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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
This is a book about what we consider normal. It details how the very concept of normality emerged in the modern era, and how it has changed over the centuries.
By the mid-twentieth century, the expansion of norms across various areas of human endeavour generated a governing normative order in Western societies. Normality was defined as conformity with a narrow model of conventional human behaviour. However, this model has since been displaced by an anti-conformism, in which normality is defined as absolute self-fulfilment, defying older restrictions on our behaviour. Paradoxically, narcissistic individualism and rebellion against conformity have become compulsory.
Normal Now explores in detail how this new normative order plays out today in the arenas of politics, health, and sex and sexuality. In all these areas, the uncompromising perfectionism of our norms of self-expression leads to increasingly deep-seated and ubiquitous anger, anxiety and dissatisfaction.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Table of Contents
Cover
Epigraph
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Preface
Notes
1 Genealogy
Normality as Normative
Normalization
What’s in a Norm?
New Norms
Method
Notes
2 New Norms
The Old Norms
Individualism
Success
American Christianity
Enjoy
Universalization
Notes
3 Politics
Normalization
Trump as Abnormal
Trump as Normal
Political Ideology as Norm
Notes
4 Sex
Sexuality
Celibacy
Monogamy
Consent
Queer
Gender
Identity
Notes
5 Life
Anxiety
Diet
Epidemiology
Death
Artifice
Notes
6 Law
Guilty
Sin
Psych-
Perfectionism
Divergence
Notes
7 Difference
Diversity
Differential Abnormalization
Justice
Notes
Conclusion
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Epigraph
Only one truth appears before our eyes: wealth, fertility and sweet strength in all its insidious universality. In contrast, we are unaware of the prodigious machinery of the will to truth, with its vocation of exclusion.
Michel Foucault, ‘The Orders of Discourse’
NORMAL NOW
Individualism as Conformity
Mark G. E. Kelly
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Mark G. E. Kelly 2022
The right of Mark G. E. Kelly to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2022 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
101 Station Landing
Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5094-4
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5095-1(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021945288
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
I thank James Kent for his comments on an initial draft of this book (and for his broader willingness to act as a sounding board for my ideas), three anonymous reviewers for their comments and recommendations, and Robert Carson for his comments on the chapter on sex.
I thank my editor at Polity, Pascal Porcheron, for facilitating the publication of this work.
This work originates in the project, generously funded by the Australian Research Council as a Future Fellowship (Grant FT140101020), ‘The invention of norms: understanding how ethics, law, and the life sciences connect to shape our social selves’. I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to the ARC and to Australia more generally for this funding. I would also like to thank those who fostered this project: Alison Ross, who helped enormously with my application; Diego Bubbio, who also helped in this regard; Dimitris Vardoulakis, without whom I doubt it would ever have occurred to me to apply; Paul Patton, the relevant member of the ARC’s College of Experts at the time the project was funded; the various anonymous reviewers of my proposals for their feedback and generous estimation of its worthiness; and Adam Jasper Smith and the University of Technology, Sydney, for arranging library facilities for me while I was first writing the application. I would also like to thank those who hosted me on research visits during the fellowship, most particularly the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University London, and especially Peter Hallward for seminar questioning that forced me to add caveats that survive in this manuscript.
Preface
Am I normal?
Haven’t we all asked this question at one time or another? Some of us might ask it frequently. The answers we come up with surely vary, even for the same person at different times. Some defensively assert that there is nothing wrong with them, and indeed that it is, perhaps, other people, the ones who appear normal, who are the real weirdos. Many of us concede that there is something wrong with us, and schedule an appointment with a professional in search of a solution.
What is at the heart of such worries? What are we trying to achieve by either accusing others of being abnormal or seeking to improve or cure ourselves? Of course, the precise answers are as many and varied as human psychology itself, but there are some general motives that most or perhaps even all of us have, such as wanting to be healthy and happy. These general human goals seem to me precisely to have become subsumed by a more general and distinctively modern drive to be normal. Happiness as we understand it today is our affective norm, as health is our medical one.
