms can only exist socially, there can be no such thing as a norm that exists in isolation, for a norm never refers to anything but other norms on which it depends. Norms communicate among themselves, shifting from one level or field of their existence to another according to a kind of modular logic. The norm finds meaning only in relation to other norms: only a norm can provide a normative value for another norm. The paradox of the norm is that before one can exist, there must already be another. If a norm exists, the entire space in which it appears becomes a normative space. Thus it would be an error to say that The History of Sexuality, which extended the scope of the normative to the state and the populations within its jurisdiction, continues or completes Discipline and Punish, which merely situated the normative at the level of discipline. This displacement is part of the logic of the norm. When the norm appears, it establishes itself necessarily as an order: the normative order that characterizes modern societies.

This correlative quality of norms provides us with a methodological insight: it is essential to distinguish between the norm itself and the apparatus, institution, or technique of power that brings it into action and functions according to its principles. The norm (or the normative) is no more specific to discipline than it is to insurance or standardization. The norm in particular cannot be characterized as the exertion of a punctilious or minute form of power or imagined in



terms of the microphysics of its engagements. Norms are linked neither by scale (macro or micro) nor by the characteristics of their objects, whether they are bodies, populations, or things. Hence the ubiquity of the normative, which can no longer be confused with the exercise of power that it informs. If power is exerted according to a set of physical constraints, the norm falls within the prov- ince of a metaphysics of power.

What, then, is a norm? It is a way for a group to provide itself with a common denominator in accordance with a rigorous principle of self-referentiality, with no recourse to any kind of external reference point, either in the form of an idea or an object. The normative process can obey a variety of different logics: the pan- optical logic of discipline, the probabilistic schema of insurance, or the commu- nicative logic of the technical norm. These three logics have the same form: in each case, the rule which serves as a norm, by virtue of which everyone can measure, evaluate, and identify himself or herself, will be derived from those for whom it will serve as a standard. A strange logic, this, which forces the group to turn back in upon itself and which, from the moment it establishes itself, will let no one escape its purview.

The norm implies a rule of judgment, as well as a means of producing that rule. It is a principle of communication, a highly specific means of resolving the problem of intersubjectivity. The norm is equalizing; it makes each individual comparable to all others; it provides the standard of measurement. Essentially, we are all alike and, if not altogether interchangeable, at least similar, never different enough from one another to imagine ourselves as entirely apart from the rest. If the establishment of norms implies classification, this is primarily because the norm creates classes of equivalency.

But the norm can also work to create inequalities. This is, in fact, the only objectivity that it provides: the norm invites each one of us to imagine ourselves as different from the others, forcing the individual to turn back upon his or her own particular case, his or her individuality and irreducible particularity. More precisely, the norm affirms the equality of individuals just as surely as it makes apparent the infinite differences among them. The reality of normative equality is that we are all comparable; the norm is most effective in its affirmation of differences, discrepancies, and disparities. The norm is not totalitarian but individualizing; it allows individuals to make claims on the basis of their individuality and permits them to lead their own particular lives. However, despite the strength of various individual claims, no one of them can escape the common standard. The norm is not the totality of a group forcing constraints on individuals; rather, it is a unit of measurement, a pure relationship without any other supports.

Normative practices, based on the notions of equality and the common standard, are compatible with the existence of a certain kind of law. The normative allows us to understand how communication remains possible even within a historical moment characterized by the end of universal values. The norm is a means

154 REPRESENTATIONS


of producing social law, a law constituted with reference to the particular society it claims to regulate and not with respect to a set of universal principles. More precisely, when the normative order comes to constitute the modernity of societies, law can be nothing other than social.

This kind of law possesses two remarkable qualities: first, it is no longer based on a model in which the law emanates from a sovereign will. In a normative order, there is no room for the sovereign. No one can pretend to be the subject that establishes the norm; norms are created by the collectivity without being willed by anyone in particular. The norm is the group's observation of itself; no one has the power to declare it or establish it. Undoubtedly, the norm gives the group a certain sovereignty over itself, but that sovereignty does not derive from a con- tract. Although it presents itself as an expression of the general will, legislative sovereignty within the normative order is mere appearance, a form or fiction necessary to ensure the community's respect for the common standard.

