Histories of the Normal and the Abnormal

Social and Cultural Histories of Norms and Normativity

Waltraud Ernst

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134205486
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

This fascinating volume tackles the history of the terms 'normal' and 'abnormal'. Originally meaning 'as occurring in nature', normality has taken on significant cultural gravitas and this book recognizes and explores that fact.

The essays engage with the concepts of the normal and the abnormal from the perspectives of a variety of academic disciplines – ranging from art history to social history of medicine, literature, and science studies to sociology and cultural anthropology. The contributors use as their conceptual anchors the works of moral and political philosophers such as Canguilhem, Foucault and Hacking, as well as the ideas put forward by sociologists including Durkheim and Illich.

With contributions from a range of scholars across differing disciplines, this book will have a broad appeal to students in many areas of history.

1 The normal and the abnormal

Reflections on norms and normativity

Waltraud Ernst

This book engages with the concepts of the normal and the abnormal from the perspectives of a variety of academic disciplines – ranging from art history to the social history of medicine, literature and science studies to sociology and cultural anthropology. The contributors use as their conceptual anchors the works of moral and political philosophers (Canguilhem, Foucault, Hacking), as well as the ideas put forward by sociologists (Durkheim, Goffman) and anthropologists (Benedict, Douglas, Mead). Such a plurality of approaches and diversity of theoretical background requires clarification of terms, not least because the issues of norms, normalisation and normativity are contested, and subject-specific methodologies and conceptual points of reference necessarily imbue terms with varied meanings.

Diversity of subject-specific methodologies and conceptual points of reference has the potential to harbour conceptual imprecision and confusion. Alternatively, it can constitute a fertile ground for conceptual refinement through interdisciplinary engagement. The ethnologist and psychoanalyst Georges Devereux suggested the latter in his The Normal and the Abnormal: ‘A truly interdisciplinary science is the product of cross-fertilisation between the various key concepts of the involved disciplines.’¹ It is within such a framework of disciplinary exchange that the contributions to this volume need to be set. Devereux does not only invite us to look over the often all too narrowly conceived rim of disciplinary boundaries. He also seems to imply that the terms ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ originated from the discipline of psychiatry.² Other scholars in contrast see Foucault and, increasingly, Canguilhem as the originators of these terms.³ Sociologists in turn consider Durkheim, one of the founding fathers of their discipline, as their major fount of wisdom and inspiration in regard to social norms, while anthropologists refer to Boas’s work.⁴ Philosophers in contrast will place concerns about norms within the realm of ethics, because reflections on what ‘is’ and what ‘ought’ to be – on what is to be considered a given (or ‘fact’) in contrast to what is being prescribed or put forward as a normative suggestion – have been part and parcel of metaphysics and ethics respectively throughout the history of moral philosophy in the West.⁵

Such varied and competing foundation histories (and myths) and attempts to trace the origins of our key terms may rightly be seen as indicative of the fragmentation of, or – to put a slightly more positive construction on it – the increasing specialisation in, what have become the ‘social sciences’. Given such fecundity, it is perhaps not surprising that a number of definitions of the nature, scope and meaning of norms – and of their assumed counterpart, variously labelled ‘the abnormal’ or ‘the pathological’ – should prevail, leading to some confusion, imprecision, and conflation of terms. Although any attempt at a definite answer to the question of the original source and single most authoritative meaning of our key terms is likely to be a moot point, a brief outline of major conceptual and linguistic shifts may aid clarification of terms and concepts, and provide the wider historiographic context within which specific case studies need to be set. In a similar vein, and as suggested by the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, the historical and cultural specificity of the key terms needs to be considered in order to avoid ungrounded generalisation and anachronism.⁶ Further elucidation of key terms will of course also be undertaken in relation to and within the particular contexts of the specific historical and empirical evidence put forward in the individual case studies assembled in this volume.

The normal and abnormal in historical and cultural context

Until about the middle of the nineteenth century the term ‘normal’ was defined in English dictionaries simply in a formalistic way as ‘standing at right angles’. Yet although no moral prescription appears to be inherent in this seemingly purely mathematical definition, the seed of evaluation and prescription can be discerned: the notion of measurement and measuring, of imposing a standard against which things and people are measured. A norm in this sense of ‘running the rule’ over someone or ‘getting the measure of them’ points us to the norm as a standard, a rule, or principle to be complied with. This leads to the modern, nineteenth- and twentieth-century meaning of the term: the norm as signifying expected forms of social behaviour, based on sets of more or less implicit social rules that exist independently of individuals and exercise a coercive influence, with breaches of the norm being subject to sanctions. This definition of norms as social norms that refer to conventions of behaviour and standards of value is taken as the starting point of analysis by thinkers such as Durkheim, Foucault and Canguilhem alike. This understanding fits in also with philosophical conventions, which are careful to differentiate between prescriptive and evaluative (‘normative’) statements (i.e. what ‘ought’ to be) on the one hand, and mere descriptions or statements of matters of fact (i.e. what ‘is’) on the other. It is the realm of the former that has been at the core of moral philosophy.

