Foucault's Critique of the Norm

This research examines Foucault's critique of the concept of the norm. Foucault's analysis of the emergence of regimes of discipline in the West charts the development of social coercion as a defining feature of power implementation in society. The basic argument is that power as the right of life or death, associated with state regimes, was transformed into power in determining quality of life as it is understood in the modern period. According to Foucault's line of thought, the individual human being is considered an object upon which authorities may enact various ideas of control. In his description of Mettray, a farm colony for juvenile delinquents and/or abandoned children, the control does not necessarily entail brute force, though that is not out of the question, but rather other forms of coercion, including isolation from the community and the construction of a physical and linguistic vocabulary of experiential reality in the facility. Significantly, Mettray inhabitants were sent there in consequence of a judicial determination based on recommendations of credentialed physicians. This pattern of commitment appears to have gained wider currency than the context of the 19th-century juvenile work farm:

[T]he supervision of normality was firmly encased in a medicine or a psychiatry that provided it with a sort of "scientificity"; it was supported by a judicial apparatus which, directly or indirectly, gave it legal justification. Thus, in the shelter of these two consider

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th of purchasing and eating the products on offer: "'Reading McDonald's' might involve such aspects as understanding what some people are saying when they consume 'value meals' and what others are saying by eschewing such meals" (Ritzer 274). Eating a fast-food meal also involves being aware of rituals (or codes or norms) of behavior that accomplish a food purchase--standing in line inside or waiting in line in one's car at the drive-thru window outside, paying at the first window and picking up at the second, the whole transaction taking place in full view of closed-circuit video. The person-to-person (clerk-to-customer) encounter has the manifest appearance of interaction, but the fact is that the process of fulfilling the transaction governs the encounter, not anything like an authentic personal connection, a point that becomes clear if a customer makes a special request (e.g., no onions) that falls outside the expected pattern of behavior. The point is that the codes and norms of fast-food consumption are determined and managed by the authority and business-format expertise of the corporate entity. The entity may be reluctant to enable the handling of something that is outside the norm, or may not equip its clerks to respond

Category: Philosophy - F