normalization: remedial gym class, eye patches

I’m letting ideas swirl around a bit. Some of my motivation for investigating normality and normalization is autobiographical.

I wrote in a blog post once that I had been in “remedial gym” in elementary school. This is not what the school called it; in fact, I don’t know if they had a name for it. This happened in first grade, so my memory of it is not all that reliable. Some parts of it are crystalline.

Evidently, I was so awkward and inept physically that it was noticeable in gym class. I couldn’t catch a ball thrown or bounced to me, or throw or bounce a ball to someone a given distance away.

I don’t remember the precise circumstances, but I was sorted into a special gym class, of something like six kids. The one classmate I remember was an unfortunate soul who lived down the street from me, David Swisher. He was chubby, hyperactive, a fairly ineffective aspiring bully, and unsuccessful academically later on. He was called, of course, Swishy or Swish.

I had homework for remedial gym class.  So I could practice, my parents had to buy one of those hideous raspberry-Koolaid-vomit pink rubber inflatable balls with the scuffy texture—you know the thing, it was the “gym ball” because it wasn’t any particular kind of ball. I spent time in the hallway between our front door and the kitchen, bouncing this stupid ball back and forth to my mom. I think I wasn’t very good.

Now, this was strange, because I was physically very active, especially outdoors with my neighbors and best friends, Ryan and Trever Sink. It was hard to get us inside for the night. We spent every available daylight hour in good weather riding Big Wheels, bikes, or our old undersized trikes. We used the tricycles—solid steel and iron monsters—to play “Smash-Up Derby,” which involved riding them as fast as we could and running directly into each other as violently as possible. In the snow, we tromped around trying to see how far we could walk between yards, over fences that were nearly covered. I seemed reasonably coordinated for these activities.

It finally occurred to someone that I couldn’t catch, throw, or bounce a ball accurately because I couldn’t see it. On came the glasses. I still had trouble when the ball was to my left. It turned out I had a lazy eye. On came the eye patch, which was prescribed back then to try to train lazy eyes to work (I gather this has been abandoned since).

These were efforts to normalize my body and my movements. It didn’t matter that I was able, spontaneously, freely, and gracefully to crash tricycles together, to dig out of collapsed snow banks while suffering only minor frostbite, or to variously run, ride, leap, and so on. I did not perform to standard in the throw-catch-bounce test. Normalizing this performance began with identifying it as abnormal, separating my body from a mass where it could have remained relatively anonymous, placing me in a special location and prescribing special treatments. It reformulated my spontaneous, free, graceful embodiment as uncoordinated, incapable, and in need of correction.

Of course, a six year old with glasses and an eye patch (stuck onto the lens) is subjected to merciless hazing by other six year olds. This reinforced my body’s difference, the judgment that I am in fact uncoordinated and incapable, or in a word, defective. The failure of the eye patch to correct my lazy eye (lazy to this day) was my failure to achieve normalization, so along with my glasses becoming thicker every year, I remained defective, and it was my failure.

Now, imagine if my case had been really serious.

pain, perversion, desire, normal and abnormal

This morning, upon waking, I was thinking about situations in which pain is desired. The erotic relation to pain is exhibited and practiced in athletics, S&M, and by some guitarists who play until their fingertips bleed. In sports and among guitarists, there is a macho response, “playing through the pain,” that is interesting to consider as a cover story for the intense and very kinky, unacknowledged, or at least unnamable desire for pain. Psychoanalytically, this may be quite fascinating. In terms of neuro-evolution, this may be quite boring (our lizard brains incite us to replay melodramas of fear and threat for the sake of running through the motions of fight or flight—hence also horror movies and running for President). What I am interested in is what it tells us about normal and abnormal conscious embodiment.

Is it “normal” to desire pain? This is not the exact question, but could be a place to begin. Note first of all that to a large extent the discourse of modern scientific medicine defines pain in terms of an “abnormal” condition, both relatively and absolutely. In this discourse, pain is also treated as an aversive affect, which obviously makes desire for pain incomprehensible except as pathology.

Athletes desire to “feel the burn” from exertion. I do not see any reason to assume that this is because they take the pain as informing them of their success in extending their bodies’ strength or endurance, rather than because they desire and enjoy the pain itself. But I don’t want to get caught up in their motivations, so much as to understand as far as possible what they experience as pain and as desire, and how this experience fits into their overall sense of consciousness and embodiment as “normal.”

This is a relative-normal, a normal state of things for some individual embodied consciousness, rather than an absolute-normal, if there even is such a thing. In other words, the “normal” embodied consciousness of some athlete who desires to “feel the burn” is not here determined in relation to a statistical population, but only self-reflexively for that person. Even someone who has an “abnormal” desire for pain still experiences some pain as part of the normal course of erotic desire and some as abnormal—good and bad pains. (For many this may be based on what hurts versus what injures, but not all pain-perverts* are averse to injury.)

