Can you write about 'dividing practices' without bullet points
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Michel Foucault introduced the notion of “dividing practices” to describe how modern power organizes people by separating, categorizing, and classifying them—literally dividing them from one another and from themselves. These divisions are not merely social distinctions; they are techniques of power that produce and maintain hierarchies of normality and deviance, sanity and madness, health and illness, reason and unreason. Through dividing practices, institutions and discourses make certain kinds of people visible and intelligible, while rendering others abnormal, marginal, or disposable.
In his early work, Foucault examined how the modern subject is constituted through such divisions. Madness, for example, becomes not a state of being but a category defined in relation to reason and institutionalized through asylums and psychiatric practices. The act of confinement, justified as treatment or protection, both separates the mad from society and defines what it means to be sane. Similarly, in Discipline and Punish, the criminal is distinguished from the law-abiding citizen through a network of surveillance, punishment, and moral discourse. These are not merely punitive distinctions but productive ones: they generate the subjectivities they claim only to describe.
Dividing practices operate both externally and internally. Externally, they sort populations—sick and healthy, mad and sane, dangerous and safe—through institutions, policies, and bureaucratic classifications. Internally, they invite individuals to recognize themselves through these categories, to confess, diagnose, or measure their difference according to norms. In this sense, power is not only exercised upon people but through them; it shapes the ways they understand themselves, and even the ways they feel they must be understood by others.
Foucault’s concept helps explain why social inclusion or equality cannot be achieved simply by rearranging labels or redistributing resources. The mechanisms of division—medicalization, criminalization, moralization—persist beneath the rhetoric of care and rationality. Modern societies often claim to dissolve old exclusions, yet they continuously reconstitute them under new guises: the “patient,” the “risk group,” the “deviant,” the “unproductive.” Dividing practices thus form part of a deeper logic of governance, one that depends on differentiation to sustain order and identity.
Ultimately, the significance of dividing practices lies in their subtlety. They work not through open coercion but through the production of knowledge and the administration of life. They define who can speak, who must be spoken for, and who disappears into the margins of the human. Understanding these practices means recognizing that power is not only repressive but constitutive—that every effort to define, protect, or rehabilitate may also be an act of division.
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A critique of Foucault’s notion of dividing practices begins by recognizing both its analytical power and its conceptual limits. It captures something essential about how modernity organizes subjects through differentiation and normalization—how power no longer relies primarily on overt domination but on subtle separations and internalized distinctions. Yet the concept’s brilliance is also its constraint: it risks dissolving the lived, material, and existential dimensions of division into a totalizing account of power’s productivity.
One limitation lies in its structural neutrality. Foucault describes dividing practices as mechanisms of power-knowledge, but his framework rarely distinguishes between their moral or political valences. The asylum, the clinic, and the prison all become expressions of the same underlying logic of division. This flattens the complexity of moral life. It is not that Foucault denies suffering or injustice, but that he translates them into effects of discourse and administration, often losing sight of the singular, embodied experiences of those subjected to these divisions. In emphasizing how individuals are “produced” by systems of classification, he risks underplaying the residue of the human that resists production—the unassimilable remainder that refuses to be fully divided or normalized.
Another critique concerns historical and ontological scope. Foucault frames dividing practices as features of modernity, linked to bureaucratic rationality and disciplinary institutions. But separation and exclusion are not unique to the modern age. Ancient societies, too, divided insiders from outsiders, the pure from the impure, the human from the monstrous. What is distinct about modernity is not division itself but its epistemological formalization—its claim to neutrality and scientific legitimacy. Foucault’s analysis illuminates this transformation, yet he treats it as an inevitable extension of rationality rather than a contingent ethical choice. There is little sense of how one might refuse division, or what a non-dividing relation to others could look like.
There is also the problem of agency. By focusing on how subjects are constituted through power, Foucault renders resistance conceptually thin. If every attempt to assert oneself is already framed by the very categories one resists, then liberation becomes little more than a rearrangement of discourse. This produces a kind of theoretical fatalism: the subject can see the trap but cannot escape it, because even self-knowledge is a form of subjection. Critics such as Nancy Fraser, Axel Honneth, and Charles Taylor have pointed out that without a normative account of recognition or justice, Foucault’s analysis risks collapsing critique into diagnosis. One can describe the machinery of division but not say why it should be dismantled or what might replace it.
Finally, Foucault’s genealogical method—his refusal to ground critique in universal norms—can obscure the stakes of contemporary dividing practices. The line between inclusion and exclusion is not only epistemic but existential: to be divided is not just to be named but to be rendered killable, disposable, or unworthy of empathy. When we think about mental illness, migration, or disability, the dividing line often marks who counts as fully human. Foucault gestures toward this, but his analytic language—power, discourse, knowledge—struggles to capture the moral horror of dehumanization itself.
