To be sure, every society has had unstated rules of conduct alongside its explicitly stated codes, and sociologists today refer to these unstated rules as ‘norms’, but our society has a very different kind of unstated norm, and, unlike any other society, applies the word ‘norm’ to refer to it. Our society (which is to say, late modern Western society), for this reason, can in history be classified uniquely as the society of the norm.
It is frequently difficult to be sure whether we are following all the rules, and even harder to be sure that no one will accuse us of breaking them, but it is possible, at least in principle, to avoid breaking any given rule. Generally, this can be accomplished negatively: while there are some laws that actively require me to perform some obligation, if I do nothing, I will, by and large, remain innocent before the law. By contrast, the norm is essentially positive, always prescribing that we should be something more than what we are (even if this implies the negative injunction that we stop doing or being anything that is not in line with this ideal).
This is not to say that the norm requires any explicit reference to perfection. Indeed, norms need not be explicit in any respect. Norms may be invisible and unremarked upon. Nonetheless, a norm always operates as an injunction for people to conform perfectly to it, even though this is always ultimately impossible.
One dimension of this impossibility is, typically, that norms are nebulous and phantasmic, such that we can never know to what extent we actually conform to them. But complete conformity is not even possible in those rare cases where norms are actually explicit and precisely quantified. Take, for example, the normal human body temperature of 37°C: if we actually coincide with this it is for a limited duration, and then only ever to the extent that the thermometer measuring us does not have the accuracy to measure our inevitable minute variation from this precise number.
I imagine readers might object that people have always desired perfect health, and so they have, but only inasmuch as they desired the negation of any specific malady from which they suffered. To desire to be free from sickness does not immediately imply a normative image of perfect health, even if the former paves the way for the latter. Now, there is a certain natural fact here, that we don’t like being sick or acutely unhappy, but I am suggesting that the norms install in our minds a contingent goal of a total banishment of ill-functioning and ill-feeling. Such norms follow a widespread pattern by which norms are based on pre-existing imperatives, harnessing these and elevating them to unattainable heights. The norm of health may be specified in myriad different ways (and thus gives rise to many specific norms) in relation to particular indicators, organs, etc., but nonetheless implies a general aim of perfect healthiness towards which all such specifications are aimed.
Before the advent of the norm, medicine was negative, directed towards curing specific illnesses that presented themselves. Once there is a norm, however, we always vary from that ideal of health in some way. For most people, much of the time, this makes little practical difference: we still go to a doctor only when we feel sick, and the doctor tries to patch us up and send us on our way rather than chase some elusive ultimate normality. Normative medicine has the major benefit, moreover, that it plays a more active role in bringing illnesses to light, detecting problems earlier and identifying them more accurately. However, by the same token, the door has been decisively opened from the doctor’s side to an interventionist form of medicine (with no ultimate end point) that means that, if they wish to, they can always find something wrong to try to cure, and to a concern on the patient’s side that they are always to some extent in ill health, which is to say to hypochondriacal tendencies. Perhaps there have always been hypochondriacs, but medical norms allow a hypochondriac always to find some organic basis to point to as evidence that they really are sick.
New Norms
While our society is uniquely defined by the presence of norms, the specifics of these norms can vary greatly. We can presume that at any given time there must, in general, be only a single norm governing any given phenomenon, or else a major cleavage in relation to that phenomenon, as one finds in situations where organizations split around basic principles. I would suggest that multiple norms can only ever coexist where they apply to different domains, in different institutions, to different people, etc., such that within a given body of people there can only be one operative norm for any given attribute. We can, moreover, presume that there is a tendency for norms governing different phenomena at any given time to reconcile with one another, since, when norms come into conflict around marginal questions (that is, questions that marginally concern multiple norms), some kind of accommodation between these norms must be reached or else a social cleavage occur. Broadly speaking, if norms in different areas for people in the same group conflict with one another, there will be pressure for the norms to change so that there is no longer any conflict, or else some device for reconciling or mediating them must appear.
My suspicion is that our society is so normalizing that, in every area of our lives that we think about, without particularly meaning to, we posit norms and orient ourselves towards these. I cannot hope to prove this, and indeed there may be many areas of our lives that are not yet norm-governed. What I try to do in the rest of this book is to show and discuss how norms have come to affect crucial major areas of our lives. My claim here is not that everything comes down to norms; it is, rather, that in our society norms affect everything, however subtly.
In the original expansion of norms across society, a network formed in which norms tended to accord with one another and hence mutually reinforce one another’s demands for conformity. This produced a profoundly (although of course never completely) conformist society. This conformism reached its apex in the mid-twentieth century in Western societies.
It has subsequently mutated into something quite paradoxical, however. The engine of this mutation has been a revolt against conformism itself. This revolt occurred in part as a result of the importation of diverse influences from the rest of the world that called Western norms into question, in part through an uprising of people (particularly from the lower orders) who had never been entirely inculcated into the old reigning norms, and in part as a phenomenon of spontaneous reaction from within the normative order. The exact moment this revolt begins is difficult to discern. I would of course, from a Foucauldian perspective, say that there was always already resistance to the old normative order. The revolt clearly began to cohere, however, by the 1960s, out of more inchoate beginnings during the ultra-conformist 1950s, and reached its peak only in recent years during the twenty-first century, if indeed it has yet reached it.
Despite some more radical tendencies in such a direction, this revolt has not been against norms as such, but rather only against particular norms, or perhaps more broadly against a particular form of normalization. The overall form of the norm thus survived and colonized this revolt through the becoming-norm of the anticonformist ideal of the revolt itself. This produced our contemporary normative order. Unlike older norms, which simply demanded conformity, our norms today have been produced in line with new reigning meta-norms of nonconformity and diversity. Where previously the only meta-norm was that one should conform with norms – which was hardly an additional norm at all, but rather simply an implication of the norms themselves as such – now the reigning meta-norm has become rejecting conformity with the old norms.
Norms are inherently conformist: the very existence of a norm as norm means that you are supposed to conform to it. The great contemporary normative paradox is that anticonformism has itself become a norm. This is the perverse result of a revolt against norms that did not overthrow the model of the norm but instead itself became normative. It is