So we cannot say that pain is in itself aversive, or that it is in itself an abnormal state of embodied consciousness, either in a descriptive or in a normative sense. Perhaps this means that we cannot generate a list of universal, common characteristics of normal or abnormal embodied consciousness. There is no set of specific objectively describable conditions of embodied consciousness that is a set of “normal” conditions.

I’m using “objectively describable conditions” to mean what can be objectified through expression, indirectly shared through description or narrative, as opposed to “subjective” conditions that would have to do with the structures of consciousness and embodiment themselves. What I am trying to mark out here is what I think goes very wrong in so many analyses of pain, even those that call themselves phenomenological.

Elaine Scarry suggested long ago that pain is unshareable because it is absolutely subjective. That’s an overstated claim, but the truth in it is this: pain, and indeed any state or experience of embodied consciousness, entails a subjective dimension, what I called the structures of consciousness and embodiment, that are not “shared” by way of expression among us, not made “public,” but are nonetheless the common and universal structures of consciousness and embodiment. When pain is analyzed in terms of what is normal or abnormal, so often this leads to claims about what is normal and abnormal for embodied persons, not for embodied consciousness. Embodied consciousness of those of us who desire pain still has normal experience, including normal experience of pain.

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* I mean "pervert" in a kind and kindred way, of course.

normal, abnormal, and problems

From the standpoint of persons who regard themselves as normally sexed, their environment has a perceivedly normal sex composition. This composition is rigorously dichotomized into the ‘natural,’ i.e., moral, entities of male and female. 

For such members perceived environments of sexed persons are populated with natural males, natural females, and persons who stand in moral contrast with them, i.e., incompetent, criminal, sick, and sinful. 

The members of the normal population, for him the bona fide members of that population, are essentially, originally, in the first place, always have been, and always will be, once and for all, in the final analysis, either 'male’ or ‘female.’

      -- Harold Garfinkel, "Passing," in The Transgender Studies Reader, pp. 59, 62, 62

This illustrates starkly why normality matters. I assume that, 53 years after Garfinkel published “Passing,” a sizable minority of the population of the US understands that the characteristics of sexed bodies range along spectra of both genotypic and phenotypic traits, as well as that sexual behavior is wide-ranging. This seems pertinent to a slight shift in attitudes toward sexual variation and what I am sorry to have to call tolerance toward abnormalities. (Easy, I suppose, for the polymorphously perverse to say.) The assumption of sex binarism remains powerfully normative.

So when Husserl analyzes the “normality” of the prevailing surrounding world, as the background horizon of all our everyday activity, it’s hard to avoid reading that word in the same sense as Garfinkel’s usage—which I think is basically also Foucault’s, and Sara Ahmed’s. Foucault’s work on power/knowledge, particularly The History of Sexuality, is usually interpreted as a critique of institutional normalization as a process of the production of regimented bodies. Ahmed, in Queer Phenomenology, develops a quasi-phenomenological critique of the phenomenology of orientation and normality. Looking back from this standpoint on Husserl’s presumably phenomenological account of normality, I see a very strange equivocation, or possibly an ambiguity.

Normality can be analyzed on three levels, to start. In my language for these, purely subjective normality is the level of my own perceptual/embodied being in the world. It would entail all that is unique to my own perspective, being six feet tall, of very acute hearing in the left and some deafness in the right ear, of very myopic but focused vision in the right and less myopic but poorly focused vision in the left eye, etc. For me, my aural, visual, etc. perception is normal as per these peculiarities. What is abnormal for me is distortion in the perceptual field, for instance when I first put on new glasses, or when there’s water in my ears from swimming. As I adjust to the new glasses, the anomalous motivates a reconstitution of the normal, that is, a new normal, which then prevails, becomes sedimented as “just how it is for me,” and disappears into the horizon.
Intersubjective normality pertains to the everyday world shared with others. For Husserl (in contrast, I think, ultimately, with Heidegger), the intersubjectively normal surrounding world involves actively as well as passively shared meanings, events, constructions, etc. Communication and community are whereby there comes to be a real world, an objective world for us, and it is in reference to this real world that intersubjective normality has its crucial significance. This is one level at which the idea becomes important that the real world is corrective.

Were I to exist solus ipse, my purely subjective normal perceptual life would obtain, always and everywhere—given the caveat that distortions, error, etc., serve as self-correctives, in reference only to purely subjective further intendings. But, obviously, others’ perceptual lives and their actions matter to me and are part of my own experience. Intersubjective normality is there for me because others are. Were I to perceive and act as if trees were murderous, or as if human beings should wiggle on the ground to get around rather than ambulate, it would matter for others that I did so, and it would matter for me that others did not. My abnormal perception and action would appear as abnormal for me and for others. How?

