ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the defining characteristics of normalisation, and considers how it frames and influences how we see the world. Jonathan Crary uses Foucault’s notion of the modern discursive regime, which was predicated on the development of scientific categories, knowledge, techniques and attitudes, in order to suggest how and why new ways of understanding vision came about at the same time. Ways of seeing in the Western world are strongly informed, then, by both the pervasiveness of the scientific gaze itself, and the categories that are produced by and through that gaze—even in the most everyday of practices. The gaze associated with the normalising visual regime is not only meant to discover the truth of the world through the processes of observation, analysis, diagnosis and prescription; it also works, at least theoretically, to shape it. The reproduction and continuation of normalised ways of seeing is in a sense a circular process.