What is normality? Like many of the concepts in the cognitive background to our lives, it is not immediately easy for us to define. Indeed, I will argue that it is not a concept that has been defined adequately even by experts in fields that rely on it. Moreover, I will suggest that it is a peculiarly insidious concept in the way that it evades a simple definition.1
This is a book about what is considered normal today and about how our conception of normality has changed in a seismic shift that is still moving the ground beneath us. I will claim that normality has, in the course of the last century, gone from being a series of differentiated social standards applying to different categories of person to being a network of contradictory and paradoxical standards that apply increasingly indifferently to everyone. The pressure to be normal has always put people in an ultimately impossibly difficult position, but the new normality adds to this an expectation that we conform by refusing to conform, leading to the profoundly confused form of subjectivity we all today embody in various ways.
This mutation in normality is perhaps barely half a century old. The very concept of ‘normality’ in which it has occurred was itself invented perhaps only a few centuries ago. Although the word ‘normal’ is part of our everyday vocabulary today, it is a fairly recent addition to the English language (from French or Latin), only two hundred or so years old. Only about a hundred years ago did it become a widely used word. Its relative novelty does give us reason to suspect that our contemporary normality might itself soon disappear, though we can have little idea what might replace it or when.
* * *
Over the years that I have been developing the thoughts presented in this book, the concept of normality has proved to be a mobile target. First, around the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency in 2016, a prominent discourse appeared about Trump ‘normalizing’ adverse behaviour. More recently, in 2020, the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic saw changes to people’s lifestyles widely described as a ‘new normal’ (a phrase that was, prior to that year, the working title of this book, and which I abandoned to avoid this novel connotation).
Such invocations of the concept of normality, I would suggest, bear out my position that it is a central question in our society today. However, they invoke the concept in ways that are only obliquely related to how I discuss it here. The second chapter of this book does attend intensely to the Trump phenomenon, but I argue that he has actually normalized approximately nothing. I spend less time discussing COVID-19, partly because I think it is too early to draw any conclusions about its effects on norms, but also because I don’t as yet see much evidence of novelty in this relation either. As I detail in the first chapter, recent changed expectations around hand-washing and social distancing, albeit constituting a major change to our lifestyles, is not technically a ‘new normal’ as I understand it, but rather a modulation of the old normal standards, harking back, indeed, to the very origins of normality as a phenomenon. Face masks and restrictions on movement are blunt measures, which we experience as oppressive, but there is nothing very new about authorities intervening to affect our behaviour in ways that are supposed to be for our own good. It is entirely possible that the current pandemic will change our society such that it will produce a sea change in our norms – but I don’t think anyone can yet claim to know this or what it might look like. What I detail here are changes that were well underway long before the pandemic hit, and which show no obvious sign of dissipating in the face of it.
Notes
1
In making this claim, I am influenced by Stéphane Legrand’s reading of Foucault’s work on norms, although in point of fact I reject what he says as an interpretation of Foucault. Stéphane Legrand,
Les Normes chez Foucault
. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2007. For my position, see Mark G. E. Kelly, ‘What’s in a Norm? Foucault’s Conceptualisation and Genealogy of the Norm’,
Foucault Studies
, 27, 2019.
1Genealogy
In this chapter, I outline the history of normality, before moving on in the next chapter to detail the more recent development of what I call our ‘new norms’, and then, in the rest of the book, detailing how these have played out in different social realms.
I will throughout this book use the word ‘norm’ (and hence the derived adjectives ‘normal’ and ‘normative’) in a highly specific way, as I will now explain. This usage of the term derives from the work of two twentieth-century French philosophers, Georges Canguilhem and, following him, Michel Foucault. They in turn derive their use of the term ‘norm’ from the study of the actual history of norms.
This usage of the term then has a strong etymological basis, but there are manifold senses in which the term is used today that I am not employing here, even if these senses also do constitute part of the broad history of the use of the term that I am alluding to. I therefore do not use ‘norm’, as sociologists do, to mean any unwritten social convention. Nor do I use it to mean a formal rule or average; indeed, I precisely mean by norm that which is neither a formal rule nor an average.
