4

The Concept of Normality

‘Normal’

Constant and wide usage of the catchphrase ‘new normal’ has a bearing on the idea of normality—on received connotations of the term ‘normal’—even if that idea is undefined and rarely considered explicitly. In the ‘new normal’, the implicit idea of normality rests on the cusp of contradiction, which is a productive circumstance for a catchphrase and may well be responsible for its memorable quality and convenient adaptability. On the one hand, within the catchphrase, the ‘normal’ is associated with whatever seems to be a dominant arrangement or perception at a given juncture. There is a relativized presentism there: that was ‘normal’ then, this is ‘normal’ now. On the other hand, the ‘normal’ in the catchphrase suggests its continuous cancellation: the ‘normal’ is done with, this is the ‘new normal’. In the latter sense, the ‘normal’ is not relativized but fixed and relegated at the same time, put firmly in the past. Between relativization and fixity, the term ‘normal’ in the catchphrase seems to pull awkwardly in different directions. None of its received connotations are lost but all seem somewhat displaced. Every enunciation of the ‘new normal’ places a question mark by the idea of the ‘normal’ and tacitly puts its received meanings in doubt. As it happens, the connotations of ‘normal’ are extraordinarily rich and multifarious. The usage of ‘normal’ was first grounded firmly in various areas of rigorous knowledge formation, specialist and academic, and then dispersed across popular and everyday language usage. Thus, when the catchphrase casts an interrogative pall over ‘normal’, however thoughtlessly, a whole structure of knowledge and ordinary communication is put under pressure. Arguably, thereby a significant shift in general human understanding takes place, most likely in keeping with the ruling interests and purposes of our times.

Ultimately, to understand the effect of the catchphrase ‘new normal’ it is necessary to come to grips with the term ‘normal’. This chapter is devoted to doing so.

The term ‘normal’ has an unusual career, with shifting and accruing connotations; it is the site of wide-ranging debates. As just observed, its nuances developed within specialist domains (particularly biological and health sciences and statistics), primarily in the nineteenth century, before gradually becoming embedded in everyday communication in the course of the twentieth century. The term’s career is therefore relatively short, and its scientific origins render the variable nuances and dispersals substantially traceable in texts. The scientific origins also make it a useful anchor for tracking knowledge development across several disciplines. Further, its gradual percolation into ordinary-language contexts throws light on the relationship between specialist and general knowledge, or between rigorous methods and customary practices. In short, the term ‘normal’ brings modern knowledge construction and social organization together. As such, the career of the term has been the subject of influential histories of ideas, especially from Georges Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological (1989 [first published in 1966]) to Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens’s Normality: A Critical Genealogy (2017). Where, from Canguilhem onwards, such histories have usually addressed the concept of normality, Cryle and Stephens were also particularly attentive to the specific nuances of the term ‘normal’. In their words:

Certain terms, we will suppose, become by their emergence markers of conceptual change. As might be expected then, our history of normality will pay close attention to shifting uses of the word ‘normal’, making the assumption that the thing we now know as normality has been molded by discursive usage. (25)

Such an assumption obviously underpins my tracking of the catchphrase ‘new normal’ in the previous chapters. Cryle and Stephens’s book was the most careful and comprehensive tracing of the intellectual contexts of the term available when I embarked on the present study. My understanding of the ‘normal’ and approach to the ‘new normal’ lean quite heavily on it, and could be regarded as complementing it: that is, starting where it ended, and drawing upon and away from precepts it examined. Cryle and Stevens had, in fact, just about touched on the catchphrase ‘new normal’ right at the end of their book: ‘Current usage of the phrase “the new normal” provides one testimony to the contemporary endurance of the term [“normal”] in popular culture, despite half a century of skepticism and critique’ (358). A later article by the one of the co-authors, Stevens (2020), reflecting on the currency of phrases like ‘return to normal’ and ‘new normal’ in the Covid-19 context, lamented that the term ‘normal’ had received too little considered attention of late. This chapter moves in that direction, but not in the way Cryle and/or Stephens might have done. I do not foreground continuing scepticism and critique of the term ‘normal’ but the distinctive rationale of the catchphrase ‘new normal’. For this, naturally, the other histories of normality are also immensely helpful, and Canguilhem’s and Michel Foucault’s formulations in particular are of critical interest for my argument.

Tracking the history of the term ‘normal’ has involved working through specialist domains and texts as it gradually gained a popular purchase. There’s a direction there, from well-defined and considered usage to loosely described and habitual usage, or from scientific knowledge to everyday common sense. Such tracking has mainly focused intensively on the specialist manoeuvres, in relation to which the term’s gradual dispersal into popular and everyday usage is more or less impressionistically apprehended. The everyday usage is accounted, then, as a withdrawal from scientific rationality, accepting fuzziness where clarity used to be sought. A catchphrase like the ‘new normal’, as the previous chapters argue, was born within and amidst popular and everyday communication: in political address, public advocacy, news reportage, advertisement, popular writing and performance, and the like. The catchphrase has occasionally appeared in academic texts, and indeed many of the references in the previous chapters are of scholarly papers using the phrase. Even there though, it is usually used deliberately as a catchphrase. That might be the reason why the nuances of the term ‘normal’ seem not to have particularly helped in pegging the ‘new normal’. There isn’t a continuous line from the usage of ‘normal’ to that of ‘new normal’ to be drawn. The line wobbles and slips away. But, with some reconsideration, it can be drawn reasonably firmly. Doing so calls, unusually, for an approach to the term ‘normal’ against the thrust of the usual historicist approach: with the rationale of popular and everyday usage squarely foregrounded, and its scientific and statistical career deliberately defocused.