Secondly, although there can be a parliament within a normative order-and practically speaking, there are usually many, since they have a tendency to multiply-there is no legislator. This position is empty, and definitively so. The law is no longer valid as an expression of the general will or the common interest. Rather, it is valid by virtue of its normative quality. Parliament no longer establishes the fundamental principles of law; it can only set forth regulations. A normative economy of obligations allows us to imagine a law without obligations or sanctions. The supporters of technical normalization have made it amply clear that whenever a regulation is propounded, a norm has been negotiated. The validity of a norm derives from the fact that it is not imposed from outside but that it observes itself without requiring obedience. Within a normative space, constraint is more of an obstacle than an aid. At the United Nations, for example, arguments have been made for "resolutions" and "recommendations" that do not have the binding force of treaties and serve instead as points of reference for evaluating the conduct of states. Of course, they are most effective when they express a consensus. More precisely, these resolutions and recommendations are the expression of norms. The norm eliminates within law the play of vertical relations of sovereignty in favor of the more horizontal relations of social welfare and social security.

The norm, then, is a means of producing the common standard, a rule for common judgement that makes law possible in modern societies. It functions within the bounds of three defining conditions.

The first involves the constitution of a homogeneous field of positive values. The norm makes visible and records only the sheer phenomenality of phenomena. The normative gaze does not seek to penetrate to the inner substance of things. Instead, it remains on the level of pure facticity, never going beyond



this to attain a deeper appreciation of its objects. Facts are sufficient in themselves; they simply exist, neither as appearance nor as essence. Processing them is not a question of unmasking them or interpreting them because for the normative way of seeing, a fact refers to other facts and not to an original cause. Thus, in the normative order one simply moves from one visible surface to another, indefinitely.

This positivism based on pure facts is fundamental to the normative order. It allows the norm to appear as both a principle of objectivity and as a common language. If there were a norm for the norm, it would be this rigorous positivism of exteriority. The normative institution presupposes a dual decision that functions in both a negative and a positive sense. In its negative formulation, the language of the norm assumes that it is always possible to distinguish facts from their interpretations. From the normative point of view, all interpretation is subjective; all explanation, opinion, and theory are simply forms of metaphysics. In its positive formulation, the normative allows for communication that is independent of all philosophical or religious conviction. Within the realm of the norm, faith and knowledge are definitively separated. The category of the normative itself presupposes the creation of a purely descriptive language in which syntax and vocabulary would always succeed in containing the slippage of meaning that occurs in metaphor. If the possibility of secular politics is founded on the constitution of a sphere of objective interpretation, then the norm is eminently secular.

As I have suggested earlier in this essay, norms are anything but natural; facts are never simply given. It is essential to distinguish between facts and their interpretations, and statistical probability has played a major role in establishing this distinction. In this respect, the science of statistics resembles the language of the norm both in its vocabulary and its syntax. It also functions as a common language because it produces objectivity independent of any doctrine. Of course, there can be no objectivity without objectification. Statistics and probability are techniques of objectification that produce facts whose objectivity, liberated from all metaphysics, can function as a common language. This is not to say that either one is neutral, or that there are such things as pure facts, but simply that they create the possibility of objectivity.

The second characteristic of the norm is its relativity. This directly contradicts the idea that the norm represents some kind of absolute. A norm is a self- referential standard of measurement for a given group; it can make no pretense to bind anyone for an indefinite period, as a law can. This is not to say that norms are ephemeral, for they are enormously durable. But they are also inconstant, almost by definition. In the eyes of the business community, this capacity for adap- tation and flexible response to changing conditions makes normalization superior to laws or regulations as a management technique. Part of the norm's value derives from the fact that it is so completely time-bound.

