Normal Now. Mark G. E. Kelly
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writing, whereas earlier grammars had merely listed rules. Industrial and military norms followed as standardized production and regimented warfare developed in Europe, in answer to a prior situation in which incompatible components and motley troops were inhibiting the aims of industrialists and generals. The adoption of a normative model of the functioning of the human organism, not merely for triaging plague-afflicted habitations but for general use, in turn produced modern medicine as we know it, providing a clear standard to diagnose illness relative to the obscure conceptions of disease that had previously circulated. While we might certainly want to criticize all these developments – the suppression of natural change and diversity in language by normative grammar, the familiar woes of an industrialized society, the increase in deaths from warfare in the mechanical age and the mistreatment of many individual cases by a one-size-fits-all scientific medicine – we may nonetheless see this initial adoption of the concept of normality as clearly furthering the goals of the fields in which it made its mark.
After this point, certainly from the nineteenth century – and, I believe, accelerating more or less continuously thereafter – the phenomenon of the norm metastasized throughout society, a spread emblematized and perhaps even caused by the popularization of the notion of the ‘normal’ itself. Above all, two institutions are implicated in this spread of the norm.11 The first is surely modern medicine: hospitals, and then the emergence of general practice medicine, spread medical ideas throughout society, dynamized in the twentieth century by the introduction of mass health insurance schemes (both public and private). Almost every individual in industrialized societies is now medically supervised – on an ever more continuous basis – from birth. Medical discourses and terms are increasingly absorbed and repeated by patients, used by them autonomously to describe themselves, and people start to self-diagnose based on medical principles without the direct intervention of the medical institution. A further, powerful mutation occurred via the development of a branch of medicine, psychiatry, concerned not with the body as such but with the mind.
The diffusion of norms involved a raft of other institutions, of course, and moreover much of this diffusion presumably occurred outside formal institutional settings. A crucial development, alluded to above, which occurred in medicine, but quickly spread across other institutions and then outside them, was the appearance of norms for human behaviour. Medicine’s original norms applied to the organic condition of bodies, and norms had appeared governing the motions of bodies in particular situations (such as in military firing lines or on industrial production lines), but behaviour came to be medicalized and normalized as such with the invention of the medical discipline of psychiatry (which is approximately as old as modern medicine itself), and the later academic discourse of psychology (from the end of the nineteenth century). Psychology and psychiatry explicitly pertain to the human ‘psyche’, which is to say to our minds (or indeed our souls, to translate this Greek word a different way).12 However, psychologists and psychiatrists cannot peer directly into our consciousnesses, even today. Rather, they must primarily be concerned to monitor our visible behaviour, whether or not they proclaim an explicitly ‘behaviourist’ orientation. All the new social institutions that emerged and became pervasive from the eighteenth century to the twentieth – principally the school, the hospital, the prison, the factory and, most obviously, the insane asylum – are shot through with this psychological normalization of behaviour.
Mass public education, appearing in earnest in the late nineteenth century, has been the other key institution for the diffusion of norms, besides medicine. For the first time, all children were required to attend schools. This new omni-education was intensely normalizing from its inception. Its teachers were trained in institutions then called ‘normal schools’, the chief function of which was explicitly to impart norms. The most obvious norms operative in schools are those of educational attainment, but mass education has also always been prominently concerned with inculcating more general norms of behaviour. These include the simple but highly transferable classroom norms of obedience and attentiveness, but also encompass a more general concern with the moral education of pupils: schools deliberately and loudly proclaim their mission to impart a broad spectrum of attitudinal and behavioural norms that are supposed to stand students in good stead in later life. Relatedly, the school is a major venue for the transmission of medical norms: morality and public health have always been normatively linked. This once meant that children’s juvenile sexuality would be shaped and constricted; today, this approach has given way to an attempt positively to produce healthy sexual practices, as well as to inculcate acceptance of others’ sexualities, but the basic principle remains the same, namely producing what is deemed hygienic and ethical adult behaviour.
What’s in a Norm?
I imagine the reader might well ask, in relation to these claims of mine about norms, whether things weren’t always like this: weren’t there always such models? To this, I would suggest that we imagine this to be the case precisely because we are today so dominated by norms that it no longer seems conceivable that things could ever have been otherwise, or ever could be again. Although it does not affect the specific claims I will go on to make in this book, the critical force of my argument does depend to an extent on norms being an invention and hence being something that might reasonably be expected to disappear.
Norms in our society are different from the unspoken rules that also exist in other societies, in that norms are not rules in a strict sense at all, but ideals. What is different about our society is that we are expected not just to follow rules, but in addition to conform to innumerable images of how we should be.
This understanding of what a norm is, I believe, that which is operative in both Canguilhem and Foucault. However, neither of them cares explicitly to define this term, despite its crucialness, supplying clear definitions being considered somewhat gauche in twentieth-century French philosophy. Foucault does, however, say the following:
Normalization consists first of all in positing a model, an optimal model that is constructed in terms of a certain result, and the operation of … normalization consists in trying to get people, movements, and actions to conform to this model, the normal being precisely that which can conform to this norm, and the abnormal that which is incapable of conforming to the norm. In other words, it is not the normal and the abnormal that is fundamental and primary in … normalization, it is the norm. That is, there is an originally prescriptive character of the norm and the determination and the identification of the normal and the abnormal becomes possible in relation to this posited norm.13
Foucault contrasts the norm with the older model of the law, but I find it more instructive to contrast it with the rule, partly for etymological reasons and partly because of the greater generality of the concept (laws are effectively a particular kind of rule). The historical and anthropological records suggest that rules have existed in every human society, but are precisely not norms in the sense of regulative ideals. Rules are still with us today. Indeed, there has perhaps never been such a dense profusion of rules as we now have. The profusion of norms is, however, something distinct from this phenomenon, even if the two things are complexly interrelated and indeed compound one another (as I will detail in Chapter 6). There is a significant difference between obeying a rule and conforming to a norm, even if the two are often closely associated. This difference is the one between having to live according to a set of commandments and having to live up to an image of how a perfect person ought ideally to behave.
Incidentally, Christianity, I would argue, historically has been about laws rather than norms because, although it held Jesus up as an example to imitate, it also held that Jesus was God, and hence that, unlike Jesus, mortals are all sinners who could not actually achieve his perfection – at least not in this life. Even if Christ makes Christ-like behaviour possible through His influence, He remains an extrinsic principle in this process, always above and beyond. Thomas à Kempis’s medieval classic, De Imitatione Christi (The Imitation of Christ), thus effectively contains a list of rules (alongside prayers and meditations) based on Christ’s behaviour. The logic of the norm is diametrically opposite because it makes perfection normal, a default