The various scientific connotations of ‘normal’ that were tracked by Cryle and Stevens (2017) may be summarized as follows. The usage of ‘normal’ has developed largely, but not exclusively, either in contradistinction from certain terms—such as, ‘anomalous’, ‘abnormal’, ‘pathological’, ‘deviant’, ‘monstrous’, ‘minority’, ‘skewed’, ‘unstable’, ‘disabled’—or in consonance with certain terms—such as, ‘standard’, ‘healthy’, ‘average’, ‘natural’, ‘common’, ‘ordinary’, ‘ideal’, ‘usual’, ‘regular’, ‘dominant’, ‘stable’. In some, but not all instances a specific contradistinctive term also suggests a consonant term: for example, where ‘normal’ is contradistinctive from ‘pathological’, ‘normal’ is also consonant with ‘healthy’. In some instances, a contradistinctive term may suggest several consonant terms and vice versa. It is evident that the contradistinctive terms named here are not synonymous with each other and nor is that the case for the named consonant terms. In fact, a consonant term like ‘ideal’ may well be regarded as the antonym of another consonant term like ‘ordinary’. Though the term ‘normal’ and its contradistinctive term ‘abnormal’ appear to be adjectival forms of the noun ‘norm’, they do not have a necessarily antonymous relationship in usage. That is to say, ‘abnormal’ is not necessarily the dominant contradistinctive term. ‘Normal’ may also be used as a noun in some contexts.

In specialist usage, ‘normal’ is given a definitive (i.e. direct and explicit) relationship with one (usually, or a limited number of) specific contradistinctive and/or consonant terms. The precise definition of the relationship depends upon the context of usage, that is, for which area of knowledge or academic discipline and with what purpose. Thus, for making anatomical and physiological classifications, marking degrees/distinctions of pathology, identifying law/rule-abiding phenomena, describing populations and groups, gauging incidence or frequency, setting standards of sexual/moral behaviour, etc. there are respectively specific and separate contradistinctive and/or consonant terms to define ‘normal’. These definitions then enable classification, measurement, prediction, standardization, modelling, and engineering to proceed accordingly. In the main, studies of the career of the term ‘normal’ from Canguilhem to Cryle and Stevens elaborate this process of defining. They pay close attention to pioneering and seminal disciplinary texts with clearly articulated purposes (descriptive, remedial, or standard/rule-setting) at particular historical junctures. The result of such a historicist approach to ‘normal’ across disciplines is a broad account of rational knowledge development. One of the findings of such accounts is that well-defined usages of ‘normal’ seem to speak to each other across disciplines and areas, and cohere or diverge to convey a broad history of ideas (or science or social progress). The term ‘normal’ becomes a site for negotiating diverse rationales and purposes within the sphere of specialist discourse. That is analogous to the catchphrase ‘new normal’ being presented as a site for negotiating diverse rationales and areas within the sphere of everyday and popular discourse in the previous chapters.

The historicist accounts of the scientific ‘normal’ reach towards the inevitable encounter with the everyday and popular usage of ‘normal’. Though usually such accounts then offer impressionistic and inconclusive observations on the latter, much of value for this study is found there. From such observations some general principles underpinning the everyday and popular usage of ‘normal’ can be discerned, which are useful for considering the term ‘normal’ in the catchphrase ‘new normal’. I turn now to such general principles for ordinary and popular usage, before moving to their bearing upon the catchphrase.

For Cryle and Stevens (2020), an important moment in the term’s drift from scientific towards popular usage occurred when it began to be used as if its meaning was known already and did not need definition, that is, when it began to be taken for granted. They associated this juncture particularly with the work of criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso and the Italian school of anthropometry. By this argument, such undefined usage helped the popular appeal of Lombroso’s texts though he was not particularly courting popularity:

It would be misleading to see Lombroso and his colleagues as mere vulgarizers. They did not just build fame by simplifying and popularizing physical anthropology, or even by extending its reach while maintaining its methods. They shared certain premises with the anthropologists associated with the Parisian Société that had built physical anthropology as an influential discipline but made sense of those premises in different ways. While the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris had been preoccupied with the study of race as hereditary normality, the Italian scuola positiva tended to take the concept of normality for granted. Whether or not that was done purposely, the fact of taking the normal for granted is itself worthy of a place in our history because that became standard practice in the twentieth century. It may well be, in fact, that the normal continues to be most comfortably influential precisely insofar as it remains unanalyzed. (180)

Cryle and Stevens teased out some of the specific nuances of ‘normal’ in Lombroso’s work, especially in his attempts to clarify the term by illustration rather than by definition. Irrespective of these details, the significance they saw in taking ‘normal’ for granted—without definition—is a generalizable matter. Where, as already noted, rigorous scientific usage gives ‘normal’ a definitive relationship with one or a few contradistinctive and/or consonant terms according to purpose, taking it for granted involves not doing so. For Lombroso’s methodologically less rigorous texts, taking ‘normal’ for granted meant leaving it to readers to infer what the relevant contradistinctive and/or consonant terms should be according to disciplinary preconceptions. In more ‘simplifying and popularizing’ or ‘vulgarizing’ texts, the disciplinary address would be watered down further. Then users would employ and receive the term ‘normal’ not according to shared academic preconceptions and purposes, but according to experience and cognitive factors that govern everyday communication. That is to say, if undefined, the term ‘normal’ would be used as if it were an aggregate of all the contradistinctive and consonant terms it has become associated with through specialist usages, and depend upon the user’s experience and cognitive context to indicate which of those serve best to make immediate sense, or which of those seem most relevant. This fluid and more or less unthinking process of relevance-determination from a range of possible contradistinctive and consonant terms is obviously different from foregrounding definitive contradistinctive and consonant terms. To summarize, for everyday and popular usage, the term ‘normal’ comes with a diversity of received connotations and associations of which users may be more or less aware. When the term is used without definition in a statement, from the known connotations and associations users tacitly imply or pick those which seem most immediately relevant and serve to make the best sense of the statement. This is not a considered process. As is characteristic of relevance-determination in all everyday communication, the process is largely habitual and unconsidered. Arguably, using terms thus enable them to circulate more fluidly and adaptably than using terms in rigorously defined ways.

