Abnormal, the “New Normal,” and Destabilizing Discourses of Rights
A boy was taken from his elementary school in handcuffs after his classmates turned him in for drawing pictures of weapons. The 11-year-old fifth grader was not charged with a crime in the Wednesday incident. His name is not being released to protect him, school officials said. “There were some drawings that were confiscated by the teacher,” Oldsmar Elementary School Principal David Schmitt said. “The children were in no danger at all. It involved no real weapons.” Still, Schmitt refused to discuss details of the boy’s case.
“All I can tell you is it was a threat . . . against students,” he said. “Nobody in particular, but students in general. . . . We just need to get it through kids’ heads that there are certain things you don’t say and there are certain things you don’t draw,” he said. The boy was handcuffed by school police for his safety, according to Pinellas County School District spokesman Ron Stone. “That’s normal procedure in a situation like this,” Stone said. “The primary concern was to make sure we get appropriate services for the child.”
—Sun-Sentinel, May 11, 2001
There is a profound shift underway in the public institutions that are responsible for the training and socialization of children in Anglo- American nations, a shift that marks the final demise of a modern ideal of childhood and the emergence of something new. It is not the idealized possibility of a new regime of rights for children that has been championed by child rights advocates. It is not the incorporation of children’s views and knowledges into the design and planning of public infrastructures, nor the protection of children from the extremes of poverty or forms of exploitation. However, this new shift is nevertheless being ushered on the coattails of a push for expanded rights for children.
This shift is constituted by a changing logic of discipline and new techniques of normalization of children, but, more important, also by the reimagining of the child as subject and object of these technologies, and by a reimagining of the structures of the “normal” itself. New normal is a term that Columbine High School students used to describe their state of being after the 1999 massacre that occurred there. But I rework the term here in relation to an “old” normal: Michel Foucault’s term to characterize techniques of normalization in modern institutions.
Since Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts published Policing the Crisis (1978), scholars have suggested that successive waves of moral panic over youth criminality seem curiously disconnected from any rise or fall in youth crime.1 What interests me is not the endless “angels or devils” dyad that arises in this work, but the ways in which these cycles serve as signal and site for the transformation of techniques of discipline. To understand the depth of the current transformation, we need to go back over two hundred years to the early foundations of modern notions of culpability and techniques of normalization, which have organized public institutions up until this day.
Abnormal and Modern Discourses of Correction and Punishment
In Abnormal, Michel Foucault (2003) explores the discursive field that emerged from the late 1700s through the early 1900s to constitute modern techniques of normalization in the juridical system. A central issue in this text is the way in which juridical and psychiatric discourses came together to constitute a modern system of correction and punishment. Under penal law of the eighteenth century (which Foucault referred to as classical law), psychiatric testimony functioned only to assess the accused’s sanity at the time of the crime. Under modern law, psychiatric testimony began to serve a different purpose. It created a link between the criminal act and the life of the criminal before the crime, thus establishing a new moral economy of punishment. Classical punishment was based on a display of the excess power of the monarch: through extreme forms of punishment — public beheadings, disembowelings — the monarch erased the crime and the criminal, cleansing the social body of his or her polluting effect. Modern punishment, by contrast, abandoned excess display in favor of a precise economy that matched the punitive or rehabilitative sentence with the criminal act and the life history of the accused.
Both the substance and method of Foucault’s argument are relevant in examining this contrast. Foucault selects a series of key events — acts of criminality that became problematic occurrences for the system of jurisprudence and that functioned as a limit condition for its existing logics. The motiveless crime, for instance, was to become a coveted object of psychiatry, because it could be explained only when the “indictment substitute[d] the subject’s resemblance to her act for the act’s unintelligibility.”2 The normalizing techniques developed to address these crimes are a central theme in much of Foucault’s work. Of greater interest here, however, is the critical role of an ubuesque3 or grotesque discourse in the constitution of these techniques. For Foucault a grotesque discourse has three properties: it can kill, it is taken for truth, and it provokes laughter. The grotesque becomes critical because it acts as a transfer point between juridical logics and psychiatric and therapeutic technologies. It produces in us an incredulous laughter because it signals that something has gone awry, that there is an application of an arbitrary sovereignty, that the discourse mobilized to produce truth claims does not conform even to its own rules. In this case, the grotesque emerges when the psychiatrist’s testimony produces a “reconstruction of the crime itself in its scaled down version, before it has been committed,” offering commonplace, puerile scenes committed early in childhood that function as proof of later criminality.4 Thus, the psychiatrist would assert in testimony: “ ‘He played with wooden weapons.’ ‘He cut the heads off cabbages.’ ‘He was a trial to his parents.’ ‘He played truant from school.’ And then: ‘I conclude from this that he was responsible [i.e., guilty].’ ”5
