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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
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5094-4
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5095-1(pb)
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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.