It seems likely that the term ‘normal’ has been particularly amenable to popular and everyday usage because of its prior passages through specialist usage. Specialist definitions and associations preceded everyday relevance in this instance, and seemed to accrue in the term as it passed into everyday and popular usage. Even if those definitions and associations were not clearly processed in everyday usage, they played tacitly in the rich adaptability of the term. Possibly, the ground for this amenability for everyday and popular usage developed through phases of specialist usage. In Cryle and Stevens’s account, before Lombroso’s undefined usage, ‘normal’ was occasionally used interchangeably with several consonant terms and against several contradistinctive terms even in scientific tracts, and not always consistently. After Lombroso and the Italian criminal anthropologists, the earlier split between biomedical usage and statistical usage of ‘normal’ gave way to several conflations. The two thrusts were sometimes laboriously united, from anthropometrician Francis Galton’s effective reinvention of the term to sexologist Alfred Kinsey’s putting the term into an interrogative and sceptical perspective. Various earlier distinctions in normality, Cryle and Stevens noted, were conflated in studies of human sexuality to conceive a ‘whole person’ (264), markedly in Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s and Sigmund Freud’s different mappings of psychological types. A kind of cultural ‘normal’ individual, balancing the physiological and psychological concepts, was thereby invented. Then normality came to be promoted as a matter of self-management, as if the term had passed out of scientific hands and been given to everyday and popular possession. Further such moves in specialist usage were analysed by Cryle and Stevens. In each move, the term ‘normal’ extended its flexible and fuzzy everyday and popular possibilities by drawing upon and concurrently away from scientific usage.

Conceived thus, ‘normal’ seems to have a fairly clear direction from well-defined towards undefined usage, and accordingly from scientific and specialist towards popular and everyday usage. Of course, through much of the term’s career both kinds of usage overlapped, and still do. In fact, perhaps the sweep of that direction has been overstated. In some respects, specialist usage made concessions to its own limitations while conceptualizing the ‘normal’, so that the term’s everyday potential was already prefigured within the specialist context. That is to say: even rigorous scientific definition has been corollary to or at least dependent upon rule-of-thumb descriptions and non-specialist determinations in ways that already tended to place the term ‘normal’ awkwardly in scientific domains and within the reach of everyday domains.

For the practice of medicine, in particular, a degree of subjectivity or rule-of-thumb estimation in understanding what is ‘normal’ has been unavoidable. In this regard, Canguilhem’s (1989) distinction, made in his earlier reflections in 1943, between a patient’s and a physician’s view of ‘normal’ health, are worth recalling:

In the final analysis it is the patients who most often decide – and from very different points of view – whether they are no longer normal or whether they have returned to normality. For a man whose future is almost always imagined starting from past experience, becoming normal again means taking up an interrupted activity or at least an activity deemed equivalent by individual tastes or the social values of the milieu. Even if this activity is reduced, even if the possible behaviors are less varied, less supple than before, the individual is not always so particular as all that. The important thing is to be raised from an abyss of impotence or suffering where the sick man almost died; the essential thing is to have had a narrow escape. (119)

From the patient’s point of view, then, feeling healthy is relative to the experience of illness and the ‘normal’ is a gauging of subsequent relative experiences. For the physician, however, the considerations are objectively grounded:

What interests physicians is diagnosis and cure. In principle, curing means restoring a function or an organism to the norm from which it has deviated. The physician usually takes the norm from his knowledge of physiology – called the science of the normal man – from his actual experience of organic functions, and from the common representation of the norm in a social milieu at a given moment. (122)

Nevertheless, the physician’s efforts are initiated by the patient’s sense of not feeling ‘normal’, and those efforts do not end till the patient admits some sense of feeling ‘normal’, even if relative to the interim suffering. In that sense, illness and normality are first and last grounded in the patient’s condition and experience of that condition. A refined reiteration of this argument is found in Elisabeth Lloyd’s (2008) interrogation of medical claims based on the Human Genome Project (HGP). The HGP brought what Canguilhem had dubbed the physician’s ‘science of the normal man’ to a high pitch of fine-grained description: a molecular description of a complete ‘normal’ human individual. With such a fine-grained template at hand, it was claimed that diseases can be classified, analysed, and treated at the molecular level, and possibly alleviated for good. While admitting that HGP is a step change in medical science, Lloyd raised several objections to such claims. She cited evidence showing that what might seem abnormal compared to the normal at a molecular level may not be manifested as a disease at the level of the physiological functions of the organism. Further, much that is categorized as pathological is dependent on social attitudes: for example, at times homosexuality has been considered abnormal and is now accepted as normal. Moreover, in terms of populations, how disease is manifested and understood cannot necessarily be inferred from having a ‘normal’ model, but from the interactions of different types of genes, phenotypes, and environments. In brief, Lloyd concluded:

In the genome project, certain genes are labeled as abnormal, and the decision to do so is made by using as a comparison the DNA sequence of a gene that appears in an accepted model [‘normal’] of the biomedical causal chain. What is abnormal under the biochemical model is not necessarily abnormal under a medical model. (143)

Thus, there are vagaries which interfere with the objective description of human biology when it comes to determining what is ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’/‘pathological’.

