NotNormativelyHuman 179
context, Foucault records a veritable "explosion of numerous and
diversetechniquesforachievingthesubjugationofbodiesandcontrolof
populations.. ." (Hi story of Sexuality 140). Such a regulation by the
modern nation state of human life has unfolded in various
manifestations, not all of which are biological in the strict sense of the
word and in Foucault's view include schools, prisons, the army, and
other areas of modern governance, plus disciplinary power/knowledge
assemblages such as psychoanalysis. Together, they constitute a regime
ofwhatCanguilhemcalled"vitalnormativities"(136,174-76),whichin
the view of his disciple construes and constricts the range of available
actionsto bepursued by citizens.Iwill return tothis issue below in the
discussionofseniorlifeandgovernmentality.
The Foucauldian perspective on biology-based normativities, for all
its comprehensiveness, tends to occlude the fact that it is not the state
and its agencies alone, but a whole array of non-state actors that has as
effectively, if not even more so, subjected the biology of the human
body to a cluster of normativities. Many of the functions of what
Foucault calls "governmentality" have today (if not already with the
emergence in the 18thcentury of a public sphere in the Habermasian
sense) been taken over by media of various sorts, and are thus more
cultural than governmental. In addition, normativities also derive from
the activities of such diverse actors as the medical profession, religious
organizations, mass production and the industrial complex, health care
providers, etc. Together, these actors and agencies have turned the
biologyofthehumanbodyintooneofthemostdenselynormalizedand
surveilledzonesintheuniverse.
There is a certain logic in how Foucault's immanentist view of
power,control,andsubjugationshouldultimatelydrawhimto thebody
asthemostimmanent,innate,andintimatelocusoftheseforces.Having
positioned the human body as the site of multiple interlocking
and the industrial era was in some senses characterized by the growth of a
biopolitical consensus, whereby the norms of welfare – health, education and
various forms of insurance – were articulated with the demands of mass,
organizedindustrialandcommercialactivity"(333).