My thesis here is sui generis, but might be said to intersect with (which is to say, potentially either dovetail with or conflict with) any number of other accounts about social and cultural change in the era under discussion. Christopher Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism is a particularly clear example of a thesis that is in many respects close to mine, but which has significantly different coordinates and claims in others.1 I have not sought to deal with any such intersections in any detail, however, in order instead to focus on honing my own thesis.
This is not merely a thesis about a change in norms in a sociological or moral sense, although I certainly do claim there is such a change. Rather, my conception of the ‘norm’ is much more specific, and hence so too are my claims. This serves as the fundamental point of difference between my thesis and a superficially similar survey of the sociology of morals under capitalism such as that by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello.2 This does not mean that what I say is meant to contradict such accounts. Rather, I would hope mine ultimately dovetails productively with others.3
What I mean by a norm is, in short, a model for the perfect operation of the thing to which it pertains.4 I believe that this definition of the norm is the one with which Foucault and Canguilhem work, and which can be found in historical discourses about norms from the seventeenth century on. Other scholars disagree that this is Foucault’s understanding of the norm, but this ultimately does not matter for the purposes of this book. Regardless of its provenance, this is what I mean in this book when I refer to the norm and derived terms.
Normality as Normative
Canguilhem’s book, The Normal and the Pathological, written in the middle of the twentieth century, remains the landmark investigation into the concept of normality.5 Canguilhem was a French medical doctor, historian and philosopher of science. His study concerns the technical question of medical normality. This ostensibly specialist work is more generally illuminating than one might imagine, not least because medicine has operated as a motor for the diffusion of the concept of normality throughout our culture.
Modern medicine is based on a notion of medical normality, which is to say on defining health as accordance with a predefined norm. Canguilhem’s key question is that of the origin of this norm. Modern medicine clearly considers itself to be a scientific enterprise, based on empirical study and objective criteria. Its basic norms do not really measure up to this self-image, however.
Canguilhem notes that it is commonly believed in the medical profession that what is normal is simply what is average, such that the normal condition of health can be defined by observing what most people’s condition is. He concludes, however, that medical normality cannot possibly be defined or derived in this way. To be normal is defined in medicine as being optimally healthy, and this is clearly not the average condition of human beings. Rather, most people are to some extent, in some way or other, unhealthy, which is to say that they deviate from the norm. Unless exactly as many people deviate in two opposite directions – for example, exactly as many people have high blood pressure as have low blood pressure, to the same extent – then the average will not be the norm. And such an absolutely symmetrical deviation in both directions from the norm never occurs in reality.
In fact, the word ‘normal’ only came to be associated with averages when statisticians in the late nineteenth century applied this word – which was by that time already in use in other technical fields, and in medicine in particular – to an extant statistical idea that they had called by other names previously, dubbing this now the ‘normal distribution’.6 However, I will argue that this invention of a statistical notion of the normal thenceforth serves to give a patina of objectivity to the concept of normality in general.
Canguilhem concludes that the medical notion of normality, although presented as an objective and scientific judgement, is in fact normative, which is to say, a judgement of what things should be like. Such normative judgements cannot be empirical inferences from scientific study – as Ian Hacking points out, statistical judgements of normality cannot have any normative implications7 – but rather must be a priori principles. These principles are, in a word, norms, imaginary standards of perfection to which reality is held.
Although it might seem like a great scandal that medicine is based on prejudices, Canguilhem does not reject these norms. He is instead quite clear that modern medicine needs the yardstick of normality to operate. Discarding it would cost untold lives. He instead suggests reforming the standard of normality by abandoning the pretence that it is objective and acknowledging its subjectivity by making patients themselves the final arbiters of whether they actually are sick.
For my part, I am not advocating even this: unlike Canguilhem, I do not have a medical background, and am not directly concerned with medical norms. Rather, I am concerned with what has happened as the notion of normality has exploded out of medicine and become a social phenomenon over the last two centuries.