For Canguilhem then, there are vagaries in a patient’s experience of his/her condition which may not always gel with the physician’s analysis in terms of the ‘science of the normal man’, and which the physician nevertheless needs to take into account for the purpose of treatment. Similarly, for Lloyd, there are vagaries in an organism’s functioning in specific contexts which may not gel with the geneticist’s analysis in terms of the ‘accepted model’ of molecular description for humans, which the geneticist also needs to take into account for the purpose of treatment. What is perceived as ‘functional’ by individuals or according to social conventions is the overlapping point between them, and therein the fluidities of everyday language shoulder rigorous definitions of the ‘normal’.

Evidently, everyday and popular usage of the term ‘normal’ has to be factored into scientific usage when it concerns professional practice involving direct contact with populations at large, as the physician’s medical practice does. Contact is a two-way process, and at the heart of the physician’s practice there’s the conventional space of consultation. Otherwise, professional practices which bear indirectly upon populations at large are apt to work with well-defined concepts and measurements of the ‘normal’ which then also pass into everyday language, but in a loosened and flexible way. In everyday language, those well-defined concepts are expanded by undefined usage. That is to say, the term ‘normal’ in various specialist usages is recognized as having a significant bearing on everyday life but is now interpreted through relevance-determination, as described earlier. In histories of the term, it is generally accepted that this is the principal mode for its transfer from specialist towards everyday and popular usage. Such histories have usually been particularly interested in the role played by institutions in this process. Governmental and commercial professional practices, usually institutionally structured (for health, housing, education, entertainment, consumption, trade, etc.), have been analysed as the principal pathway for the popularization and democratization of the term ‘normal’. Thus, the term’s growing everyday purchase is not so much imposed by specific policies and strategies as instilled through a range of policies and strategies that have been gradually introduced, familiarized, and disseminated. The top-down thrust of policies and strategies, variously structured around concepts of the ‘normal’, is dispersed and becomes pervasive in everyday life, seeping down to the minutiae of habits, expectations, attitudes, anticipations, transactions, and decisions … the very grain of living as individuals within collectives. Thus, the ‘normal’ in everyday usage has come to signify as unquestioning social adaptation at ground level and, simultaneously, as questionable control from above, but not such that particular agents are easily pinned down. By this line of argument, institutions are regarded as the via media. They operate in networks of organizations and authorities which form a coherent system, and which then extend across areas of knowledge and begin to structure knowledge, and so bear upon populations at large. The term ‘normal’, pushed out like a bagatelle ball from specialist usage, rolls through the institutionalized centre of the board, knocking left and right against policy and strategy pins, and settles at the everyday base of the board. But that passage, it has usually been held, could only be tracked with a fine-tuned political awareness.

In his later reflections (1963–1966), Canguilhem (1989) marked the following nuances of everyday and popular usage:

It is possible for the normal to be a category of popular judgment because their social situation is keenly, though confusedly, felt by the people as not being in line, not ‘right’ (droite). But the very term normal has passed into popular language and has been naturalized there starting from the specific vocabularies of two institutions, the pedagogical institution and the hospitals. (237)

For Canguilhem, what appears from those institutions are demands from below, which may well be manifested, at the same time, as ‘the absence of an act of awareness [prise de conscience] on the part of individuals, in a given historical society’ (237). Apprehending a disjunction from droite in the ‘normal’, with different levels of and even without exercising prise de conscience, allows for a range within everyday and popular usage of the term. Where a particular instance of usage may be located within this range depends upon the relevance-determination of contradistinctive and consonant terms, as described earlier. The complexities of the context, the prevailing social contestations and flexibilities in the public sphere, might be decisive. The catchiness of the term ‘normal’ in popular usage follows accordingly, nodding towards what is not-quite-right or towards what-should be.

Historians of the ‘normal’ have often felt that the political work of the term should not be left to popular circumstance. Most historians of the ‘normal’ have therefore taken it upon themselves to actively fill in the orientation of the ‘normal’ by doing history. That is to say, doing history becomes then a project that crystallizes subsequent and manifold contexts of usage, whereby the ‘normal’ is substantiated as not-quite-right with full cognizance of what-should-be. That was evidently the sort of project through which Michel Foucault developed his concept of ‘normalization’ from The Birth of the Clinic (1973[1963]) onwards. He didn’t foreground fixed definitions of the ‘normal’, with reference to which the institutions ‘above’ act upon the populace ‘below’. Instead, he set about tracking the ‘normal-in-process’, so to speak, whereby the ‘above’ and ‘below’ mutually constitute each other. His 1974–1975 Collège de France lectures on the ‘abnormal’ offered a succinct summary on this conception of ‘normalization’ and his historical project:

I would like to try to study this appearance, this emergence of techniques of normalization and the powers linked to them by taking as a principle, as an initial hypothesis […], that these techniques of normalization, and the process of normalization linked to them, are not simply the effect of the combination of medical knowledge and judicial power, of their composition or the plugging of each into the other, but that a certain type of power – distinct from both medical and judicial power – has in fact colonized and forced back both medical and judicial power throughout modern society. It is a type of power that finally ends up in the courtroom, by finding support, of course, in judicial and medical institutions, but which, in itself, has its own rules and autonomy.

(Foucault 2003: 25–6)

This summary of the project led into an examination of how medical and judicial power have been ‘forced back’ by normalization, starting with expert testimony in criminal cases. The point of interest for Foucault was that normalization, while still operating from and traceable through institutional texts, had released itself from those institutions and had become a locus of power in itself. By this account, normalization is per se the process of power irrespective of and yet sieved through institutions and grounded pervasively in everyday life. Recognizing its autonomy, as Foucault put it, is tantamount to foregrounding the not-quite-right quality of its everyday acceptance among those in the grip of power. Thus, the disjuncture from droite was pulled out and foregrounded by the historian Foucault’s efforts. But the historicist foregrounding was only possible because an incipient apprehension of disjuncture from droite was already there in everyday usage, even if without prise de conscience. Foucault’s historicizing of normalization assumed a historiographical burden because it recognized the content of everyday and popular usages of the ‘normal’, and perceived the need to exteriorize their incipient prise de conscience, to highlight their potential for political awareness. As such, Foucault’s was an academic project apropos of everyday and popular usage and not merely an accounting of subsequent and different usages of the term ‘normal’. ‘Normalization’, in fact, is itself a term with little popular or everyday currency.

