Why does ‘normalization’ matter to political semiotics?
Why does ‘normalization’ matter to political semiotics?

Summary/Abstract: The purpose of the paper is to consider the concept of normalization as an analytic tool for the semiotics of power. In order to do this, I review the different types of normative activity in different forms of power as theorized by Michel Foucault. The first apparatus is that of juridical power which deals with the codification of norms into laws; the second is the discipline which individualizes bodies by concentrating on their natural forces in artificial spaces; the third is the apparatus of security which regulates (by securing) the ‘natural’ processes of the population. It is crucial to understand that norms are always the result of specific (governmental) activities in specific contexts and that these diverse activities form the ‘normal individual’. Now, this normal individual cannot solely be conceptualized by concentrating on the dialectical self/other relation that constitutes social, cultural and political identities. Normalization is here approached within the context of biopower, and is taken to be constantly crossing or blurring the boundaries between the political and the biological, making it possible for politics to take as its object the biological processes of the human being. It is, consequently, the author’s conviction that the concept of normalization has the ability to diversify the approach of the semiotics of power.

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