Normalization
The concept of normality implies an underlying concept of the norm, the norm being the measure of what counts as normal. This is somewhat obscured in English by the fact that the word ‘normal’ is much more prominent than ‘norm’, perhaps because it came into our language first, only to be followed by the word ‘norm’ later.8 It is the latter word that is older, however, in the tongues in which these terms originated, namely the Romance languages.
‘Norm’ comes from an old Latin word for a carpenter’s rule, norma. For a long time in European languages, cognates of norma were synonymous with the cognates of a different Latin word with a similar literal meaning, regula (from which we get the English word ‘rule’, in all its senses). At a certain point, the meanings of these two terms diverged sharply. Canguilhem finds that this new sense of the cognates of ‘norm’ first appears in relation to seventeenth-century French ‘normative grammar’.9
Michel Foucault, following in Canguilhem’s footsteps, detects the logic of normality earlier than in the application of words derived from norma to describe it, namely in medieval practices for dealing with outbreaks of plague. While the exact point of origin of this logic might not be precisely locatable and matters little to the claims I want to make about contemporary society, it is at least somewhat important that this is a concept that has been invented at some point or other, and the fact that the genealogy of this notion involves plagues cannot but be interesting to us, living as we are through the COVID-19 pandemic.
Foucault finds that, in the Middle Ages, there was initially only one systematic method for dealing with contagious disease, namely that used to deal with leprosy: to remove the visibly sick from society in order to prevent the spread of disease.10 This approach did not work with the Black Death pandemic that descended on Europe in the fourteenth century, however, because that new disease was so contagious that people spread it before they could be exiled. So a practice was adopted of continuously monitoring habitations once plague had appeared in a vicinity, looking for signs of infection and isolating any household in which it appeared. Though this was not exactly the twenty-first-century lockdown with contact tracing with which we are now so familiar, it nonetheless represents the same basic approach. This in effect requires norms – that is, specific ideas about exactly what a healthy person should be like in order to detect relatively small variations from these. This is still the basic approach we have taken today with COVID, where a cough or elevated temperature raises an alarm. Hence I do not see in our response to the contemporary pandemic a new normal strictly speaking, so much as an instantiation of an old one, albeit in an age of hand sanitizer and phone apps.
In contrast to age-old measures to control the spread of disease, normality has, in other areas, developed into something rather more sophisticated. A crucial development in this regard was certainly the explicit formulation of the concept of the norm as such. This occurred by the seventeenth century at the latest, with that notion and the derived one of normality expanding in influence rapidly throughout the nineteenth century. What is crucial to grasp about the novelty of this notion is its original reference to an ideal model for the operation of a particular thing. Previously, there were perhaps some templates for making certain things, and plenty of rules – but nothing was governed by a positive model of perfection towards which a thing was pushed without ever entirely reaching it. With the introduction of the norm, however, increasingly many things began to be normalized, brought into a relation with a governing norm to which they were now made to tend.
This pervasive normalization began relatively modestly. French normative grammar was invented to provide a model to which people might conform in their writing, whereas earlier grammars had merely listed rules. Industrial and military norms followed as standardized production and regimented warfare developed in Europe, in answer to a prior situation in which incompatible components and motley troops were inhibiting the aims of industrialists and generals. The adoption of a normative model of the functioning of the human organism, not merely for triaging plague-afflicted habitations but for general use, in turn produced modern medicine as we know it, providing a clear standard to diagnose illness relative to the obscure conceptions of disease that had previously circulated. While we might certainly want to criticize all these developments – the suppression of natural change and diversity in language by normative grammar, the familiar woes of an industrialized society, the increase in deaths from warfare in the mechanical age and the mistreatment of many individual cases by a one-size-fits-all scientific medicine – we may nonetheless see this initial adoption of the concept of normality as clearly furthering the goals of the fields in which it made its mark.
