all of which are enormously contentious. These areas and the norms that govern them are closely interlinked, and I do not mean to imply, by treating them under different headings, that they are somehow so neatly divided in reality. Rather, this is principally a device for managing the material in the book.
I will aim here to be as objective as possible rather than being normative. I take it, following Foucault, that a critical understanding of norms cannot proceed by cleaving to existing norms but must do so by making some kind of effort to step outside them through objective analysis. In this respect, I am at odds with advocates of ‘immanent critique’, who think the best approach is to invoke some of our current norms against others.
Despite my now denying it, however, I expect some will think that what I am doing here is condemning all the norms I describe and will then ask what alternative I am proposing, much as they have done in response to Foucault’s critiques. While I certainly do have ideas in this regard, I have tried to put them aside. In many of the specific areas I will discuss, I think most readers will simply say that what I describe as the contemporary norm is the only appropriate way to behave. I can only sympathize with this view: since I am part of this normative order, it is difficult for me to imagine any other way of doing things myself. But the fact that it seems this way to us is, I think, simply part and parcel of our social norms being what they are. The norms that obtain in our society will eo ipso appear to be obvious and natural and right. The historical evidence, as presented in the following chapter, suggests, however, that our current norms are not very old, and hence we have no particular reason to expect they will be around for much longer.
Despite my aim of objective neutrality, however, in one key respect my method here will be highly subjective, since, on my conception, a norm is generally not a precisely measurable object. Since, on my account, no one ever actually accords with any given norm, quantitative empirical data is generally inapt to provide evidence of norms. What might count as evidence would not be studies of actual behaviour, then, but attitudinal surveys that show what most people think they should do, the kind of thing that is studied in the field of empirical ethics. However, on my account people are not even reliably consciously aware of norms – rather, the norm could be said to be largely unconscious. In Freudian terms, norms surely belong primarily to the superego, which implies that people who have them may or may not be conscious of them. This to some extent puts me in the psychoanalytic position of auto-analysis, trying to divine norms by analysing not only society around me, but also my own feelings and behaviour. Indeed, to an uncomfortable extent, this book might be said to be a critique of my own attitude to life over the past several decades. While the subjectivity of my approach might lead me to idiosyncratic judgements, it is generally the case that, as a member of society, I should have as good an access to our norms as anyone, even if the mechanism of this awareness is rather obscure.
Of course, my perspective can be presumed to be different from others, in particular those who belong to (sub)cultural groups in which different norms are operative. This book is thus explicitly a study of ‘Western’ norms, and might be said to be more narrowly focused on Anglospheric ones (I am a British and Australian dual citizen) – which actually entails a focus on the United States of America qua the numerical mainstay and cultural centre of the Anglosphere.16 There can be little doubt though that the United States constitutes a peerlessly influential and weighty example not only for the Anglosphere, but for the entire West and, indeed, to a lesser extent, for the entire world. Still, what I say here can be assumed to apply less to other parts of the West, and also may be presumed to apply less to immigrant and other minority groups in the Anglosphere than to the culture of white English-language speakers, the group to which I myself belong.17 That noted, I am wary of claiming, for example, that this is specifically a study of ‘White norms’ or anything of that sort, so I will leave this boundary deliberately undefined rather than explicitly posit a dubious racial index in any given area. I thus do not claim that the norms I describe are exclusively ‘White’, but also acknowledge that I, as a white (and also male, etc.) researcher, am in a poor position to comment on the norms of others.
I must also acknowledge the variability of the use of the concepts that I place at the centre of my argument here. Like any word of natural, living language, the term ‘normal’ in particular is used in practice by different people in different ways. I do not claim that every person who uses the word means by it the same thing that I do here. In particular, people clearly do sometimes use the word ‘normal’ to mean ‘average’. I am not saying that you should only use the word ‘normal’ in a certain way or that every use of the term is ‘problematic’. I do however think that this word is the original name for a pervasive social tendency that I mean to critique, and that one of the problems with this pervasive concept is that it blurs the distinction between the average and the ideal. The phenomenon that I refer to with the word ‘normal’ is inherent in our society, a dynamic in the way we relate to one another and to ourselves. I certainly think this phenomenon has a close relation to the historical usage of the word, but in the end the name it goes by is not what is important.
Lastly, given that I have spent my academic career to date writing primarily on the thought of Michel Foucault, and given that Foucault is a privileged reference point in this book, readers might reasonably take the account I am presenting here to be a ‘Foucauldian’ one. I want then to hasten to clarify that this book is ‘Foucauldian’ only in the sense of being strongly influenced by certain particular arguments and aping certain forms of argumentation drawn from Foucault. While my debt to Foucault here is heavy, such that I could not possibly have reached my conclusions without his influence, I certainly do not contend that any of my own claims in this book were ever Foucault’s (except in those cases where I explicitly report them as such). Clearly my claims here differ greatly from his. Even if this difference is at least partly attributable to the fact that I am dealing with cultural shifts that have occurred mostly in the period since Foucault’s death in 1984, I also would not presume to claim that Foucault himself would agree with anything I say here were he alive today. Nevertheless, I would want to suggest that, even if Foucault would not say exactly what I am arguing here, I am Foucauldian in a broad sense of following an eternal impulse to critique actuality, even if actuality at this point is marked culturally by a mutant reception of Foucault’s thought.
Notes
1 1 Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism. New York: Norton, 1979.
2 2 Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso, 2017.
3 3 So, for example, Ian Hacking might be right that our conceptions of the normal are linked by being part of the historical shift from determinism to indeterminism that he diagnoses, but this connection is quite beyond the scope of the current book. See Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 179.
4 4 My close analytical work to derive this definition can be found in Kelly, ‘What’s in a Norm? Foucault’s Conceptualization and Genealogy of the Norm’, Foucault Studies, 27/27 (2019): 1–22.
5 5 Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological [1966]. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1978.
6 6 There are other accounts of the origin of norms that portray it as coming precisely out of statistics, but I would simply maintain that these accounts are mistaken. Perhaps the most prominent such account is Hacking’s The Taming of Chance. Hacking, however, is apt to portray things in this way precisely because he is doing the history of statistics, not the history of norms, and he is therefore not looking for a non-statistical origin of the concept of the norm.
7 7 Hacking, The Taming of Chance, p. 178.
8 8 The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) notes an isolated use of the word as early as 1598, but in its modern sense only in a zoological journal from 1825 – and does not record its use in relation to human beings until 1886, unsurprisingly in a medical publication. Google’s ‘Books Ngram Viewer’
