Normality : A Critical Genealogy

447 Pages·2017·1.778 MB·English

by  Peter Cryle , Elizabeth Stephens

Normality

Normality:
A Critical Genealogy
P E T E R C R Y L E
A N D E L I Z A B E T H S T E P H E N S
The University of Chicago Press
chicago and london
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2017 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief
quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the
University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.
Published 2017
Printed in the United States of America
26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 1 2 3 4 5
isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 48386- 3 (cloth)
isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 48405-1 (paper)
isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 48419- 8 (e- book)
doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226484198.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Cryle, P. M. (Peter Maxwell), 1946– author. | Stephens, Elizabeth,
1969– author.
Title: Normality : a critical genealogy / Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens.
Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifi ers: lccn 2016051200 | isbn 9780226483863 (cloth : alk. paper) |
isbn 9780226484051 (pbk. : alk. paper) | isbn 9780226484198 (e- book)
Subjects: lcsh: Norm (Philosophy)— History. | Social sciences—E urope,
Western— History— 20th century. | Social sciences— Europe, Western—
History—1 9th century. | Social sciences— United States— History—
20th century. | Social sciences— United States— History— 19th century. |
Medicine— France— History— 19th century.
Classifi cation: lcc b105.n65 c79 2017 | ddc 302/.1— dc23
lc record available at https:// lccn .loc .gov/ 2016051200
This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48- 1992
(Permanence of Paper).
Contents
1
Introduction •
i the normal in nineteenth- century
scientific thought
1
The “Normal State” in French Anatomical and Physiological
1 1
Discourse of the 820s and 830s 23
1
2 “Counting” in the French Medical Academy during the 830s 63
3 Rethinking Medical Statistics: Distribution, Deviation, and
1 1 1
Type, 840– 880 00
4 Measuring Bodies and Identifying Racial Types: Physical
1 1 1
Anthropology, c. 860– 880 42
5 The Dangerous Person as a Type: Criminal Anthropology,
1 1 1
c. 880– 900 80
6 Anthropometrics and the Normal in Francis Galton’s
1 1 1 1
Anthropological, Statistical, and Eugenic Research, c. 870– 9 0 2 2
ii the dissemination of the normal in
twentieth- century culture
7 Sex and the Normal Person: Sexology, Psychoanalysis,
1 1 1
and Sexual Hygiene Literature, 870– 930 26
8 The Object of Normality: Composite Statues of the Statistically
1 1
Average American Man and Woman, 890– 945 294
9 Sex and Statistics: The End of Normality 333
Conclusion • 353
1
Acknowledgments • 36
Notes • 363
Bibliography • 407
Index • 433

