Key Arguments

• Foucault notes a historical shift in the markers of social differentiation: ‘For the marks that once indicated status, privilege and affiliation were increasingly replaced – or at least supplemented – by a whole range of degrees of normality’, showing that ranking by normality displaces inherited status.
• These degrees of normality both indicate ‘membership of a homogeneous social body’ and simultaneously ‘play a part in classification, hierarchization and the distribution of rank’, so that normalization becomes the basis for new forms of social stratification within apparent homogeneity.
• He highlights the dual function of the power of normalization: ‘In a sense, the power of normalization imposes homogeneity; but it individualizes by making it possible to measure gaps, to determine levels, to fix specialities and to render the differences useful by fitting them one to another.’ This shows that normalization both levels and differentiates, producing individualized positions in a graded continuum.
• He notes that this mechanism operates ‘within a system of formal equality’, implying that norm-based differentiation is especially compatible with modern egalitarian legal frameworks: ‘It is easy to understand how the power of the norm functions within a system of formal equality, since within a homogeneity that is the rule, the norm introduces, as a useful imperative’, thus explaining how inequality and hierarchy persist under the guise of equality through normalizing judgement.

Source Quotes

Like surveillance and with it, normalization becomes one of the great instruments of power at the end of the classical age. For the marks that once indicated status, privilege and affiliation were increasingly replaced – or at least supplemented – by a whole range of degrees of normality indicating membership of a homogeneous social body but also playing a part in classification, hierarchization and the distribution of rank. In a sense, the power of normalization imposes homogeneity; but it individualizes by making it possible to measure gaps, to determine levels, to fix specialities and to render the differences useful by fitting them one to another.

For the marks that once indicated status, privilege and affiliation were increasingly replaced – or at least supplemented – by a whole range of degrees of normality indicating membership of a homogeneous social body but also playing a part in classification, hierarchization and the distribution of rank. In a sense, the power of normalization imposes homogeneity; but it individualizes by making it possible to measure gaps, to determine levels, to fix specialities and to render the differences useful by fitting them one to another. It is easy to understand how the power of the norm functions within a system of formal equality, since within a homogeneity that is the rule, the norm introduces, as a useful imperative

In a sense, the power of normalization imposes homogeneity; but it individualizes by making it possible to measure gaps, to determine levels, to fix specialities and to render the differences useful by fitting them one to another. It is easy to understand how the power of the norm functions within a system of formal equality, since within a homogeneity that is the rule, the norm introduces, as a useful imperative

Key Concepts

• For the marks that once indicated status, privilege and affiliation were increasingly replaced – or at least supplemented – by a whole range of degrees of normality indicating membership of a homogeneous social body but also playing a part in classification, hierarchization and the distribution of rank.
• In a sense, the power of normalization imposes homogeneity; but it individualizes by making it possible to measure gaps, to determine levels, to fix specialities and to render the differences useful by fitting them one to another.
• It is easy to understand how the power of the norm functions within a system of formal equality, since within a homogeneity that is the rule, the norm introduces, as a useful imperative

Context

Final sentences of ‘Normalizing judgement’, where Foucault explains how normalization restructures social differentiation by degrees of normality, reconciling homogeneity and individualization within modern systems of formal equality.