After this point, certainly from the nineteenth century – and, I believe, accelerating more or less continuously thereafter – the phenomenon of the norm metastasized throughout society, a spread emblematized and perhaps even caused by the popularization of the notion of the ‘normal’ itself. Above all, two institutions are implicated in this spread of the norm.11 The first is surely modern medicine: hospitals, and then the emergence of general practice medicine, spread medical ideas throughout society, dynamized in the twentieth century by the introduction of mass health insurance schemes (both public and private). Almost every individual in industrialized societies is now medically supervised – on an ever more continuous basis – from birth. Medical discourses and terms are increasingly absorbed and repeated by patients, used by them autonomously to describe themselves, and people start to self-diagnose based on medical principles without the direct intervention of the medical institution. A further, powerful mutation occurred via the development of a branch of medicine, psychiatry, concerned not with the body as such but with the mind.
The diffusion of norms involved a raft of other institutions, of course, and moreover much of this diffusion presumably occurred outside formal institutional settings. A crucial development, alluded to above, which occurred in medicine, but quickly spread across other institutions and then outside them, was the appearance of norms for human behaviour. Medicine’s original norms applied to the organic condition of bodies, and norms had appeared governing the motions of bodies in particular situations (such as in military firing lines or on industrial production lines), but behaviour came to be medicalized and normalized as such with the invention of the medical discipline of psychiatry (which is approximately as old as modern medicine itself), and the later academic discourse of psychology (from the end of the nineteenth century). Psychology and psychiatry explicitly pertain to the human ‘psyche’, which is to say to our minds (or indeed our souls, to translate this Greek word a different way).12 However, psychologists and psychiatrists cannot peer directly into our consciousnesses, even today. Rather, they must primarily be concerned to monitor our visible behaviour, whether or not they proclaim an explicitly ‘behaviourist’ orientation. All the new social institutions that emerged and became pervasive from the eighteenth century to the twentieth – principally the school, the hospital, the prison, the factory and, most obviously, the insane asylum – are shot through with this psychological normalization of behaviour.
Mass public education, appearing in earnest in the late nineteenth century, has been the other key institution for the diffusion of norms, besides medicine. For the first time, all children were required to attend schools. This new omni-education was intensely normalizing from its inception. Its teachers were trained in institutions then called ‘normal schools’, the chief function of which was explicitly to impart norms. The most obvious norms operative in schools are those of educational attainment, but mass education has also always been prominently concerned with inculcating more general norms of behaviour. These include the simple but highly transferable classroom norms of obedience and attentiveness, but also encompass a more general concern with the moral education of pupils: schools deliberately and loudly proclaim their mission to impart a broad spectrum of attitudinal and behavioural norms that are supposed to stand students in good stead in later life. Relatedly, the school is a major venue for the transmission of medical norms: morality and public health have always been normatively linked. This once meant that children’s juvenile sexuality would be shaped and constricted; today, this approach has given way to an attempt positively to produce healthy sexual practices, as well as to inculcate acceptance of others’ sexualities, but the basic principle remains the same, namely producing what is deemed hygienic and ethical adult behaviour.
What’s in a Norm?
I imagine the reader might well ask, in relation to these claims of mine about norms, whether things weren’t always like this: weren’t there always such models? To this, I would suggest that we imagine this to be the case precisely because we are today so dominated by norms that it no longer seems conceivable that things could ever have been otherwise, or ever could be again. Although it does not affect the specific claims I will go on to make in this book, the critical force of my argument does depend to an extent on norms being an invention and hence being something that might reasonably be expected to disappear.
Norms in our society are different from the unspoken rules that also exist in other societies, in that norms are not rules in a strict sense at all, but ideals. What is different about our society is that we are expected not just to follow rules, but in addition to conform to innumerable images of how we should be.
