Mark G. E. Kelly - Normal Now

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’ indicates that usage of the word ‘normal’ in books in English began after 1820 and rose continuously, with an exponential explosion in the early twentieth century to an early peak in 1920. The OED records ‘norm’ first in 1821, but the notion of a social norm only in 1900. Google’s Ngram Viewer shows use of the word ‘norm’ beginning to grow in usage in the mid-nineteenth century and growing almost every year since, something that is also true of the much more recently coined term ‘normative’; the word ‘normal’ still appears at ten times the frequency of the word ‘norm’, though the gap is narrowing. By contrast, for the French cognates, normal and norme, the gap is closer to a factor of two for normal over norme.

9 9 Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, p. 150.

10 10 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish [1975]. London: Penguin, 1977, pp. 195ff. Michel Foucault, Abnormal [1999]. London: Verso, 2003, pp. 43ff.

11 11 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 184.

12 12 Foucault in Discipline and Punish sees modern disciplinary power precisely as producing a ‘modern soul’.

13 13 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population [2004]. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, p. 58. This passage seems clear enough to me, but is complicated immediately afterwards by a comment of Foucault’s proposing effectively to redesignate what he has just called ‘normalization’ neologistically as ‘normation’, and instead use the term ‘normalization’ to refer to statistics-based norms. Some commentators (in particular, Mary Beth Mader, Sleights of Reason. Norm, Bisexuality, Development. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011) have seized on this to assert that for Foucault normalization is in general a statistical phenomenon. Foucault, however, only ever mentions ‘normation’ in this one passing remark, and he is entirely clear that non-statistical ‘normation’ is what he elsewhere consistently calls ‘normalization’. For my full reading and treatment of alternative readings of Foucault on this point, see Kelly, ‘What’s in a Norm?’, pp. 10–13.

14 14 Sigmund Freud criticized the very Christian ethical commandment to love one’s neighbour as being impossibly unrealistic. What Freud fails to recognize is that this commandment was always tempered by the realization that it was precisely not possible to achieve – rather, it was intended as something to aim for, and a basis on which to atone for one’s trespasses against others. That Freud viewed it as he did I think is indicative of the age of the norm he was already living in a hundred years ago. See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents. New York: W. W. Norton, 1961.

15 15 My concept of the meta-norm perhaps resembles Hans Kelsen’s concept of a Grundnorm, but Kelsen is not an influence on me and I will not explore this comparison here.

16 16 For a study that focuses on closely related matters in a French context, see Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism.

17 17 To give a singular concrete example, changes in attitudes to sexual behaviour, which I deal with here, can be seen in the United States to pertain to whites vastly more than to black Americans. See J. M. Twenge, R. A. Sherman and B. E. Wells, ‘Changes in American Adults’ Sexual Behavior and Attitudes, 1972–2012’, Archives of Sexual Behavior, 44 (2015): 2273–2285, 2281.

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