WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE NORMAL?

Interview with Candeğer Muradoğlu of Mesele

Link to the Turkish version

Do we spend our lives trying to live up to standards whose criteria we don’t fully understand? In Normal Now, Mark G. E. Kelly pursues this question, arguing that normality is not a natural state but a historically produced form of power, shaped within politics, sexuality, law, and everyday life. This very uncertainty, he suggests, is why people constantly ask themselves, “Am I normal?”

According to Kelly, norms do not emerge from a single center or a deliberate plan. Rather, they take shape within the dense network of everyday relationships through which people try to influence one another. Standards that first appeared in industrial and technical fields were gradually applied to human beings through medicine, and eventually spread across society as a whole. Today, nearly every institution, identity, and way of life has its own norms.

In this interview, Kelly discusses how individualism has shifted from a promise of liberation into a new pressure toward conformity and perfection; why the injunction to “be yourself” produces anxiety, anger, and dissatisfaction; and whether certain trends presented in Turkey in the name of tradition are truly rooted in tradition at all.

Why do people spend their lives asking themselves, “Am I normal?”

The short answer is that they don’t know. Since there is a lot of talk of ‘normality’, people imagine that there is such a thing, but the standards by which it is judged are never entirely clear to anyone, so no one really knows whether they are normal. Of course, most people are quite deeply abnormal in one way or another, such that they are clearly not normal, which situation also leads them to pose the question!

Taking this question as its point of departure, Today’s Normal argues that normality is not a natural state but a historical construct, produced through processes of normalization operating in politics, sexuality, everyday life, and law. How, then, is normality defined—and who is left outside it?

The question of how normality is defined is difficult one. While some processes of normalisation are quite explicit, much normalisation is tenebrous and nebulous, perhaps not even deliberately produced by anyone, so it’s very hard to say where it comes from. As I say in the book, I would like someone to produce a general theory of the formation of the norms, but I don’t have one and haven’t even tried to formulate one, because as far as I can see it would be impossible. To answer the question a bit more directly, I would refer you to something I’ve written a lot about, which is Michel Foucault’s understanding of power: my conception of normalisation comes from him and is really a form of power in his sense. For Foucault, power comes about through the dense network of relations by which people in society try to influence one another. What they do in this regard might be deliberate, but the social effect is a network with a logic of its own that doesn’t necessarily accord with what anyone wants. I don’t believe anyone sets out to invent norms or normalisation as such. The origins of the norm in the book that I trace via Foucault go back to the requirements in early modernity to produce industrial and technical standards, which then became increasingly applied to people via the invention of such standards in medicine. From there, as I see it, the norm metastasised through society, as every institution, ever social formation came to establish its own norms. It’s unclear whether any spaces really exist outside of normalisation now, but of course, insofar as we are all abnormal to some extent, we are all outside the norms, always resisting normalisation, and that means there is always a reserve not conquered by power or norms that will in turn provoke the production of new power and norms but also always challenge and disrupt these.

How did individualism, once framed as a promise of liberation, come to generate new pressures toward conformity and perfection?

Individualism was always about conformity in essence: the individual was always an impossible norm that people would try to approximate despite their deeply transindividual natures. So the basic paradox was that everyone had to be an individual whether they liked it or not, on the perverse basis that they naturally were one. This I identify as a general characteristic of norms: that they insist both that they are completely natural and that everyone has to conform themselves to them even though, if they were really natural, there would be no effort required.

I identify this norm of individualism as initially particularly dominant in mid-twentieth century America, but of course it has much older roots in liberalism and Anglo-Saxon culture. In this era, a century ago, one can already detect a certain ambiguity in the logic of individualism, however. On the one hand, there is a Kantian dimension to this, a neo-Stoic one, that enjoins people to a form of autonomy that comes from conquering the passions and behaving ethically. At the same time, there is already in the early twentieth century a Bohemianism abroad that insists that true autonomy consists in defying society’s rules and expectations. We can trace this back to Stirner and Nietzsche in the nineteenth century and even the extreme wing of liberalism found in Rousseau and French revolutionary culture.

