Normal Now. Mark G. E. Kelly

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СКАЧАТЬ – 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 to be free from sickness does not immediately imply a normative image of perfect health, even if the former paves the way for the latter. Now, there is a certain natural fact here, that we don’t like being sick or acutely unhappy, but I am suggesting that the norms install in our minds a contingent goal of a total banishment of ill-functioning and ill-feeling. Such norms follow a widespread pattern by which norms are based on pre-existing imperatives, СКАЧАТЬ