To critique dividing practices is therefore not to reject them as a concept, but to insist that the analysis of power must re-engage with ethical and ontological questions: What kind of being divides? What does it mean to live in a world built on division? Can the human relation ever escape the logic of separation? Foucault exposes how we are governed by divisions; what remains is to ask whether it is possible, or even desirable, to imagine a world without them.
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From the perspectives of Sara Ahmed, Frantz Fanon, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, dividing practices appear not merely as institutional or epistemic mechanisms, but as deeply embodied and world-making operations that structure how beings come to appear—or fail to appear—within a shared reality. These thinkers, each in their own register, push beyond Foucault’s analytic of power-knowledge toward the terrain of lived orientation, colonial history, and relational ontology. They show that division is not simply something done to people by systems, but an ongoing choreography of space, movement, and sense—one that can also be resisted, reoriented, and undone.
For Sara Ahmed, dividing practices are felt as orientations that shape who can move freely in the world and who encounters friction. Power, in her account, is spatial and affective: it works by arranging bodies in relation to norms, by smoothing some trajectories while making others heavy, sticky, or impossible. A “straight” world, in Ahmed’s terms, is not only heterosexual but directional—it points certain ways and not others. To be “out of line” is to experience the world as misaligned, to bump against what has been taken for granted as natural order. Dividing practices thus sediment into the textures of everyday life: who is welcome at the table, whose discomfort is recognized, who must shrink to fit the scene. Yet, for Ahmed, disorientation can be a site of resistance. To lose one’s bearings is to expose the contingent nature of what passes for order. Dividing practices may govern movement, but movement itself—wandering, deviation, refusal—can generate new alignments of bodies and worlds.
Frantz Fanon offers a more visceral and tragic account of division. In Black Skin, White Masks, he describes how the racialized subject becomes split between self and image, between being and being-seen. Under the colonial gaze, the Black body is fixed as object, its humanity refracted through stereotypes and fear. Fanon calls this the “epidermal schema”: a second skin of imposed meaning that disfigures perception. Division here is not abstract classification but a violent interruption of self-relation. The colonized person lives a double consciousness, alienated from their own body and speech, forced to see themselves through the eyes of the oppressor. Yet Fanon does not end with despair. His writing strains toward the possibility of decolonization as a kind of ontological re-creation—a tearing down of the world that produced such divisions, and a reassertion of relational being beyond the Manichean split of colonizer and colonized. For Fanon, to overcome division is not to return to a prior unity but to create a new humanism, one not built on the exclusion of the Other.
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, speaking from the Aymara context of Bolivia, critiques the colonial “modernity” that thrives on binary separations—civilized/barbaric, modern/traditional, subject/object. She introduces the concept of ch’ixi, a term describing the coexistence of heterogeneous elements that do not blend but also do not annihilate one another. In a ch’ixi world, difference is not resolved through synthesis or hierarchy but sustained in tension. Rivera Cusicanqui exposes how colonial dividing practices fracture indigenous subjectivities by forcing assimilation or exoticization, yet she also shows how indigenous epistemologies already contain a counter-logic: a refusal of purity and linear progress. The ch’ixi subject embodies division without internalizing its violence; it holds contradiction as a mode of existence. In this sense, Rivera Cusicanqui transforms the problem of division into a resource for thinking plurality without domination.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson develops a related, though distinct, relational ontology grounded in Anishinaabe thought. For Simpson, dividing practices are colonial not only in their politics but in their metaphysics: they presuppose separation where indigenous worldviews perceive continuity. Colonialism operates by fragmenting land, language, and kinship—by isolating beings from the web of relations that sustain them. Simpson’s work reclaims practices of reciprocity, storytelling, and resurgence as means of reknitting these torn relations. In her account, healing from division is not a return to precolonial innocence but a reactivation of relational practices in the present, acts of grounded refusal that rebuild connection from within the cracks. Where Foucault’s dividing practices produce docile subjects, Simpson’s miskwaabik aniimi’ish—the shimmering motion of copper in water—symbolizes how life itself continues to move, shimmer, and recompose even under conditions of fragmentation.
Together, these thinkers dissolve the abstraction of dividing practices into lived experience. Ahmed shows how division structures movement; Fanon shows how it colonizes the body and the gaze; Rivera Cusicanqui shows how it can be inhabited without being mastered; Simpson shows how it can be undone through relational renewal. They share a refusal of the neutrality that often marks Foucauldian analysis: for them, division is not just epistemic—it is colonial, racialized, spatial, and ontological. Yet they also resist the opposite temptation: to imagine a world without difference. Instead, they envision modes of coexistence in which difference does not require domination, and relation does not demand fusion. Division becomes not a terminal condition but a field of struggle—a place where new ways of being together might emerge, unevenly, but with integrity.
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