Similarly, the norm can never be universal. Ever since the work of Emile

156 REPRESENTATIONS


Durkheim, both sociology and cultural ethnology have repeatedly returned to the idea that the validity of a norm can never extend beyond the bounds of the group which that norm describes. As Durkheim notes, "A fact can be termed pathological only in relation to a given species.... It can only be termed normal in relation to a particular phase, likewise determinate of its development."34 The same holds true for biological norms: standards of health are not the same for everyone, and those suitable for adults would be less so for small children or elderly people. Because norms are relative, it makes no sense to apply a particular set of norms established for one group to other unrelated groups or cases.

The relativity of norms has often been interpreted to their detriment, as though the fact that normative rules bear the marks of their historical context were enough to make them invalid. Relativity does not necessarily imply rela- tivism. If a norm's sphere of validity cannot extend beyond the bounds of the group that establishes it in the first place, this is precisely because norms are neither equivalent nor interchangeable. In short, there is system of valorization specific to norms that is altogether unrelated to the Kantian criteria for value.

Finally, norms involve polarity. Canguilhem has commented that the relationship between the normal and the abnormal is not "a relationship of contra- diction and externality, but one of inversion and polarity."35 As we have already observed, the abnormal is not outside the realm of the normal; the division between the normal and the abnormal occurs on the basis of inclusion rather than exclusion. However, if the normal and the abnormal can only be distinguished along a continuous spectrum of possibilities, are real distinctions even possible?

This is the biological problem of deciding on the status of the anomalous. Recalling Canguilhem once again, we are reminded that anomalies are part of the normal in much the same way that mutation is an essential part of biological life.36 Just as in statistics, there are never any real constants-only differences of various sorts. But if the norm is based on variation, how can we describe one particular sort of variation as abnormal? Biological anomalies can be considered abnormal less because they diverge from an a priori model of their type than because the anomalous individual will experience his or her difference as a handicap or obstacle in the business of life. If all possible forms are not normal, it is not because some forms are naturally impossible but because the various possible forms of existence are not all equivalent for those who must exist in them.37 The separation between the normal and the abnormal occurs at the point in the relationship between a living entity and its environment where equilibrium is completely disrupted, and the distance between environmental requirements and individual performance becomes too great. If environmental requirements change, performance does too, and along with them the location of the boundary between the normal and the abnormal.

We can also explain the normative assignment of value in politics on the basis of these ideas. Social groups impose demands of various sorts (e.g., industrial or



educational demands) that serve as the standard by which individual performance is measured and that allow individuals to be classified and placed in a hierarchy. Abnormality is defined as a handicap or inability. It no longer refers to a natural quality or property of being; instead, it signals some aspect of the group's relation to itself. The relationship between the normal and the abnormal thus becomes an unstable threshold. At the same time, the political stakes in the fixation of this boundary become increasingly apparent. Opposition to a particular technique and the demands associated with it implies a will to modify the threshold for exclusion. Inversely, debate over the frontiers of the normal and the abnormal is meaningless in the absence of some effort to alter the social conditions that have produced the boundary.

The normative society is a strange one: like all other societies, it excludes various individuals and groups, but its tactics for exclusion in no way imply any kind of natural prejudice. It has its own demands, which are never natural and always social. In normative societies, political life is always highly polemical and concerned primarily with the establishment of a balance between the various claims of individuals and groups, a stable social state. The achievement of specific ends is less important than the maintenance and negotiation of this state, since in the normative society social good and stability are one and the same.

To the extent that norms are unstable, one might object that they cannot function either as a common standard or as a precondition for law. After all, how can a rule serve as a common reference if it is constantly changing and can offer no security to those who will have to make decisions based on it? Doesn't a rule have to be fixed, unchanging, and outside the influence of those who are going to use it? Can a law whose rules are constantly changing still be considered a law?