By the late twentieth century, roughly from the sexual and cultural revolutions of the 1960s in the West, we see the second version decisively winning out over the first, producing for the first time an entire society that is grounded in the idea that everyone should reject all established values. That is, for the first time, the standard of normality becomes the rejection of a previous set of norms. This of course is what we find in contemporary ‘woke’ culture: one is obliged to signal one’s rejection of the old valorisations of heterosexuality, masculinity, and whiteness, particularly if one is oneself heterosexual, male or white. Yet, as developments in America demonstrate, the older conception of individualism remains in play: there is in effect now an increasingly literal war between two rival individualisms, although in many ways the logic of these are the same: on the one hand, we have a left individualism that seeks to realise the hedonistic expression of natural identities of the minority, of women, oppressed peoples, alternative genders and sexuality, fighting a right individualism that states that we must instead express our natural identities deriving from our biological sex and nationality.

And why does the constant injunction to “be yourself” in today’s discussions of politics, health, and sexuality coincide with rising levels of anxiety, anger, and dissatisfaction?

People on the left believe that they are liberating themselves and others from the awful straightjackets of these older conceptions of human nature, but I think this is a profound mistake inasmuch as they are producing impossible new norms that depend only on the individual and its pleasures. By contrast, the right-wing version of individualism refers to a form of mind-independent reality that people are enjoined to conform to. This is certainly unpleasant for people who don’t want to conform to it, but the existence of a transcendental standard offers considerable relief from the anxieties generated by the demand that one express oneself. That is ultimately an impossible project, because there is no stable truth of the individual that we will find within us to rely upon. Rather individuality is always socially constructed, so the invitation to be ourselves is really an invitation to dive into a hermeneutic circle of trying to understand our socially constructed self, but to misidentify it as a perfect, stable monad. As your question suggests, I view the results in our culture as disastrous to the point of a kind of Gnostic suicidality: faced with an impossibility of fully realising their unstable identities in the world, people are turning both against themselves and against the world, denouncing both by turns, literally killing themselves in some cases, but more commonly turning to psychoactive medications and disdaining the difficult task of reproducing.

In the preface to the Turkish edition, you ask whether contemporary trends in Turkey that present themselves as traditionalist and anti-Western are truly rooted in tradition, or whether they merely recast Islam as a modern set of norms. What established assumptions in Turkey are you seeking to unsettle with this question? Put more simply: why did you feel compelled to pose this question to Turkish readers?

I ask these questions in the preface of the Turkish edition because I don’t know what the situation is like in Turkey, really. I wrote the book simply by being immersed in Anglo-Saxon culture and trying to understand it: one should expect that Turkish culture is quite different, even if we should also expect it to be heavily influenced by global trends. Turkey is of course a liminal case, straddling the European-Asian divide, and one sees in Istanbul in particular many things that seem quite recognisable to a Westerner among young people in particular. I even suspect among young people in Turkey, as for example Iran at present in particular, there is a kind of yearning for certain cultural trends coming from the West. Well, I want to warn Turks to be careful of tarrying with the West in this regard, but I also certainly don’t want to play into the logics of Islamic conservatism that are clearly prominent in Turkey this century. Although I am British-Australian, and hence don’t claim to know how things are from a Turkish perspective, due to the fact my father lived in Cyprus during my teenage years and married and converted into Islam, I have long had a toe in Islamicate culture and the Middle East. It seems to me that the broad trend in Islam that one sees actually particularly acutely in immigrant communities in the West but also in Arab countries of the last fifty years has been the growth of so-called Salafi tendencies, in particularly as sponsored by Saudi Arabia. And these in turn I actually see as something paradoxical, whereby they present themselves as a return to the earliest, authentic tendencies of Islam, but are also clearly influenced in their organisation and expression by the Western modernity they claim to reject. One sees the same pattern in various trends in Christianity in the West too, from Protestant megachurches to the revival of ‘traditional’ Roman Catholic worship. So I would urge people to be cautious of this paradox too!