Nevertheless, Foucault’s project proved helpful for later accounts of how the everyday and popular currency of the term ‘normal’ has come about. Insofar as historians of the ‘normal’ have tracked the term’s career thereafter, with close attention to the word itself, that historiographical burden has usually been taken forward. That is to say, the project of historicizing the term ‘normal’ has generally been undertaken with the suspicion that at its heart is something not-quite-right, and that this not-quite-rightness is embedded in its popular and everyday contexts. In other words, it is suspected that the balance of contradistinctive and consonant terms which have accrued behind everyday and popular usages somehow consolidate iniquitous and coercive power. The institutionally structured drive in twentieth-century United States to ground normality as a social principle, and to idealize the average person, has been accounted accordingly (Igo 2007; Creadick 2010). The circulations of the term ‘normal’ in the history of sexuality (Sullivan 1995; Warner 1999), disability (Davis 1995), and race (Carter 2007) have appeared with an unmistakable commitment to Foucault’s historiographical burden—I return to these later. Of histories, Cryle and Stevens’s (2017) genealogy of the term seems the least committed to assuming that burden. Nevertheless, in their final analysis of the popular and everyday currency of the term there is a move along those lines. They do not pin that idea on normalization from above or assimilation from below, but on the systemic disposition of capitalist consumerism:

The origins of the contemporary idea of the normal as it is used in everyday speech can be traced not to nineteenth-century disciplinary institutions, as Foucault has famously argued, but to the beginning of what is now called the data society, in which anthropometric measurements were increasingly used for commercial purposes such as the production of mass-produced consumer objects or the collection of information about subjective experiences or opinions. The commercial use of anthropometric data was driven by very different interests from the ones that guided scientific or governmental projects: in a commercial context the aim was not to normalize bodies, but rather to design objects that better suited the average or typical human body. In other words, anthropometrics enabled objects to be standardized in ways that were responsive to the dimensions of the average body; they did not simply impose normative standards upon those bodies. (354)

This describes, then, a mutually negotiated and transactive process between production (producers) and consumption (consumers) instead of an exercise of power from above and its dispersal below. As such, Foucault’s historiographical burden is explicitly disavowed. Despite the disavowal, however, it may be argued that the operations of commercial purposes through data analysis are themselves institutionally grounded. Commercial corporations and firms are powerful organizations, and their structuring of data to serve consumption and profit making are, as is oft argued, now largely in partnership with capitalist governmental power. A critique of neoliberal ‘governmentality’, as Foucault put it, seems not far behind Cryle and Stevens’s observation, and could well be tracked through popular and everyday circulations of the term ‘normal’. But Cryle and Stevens did not go there.

With these observations on the sphere of ordinary and everyday circulations of the term ‘normal’, I now turn to its place in the catchphrase ‘new normal’ and return to some of its contexts in the previous chapters.

‘New normal’

This chapter began by noting the contrary pulls of ‘normal’ in the catchphrase ‘new normal’: on the one hand, ‘normal’ seems to designate successive phases of normality relative to each other; on the other hand, a ‘new normal’ seems to countermand a preceding and fixed ‘normal’. Between the relativized and fixed senses that are now at play within the catchphrase, the term’s erstwhile relationship with contradistinctive and consonant terms appears to be readjusted—quite possibly rendered redundant—at least within the sphere of popular and ordinary language communication. No doubt, in specialist and professional circles those contradistinctive and consonant distinctions, closely woven through the development of knowledge and practice, continue to be used. It is the case that health researchers, medical practitioners, and psychiatrists continue to use the contradistinctive terms ‘abnormal’, ‘pathological’, ‘morbid’, ‘irregular’, etc. and the consonant terms ‘healthy’, ‘functional’, ‘regular’, ‘usual’, etc. to define the ‘normal’ for specific areas. Statisticians similarly continue to use consonant terms like ‘average’, ‘standard’, ‘mean’, etc. and contradistinctive terms like ‘divergent’, ‘nonnormal’, ‘skewed’, etc. to sharpen definitions of ‘normal’ according to context. So do educationists, economists, and the like. But outside the area of rigorously defined usage of ‘normal’, or where the term is used without explicit definition or taken for granted, it seems likely that the catchphrase ‘new normal’ has reoriented how ‘normal’ is understood.

In popular and everyday usage, the undefined term ‘normal’ presents a range of possible contradistinctive and consonant terms which are tacitly chosen from and honed down to determine the immediate relevance. When the catchphrase ‘new normal’ comes up, as it has with burgeoning frequency since 2001, the push to sharpen the relevant sense of the ‘normal’ therein is diluted. In its relativized sense, ‘normal’ in the ‘new normal’ appears to be consonant with itself, with its past usages—seemingly twice removed, rather like Plato’s notion of the form in ordinary perception. There is a shadowy prior ‘normal’ which is consonant with the ‘normal’ of the ‘new normal’, and that being so it is unnecessary to dig back into deeper consonant terms to determine the relevance of the already irrelevant prior ‘normal’. In this sense, ‘normal’ in the ‘new normal’ is consonant with itself in the first instance. At the same time, in its fixed sense, the ‘normal’ in ‘new normal’ also appears to be contradistinctive to the prior ‘normal’, and it seems supererogatory to sieve through deeper contradistinctive terms to sharpen the relevance of the already irrelevant prior ‘normal’. Put otherwise, ‘normal’ in the ‘new normal’ appears immediately to be contradistinctive against itself. The catchphrase, then, empties ‘normal’ of distinctions, making the term not only undefined but disinviting relevance-determination in popular and everyday usage.

