NotNormativelyHuman 181
governmental,politicalpower.^29 Inthiscontext,itmaybeusefultotake
a closer look at the particular rhetoric that characterizes much of his
writing on the human body. In a typical passage from "Nietzsche,
Genealogy, History" (1971), the body is repeatedly scripted as
somethingthat"manifests,"is"imprintedby,"orthe"inscribedsurface"
of something larger than itself, a something that Foucault would
unsurprisingly subsume under the omnibus term "power" (147-48). In
this view, the human body, including its varied biological endowments,
ends up being something like a palimpsest on which social forces
registertheirinfluence.
What is also often neglected in the writings of Foucault and of his
largefollowingisthefactthattheimaginarygrammarofnormscanalso
be vested in cultural practices and that cultural forms of oppression are
no less insidious than "official" socio-political ones. There is very little
in Foucault on the pressures exerted by non-official, conversational or
media-based normativities: "Foucault argues in terms of a historically
guidedfunctionalismthatsteadfastlyregardsculturaltraditions...only
fromtheperspectiveoftheobjectivefunctiontheyperforminasystemic
process characterized by the increase of power" and associates this,
perhaps surprisingly, with social functionalists of the Talcott Parsons
school (Honneth, "Foucault's Theory" 163).^30 The idea of a self-
(^29) A useful summary of Foucault's position is offered by Scott Lash: "For
Foucault,therearetwomodesinwhichpouvoirworks.Inthefirstitnormalizes
puissancefromabove.Inthesecondittakestheshapeofpuissance:oflifeitself.
Itispowerthatdoesnotworkthroughnormalization.Atstakearetwomodesof
power-knowledge.Thefirstisthepower-overthatFoucaulttalksaboutinterms
of surveillance and discipline. The second is when power starts – in more
contemporary times – to work from below. When it begins to circulate in the
capillaries of society. In the second mode, power enters immanent to life and
forms of life themselves" (Giddens 61). – The indecision implied in Foucault's
proceduremayalsobethebasisofthechargemadebyHabermasthatFoucault,
all his proclamations aside, is a crypto-normativist (Habermas, Moral
Consciousness276)becausehecannotaccountforthenormativefoundationsof
hisownnormativethinking.
(^30) A good example of where Foucault's analytics differ from those of Honneth
and Habermas is this passage from Discipline and Punish: "the political
technology of the body... is diffuse, rarely formulated in continuous,