The Intolerable Present, the Urgency of Revolution by Maurizio Lazzarato

Author:Maurizio Lazzarato [Lazzarato, Maurizio]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2023-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

2.2 Normalization Precedes the Norm

The end goal of biopolitics, as model of the incorporation of power in norms, is “normalization” in the sense that it makes a fundamentally “normalizing” power acceptable to the governed.

In his Concept of the Political, Carl Schmitt (there is more to learn from reactionaries than from “progressives” as Marx suggested!) describes a functioning of norms that seems to show a better understanding of the nature of power exercised by Europe inside its borders and in the colonial world. The “normalization” that targets the “normative society” is not only the result but first a presupposition of its functioning, without which norms cannot operate. Normalization by the norm presumes a prior normalization by war, violence, and force. The establishment of order, for Schmitt, is the condition of existence of the juridical norm and, I would add, the biopolitical norm (symbolic and social).

“To create tranquility, security, and order and thereby establish the normal situation is the prerequisite for legal norms to be valid. Every norm presupposes a normal situation, and no norm can be valid in an entirely abnormal situation.” 16

In the same way that the law takes the non-law of capture as its origin, norms imply the nonnorms of imposition by force as their genealogy. anomie (of war and conquest) is the condition for production of the norm. Victory in civil wars and wars of conquest put an end to the “chaos” and imposes a “normal” situation. Once the “order established,” the arrangements of normalization can begin to act on subjectivity. Only once the order of the conquerors is ensured, once a “completely normal situation” is imposed, the conquered can be subjected to the regime of “abstract labor” and “unpaid labor,” to subjections (workers, women, slaves, indigenous and colonized peoples) and to the norms of disciplinary and “biopolitical” behavior. The “positive” action of norms requires the “negative” action (destruction, repression, execution, genocide of civil war and war of conquest. The subjectivity of the “governed” can only be built on the conditions of a more or less violent defeat that makes them pass from the status of political adversary to that of “conquered.”

Norms do not intervene first to construct and manage “productive” or “reproductive” behavior, to ensure mere “control” of a population but, following a political conflict, a civil war, or a war of conquest, to guarantee the continuity of the distribution of acquired power. They operate in a relatively and temporarily pacified situation to stabilize and give continuity to the distribution of power that the conquerors imposed on the conquered. Only at this moment can one speak of a “positive” action of power, because after preventing, prohibiting, and destroying, it makes us act, it solicits and incites us but only in the strict framework of governmentality and its subjections.

The society of norms is the continuation of war of conquest to transform to transform expropriated peasants into workers, impose domestic labor once the class of women is constituted by force and labor of (sexual, affective, etc.) production while, in the colonies,

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