One important distinction that further exemplifies the ‘ought’–‘is’ dichotomy needs to be made: the distinction between social norms and what could be called statistical norms. While the former signify a standard, rule, principle used to judge or direct human conduct as something to be complied with, the latter refer to an average or usual level of attainment or performance, which is nowadays frequently calculated by means of statistical procedures. The best-known statistical procedure involves the Gaussian or ‘normal distribution’, which has received particular attention recently following heated debates about the process of statistical racialisation alleged to have been inherent in the work by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray on the bell curve.⁷ When a number of objects or persons are measured (heights, or the intelligence of African-Americans, for example, as in the case of Herrnstein and Murray’s work), most measurements will cluster around some central point, with progressively fewer data points as one moves away from that centre, thus creating the shape of what looks like a bell. The dangerous temptation is to take the core set of data at the centre of a normal distribution as that which also provides a standard of what ought to be the social norm – a procedure that implies moving from descriptive data of what ‘is’ to prescriptive statements. With the upsurge of statistics in the modern period, the conflation of statistical norms and social norms has become a focus of analysis, as in Ian Hacking’s work on the ‘taming of chance’, and David Armstrong’s Foucauldean critique of the modern type of a ‘surveillance medicine’, which works by deriving normative guidelines for control and intervention from statistical averages and probabilities.⁸ Hacking even suggests that the word ‘normal’ became ‘the most powerful ideological tool of the twentieth century’.⁹

One of the issues that is at stake in what Hacking considers to be a new style of scientific reasoning, namely the ‘probabilisation’ of the Western world, is the move from what is ‘normal’ to what is ‘normative’ – that is, from a statistical average to a prescriptive statement. Yet even in a nonstatistical sense, ‘normal’ and ‘normative’ are importantly distinct, as it is not the case that what is normal necessarily represents a standard or value to be complied with. Crucially, therefore, any statement that proceeds from a description of the ‘normal’ to a prescriptive assertion of standards or norm needs to be probed carefully. In philosophy this slippage from a statement on what ‘is’ to one of ‘ought’ is known as a manifestation of a ‘naturalistic fallacy’, namely any inference that purports to derive a normative conclusion from purely factual premises. The title of Frankfurt School philosopher Habermas’s only recently translated work, Between Facts and Norms, gives away the starting point of his analysis of norms in the development of contemporary democracies.¹⁰ Similar issues are involved in debates about concepts of the ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ being used as a standard or in a normative sense.¹¹

It is tempting to conceive of the terms ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ as the mere predecessors of the modern binary of ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’. To a certain extent it is indeed valid to suggest that what we nowadays refer to as ‘normal’ had its equivalent in the pre-modern term ‘natural’. However, the change from a religiously ordained natural order to a scientifically grounded secular framework and the emergence of the normal/abnormal dichotomy in preference to the earlier binary of natural/unnatural needs to be seen to encapsulate an important shift in kind and semantics and not merely one of magnitude and terminology – unless we subscribe to a notion of history as the unfolding of a linear process. The socio-political contexts within which notions of the natural and unnatural were embedded were highly different from those of later periods, so that it is necessary, as we will see in two contributions to this book (Ravenscroft, Chapter 2; Mitchell, Chapter 3), to differentiate between modern interpretations of pre-modern phenomena (which use as their point of reference the familiar ab/normal binary), and what would have been the contemporary understanding (which would be based on quite different social and political cosmologies, of which the un/natural couplet is but one dimension).

Reference to the natural and unnatural is of course still common nowadays, leading to further conflation of terms in day-to-day parlance and conceptual imprecision among scholars. Homosexuality, for example, has throughout the nineteenth century and by some even up until recently been morally condemned as ‘unnatural’, despite the fact that the notion of it as a disease and ‘abnormality’ had been mooted from the late nineteenth century onwards.¹² This shows that earlier terms such as the natural and unnatural have penetrated well into the modern area, existing alongside newer ones such as the normal and the abnormal. What is more, the way the earlier binary has been used still retains its earlier flaws, namely the potential conflation of ‘is’ and ‘ought’, as was the case in pre-modern Western societies that were based on a religiously ordained order that collapsed the natural (what ‘is’) into the ethical (what ‘ought’ to be). In other words, pre-modern and current appeals to nature in pursuit of guidance on moral behaviour and standards conflate the distinction between descriptive statement and moral prescription. Although the ‘is’–‘ought’ distinction emerged as part of the Enlightenment emancipation from religious prescription (so that what ‘is’, as scientifically discovered, is more clearly independent from what ‘ought’ to be), arguments on issues such as homosexuality, for example, are still infused with moral appeals to what is supposed to be a biological given.¹³ The justification of moral standards through biology or ‘nature’ is particularly common in regard to gender and race issues, when a statement on biological difference (what ‘is’) is turned into an argument about what is ‘unnatural’ or ‘abnormal’.¹⁴ In classical ethics, in contrast, the appeal to the natural in pursuit of guidance on the ethical would have been rejected, as the ancient Greeks and their Roman followers have usually seen nature as something devoid of morals and therefore requiring reason to impose on it the ethical.¹⁵ The ‘rise of reason’ and the privileging of rationality in the Western world have of course been heavily contested, not only during the recent era (or fashion) of post-modernity, but right from the inception of Enlightenment thinking and the emergence of ‘objective’ science.¹⁶ One major point of contention has been the question to what extent scientific description of what ‘is’ can be entirely devoid of value judgements, and whether therefore the qualitative distinction between value judgements and moral standards on the one hand and objective, value-free description and facts on the other is indeed valid.¹⁷ The emergence of modern science therefore has brought issues of normativity and objectivity into sharp focus, in particular in the fields of science-based medicine and affiliated sciences, which mainly concern the contributors to this book as they assess the application of norms on the physical body and, by implication, the moral body and body politic. The slippage from ‘scientific’ to ‘moral’ (as in the biologisation of race and gender, for example) and from ‘moral’ to ‘scientific’ (as in the moralisation of homosexuality, for example) has recently undergone much scrutiny and is one major theme discussed in a number of essays in this volume.