Introduction
The idea of the “normal” is now so familiar that it is hard to imagine con-
temporary life without it, and at the same time it is so thoroughly ingrained
in our thinking that we have diffi culty paying analytical attention to it. In
everyday speech, it is the most commonly used term for the common, the
ordinary, the usual, the standard, the conventional, the regular. It occupies
a broad expanse of the cultural middle as a set of functionally equivalent
ways of everyday thinking. Although the idea of the normal is now so cul-
turally pervasive as to seem ubiquitous, its meaning is nonetheless vague,
and diffi cult to defi ne: “If it is hard to deny something called normality
exists,” Robert McRuer aptly observes, “it is even harder to pinpoint what
that is.”1 In part, this is because there is a slippage in the idea itself. The
word “normal” often suggests something more than simply conformity to a
standard or type: it also implies what is correct or good, something so per-
fect in its exemplarity that it constitutes an ideal. The meaning of the nor-
mal encompasses both the norm, understood as a descriptive (or positive)
fact, and normativity, understood as the affi rmation of cultural values: “the
normal is the effect obtained by the execution of the normative project, it
is the norm exhibited in the fact,” asserts George Canguilhem.2 As a result,
“The concept of the normal is itself normative.”3 One of the remarkable
features of contemporary views of the normal is that the middle point in a
range of qualities and characters should ever have come to be invested with
such great value. After all, middling qualities might on the face of things
have been considered mediocre or nondescript, as they indeed have been
and continue to be in certain cultural contexts. However, this privileging of
2 introduction
middleness might also be seen as an important source of the power of the
normal, facilitating its conceptual slide from the descriptive to the prescrip-
tive, from norms to normativity. As Ian Hacking perceptively observes in
his infl uential essay on the normal state: the normal “uses a power as old
as Aristotle to bridge the fact/value distinction, whispering in your ear that
what is normal is also right.”4 This is the dull charm of the word and the key
source of its unspectacular strength.
While the word “normal” may sound innocuous, even bland—s erving as
it does as a synonym for the ordinary and unremarkable— this unassuming
word can have a signifi cant effect on the lives of those defi ned in contrast
to it as abnormal, pathological, or deviant. To identify a norm is to impose
a rule, writes Canguilhem. To normalize is “to impose a requirement on an
existence.”5 The effects of such impositions and normalizing practices on
those identifi ed as outside the normal have been the subject of much recent
scholarship, especially in queer and gender studies, as well as critical dis-
ability and race studies. Much of this work has cast new light on specifi c
instances in which, following Hacking, “the benign and sterile- sounding
word ‘normal’ has become one of the most powerful ideological tools of
the twentieth century.”6 The majority of such work hence focuses on prac-
tices of normativity and normalization, on the compulsory imposition of
the normal, drawing attention to the way these serve to reinforce existing
cultural systems of privilege and power. This book seeks both to contribute
to such work and to depart from it. It focuses specifi cally on the normal it-
self, aiming thereby to bring greater historical precision to our understand-
ing of the term and its cognates. In so doing, it attempts in the fi rst instance
to understand better the persistent but elusive infl uence of the normal by
recovering the conditions of its historical emergence. By bringing its non-
descript qualities into a sharper focus, we expect to be able to show clearly
the specifi c conditions in which it emerged, and the cultural and intellectual
practices that have allowed it to fl ourish.
As the title of our book indicates, this study was born out of impatience
and yet produced by dint of persistent labor. We were worn out by the
ubiquity of the normal, alienated by its casual self- assurance, sidelined by
the manner in which it took its comfortable place in the middle of our lives.
But—t hat last sentence apart—t his book is not a diatribe against normality.
It is rather a careful genealogy of the concept, a critical history that begins
by examining just how, in the early nineteenth century, people fi rst came to
use the word “normal,” and how it came over the course of the twentieth
century to acquire its current cultural authority. We have found no golden
introduction 3
age of normality, not even a steady rise to prominence, but rather a series
of hard- fought intellectual contests with equivocal outcomes. In this book
we tell the nineteenth- century scientifi c contests from all sides, and telling
it that way has itself been an exercise in patience. Yet it is precisely because
this is a history of contest and contradiction that we have been able to give
space to critical thinking while continuing to build our genealogy. For all
its invasiveness, normality has never been simply triumphant. The fi rst part
of our book is in fact an analysis of the controversies that attended and
constrained the concept of the normal throughout the nineteenth century.
In the second part, which focuses on the twentieth century, we show how
the notion of normality entered into general usage, eventually becoming so
widespread that it could function as a working equivalent of “widespread,”
a commonsense term for commonsensical. Our central thesis, which we of-
fer as a genealogical summary with critical import, is that the concept of the
normal as we know it today dates from no earlier than the mid- twentieth
century. It is in no sense historically ubiquitous, and does not deserve to be
considered a timeless idea. The intellectual and cultural history that made
the normal what it is today is in fact encumbered with enduring questions
and unresolved issues. Our wager is that those questions, if brought to light
in the way we are seeking to do here, will help to understand the perpet-
uation of its cultural power in ways that will allow us to undermine its
authority.
Although the current ubiquity of the normal can make its signifi cance
seem assured and timeless, in fact the history of the notion is surprisingly
short. For most of the nineteenth century, the word “normal” was used
almost exclusively in scientifi c contexts. Its etymological antecedents can
be traced back to the mid- eighteenth century, when it fi rst appeared in
geo metry, being used as a less common synonym for a perpendicular line.
However, we will show that the term was fi rst used in its modern sense in
1
France in comparative anatomy, around 820. A literally vital matter was
the question of whether quantitative thinking, particularly statistical calcu-
lations, could be applied to the fi eld of medicine. French medical thinkers
continued to affi rm in their great majority that statistics involving the calcu-
lation of averages and probabilities did not deserve a place in clinical prac-
tice. There were no average patients, no reliable means of calculating the
probability of recovery from sickness, and no standard illnesses. The threat
posed by statistical method, as they saw it, was a double one: quanti fi cation
left no room for the doctor’s fi nesse, and the standardization it entailed
denied patients their distinctiveness. While it might sometimes be a ffi rmed,