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 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.
1 Genealogy
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.
