Normativity in and Beyond Foucault: the Immanent Life of Norms

In his piece ‘Towards a Natural History of Norms’, Pierre Macherey (1992) distinguishes between two conceptions of the ‘norm’ present in Foucault, which reflect the two correspondent forms of the negative power of sovereign exclusion and the productive orientation of biopower. On the one hand, norms have a negative function, which works through juridical exclusion of permitting/forbidding and coincides with the restrictive character of the law. On the other hand, norms are also invested with a positive meaning, by acting through a biological process of inclusion and regularisation. This second form implies a productive character of life that biopolitical norms require in order to establish and maintain themselves, by inserting individuals into a normative apparatus which reproduces and transforms them into subjects. The operation of this second type of norms requires that the norm is not separate from its own products and effects, but rather stands in a relation of simultaneity, or immanent causality, to the latter (Juniper and Jose, 2008). This dynamic, thus, locates the operation of biopolitical norms on an immanent plane, that entails the constant interaction with a force of life co-constitutive of its very norm, without any pre-dermined outcome. The paper expands on this contribution and argues for the recuperation of the idea of immanent norm of life in Foucault as understated aspect of the author’s work. It does so for two reasons. First, the immanent working of norms puts Foucault’s perspective on biopolitics in relation to the work of the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza around questions of normativity and the living being, thus moving beyond the focus on generalised processes, creativity and unbounded liveliness more commonly found in contemporary scholarship (Deleuze and Guattari, Negri). Studies around the connection of the two authors in this direction are underdeveloped and in fact, Foucault himself makes an explicit reference to Spinoza only twice in his whole body of work (1971, 1973). Secondly, the paper maintains that the analysis of the immanent working of norms can highlight a new relationship between biopolitics and another approach concerned with the question of life, that is, perspectives of vitalism. The paper argues that, as a very composite body of thought, vitalism itself can be defined by an inner division between an active or mystic type, characterised by a teleological and holistic account of life which still conceives of life as a metaphysical principle, and a passive, or naturalist-materialist type, which fosters multiplicity and differentiation and sees life as irreducible to fixed biological laws (Colebrook, 2010; Radomska, 2011, 2016; Hoyningen-Huene and Wuketits, 2012). By following a trajectory that moves through George Canguilhem and Roberto Esposito’s analysis of singularity and the norm, the paper intimates that, from the perspective of normativity and life processes, there exists an analogy between forms of affirmative biopolitics and the latter passive, materialist-naturalist forms of vitalism. This contribution can thus bear important implications for debates interested in the relationship between life and norms, biopolitics and vitalism, and, at a broader level, between naturalism and critical theory.