Rules by Lorraine Daston

Author:Lorraine Daston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion: From Rules to Norms

Regulations are rules at their nitty-grittiest. On the spectrum from the majestic natural laws that order the universe to pinpoint rules applied to pinpoint domains, regulations tilt toward the latter. Just how far depends on the domain: rules of capitalization can apply to an entire language; rules stipulating the maximum length of beaked shoes apply only to beaked shoes. There are global regulations governing, for example, trade and diplomacy, but most regulations are local, where particulars matter. And even global regulations must inevitably be adjusted to local circumstances, if only because enforcement is always ultimately local.

Regulations are therefore a case of multum in parvo: much compressed within a small compass. The scales within which the regulations examined in this chapter operate range from the small city to the metropolis to a linguistic community, and in all three cases regulations pack a multitude of detail into the bounded realms they govern. What is characteristic of times and places where there is an upsurge of regulations is not just size but also complexity and density. More far-flung and tightly woven trade networks created the wealth and wares that drove sumptuary regulations in commercial cities; exploding population and demands on fragile infrastructure drove traffic and sanitation regulations in Enlightenment metropolises; increased literacy and the printing press drove efforts to regularize spelling. Wherever human interactions expanded and intensified at an accelerated pace, regulations cropped up to order the perceived disorder of many people doing many different things in many different ways in the same space, whether at a Bolognese wedding, in a Paris street, or on the pages of a printed book.

At this point, the libertarian in all of us will protest: what’s wrong with wearing beaked shoes (or ripped jeans), letting carriages (or cars) go as fast as they like, and spelling fox as focks or phawx or all of the above on the same page? (There are probably fewer libertarians in favor of emptying the contents of chamber pots onto the heads of unsuspecting passers-by.) Aren’t all of these regulations at root an authoritarian effort to stamp out variety and individuality? It is undeniable that the prologues of many of these rules and regulations often exude a prim and tidy aesthetic: the Saxon authorities who begged fashion to halt, the Parisian authorities who dreamt of uniform house façades all facing the same direction, the German authorities who howled in horror over the “lawlessness” of spelling textbooks. One can easily imagine a counter-aesthetic of wardrobe miscellany, mismatched street fronts, and devil-may-care orthographic inconsistency. But beyond aesthetic preferences, hard realities also motivated many regulations: the reality of family fortunes dissipated on frippery, of trying to find one’s way in a labyrinth of unnumbered, turned-around houses, and of deciphering the words that strange configurations of letters on the page spell out. Not all realities are equally hard. Co-ordinating traffic and sorting out its versus it’s are orders of magnitude apart in terms of their consequences. Yet the latter probably stirs more passions than the former.

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