What is Normal? by Carroll Roz; Ryan Jane;

What is Normal? by Carroll Roz; Ryan Jane;

Author:Carroll, Roz; Ryan, Jane;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Confer Ltd
Published: 2020-09-15T00:00:00+00:00


Normality as necessary and constructive: meaning, security, value(s) and regulatory support

Normality and norms position us in economies, cultures and with other people, intimately, globally, intrapsychically. They are both lived experience and abstracted relationship forms, embodying a kind of internalised and shared generalised cultural presence, and in their specifics providing behavioural and emotional roadmaps for all sorts of situations. It’s hard to imagine sociability, civil society or identity without them; they convey and contain order, ethics, values, regulation (with its mix of restriction and relief). Normativity mostly presents itself with a kind of necessity: inhabiting and being inhabited by all the different procedures given to us by what is regarded as normal, we can engage in commerce, classrooms, childrearing, courtship, psychotherapy. Norms are generally implicit, becoming most visible in the breach: cross-dressing discloses the usual gender conventions; abuses of state power draw attention to democratic values.

Normativity has been disparaged as constraining liberty, spontaneity and authenticity. Some, though, would call this naive anarchism, or a vestige of adolescent rebellion and negativity: without a set of guiding principles and implicit social agreements, reply the defenders, freedom and authenticity are meaningless. Sharing values and beliefs provides core security, legitimacy and ideals, a feeling of belonging to a larger world that makes sense, and an orientation about what is acceptable. From the psychoanalytic perspective, we might call this the positive narcissistic and identificatory side of normality. Since humans are naturally social, we are embedded in cultures and economies, on which we cannot help but rely. Normality, then, emerges from the most basic fabric of society in a kind of implicit and self-renewing consent of the sort imagined by philosophers Rousseau (1762/2018) and Rawls (1971/2009).

Encountering different cultures, subcultures or historical moments can disrupt normativity’s implicit claim to universality: orientalisms and exoticisms are among the many ways of organising the mix of stimulation and excitement here; we look at other cultures as if they are some kind of inferior, primitive life form, reinforcing our own faith in ourselves in our cultures. But what happens when these turn out to be differences rather than badges of superiority or legitimacy? Further, the ‘primitive’ Other can become eroticised or otherwise rendered in some sort of gratifying appropriation. Immigration and globalisation, for example, cut both ways these days, arousing powerful passions. Racism is perhaps the most conspicuous form. None of this is to say that there must be unanimity about norms. There are all kinds of local institutions and subcultures, often buttressed by shared dissent from the consensus.



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