Table Of ContentNormal Now
Only one truth appears before our eyes: wealth, fertility
and sweet strength in all its insidious universality. In
contrast, we are unaware of the prodigious machinery of
the will to truth, with its vocation of exclusion.
Michel Foucault, ‘The Orders of Discourse’
NORMAL
NOW
Individualism as Conformity
Mark G. E. Kelly
polity
Copyright © Mark G. E. Kelly 2022
The right of Mark G. E. Kelly to be identified as Author of this Work has been
asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2022 by Polity Press
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Preface viii
1 Genealogy 1
2 New Norms 24
3 Politics 57
4 Sex 75
5 Life 106
6 Law 130
7 Difference 150
Conclusion 167
Notes 175
Index 190
v
Acknowledgements
I thank James Kent for his comments on an initial draft
of this book (and for his broader willingness to act
as a sounding board for my ideas), three anonymous
reviewers for their comments and recommendations,
and Robert Carson for his comments on the chapter
on sex.
I thank my editor at Polity, Pascal Porcheron, for
facilitating the publication of this work.
This work originates in the project, generously
funded by the Australian Research Council as a Future
Fellowship (Grant FT140101020), ‘The invention of
norms: understanding how ethics, law, and the life
sciences connect to shape our social selves’. I would
like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude
to the ARC and to Australia more generally for this
funding. I would also like to thank those who fostered
this project: Alison Ross, who helped enormously with
my application; Diego Bubbio, who also helped in this
regard; Dimitris Vardoulakis, without whom I doubt it
would ever have occurred to me to apply; Paul Patton,
the relevant member of the ARC’s College of Experts at
the time the project was funded; the various anonymous
vi
Acknowledgements
reviewers of my proposals for their feedback and
generous estimation of its worthiness; and Adam Jasper
Smith and the University of Technology, Sydney, for
arranging library facilities for me while I was first
writing the application. I would also like to thank those
who hosted me on research visits during the fellowship,
most particularly the Centre for Research in Modern
European Philosophy at Kingston University London,
and especially Peter Hallward for seminar questioning
that forced me to add caveats that survive in this
manuscript.
vii
Preface
Am I normal?
Haven’t we all asked this question at one time or
another? Some of us might ask it frequently. The
answers we come up with surely vary, even for the
same person at different times. Some defensively assert
that there is nothing wrong with them, and indeed
that it is, perhaps, other people, the ones who appear
normal, who are the real weirdos. Many of us concede
that there is something wrong with us, and schedule an
appointment with a professional in search of a solution.
What is at the heart of such worries? What are we
trying to achieve by either accusing others of being
abnormal or seeking to improve or cure ourselves? Of
course, the precise answers are as many and varied as
human psychology itself, but there are some general
motives that most or perhaps even all of us have, such
as wanting to be healthy and happy. These general
human goals seem to me precisely to have become
subsumed by a more general and distinctively modern
drive to be normal. Happiness as we understand it
today is our affective norm, as health is our medical
one.
viii
Preface
What is normality? Like many of the concepts in the
cognitive background to our lives, it is not immediately
easy for us to define. Indeed, I will argue that it is not
a concept that has been defined adequately even by
experts in fields that rely on it. Moreover, I will suggest
that it is a peculiarly insidious concept in the way that
it evades a simple definition.1
This is a book about what is considered normal
today and about how our conception of normality has
changed in a seismic shift that is still moving the ground
beneath us. I will claim that normality has, in the course
of the last century, gone from being a series of differen-
tiated social standards applying to different categories
of person to being a network of contradictory and
paradoxical standards that apply increasingly indiffer-
ently to everyone. The pressure to be normal has always
put people in an ultimately impossibly difficult position,
but the new normality adds to this an expectation that
we conform by refusing to conform, leading to the
profoundly confused form of subjectivity we all today
embody in various ways.
This mutation in normality is perhaps barely half a
century old. The very concept of ‘normality’ in which
it has occurred was itself invented perhaps only a few
centuries ago. Although the word ‘normal’ is part of
our everyday vocabulary today, it is a fairly recent
addition to the English language (from French or
Latin), only two hundred or so years old. Only about
a hundred years ago did it become a widely used word.
Its relative novelty does give us reason to suspect
that our contemporary normality might itself soon
disappear, though we can have little idea what might
replace it or when.
* * *
ix