In the field of science studies, scholars such as Barnes, Bloor, Collins and Latour have taken a step further the issue of whether the validity of scientific knowledge transcends its specific cultural origins, suggesting instead that the core criteria of science (objectivity, rationality, description of ‘is’) are subject to the same rules as govern other social and cultural phenomena.¹⁸ Debates on the social construction of scientific knowledge and methodologies, and on how we discover what ‘is’, have flourished in the past two decades in particular and stimulated further probing into the status of norms and values. These epistemological debates on whether science on account of its supposedly inherent objectivity is indeed the best way to inquire into what ‘is’ or whether it is itself value laden and prescriptive have had much to contribute to a more critical understanding of the status of science in the modern world. However, the distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ (ontological) is not necessarily undermined by debates on the social construction of science (epistemology). In other words, even if values are embedded in a description, it is an additional step to arrive at a normative statement. This is an issue that has been most succinctly formulated by Hume.¹⁹

Most philosophers would agree on the importance of differentiating ontological statement (descriptions of what exists) from epistemological deliberations (normative reflections on the nature of knowledge), and descriptive from prescriptive reflections. However, the suggested conceptually strict boundaries between the latter in particular are not necessarily manifest as clearly in the empirical world. Whereas stipulations of what is supposed to count as ‘normal’ in contrast to the ‘abnormal’ can be more or less clearly delimited in scientific theories and models, what can actually be observed in the real world is much more likely to be located on a continuum. Statistical approaches to the definition of the normal and the abnormal provide a particularly good example of abnormality being defined as a matter of degree rather than an absolute entity. As is evidenced in some of the essays in this volume (Sinding, Chapter 11; Timmermann, Chapter 12), the normal/abnormal binary as a guiding theoretical model can exist side by side with ideas on the normal and the abnormal being part of a measurable spectrum.

Reflections on norms have a long history, but it is during the Enlightenment period that moral norms in particular came into sharp focus, as in the theories put forward in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on moral sense, for example.²⁰ Since then, discussion has partly focused on the question of whether norms and differentiation between what is to be considered normal and abnormal are a ‘good thing’ or problematic, constructive and vital or oppressive. The former contention has been accentuated by Durkheim and Habermas, who contend that norms (if they are built on consensus) are necessary for democratic societies, as restrictions on individuals’ possibly destructive socially harmful behaviours and inclinations need to be employed in order to guarantee social cohesion and a good life for the majority of people. Hobbes’s well-known dictum that, if left unrestricted (i.e. in its natural state), life would be full of ‘continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’ encapsulates this.²¹ Hobbes developed his reflections in the aftermath of the English Civil War, which in his view resulted in the above state. Durkheim’s theories of the necessity of social norms emerged from a highly different, late nineteenth-century political context that had seen other kinds of social unrest and revolution, but enunciated similar concerns. In the aftermath of the Islamist fundamentalists’ terror attacks of 9/11, 3/11 and 7/7 in New York, Madrid and London, discussions on the necessity of norms have gained renewed urgency, with references to the importance of restrictive laws, punitive actions and military intervention in order to guarantee ‘our way of life’ reverberating an earlier contention that ‘covenants without the sword are but words’.²²

On the other hand, there exists a body of thought that puts emphasis on the negative and oppressive aspects of social norms and focuses on the restrictive measures imposed by modern states on groups and individuals, through ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The normal and the abnormal
• 2 Invisible friends
• 3 From ‘monstrous’ to ‘abnormal’
• 4 Eccentric lives
• 5 Constructing the common type
• 6 Norms and violations
• 7 Made to measure?
• 8 ‘A masculine mythology suppressing and distorting all the facts’
• 9 Interpreting abnormal psychology in the late nineteenth century
• 10 Can kinship be designed and still be normal?
• 11 Flexible norms?
• 12 A matter of degree
• 13 Deviant roles, normal lives