The norm is that which, as a rule, is least arbitrary. The evidence provided by averages and statistical regularities suggests that normative objectivity does exist, at least for particular moments and particular situations. Certain social facts do recur reliably in obedience to a sociological law of inertia which can be read as proof that the life world has found its equilibrium in a specific normative identity. A priori, a normative order may seem to be constructed as if anything were possible. However, even if we do believe that everything is possible in law, in practical terms the possibilities are predetermined and relatively limited. The rationality of the norm has introduced us to a kind of positivistic pragmatism that cannot be grasped in absolute terms. What we must understand is that there is no need to impose a law on the living in order to ensure regularity in their behavior.

I have attempted to elucidate Foucault's rather enigmatic claim at the end of The History of Sexuality that, as a result of the rise of bio-power, "we have entered a phase of juridical regression in comparison with the pre-seventeenth-century societies we are acquainted with."38 This remark might well be construed to mean

158 REPRESENTATIONS


that there has been some kind of decline of law and legality in modern society. However, Foucault's project was neither to announce the imminent disap-

pearance of law, nor to criticize bio-power in the name of law. Foucault was concerned less with the place of law in the exercise of power (that is, whether bio- power is compatible or not with the exercise of law) than with the use of law as a "model" for analysis, a principle that makes power intelligible.39 Foucault was interested in the relationship between the juridical and the political, and between power and law, as a means of determining the conditions necessary for an analysis of the mechanisms of power. Power does not necessarily function through law. Instead, law serves to camouflage the machinations of power. An adequate description of monarchical power would have to include law, for law is the language the monarchy provides itself with in order to legitimate its own exercise of power. However, in the case of bio-power, any reference to thejuridical is illusory, since the language of bio-power is purely technical and has almost nothing to do with the law as such. Foucault's analysis leaves open two questions: first, if the juridical is an inappropriate category to use in interpreting bio-power, how do we make sense of all those "instruments of the law" (codes, constitutions, laws, regulations) that have developed and expanded during the era of bio-power? Second, if the action of norms replaces the juridical system of law as the code and language of power, what role remains for law?40

I have tried to argue that the contemporary legal apparatus is not cotermi- nous with the juridical, as Foucault describes it, and that the normative and the juridical are essentially opposed. Further, I have attempted to delineate the structure of the normative on the basis of two examples: insurance and industrial standardization. I have broadened the definition of the norm to include that form of the common standard produced through the group's reference to itself and demonstrated, finally, that law cannot be understood simply in terms of its formal expressions (constitutions, codes, laws). These must all refer back to what functions in society as a common standard, a normative and objective basis for judgment. Thus we can now imagine a history of the law in which law is no longer conceived in essentialist terms, and an account of the inevitable decline of essentialist law becomes unnecessary.

In both the insurance system and industrial standardization, the norm appears as a technique for the production of a common standard of measurement. No society can exist without something akin to this common standard, a common language that binds individuals together, making exchange and communication possible. The norm is one part of a long history of the common standard, a lesser instance of a larger category. This articulation of the norm and the common standard opens up a variety of research perspectives, allowing us to explore modernity in terms of measurement techniques and standards. Societies



become modern at least partly by virtue of transformations in their instruments of technical, political, and social measurement. What did the French Revolution bring about, after all, if not an enormous transformation in systems of measurement? The introduction of the metric system, the institution of a truly national language, calendar reform, and the creation of the Civil Code are all examples of this. Similarly, the institution of constitutional democracy was a means of producing a common political standard. One might also read the history of the social sciences in the nineteenth century as the formation of so many instruments intended to furnish modern societies with social and political measurements. Thus we might well assess social modernity in terms of the transformation a given society may have experienced in its techniques of measurement.

-Translated and adapted by Marjorie Beale

Notes

1. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1980), 135, passim.

2. Ibid., 144. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., 82-83 and passim. 5. Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett and

Robert S. Cohen (New York, 1989), 239. 6. See Fran~ois Ewald, L'Etat providence (Paris, 1986), particularly part 2, chaps. 1 and 2. 7. It is worth noting that it is impossible to insure oneself against danger. 8. See Lorenz Kruger et al., The Probabilistic Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1987). 9. Alphonse Quetelet, Du Systeme social et des lois qui le regissent (Paris, 1848), 13-14.