Where the term ‘normal’ had passed from academic and specialist usage into popular and everyday usage, the catchphrase ‘new normal’ appeared and has stayed predominantly within the latter area of usage. I explore some of the catchphrase’s peculiar academic turns further on. Within the everyday domain where catchphrases overwhelmingly circulate, it is evident from the previous chapters that the ‘new normal’ has, so to speak, percolated from above. This is not from above in the sense of originating in specialist knowledge but in the sense of being initially promoted for bureaucratic and management purposes by political and commercial authorities and by media pundits—a contemporary political and cultural elite. To be precise, rather than being expressive of elite purposes, the catchphrase has served as a means of moderating the relationship between elites and citizens, leaders and followers, managers and the managed, sellers and buyers, employers and employees, governors and the governed. In each such relationship, the ‘new normal’ has rendered the former’s interests ostensibly obvious and acceptable to the latter. The catchphrase has largely worked as a management tactic in itself, to reassure or to announce optimistic prospects. To this extent, its grounding in everyday and popular discourse is as driven by institutional imperatives as the term ‘normal’ had been, but in this instance with a different impetus—managerial rather than specialist. From Dick Cheney’s announcement of a ‘new normalcy’ in security and legal regimes in the USA after 9/11 and through the continuing ‘war on terror’, the catchphrase was deployed to reset expectations in a tone of reassurance. Similarly, after the dot-com crash of 2002, and particularly with the 2007–2008 financial crisis, the catchphrase was taken up by investment gurus to recommend new investment opportunities, and by politicians and bureaucrats to make ‘doing more with less’ an inevitable process of disinvestments and privatizations. The ‘new normal’ of ‘flexible working’ was meant to rationalize employment regimes acceptably against the grain of existing laws and contracts. And, of course, during the 2020 Covid-19 outbreak the ‘new normal’ was understood as an inescapable accommodation of necessary restrictions on movement and contact. Insofar as the primary impetus for announcing a ‘new normal’ is for management ends, in an upbeat or reassuring spirit, the catchphrase’s implicit dissociation of the ‘normal’ from both consonant and contradistinctive terms is useful. A particular casualty of such usage has been the contradistinctive associations of ‘normal’. Since ‘normal’ in the catchphrase is, as I noted, its own contradistinctive term, it suggests more a continuity in contradistinction within itself rather than suggesting a point from which critical gauging of departures from normality is possible. For Canguilhem (1989), the norm that is raised in popular uses of the ‘normal’ were necessarily in contradistinction from the ‘abnormal’: ‘The reason for the polemical final purpose and usage of the concept of norm must be sought […] in the essence of the normal-abnormal relationship’ (239). For the ‘normal’ in the ‘new normal’ there is no such contrary position, no essence to pin down or refer to. The sphere of popular and everyday communication instead focalizes the catchphrase ‘new normal’ by way of habitually accepting a continuum of relative positions without perceptible normative boundaries (or without a value locus), either wholly absorbed into a present without prospection or retrospection, or finding an ethos of continuous progress (a normalized teleology). The advantages for authority and management in these implicit nuances of the catchphrase are easily grasped. But, of course, the rhetorical designs of management and authority are only successful insofar as the contradictions and inequities of the present do not become intrinsically unmanageable, so that disaffection co-opts the ‘new normal’.

However, the co-optation of the catchphrase against its management thrust to express disaffection is relatively toothless so long as the ‘normal’ therein is disinvested from consonant and contradistinctive nuances. This is evident in the bitterness with which, following 9/11, moves contradicting rule-of-law principles were regarded as the ‘new normal’, or, after the 2007–2008 financial crisis, austerity and exacerbating inequality were pegged as the ‘new normal’, or, with growing unease after 2010, freakish weather events related to climate change were dubbed the ‘new normal’. This kind of turning of the catchphrase against its management temper suggests, unmistakably, an unmanageable juncture from which there is no return, redolent either with despair or irony. In the very usage of the catchphrase, with contradistinctive and consonant nuances muted, the possibility of a horizon or point for resistance or opposition seems forbiddingly remote or abstract. The only appeal that is possible appears to be within the sphere of existing management and authority, which has prior possession of the ‘new normal’ already. There are obviously, as the previous chapters have found, numerous appeals which dislocate the catchphrase from its brash managerial presentism to imbue it with a futuristic idealism. However, that ultimately takes the form of calling upon the same authorities and management functionaries that have possession of the ‘new normal’ now to push the catchphrase into future realization, demanding that those very elites should declare emergencies or enact better policies and simply become universally beneficent. The juncture of spiraling disaffection that was 2020 amidst the pandemic thus saw a contestation of catchphrases that diversified appeals to the elites and were quickly adopted by them: for the immediate management of pandemic measures as a ‘new normal’; for the management of larger disaffections with the more future-gazing ‘next normal’ and its variants, like ‘build back better’, all heartily taken up to bolster the authority of, for instance, Boris Johnson’s government or Joe Biden’s candidature. The other side of that appeal simmers at the same time in the populist right-wing ‘return to normal’—with its Harding-like echo—where ‘normal’ doesn’t have contradistinctive or consonant nuance either, but simply replaces presentism and progressive future-gazing with a regressive nod to a past that is now per se the ‘normal’ and, in any case, it is an imagined past.