The modern criminal’s act, his or her abnormality, is made intelligible through petty transgressions that lead up to and resemble the crime. They not only double the crime, but these “forms of conduct, ways of being, [are] presented as cause, motive, organizing point of the offense.”6 These acts constitute “a continuum, ranging from the first correctional hold over an individual to the ultimate sanction of death . . . effectively constituted by a vast practice, by an immense institutionalization of the repressive and the punitive that is discursively sustained by criminal psychiatry . . . society responds to pathological criminality in two ways that offer a homogeneous response with two poles: one expiatory and the other therapeutic.”7
But a new kind of grotesque is surfacing in the courts and the schools, which moves away from therapeutic forms of intervention to new forms of punishment, sometimes for the most ludicrous of offenses. Thus a young child can be led away from his classroom in handcuffs, not for committing any crime, but for drawing pictures that might, possibly, foreshadow a crime against “nobody in particular, but students in general.”8
Organized in the name of the child’s best interests and as a particular variant of children’s rights, a whole new series of subjects/objects and corresponding disciplinary technologies are emerging that radically transform modern systems of education and discipline. At this moment, the discourse of criminality — the link between conduct and crime — is undergoing a significant inversion. In the new normal, the imagined time frame between puerile act and serious offense is constrained to the point of collapse: the smallest transgression is acted upon as if the criminal act is immanent. The child is swiftly condemned as if he or she was already aware of this connection, as if the transgression were a taunt or warning, rather than harmless experimentation or a small step on a long path that may or may not lead to criminality.9
The new normal reorganizes norms and forms of child socialization that have existed for over a century. For the past century, the juvenile delinquent was the coveted object of modern institutions for children’s education and socialization: their raison d’être and organizing principle. The concept of juvenile delinquent applied potentially to all young people, from those who made the smallest transgression to those who committed the worst criminal acts. All children were considered potential juvenile delinquents and even capable of juvenile crime. The bridging stage between the unproblematic child and the young criminal was the status offender: the child who smoked, drank, skipped school, visited pool halls, or engaged in a number of activities that might be perfectly legal if he or she were an adult. But the path between normalcy and criminality ran both ways — all juvenile criminals were considered possible candidates for rehabilitation. Over the past forty years, this object — the juvenile delinquent — has assumed a problematic status and consequently has been cast out first by the juvenile corrections system and more recently by the public school system.
Parents once handed their children over to public education with the full belief that the participation of any child in that system would prevent inappropriately precocious or delinquent behaviors and instill appropriate skills and training.10 Now schooling is configured around two different objects. The first is the response-ready child: accustomed to intense rivalry, already fully socialized to compete within the educational system, already possessing the “right” disposition — that which is necessary to function in a highly competitive environment. The second is the amoral child: beyond discipline, in need of containment, capable of “meltdown,” often requiring intervention as extreme as suspension or psychotherapeutic drugs. Both are treated as fully actualized and knowledgeable subjects — as beings, not becomings. This is the dark side of the emergent discourse on the child as a social actor.
Although we might expect that discourses around children’s rights would help mitigate schools’ disciplinary practices, the opposite is often the case. This dark side of children’s rights makes children fully responsible for their actions while ignoring and even forestalling questions about the transformation of public institutions once designed for their training. Rights discourse has become a destabilizing mechanism, disrupting old institutional logics and opening the space for a different grotesque associated with the new normal: the mobilization of a language of criminality and punishment by those charged with the training, care, and protection of children.
There is nothing inevitable about this new normal.11 Nor is the United States a leading edge that other countries are doomed, inevitably, to follow. But this shift is significantly entrenched within the United States, and there has been enough uptake in other Anglo-American countries to suggest that it has become a new basis around which disciplinary norms are being organized.
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Notes
- Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (London: Macmillan Education, 1978).
- Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974 – 1975, ed. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2003), 124.
- Foucault, Abnormal, 12.
- Foucault, Abnormal, 20.
- Foucault, Abnormal, 36.
- Foucault, Abnormal, 15.
- Foucault, Abnormal, 34.
- Associated Press, “Pinellas Fifth Grader Cuffed, Sent Home after Classmates Turn Him in for Drawing Weapons,” May 11, 2001, www.sun-sentinel.com.
- Compare to Foucault, Abnormal, 33 – 34.
- Foucault, Abnormal; Anthony Platt, The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969); John R. Gillis, Youth and History: Transition and Change in European Age Relations, 1770 – Present (New York: Academic Press, 1981); Nicholas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (New York: Free Association Books, 1999).
- In fact, some of the key developments addressed in this essay that have become routine practice in the United States (such as zero-tolerance policies in schools) have been selectively applied and discarded in other nations. The contemporary history of different national and regional regimes of socialization and education, and the impact of national differences in class composition and other factors in norms and forms of child rearing, still needs to be written (for a start, see Gillis, Youth and History, and Platt, The Child Savers).
