Michel Foucault – “Security, Territory, Population” (1978)

Foucault is concerned with the distinction between security and discipline, and how each relates to what is known as “normalization.” He argues that discipline normalizes: it separates the normal from the abnormal based upon conformity to an optimum model. He utilizes the example of smallpox epidemic in the eighteenth century to discuss the process of normalization, breaking it down into the notions of case, risk, danger and crisis.

In the system of normalization, then, he eventually notes the plotting of the normal and the abnormal, “of different curves of normality,” where the “operation of normalization consists in establishing an interplay between these different distributions of normality and [in] acting to bring the most unfavorable in line with the more favorable” (63).

Foucault then discusses the relationship between sovereign and population, and the changing nature of the relationship over time. Security is a crucial issue, as is circulation (meaning movement, exchange, contact, dispersion and distribution). He notes that in a sovereign-subject relationship, “the limit of the law is the subject’s disobedience; it is the ‘no’ with which the subject opposes the sovereign” (71).

Q: Relating this to the body (or the body politic), at what point does the power in the sovereign-subject relationship begin to shift?

Q: Relating to my case study building, the Casa del Fascio, what was the dynamic of the sovereign-subject relationship of the Fascists to the general population? They must have provided a strong sense of security in the beginning to allow them to gain the power that they did, so how long would they have continued to rule had they not become entangled with Germany in WWII?