From the area of everyday and popular usage where catchphrases have ascendancy, then, a curious gap is introduced in relation to specialist and academic areas apropos of conceptualizing normality. In these areas, as I have noted, well-defined usage of the ‘normal’ continues, but their rationales seem to work across a chasm from popular and everyday usage where ‘normal’ is captured in ‘new normal’ or ‘next normal’. Arguably, these catchphrases alongside others play a part, however unthinkingly, in attitudes of uncomprehending hostility or sacralized deference to ‘science’ or ‘experts’—terms which acquire a monolithic remoteness from everyday life. The undefined ‘normal’ has habitually been associated with consonant or contradistinctive terms which emerged from scientific investigation, as an accrual around the term in everyday usage, and thereby also as having a continuous relationship with everyday usage. ‘Normal’ contained in ‘new normal’, now its own consonant and contradistinctive term, loses that continuity; in catchphrase circulation it offers no more than devout acceptance of expertise/science or arbitrary refusal thereof with managerial or authority-bearing assertion.

I have put these arguments impressionistically and perhaps I have made too much of something as blithe and light as catchphrases. These observations are no more than speculations to consider and test. They do, at any rate, offer a bridge towards considering the advent of the catchphrase ‘new normal’ in academic studies and the continuing career of the term ‘normal’ alongside.

I have suggested that in historicizing the term ‘normal’, academic effort, especially since the 1980s, has largely been in line with Foucault’s project of elucidating normalization as a structure of power. That usually meant assuming Foucault’s historiographical burden of elucidation, whereby tracking the career of the term entails questioning and possibly resisting existing power structures. In its bare bones, the argument was that normalization involves concealing how power, as a social force (political, economic, cultural, institutional, interpersonal, etc. in a cohesive totality), works through institutionalized concepts of normality. Tracking the history of normalization then, woven through the term ‘normal’, reveals how power has been embedded from the top to the bottom in society. Such a revelation through doing history makes it possible to clarify where the structure of power is not-quite-right (iniquitous, coercive, oppressive) and accordingly conceive resistance to such power structures. Foucault gave little substance to what such resistance might involve, but it could reasonably be inferred that critique and resistance would engage with the linked-up totality of the institutional and discursive structures through which power is exercised. Put otherwise, the power that is grounded through the undefined everyday usage of the term ‘normal’, carrying the complex accrual of contradistinctive and consonant terms from specialist usage, can only be countered by carefully reckoning with those accruals. In that sense, Foucault’s project involved addressing normalization itself, as an autonomous processing of power with its own principles.

From the 1980s onwards, the spirit of Foucault’s project was seemingly taken forward, anchored to the term ‘normal’, from a limited standpoint. This may be broadly dubbed the standpoint of embodied identity politics—that is, from the political perspective of, particularly, disability, sexuality, and race, where politics is an expression of collective identities, principally by those who can individually claim those identities for themselves. I have in mind, especially, Lennard Davis’s Enforcing Normalcy (1995), Michael Warner’s The Trouble with Normal (1999), and Julian Carter’s The Heart of Whiteness (2007). Several similar arguments were made from such standpoints. First, these noted some of the accruals of contradistinctive and consonant terms through biomedical and statistical definitions of the term ‘normal’, and observed that in everyday and popular usage a range of associations underpin it in a kind of blur (Davis gave a fairly detailed history of the term). These arguments then took this aggregate blur of the connotations in ‘normal’ as actualizing a dominant normal culture. Second, these arguments stressed that they were themselves extended from non-dominant cultural positions and were accordingly named by particular contradistinctive terms, such as ‘disabled’ (or, eschewing its own contradistinctive placement, ‘differently abled’) or ‘queer’ or ‘black’. In doing that, it might have appeared that the term ‘normal’ and the concept of normality were being narrowly defined after all, in terms of specific contradistinctive terms. But, third, these arguments maintained that this was not the case because their specific non-dominant perspectives were not narrow but themselves rounded social positions, themselves cultures that confront the totality of the dominant normal culture. Thus, Lennard (1995) held that dominant culture normalizes able bodies in all dimensions of social life and thereby conceals its power dynamics; from the disabled perspective, this normal dominant culture was revealed as a prejudiced and iniquitous ‘ableist culture’. Roughly the same structure of argument was followed by Warner (1999), here revealing that normal dominant culture was really ‘straight culture’, and by Carter (2007), where normal dominant culture was revealed as ‘White’. Such arguments putatively removed shrouds from normal cultures with marginal embodied vision. The point was most lucidly made by Carter:

Normality seems both immense and blank, ubiquitous and insubstantial, so that it is difficult to get a critical purchase on it except by catching at its ragged edges. In the effort to focus on its center, I have found it helpful to think of normality’s apparent blankness as deriving from the power-evasiveness of its component parts, heterosexuality and whiteness. […] If normality is a slippery subject, then, it is because whiteness and heterosexuality share a certain unwillingness to acknowledge their own power and the many forms of coercion and violence that uphold their own coercion and violence. (26–7)

Fourth, the thrust of such arguments was that the impetus for resisting normal dominant culture comes from the embodied non-dominant culture which allows the undesirable dominant power to be characterized as ableist culture, straight culture, White culture. Notably, unlike received terms like ‘Black’ or ‘disabled’, the very appointment of the term ‘queer’—itself a catchword—was a resistant strategy that worked at the level of terminology itself, generally designating lifestyles that are not exclusively and institutionally heterosexual. ‘Queer’ was thus enunciated with metaphoric directness against the term ‘normal’ as an agglomeration of normalized senses. As Warner (1999) put it: ‘One of the reasons why so many people have started using the term “queer” is that it is a way of saying: “We’re not pathological, but don’t think for that reason that we want to be normal”’ (59).