10. Ibid., 18-19. 11. Alphonse Quetelet, Sur l'Homme et le delveloppement de ses facultes; ou, Essai de physique

sociale, 2 vols. (Paris, 1835), 1:20, 2:250. 12. Ibid., 1: 147-48. 13. Eugene Reboul, Les Assurances sur la vie (Paris, 1863), 44. 14. Statutory order of 26 January 1984 concerning normalization. 15. Norman F. Harriman, Standards and Standardization (New York, 1928), 24. 16. Some of these organizations include: Normenausschuss der Deutschen Industrie,

1917; Union Suisse de normalisation, 1918; American Engineering Standards Com- mittee, Comission permanente de standardisation (France), Engineering Standards Committee (England, reorganized from an earlier institution created in 1901, the International Standardizing Association), 1928-30.

17. See Jacques Maily, La Normalisation (Paris, 1946), 11 and passim; Harriman, 1; John Gaillard, Industrial Standardization, Its Principles and Application (New York, 1934), 1 and passim; Waldemar Hellmich, Vom Wesung der deutschen Normungauschuss: D.I.N. 1917- 1927 (Berlin, 1928).

18. Albert W. Whitney would interpret this transformation as the passage from a process of natural selection to a process of selection based on rational choice. See National Industrial Conference Board, Inc. [N ICB] Industrial Standardization (New York, 1929), 18.

160 REPRESENTATIONS


19. Maily, La Normalisation, 24. 20. See Hellmich, Vom Wesung der deutschen Normung. 21. See Hellmich, ibid.; Maily, La Normalisation, 26. 22. Maily, La Normalisation, 35 and passim; Harriman, Standards, 24 and passim; NICB,

Industrial Standardization, 23 and passim. 23. See Maily, La Normalisation, chap. 5, "Les Avantages de la normalisation," 89 and

passim. 24. For example, see ibid., 48 and passim. 25. Ibid., 49. 26. See Gaillard, "Definition of Concepts in a Standard," Industrial Standardization, 36. 27. Harriman, Standards, xvi. 28. Hellmich, Vom Wesung der deutschen Normung: "There is no such thing as an isolated or

independent norm; all norms are interdependent." 29. Harriman, Standards, 79. 30. See Jessie V. Coles, Standardization of Consumers' Goods: An Aid to Consumer Buying (New

York, 1932). 31. Maily, La Normalisation, 150 and passim; N ICB, Industrial Standardization, chap. 6, "The

American Standards Association and Other National Standardizing Bodies," 100 and passim.

32. Maily, La Normalisation, 61. 33. Canguilhem, Normal and Pathological, 249. 34. Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, ed. Steven Lukes, trans. W. D. Halls

(London, 1982), 92. 35. Canguilhem, Normal and Pathological, 239-40. 36. Ibid., 263-64, 267-68. 37. Ibid., 125ff. 38. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 144. 39. Ibid., 86. 40. Ibid., 144.



Article Contentsp. 138p. 139p. 140p. 141p. 142p. 143p. 144p. 145p. 146p. 147p. 148p. 149p. 150p. 151p. 152p. 153p. 154p. 155p. 156p. 157p. 158p. 159p. 160p. 161

Issue Table of ContentsRepresentations, No. 30, Special Issue: Law and the Order of Culture (Spring, 1990), pp. 1-189Front Matter [pp. ]Generalization in Interpretive Theory [pp. 1-12]Theories of Constitutional Interpretation [pp. 13-41]Facing Facts in Legal Interpretation [pp. 42-77]The Placement of Politics in Roberto Unger's Politics [pp. 78-108]Enlightenment Epistemology and the Laws of Authorship in Revolutionary France, 1777-1793 [pp. 109-137]Norms, Discipline, and the Law [pp. 138-161]Law, Boundaries, and the Bounded Self [pp. 162-189]Erratum: Emulous Factions and the Collapse of Chivalry: Troilus and Cressida. [pp. ]Back Matter [pp. ]

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Ewald Norms, Discipline and the Law