Technical Normativity

Despite their increasingly expanding empire, technical norms have scarcely attracted the attention of legal scholars. This article tries to understand the working of such norms by approaching the issue from the standpoint of the notion of “artefactual normativity”—i.e. normativity concerning artefacts and their charac- teristics—and then by analysing a strikingly growing class of technical norms more or less explicitly directed at influencing behaviour. What emerges from this analysis is a non-legal form of normativity which involves the subject in a process of con- tinuous observation, surveillance and direction of his/her conduct whose final aim is his/her self-identification with certain imposed standards. The paper ends with a section on the standardisation of the language of regulation.