Monsters—from the Id!

I saw this video on Instagram yesterday where someone advocating normalizing certain concepts that are getting a lot of flak lately. The concepts themselves aren’t important (at least not as I start this post); what matters is that it prompted me to wonder whether everything needs to be “normalized.” Or, for that matter, whether it’s even possible to normalize everything.

I’ve encountered discussions about what should or shouldn’t be “normal” my entire life. I bet we all have. Sometimes, the discussion’s about whether something that affects a lot of people outside yourself (e.g., mass shootings) should be “normalized” because normalization can lead to desensitization, and we argue about where the line should be drawn to provide for the security of our society as a whole. More often than not, though, the discussion about what should be “normalized” boils down to a question of conformity to societal norms, whether it’s about relationship types, fashion, or even the definition of “success.”

As I was thinking about how some of the comments were vitriolically against normalizing these ideas that are considered nonconformist right now, it brought to mind an essay I’ve read multiple times (starting way back in the early 1990s) called “Black as an Ideal” by Theodor Adorno. What I took from it the first time I read it has stuck with me all this time (though sometimes I wonder if I misread Adorno or I’m mixing it with Derrida), and it comes back to the questions of normalization and conformity. See, what I remember from that first reading is that Adorno, defining norms as “in” and non-norms as “out,” postulated that we can’t define “in” without knowing what “out” is. In other words[1], you can’t define what “black” is without “white,” or what “conformity” is without “nonconformity.”

I’ve seen the phenomenon described in linguistics as “marked” versus “unmarked.” The Oxford Reference sums “the concept better than I can: “Unmarked forms reflect the naturalization of dominant cultural values.” Take this back to Adorno/Derrida, and “unmarked” becomes “in,” while “marked” is out.” Anything that’s unmarked/in kind of flies under the cultural radar, while anything marked/out might as well have a giant neon arrow pointing at it. In this respect, conformity is “unmarking” oneself; people conform to societal norms to blend in, consciously or unconsciously. By contrast, nonconformity is “marking” oneself. On its surface, nonconformity seems to be a strictly conscious act, but considering how norms fluctuate, nonconformity can be an unconscious act when people move between communities.

That last point was my a-ha! moment (which is probably a duh! moment to everyone else, but nobody said I was always quick on the draw). When we’re talking about “normalizing” something, who are we normalizing it for? You might say, “We’re normalizing it for society,” but then comes the question, “What society?” At what point does normalizing—or even pushing back against normalization—reach the point where it becomes “mind your own business” instead of being something we should actively try to desensitize people to?

One final thought: Whether it was Adorno or Derrida, one other idea I came away with was that the boundary between unmarked/in and marked/out isn’t fixed, and as it shifts, some things that were “out” become “in” and vice versa (fashion is an obvious example). So, if boundaries are shifting anyway, is there even a need to push for or against normalizing something? Maybe so, maybe not, but to borrow from that same Oxford Reference site, “Social differentiation is constructed and maintained through the marking of differences. To be marked is to be ‘one of them’ rather than ‘one of us.’” Looking at it that way, is normalization an effort to create a society where “one of them” doesn’t exist because everyone is “one of us”? If so, what’s the ultimate goal—and for that matter, is the goal, whatever it is, attainable?