This understanding of what a norm is, I believe, that which is operative in both Canguilhem and Foucault. However, neither of them cares explicitly to define this term, despite its crucialness, supplying clear definitions being considered somewhat gauche in twentieth-century French philosophy. Foucault does, however, say the following:
Normalization consists first of all in positing a model, an optimal model that is constructed in terms of a certain result, and the operation of … normalization consists in trying to get people, movements, and actions to conform to this model, the normal being precisely that which can conform to this norm, and the abnormal that which is incapable of conforming to the norm. In other words, it is not the normal and the abnormal that is fundamental and primary in … normalization, it is the norm. That is, there is an originally prescriptive character of the norm and the determination and the identification of the normal and the abnormal becomes possible in relation to this posited norm.13
Foucault contrasts the norm with the older model of the law, but I find it more instructive to contrast it with the rule, partly for etymological reasons and partly because of the greater generality of the concept (laws are effectively a particular kind of rule). The historical and anthropological records suggest that rules have existed in every human society, but are precisely not norms in the sense of regulative ideals. Rules are still with us today. Indeed, there has perhaps never been such a dense profusion of rules as we now have. The profusion of norms is, however, something distinct from this phenomenon, even if the two things are complexly interrelated and indeed compound one another (as I will detail in Chapter 6). There is a significant difference between obeying a rule and conforming to a norm, even if the two are often closely associated. This difference is the one between having to live according to a set of commandments and having to live up to an image of how a perfect person ought ideally to behave.
Incidentally, Christianity, I would argue, historically has been about laws rather than norms because, although it held Jesus up as an example to imitate, it also held that Jesus was God, and hence that, unlike Jesus, mortals are all sinners who could not actually achieve his perfection – at least not in this life. Even if Christ makes Christ-like behaviour possible through His influence, He remains an extrinsic principle in this process, always above and beyond. Thomas à Kempis’s medieval classic, De Imitatione Christi (The Imitation of Christ), thus effectively contains a list of rules (alongside prayers and meditations) based on Christ’s behaviour. The logic of the norm is diametrically opposite because it makes perfection normal, a default state that we ought always already to have achieved. This is similar to the Christian logic of implying that everyone has sins they should feel guilty about, but, unlike Christianity, it offers no forgiveness or sacrificial route to salvation, only an insistence that we should be without sin, something considered impossible in traditional Christianity.14 In this way, I think the growth of the logic of the norm is closely tied to the decline of religion in Europe, though it also clearly relates to aspects of the Christian legacy and to the fact that Christianity has to some extent, at least in some expressions, come to conform to the logic of the norm. I will discuss this dynamic further in the next chapter.
To be sure, every society has had unstated rules of conduct alongside its explicitly stated codes, and sociologists today refer to these unstated rules as ‘norms’, but our society has a very different kind of unstated norm, and, unlike any other society, applies the word ‘norm’ to refer to it. Our society (which is to say, late modern Western society), for this reason, can in history be classified uniquely as the society of the norm.
It is frequently difficult to be sure whether we are following all the rules, and even harder to be sure that no one will accuse us of breaking them, but it is possible, at least in principle, to avoid breaking any given rule. Generally, this can be accomplished negatively: while there are some laws that actively require me to perform some obligation, if I do nothing, I will, by and large, remain innocent before the law. By contrast, the norm is essentially positive, always prescribing that we should be something more than what we are (even if this implies the negative injunction that we stop doing or being anything that is not in line with this ideal).
This is not to say that the norm requires any explicit reference to perfection. Indeed, norms need not be explicit in any respect. Norms may be invisible and unremarked upon. Nonetheless, a norm always operates as an injunction for people to conform perfectly to it, even though this is always ultimately impossible.
One dimension of this impossibility is, typically, that norms are nebulous and phantasmic, such that we can never know to what extent we actually conform to them. But complete conformity is not even possible in those rare cases where norms are actually explicit and precisely quantified. Take, for example, the normal human body temperature of 37°C: if we actually coincide with this it is for a limited duration, and then only ever to the extent that the thermometer measuring us does not have the accuracy to measure our inevitable minute variation from this precise number.
I imagine readers might object that people have always desired perfect health, and so they have, but only inasmuch as they desired the negation of any specific malady from which they suffered. To desire
