Myth and Normalisation

Drawing on the Foucauldian concepts of productive power and normalisa­tion, this chapter argues that in order to account for the powerful regulative effects of myth, rather than relying upon the vague notion of ‘belief’, it may be more useful to understand myths as involved in the construction of ‘truth’.

Yanow’s (1992, 415) statement that myth is ‘presented as a matter of fact’ may be read as the expression of a complex process wherein DCAF, rather than being understood as a powerful, political manifestation of the broader discourse of liberal modernity, is, instead, considered objec­tively true in its instrumental utility and effectiveness. The construction of DCAF as a social fact thus obscures its historic contingency, facilitating its universalistic claims to constituting not only the best but the sole suc­cessful policy of ‘controlling’ the military. Myths, therefore, are not simply ‘believed’ but believed in a particular way that elides their own implication in relations of power and instead constitutes them not only as ‘true’, but as natural. Crucially, however, most myths cannot, in their discrete form, completely support this process.

DCAF’s ‘success’ is subtly dependent upon what may be understood as a secondary, myth—militarism. The argument follows, analogically, from Foucault’s understanding of depoliticisation and normalisation in the penal system (Edkins 1999, 51; Foucault 1995). According to Foucault, prisons produce a subject (the criminal), a system of knowledge (criminol­ogy), and an institutional means of addressing the ‘problem’ (prisons) (Edkins 1999, 12). Through the process of criminalisation, and the cor­respondent normalisation of ‘crime’ as an expected aspect of sociality, the ‘political force of certain acts’ related to such practices is neutralised. As such, ‘the failure of prisons in their (apparent) aim of rehabilitation is in actuality a success’, in so far as they reaffirm the inevitability and ‘natural­ness’ of crime (Edkins 1999, 12). In this reading, the concept of milita­rism supports DCAF (as practically effective and normatively valid) by constructing the occasional outbursts of aggression as normal, rather than a sign of systemic flaw.