#normative judgment

The following long quote reminded me of Michael White (one of the founders of Narrative Therapy) and his thoughts about failure. Here’s a brief quote from his workshop notes, which can be found here:

It is possible to engage with the sense of personal failure in a way that provides for a reading of this as a refusal of modern power.

In the shadows of personal failure, other knowledges of life and practices of living can be identified and more richly appreciated.

This can provide a foundation for people to more significantly pursue identity projects that do not so completely reproduce the favoured individualities of contemporary culture.

notational:

“What kind of rewards can failure offer us? Perhaps most obviously, failure allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development with the goal of delivering us from unruly childhoods to orderly and predictable adulthoods. Failure preserves some of the wondrous anarchy of childhood and disturbs the supposedly clean boundaries between adults and children, winners and losers. And while failure certainly comes accompanied by a host of negative affects, such as disappointment, disillusionment, and despair, it also provides the opportunity to use those negative affects to poke holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary life. As Barbara Ehrenreich reminds us in Brightsided, positive thinking is a North American affliction, a ‘mass delusion’ that emerges out of a combination of American exceptionalism and a desire to believe that success happens to good people and failure is just a consequence of a bad attitude rather than structural conditions (2009: 13). Positive thinking is offered up in the U.S. as a cure for cancer, a path to untold riches, and a surefire way to engineer your own success. Indeed believing that success depends upon one’s attitude is far preferable to Americans than recognizing that their success is the outcome of the titled scales of race, class, and gender. As Ehrenreich puts it, ‘if optimism is the key to material success, and if you can achieve an optimistic outlook through the discipline of positive thinking, then there is no excuse for failure.’ But, she continues, ‘the flip side of positivity is thus a harsh insistence on personal responsibility,’ meaning that while capitalism produces some people’s success through other people’s failures, the ideology of positive thinking insists that success depends only upon working hard and failure is always of your own doing (8). We know better of course in an age when the banks that ripped off ordinary people have been deemed ‘too big to fail’ and the people who bought bad mortgages are simply too little to care about.”

Normalizing judgment is the core activity of modern operations of power. These operations of power are associated with the construction of knowledges of life and of identity that are assigned a truth status. These operations of power are generally effective in engaging people in an imperative to determine this truth, to reveal it, and to maintain faith with it in their acts of living. It is in this modern system of power that people's lives become objects of knowledge.

In his writings on the topic of diagnosis, the French philosopher and physician Georges Canguilhem makes a crucial distinction between pathology and abnormality, thus paving the way for the studies of his student Michel Foucault on the topics of psychiatric power and biopolitics. In Canguilhem’s view, decision making about normality and abnormality is generally based on two factors. One starts from the observation that there is variability in the ways human beings function: individuals present with a variety of behaviours just as their mental life is characterized by a variety of beliefs and experiences, of which some are more prevalent than others. Then, a judgment is made about (ab-)normality; this tends to be based on a norm or standard against which all behaviours are evaluated and considered as deviant or not.