If we stop right here, we have the problem of normality and abnormality: for us, intersubjectively, the presence of abnormality produces a mini-crisis of meaning and the presumptive unity of the world. We are motivated by the real-world assumption to wonder and problematize the abnormal, and to seek some correction, as Husserl says. Now, Husserl resolves this problem, in all I’ve read on the matter, too quickly, in turning to what I consider a third level of normality. To me, the problem of normality and abnormality is most acutely present at this intersubjective level. A person directly in front of you, terrified that the tree is going to kill him, or you, matters right now for you and for that person. You are motivated to correct and to restore the presumptive unity of the real world, because it matters whether this person is right about the trees, and because it matters that this person in front of you has this belief, because this person’s conduct takes place in the same world. (Isn’t that how it is that “crazy people” are terrifying? They induce crises, that we must resolve, by some alteration of our concept of the world, or at the very least in our own conduct—avoiding them, helping them, realizing they are right, etc. For those moments, the real world, the horizonal context of all our everyday activities, is shaken, if only just a little.)

One way to resolve the problem of normality and abnormality is in reference to a standing tradition, or culture, and this is what Husserl does. l want to call this sedimented normality to refer to its being in the ground of so much of the real world as such, and also to allude to the use of the term sedimented in phenomenology as the institution of passively accrued meaning, via actively lived experience. This also helps articulate why I think Husserl jumps the gun: if the intersubjective problem of normality is active, present, here and now, his resolution by reference to sedimented normality reverts to a passively accrued “there is.” Adjudicating the problem of normality through sedimented normality really just ignores the problem. Maybe Husserl is right about this, when he says about understanding the foreign, that because he is raised European, German, and as a small-city resident, the foreign person’s lifeworld will only be understandable in analogy to his own. That is to say, the sedimented normality of the presumptively real European, German, small-city world obtains, because it is there.

In some ways, and to some extent, Husserl does have to be right about this. I can not undo my being raised as I was. But it does not help explain how that way of life, and that tradition, became. The sedimentation of tradition is going on, incrementally, in those minute intersubjective dealings, it seems to me.

And, obviously, traditions are revised with each generation. Normality shifts, slowly, or there is a more significant crisis, and tradition loses its traditional status as it becomes an object of deliberation, critique, understanding, revision. There is a moment in Husserl’s analysis for this critique, and he acknowledges this even though he does nothing much with it. That’s when the equivocation or ambiguity of normality matters. In that intersubjective, problematic moment, we are confronted by the fact that normality is constituted, and re-constituted, and open-ended.

perfectly normal

Without meaning to, I've ended up thinking through some of my questions about normal and abnormal lately. Because I read Beauvoir's The Second Sex on a bit of a whim, and then plunged into Baudrillard's Seduction, the question has been refracted by the concept of "the feminine." Strangely, Beauvoir and Baudrillard use it similarly.

I say "strangely," because Seduction is the Baudrillard book a lot of feminist philosophers love to hate. He seems to adhere to as essentialist notion of the feminine, and that involves feminine guile and weakness, both of which are characteristics Beauvoir criticizes in the patriarchal concept of the feminine. For what it's worth, I think Baudrillard's position is not an unreconstructed patriarchal concept at all, since the feminine is for him the origin of seduction, and seduction is a game outside of the regulatory law of desire and sex. Baudrillard's feminine isn't Freud's, and in that regard isn't the "second sex" (after all, it's outside of any relation that can be reduced to sex).

That aside, for Baudrillard as for Beauvoir, the feminine is not the normal, because normal is defined in terms of the masculine from which the feminine is said to depart, in discourses pertaining to sexuality. Whether the feminine is a socially constructed abnormal that appears as part of the situation of woman, or is outside of the normal because it is beyond the economy of sexuality and desire, there is still a presumed normal against which the feminine is being contrasted.

Which leads me to the terrific old essay by Iris Marion Young, "Throwing Like a Girl." Notable in Young's critical phenomenology of motility and transcendence (and of [male] phenomenologists' accounts of motility and transcendence) is the repeated negations. For Young, girlish motility is not fully transcendent, does not achieve a complete unity with the world, is not fully melodic, does not exhibit full range of motion, etc. Again, this is in relation to the presumptive/masculine (here boyish) norm. That's her point, of course, and the essay ends with a call for phenomenological accounts starting from the standpoint  of female embodiment, presumably without so many "nots."

This has me wondering about an essay titled "____-ing Like a Boy." What would fill in the blank, such that, as in Young's title, it indicated an objectifying or objectified embodiment, especially a privatively transcendent embodiment? What do boys do in ways that mark them as boys in the way that "____-ing like a girl" marks certain people as girls?