to unattainable heights. The norm of health may be specified in myriad different ways (and thus gives rise to many specific norms) in relation to particular indicators, organs, etc., but nonetheless implies a general aim of perfect healthiness towards which all such specifications are aimed.
Before the advent of the norm, medicine was negative, directed towards curing specific illnesses that presented themselves. Once there is a norm, however, we always vary from that ideal of health in some way. For most people, much of the time, this makes little practical difference: we still go to a doctor only when we feel sick, and the doctor tries to patch us up and send us on our way rather than chase some elusive ultimate normality. Normative medicine has the major benefit, moreover, that it plays a more active role in bringing illnesses to light, detecting problems earlier and identifying them more accurately. However, by the same token, the door has been decisively opened from the doctor’s side to an interventionist form of medicine (with no ultimate end point) that means that, if they wish to, they can always find something wrong to try to cure, and to a concern on the patient’s side that they are always to some extent in ill health, which is to say to hypochondriacal tendencies. Perhaps there have always been hypochondriacs, but medical norms allow a hypochondriac always to find some organic basis to point to as evidence that they really are sick.
New Norms
While our society is uniquely defined by the presence of norms, the specifics of these norms can vary greatly. We can presume that at any given time there must, in general, be only a single norm governing any given phenomenon, or else a major cleavage in relation to that phenomenon, as one finds in situations where organizations split around basic principles. I would suggest that multiple norms can only ever coexist where they apply to different domains, in different institutions, to different people, etc., such that within a given body of people there can only be one operative norm for any given attribute. We can, moreover, presume that there is a tendency for norms governing different phenomena at any given time to reconcile with one another, since, when norms come into conflict around marginal questions (that is, questions that marginally concern multiple norms), some kind of accommodation between these norms must be reached or else a social cleavage occur. Broadly speaking, if norms in different areas for people in the same group conflict with one another, there will be pressure for the norms to change so that there is no longer any conflict, or else some device for reconciling or mediating them must appear.
My suspicion is that our society is so normalizing that, in every area of our lives that we think about, without particularly meaning to, we posit norms and orient ourselves towards these. I cannot hope to prove this, and indeed there may be many areas of our lives that are not yet norm-governed. What I try to do in the rest of this book is to show and discuss how norms have come to affect crucial major areas of our lives. My claim here is not that everything comes down to norms; it is, rather, that in our society norms affect everything, however subtly.
In the original expansion of norms across society, a network formed in which norms tended to accord with one another and hence mutually reinforce one another’s demands for conformity. This produced a profoundly (although of course never completely) conformist society. This conformism reached its apex in the mid-twentieth century in Western societies.
It has subsequently mutated into something quite paradoxical, however. The engine of this mutation has been a revolt against conformism itself. This revolt occurred in part as a result of the importation of diverse influences from the rest of the world that called Western norms into question, in part through an uprising of people (particularly from the lower orders) who had never been entirely inculcated into the old reigning norms, and in part as a phenomenon of spontaneous reaction from within the normative order. The exact moment this revolt begins is difficult to discern. I would of course, from a Foucauldian perspective, say that there was always already resistance to the old normative order. The revolt clearly began to cohere, however, by the 1960s, out of more inchoate beginnings during the ultra-conformist 1950s, and reached its peak only in recent years during the twenty-first century, if indeed it has yet reached it.
Despite some more radical tendencies in such a direction, this revolt has not been against norms as such, but rather only against particular norms, or perhaps more broadly against a particular form of normalization. The overall form of the norm thus survived and colonized this revolt through the becoming-norm of the anticonformist ideal of the revolt itself. This produced our contemporary normative order. Unlike older norms, which simply demanded conformity, our norms today have been produced in line with new reigning meta-norms of nonconformity and diversity. Where previously the only meta-norm was that one should conform with norms – which was hardly an additional norm at all, but rather simply an implication of the norms themselves as such – now the reigning meta-norm has become rejecting conformity with the old norms.
Norms are inherently conformist: the very existence of a norm as norm means that you are supposed to conform to it. The great contemporary normative paradox is that anticonformism has itself become a norm. This is the perverse result of a revolt against norms that did not overthrow the model of the norm but instead itself became normative. It is only in this era that something like a meta-norm emerges at all. Correlatively, the concept of the meta-norm is one that I am now coining to describe this formation; it is not something found in Foucault’s or Canguilhem’s thought.15 And even this meta-norm only exists in a highly paradoxical form – namely, that there is now an overarching principle governing all norms which says that norms must be anticonformist; in other words, conformity with these norms must appear to be a form of rejection of another set of norms. Given its lack of positive content, it is hard to know what to call this new meta-norm. I will hence largely refer to it simply as our ‘new norms’ or ‘new normal’, but one might, for reasons I will canvass, also designate it ‘radical individualism’, ‘hyperindividualism’, ‘postconformism’, ‘pseudo-anticonformism’ or even ‘hyperliberalism’.
Although the older conformism and the newer individualism are superficially opposites, there are deep continuities between them. They are united by a baseline demand for conformity to norms and also by a valorization of individuality, albeit that the explicit emphasis has shifted absolutely away from conformity towards individuality. Perhaps their most fundamental commonality is that they are both profoundly essentialist, but where the older conformism primarily enjoined people to conform to categorial essences, the newer individualism enjoins us each to conform to our own idiosyncratic individual essence. The earlier conformism involved different norms for people of different sexes and different classes, but enjoined certain norms, such as Christianity and heterosexuality, uniformly. A great shift then took place across the late twentieth century involving the explicit (but not ultimate) rejection of the ideas both that anyone should be treated differently to anyone else due to accidents of birth (which is to say that there cannot be any norm that treats some people as inherently abnormal), and that there is any norm that pertains uniformly to everyone. Every individual is now rather enjoined to express their individuality in whatever way seems appropriate to them, albeit within certain constitutive normative limits entailing respect for the individuality of others. The supposed abolition of conformism therefore established hedonistic individualism as our new meta-norm, because seeking individual self-satisfaction becomes the only possible goal.
Where once we were expected simply to obey the rules, we were then expected to conform to norms associated with our categorial natures, and now we are expected to discover our own nature and publicly confess and perform it. Where once we could rail against authority, then against conformity, we are now under an invisible conformity that consists precisely in demanding that we reject the vestiges of an older conformity in the name of our own self-satisfaction. This new conformity is profoundly difficult to reject because it is so hard to identify, particularly if, in rejecting it, one does not want simply to reassert the now-vestigial older forms.
Method
In what follows, I will flesh out the claims I have just outlined by examining
