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 considerable protectors, and, indeed, acting as a link between them, or a place of exchange, a carefully worked out technique for the supervision of norms has continued to develop right up to the present day (Foucault 410-11).
This passage makes clear that Foucault is not merely discussing Mettray but the whole of social organization and the supervisory function of authoritative entities, particularly when reinforced by legal and judicial power, exerts strong influenc...