Jason Stanley is well known in philosophy for his work in analytic philosophy of language and epistemology. In recent years, Stanley has migrated to more politicized practice of philosophy, producing books on propaganda and fascism, books that have gained popularity and readership across the academy, in the popular press, in leftist and mainstream media, on the progressive conference circuit, and so on.
I have not read Stanley’s (2018) book, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. (I requested a review copy from Random House Press in order to write a review of the book for the blog; however, Random House ignored my request.) Nevertheless, I have read a number of Stanley’s recent op-eds and articles that draw on the content of the book, in addition to watching various online interviews with Stanley in which he discusses the motivation for the book, outlines the main arguments of the book, including what he calls the “ten pillars of fascism,” explains how claims in the book relate to the present situation across the world, the Trump phenomenon, and so on. Thus, I thought that I had a good general picture of the book, even if I lacked a more certain familiarity with the particular brushstrokes that it comprises.
Then I watched Stanley’s recent interview on Democracy Now in which he talked about the normalization of fascism. The NORMALIZATION of fascism. That had to be a first. I’m certain that I had neither read nor heard Stanley refer to the encroachment of fascism in that decidedly FOUCAULTIAN way. Yet I have noticed that in all the op-eds, reviews, or videos that I have read or seen since the Democracy Now interview, Stanley refers to “normalizing fascism” or “the normalization of fascism.”
Has Jason Stanley become a Foucaultian? I needed to find out.
So, I went to the Amazon.ca website and typed “How Fascism Works” into the search window. When I reached the book’s page, I clicked on the Search Inside option and typed in “normalization.” Sure enough, I was taken to p. 188 of the book where Stanley, in response to possible objections to his arguments, introduces the idea that the threat of the normalization of fascist myths is real, not far-fetched, as some might claim. He then cites a 2017 article by Adam Bear and Joshua Knobe to support his claim that “normal” is not always a benign designation. As Stanley puts it, “both history and psychology show that our judgments about normality can’t always be trusted” (emphasis in Stanley).
Although I want to note that Stanley’s remarks in this context suggest that he thinks there exists some prediscursive domain of normality (in the mythic past?) that could be instantiated and accurately represented, I am more concerned to underscore the significant influence of Foucault in Stanley and in this general discussion of the normalization of fascism.
Knobe has of course been inspired by Foucault, as well as by Ian Hacking (see Knobe 2017), who himself acknowledges how Foucault shaped his thinking. Indeed, in the course of an argument about the relation between the constitutive effects of language and human action that I advance in the second chapter of Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability, I (2017, 121) briefly discuss Knobe’s work on the relation between ideas about normality and human conduct, that is, on how understandings of what counts as normal can constrain the possibilities of action that people believe are open to them. The second chapter of my book is in fact entitled “Power and Normalization”.
Insofar as Stanley claims that (fascist) relations of power operate through forms of normalization, that is, insofar as he claims that power can normalize what had previously been unthinkable or impermissible, he has assumed a notion of power as productive, rather than as necessarily or primarily repressive or prohibitive. (I leave it to others, at least for now, to consider whether the claim that power is productive conflicts with the claims that Stanley makes elsewhere in his book and with its general thesis.)
The claim that power is productive (i.e., it constitutes objects, statements, states of affairs, and so on) is perhaps Foucault’s single most important, that is, his signature, contribution to contemporary social and political thought. Indeed, the productive character of power is arguably the defining feature of Foucault’s work, in which he contrasted the conception of power as productive with juridical conceptions of power according to which power is construed as the possession of an authority of some kind that subtracts from the liberties of subjects, represses them, and so on. As Foucault derisively put it, modern political philosophy in the West still has not cut off the head of the king.
Foucault, in his histories of the present, that is, his genealogies, was concerned to show that what is generally taken to be self-evident and natural can be made strange, can be shown to be a historically contingent artifact, discursively constructed, the product of human invention and interests.
For Foucault, in short, normalization has a history, a history that can be traced genealogically, as can the history of normality itself. For Foucault, the normal signifies a process, an event, never a natural state or characteristic. One is not born normal, but rather becomes, or is made, normal. In a word, normalized. For Foucault, the category of normal has never been benign, but rather came into being as a mechanism of the relatively recent form of power that he called “biopower,” which is the form of power that directs itself to the management of “life,” both the life of the individual and the life of the species. The consolidation of the modern concept of “normal” legitimized and occurred in tandem with the new statistical knowledge and other techniques of population management that stemmed from biopower.
As François Ewald (1991, 138) explains, the norm enabled biopower, “which aims to produce, develop, and order social strength,” to steadily do the work that juridical modes of governance, characterized by forcible seizure, abduction, or repression, had done in the past. The norm accomplished this expansion by enabling discipline to develop from a simple set of constraints into a mechanism and by transforming the negative restraints of the juridical into the more positive controls of normalization (141). The normal, Foucault maintained, was established as a principle of coercion through the introduction of standardized education; the organization of national medical professions and hospital systems that could circulate general norms of health; and the standardization of industrial processes and products and manufacturing techniques. As Foucault explained it, normalization thus became one of the great instruments of power at the close of the classical age, that is, the power that the norm harnessed has been shaped through the disciplines that began to emerge at this historical moment (Foucault 1977, 184, 177-183).
From the eighteenth century on, the function of technologies of normalization has been to isolate so-called anomalies in the population, which can be normalized through the therapeutic and corrective strategies of other, associated technologies. Technologies of normalization are not merely innocuous or even benevolent responses to these anomalies in the social body. On the contrary, technologies of normalization are instrumental to the systematic creation, identification, classification, and control of such anomalies; that is, they systematically contribute to the constitution of the perception of anomalies (such as impairment, perversion, madness, and so on) and operate as mechanisms through which some subjects can be divided from others, that is, segregated and excluded.
Foucault introduced the term dividing practices to refer to modes of manipulation that combine a scientific discourse with practices of segregation and social exclusion to categorize, classify, distribute, and manipulate subjects who are initially drawn from a rather undifferentiated mass of people. Through these practices, subjects become objectivized as (for instance) mad or sane, sick or healthy, criminal or law abiding. Through these practices of division, classification, and ordering, furthermore, subjects become tied to an identity and come to understand themselves scientifically (Foucault 1982, 208).
Stanley is concerned with the normalization of fascism. In my work on normalization, I have been concerned to show how normalization is an integral and strategic mechanism of neoliberalism, whose expansion biopower has enabled and in the service of which the apparatus of disability operates. Recent critical discussions of fascism seem to have largely eclipsed or supplanted critical discussions of neoliberalism, ignoring the role that the apparatus of disability serves for technologies of normalization rather than identify ways in which, in this historical moment, neoliberalism and fascism are mutually reinforcing and complementary and to both of which the apparatus of disability is indispensable.
References
Bear, Adam, and Joshua Knobe. 2017. “Part Descriptive, Part Prescriptive.” Cognition 167: 25-37.
Ewald, François. 1991. “Norms, Discipline, and the Law.” In Law and the Order of Culture, edited by Robert Post, 138–61. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books.
Foucault, Michel. 1982. “The Subject and Power.” Appended to Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, 208–26. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Knobe, Joshua. 2017. “Cognitive Science Suggests Trump Makes Us More Accepting of the Morally Outrageous.” Vox. January 10.
Stanley, Jason. 2018. How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. New York: Random House.
Tremain, Shelley L. 2017. Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
posted by Shelley
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