the text Porta uses italics to other ends. I have therefore left these words and phrases unmarked, although this means domesticating Porta’s prose, depriving it of some of its multilingual richness and polyphonic playfulness. All references to brand names, fashion designers, films, television programs, musicians, and YouTube sensations have also been retained, even when these might not be familiar to readers of the English. I trust that this will not prevent these readers from complying with Porta’s injunction to “Enjoy!”
Notes
1 1. Jacques Derrida, “Shibboleth: For Paul Celan,” trans. Joshua Wilner and Thomas Dutoit, in Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen, New York: Fordham University Press, 2005, 30.
Grey Alert, Blue Pill
What if the truly enjoyable act were not transgressing a norm but inventing it? What if creativity consisted in pronouncing a law, under the pretext of violating it? What if it turned out that you, who say you prefer the exceptions, only spoke of these because they allow you to imagine the rules?
In these pages, we will explore these disquieting possibilities. Let us see where their convulsions lead us.
Nomography: A collective act in which a regulating principle is generated in spontaneous, unforeseen ways, in and through the gestures of a reactive imagination. // A procedure distinctive to an age in which public and private normativity is directly produced by the digital citizenry, while institutions lose their power, become a mere executive branch, or abstain from these deliberations. // A global psychological plague in which the condition known as normotic is depathologized and becomes a part of mental health. // A result of the combined actions of aesthetic, juridical, and popular forces. // A form of possession. A perverse desire that organizes personal temperaments, implements forms of order, and creates a common pressure to take distance from heterodoxy. // A form of fanaticism in which the community takes shape as a horde and affirms its collective identity as a norm-horde. // A metamorphosis of the social body in which it becomes a regulating force.
“Am I normal?” At a central moment in Masters of Sex, the television series, patients of all ages, shot in a sequence of close-ups, look at the camera with varying degrees of discomfort, repeating this question. With each repetition, the spectator feels more interpellated, more like he or she is being given the third degree, more like a culprit. Are you normal?
There are some who have responded to this question – which we could also call The Question – with resigned good humor. “I’m just a regular everyday normal guy / Nothin’ special ’bout me, motherfucker / … If you wanna mess with me, I think you probably can / Because I’m not confident, and I’m weak for a man … / And I don’t have many friends that would back me up. / My friend Steve would, but he doesn’t look very tough.” “Everyday Normal Guy” (2009), a song by the Canadian rapper and comedian Jon Lajoie that meticulously parodies the self-celebration proper to hip-hop lyrics, has received more than thirty-nine million views on YouTube. This is more than many songs recorded by full-fledged hip-hop stars, including those who declare in rhyme that they are something special. And if you mess with them …
In the fashion show for Balenciaga’s Fall–Winter 2017 line, the designer Demna Gvasalia dressed the models in simple navy blue t-shirts – very simple t-shirts, with just one detail added: the brand’s name printed in red, white, and blue, resembling the logos used in North American electoral campaigns. It was not this political connotation that interested Gvasalia, though. It was instead the appropriation of a garment that, defying the rules of the brand, was common, even cheap, and cut across divisions of class. Rather than granting distinction to its wearers, the t-shirt unified them. The brand that practically invented glamor thus filled the runway with bodies that, each in its own modest t-shirt, seemed not to belong to fashion world professionals, but rather to be the bodies of humble, naive, dedicated voters. This was a fall from high fashion to plain old voting.
A long shot shows a heavily trafficked street. Cars, pedestrians coming and going, a busy routine. Everything’s uneventful. The spectator sees all of this, waiting in vain for some incident, an accident, a cut in the digital programming, or an emergence of the Lacanian real. No such thing happens. The use of security footage in exhibition spaces, pioneered by Michael Snow, who is also Canadian, has become so widespread in video art that it is now a recurring trope in galleries and museums: the unedited, unaltered record of the ordinary.
Live show! Come see the commonplace! It’s happening right now!
Super normal. What a strange oxymoron…. And yet it has done well lately. We find it in a book-length essay about interior design that celebrates that tranquil beauty of Italian coffee machines and rubber boots. It is also the name of a refined design studio. The phrase glows, in red neon, on the façade of a Japanese restaurant in Melbourne. Meanwhile, another phrase, Kid Normal, provides the title of a celebrated series of children’s books whose protagonist is made special precisely by his lack of superpowers, or rather by his gradual discovery, during the course of many adventures, that the greatest gift, the real gift from the gods, is … being, unlike other superheroes in pajamas, just another kid. One of many.
“No International Norm Regulates This Type of Gestation.” This headline in El País, Spain’s most widely read newspaper, confronts the reader with the apocalyptic threat of a complete lack of organizing principles. “Sixteen Unwritten Rules That All Peoples Respect.” A story in the paper’s travel section lists dos and don’ts for “rural Spain” – a fictional realm conjured up by a metropolitan, centralist mindset. Chaotic deregulation and customary normativity thus constitute two guiding frameworks, two ways of negotiating two different territories: the global jungle and the local landscape. Globalizing processes turn the planet back into a terra incognita, rocked by the fluctuations of financial markets and the witchcraft of Bitcoin. Here we are in need of a new breed of adventurers, discoverers equipped with dried meats and bearing constitutions, ready to raise the flag of Law in lawless lands. By contrast, in provincial spaces, where customs are hypercodified, familiarity is defined by the ability to learn autochthonous customs and local colors. Hence the emergence of a sort of globalized regionalism.
The biggest music festivals advertise themselves using the hashtag #TheNewNormal, and even surprise parties are supposed to be organized according to sets of rules. A National Consortium of Unification, made up of the apostles of normativité, establishes rules for coexistence, in tumultuous meetings where the recounting of rapid-fire fables is the order of the day. This absurdist fiction, imagined by Boris Vian, has become the stuff of our times.1
Now books of poetry begin this way:
I have a friend who tells me that she only
wants to be a normal girl, but she often changes
her mind and keeps acting strangely, which I like and admire.
(Specifically when it comes to indecision and the refusal to compromise.)2
Biopolitical struggles become disputes over the identification of gender’s unwritten rules and efforts to lay claim to the exceptions:
Are you asking me, Ma’am, whether it is normal to be heterosexual? Of course! Just as it is normal to be homosexual!3
… but this incorrect perception – this deliberately incorrect perception – of a new relational order in which the traditional order would be inverted is in fact refuted in various spaces within the queer community, where this dichotomy is reinscribed in the disjunction between assimilation