The explicit turn towards putting the onus of resisting the normalized power of dominant culture on specific embodied identity positions seems to put these arguments in line with Foucault’s project. Moreover, this turn appears to move that project from academic work into social activism, so that it comes closer to life in everyday and popular usage. However, it is doubtful whether this is indeed a development on Foucault’s project; in some respects it seems to depart decisively from the rounded and comprehensive character of Foucault’s project. Whereas Foucault homed in on normalization itself and in all its dimensions as grounding power, the arguments of embodied identity politics do ultimately seem to apprehend normalization in a reduced and conditional way. It has always been debatable whether embodied non-dominant identity can be claimed by those who are unable to individually own to such identities, such as those who are apt to be themselves perceived as of the dominant normal culture. If the latter are de facto secondary in or excluded altogether from resistance to the iniquities of normalization, then it is not really normalization that is being resisted. The logic of embodiment seems to lead into sectoral, and often self-interested, activism which seems smaller than the critical awareness sought in Foucault’s project on normalization. Nevertheless, this argument, anchored squarely to the term ‘normal’, has a strong and continuing currency in academic usage as in everyday and popular usage, despite and alongside the rise of the catchphrase ‘new normal’. In its complex play of consonant and contradistinctive moves, it does enable a critical academic as well as popular politics to be voiced. The recruitment of the catchphrase ‘new normal’ in academic discourse has had a contrary effect. I turn to that next.

By and large, ‘new normal’ has been used in academic publications as a catchphrase but without delving into its character as such or defining the phrase. That is to say, academic usage has perpetuated its vogue as a catchphrase, much as in commercial/governmental or news reports (as in the sentences in Chapter 1). The most common academic usage takes the catchphrase as denoting a particular issue or juncture already, often in quotation marks to indicate its popular currency, so that it is recognized as such without further ado. There are numerous examples of such academic usage, many cited in the previous chapters, where simply saying ‘new normal’ refers to emerging conditions or instituted regimes after 9/11, the 2007–2008 financial crisis, China’s economic policy, and the Covid-19 outbreak. Similar denotative usage also occurs for issues with which the catchphrase has become strongly associated outside academia: flexible working, digital technology adaptations, new investment environments, austerity and inequality, weather events symptomatizing climate change, etc. Also in line with catchphrase usage, categorical statements of the form ‘such-and-such is the new normal’ are variously found in academic publications, by way of striking an informal note or chiming with the idiomatic context. To this extent, nothing specifically academic is discernible except, perhaps, in suggesting an inclination in scholarly circles to nod deferentially or condescendingly to popular usage.

Somewhat more searching academic usage of the catchphrase is occasionally found, and says a great deal about the spirit in which the catchphrase circulates. These are of two broad sorts: those that reflect on the catchphrase’s sociopolitical effect and those that seek to give it a substantial and, better yet, measurable content. Both directions attest, in different ways, to the ‘new normal’ having the effect of neutralizing both contradistinctive and consonant terms for the ‘normal’ in relevance-determination, with the kind of ideological effect impressionistically described earlier. The former sort, which considers the sociopolitical effect of the catchphrase, does so by holding the catchphrase alongside a particular contradistinctive nuance of ‘normal’ in a specific context. Those following this line then argue that the catchphrase has served to deliberately obfuscate or gloss over that undesirable nuance, effectively normalizing it. Thus, Susan Ruddick (2006), in describing deleterious changes to Anglo-American (post-9/11) legal and institutional regimes for protecting children’s rights, placed the catchphrase alongside Foucault’s concept of the ‘abnormal’. Ruddick demonstrated that where legal normalization in Foucault’s view worked in contradistinction from some concept of the unacceptably abnormal, in the proclaimed ‘new normal’ the abnormal is deliberately absorbed into what is acceptable. No space is left for excessive punitiveness and unreasonable attribution of culpability to be considered unacceptable. In this regime, the ‘grotesque’ is part of the ‘new normal’ rather than presenting a counterpoint to the ‘normal’:

In schools, the grotesque has taken the form of the adoption of a quasi-legal discourse that constructs young people who misbehave in the form of criminals and constricts their rights almost to the point of erasure, limited to codes of conduct that elaborate their rights toward each other. But these codes afford them no legal recourse. (76–7)

Similarly, contemplating US education policies to ‘do more with less’ after the 2006–2007 financial crisis, Rebecca Goldstein et al. (2011) found that the catchphrase conflated the desirable and the undesirable with rhetorical glibness: ‘[for some] the new normal is supposedly a welcome outcome of engaging in school reform during an economic crisis. For others, the new normal signals a dangerous turn in the social contract between the state and the people’ (122). Another interesting analysis along these lines appears in a study of changing work regimes by Edward Granter and Leo McCann (2015). Here, the term ‘extreme’ was somewhat unusually employed in contradistinction to ‘normal’, as in extreme work (intensive, long hours, distressing, etc.) in opposition to normal work practices. Their careful argument was succinctly stated thus: ‘Extreme has become the new normal’ (447).

Where attempts are made to give the catchphrase a substantive and measurable definition, akin to defining ‘normal’ with carefully chosen contradistinctive and consonant terms, it might be expected that the phrase would thereby be taken away from catchphrase circulation, extracted from popular and ordinary usage and recruited to specialist usage. But that is not quite what happens. In the few academic publications where this has been attempted, the catchphrase was taken as substantializing public perception, and measuring it meant measuring public perception. Thus, in a paper entitled with the catchphrase and referring to conditions following the 2007–2008 financial crisis, Amitai Etzioni (2011) merely described changes indicated in public attitude surveys and made some optimistic inferences from those. The most imaginative and rigorous attempts at giving some measurable account of the ‘new normal’ have appeared with reference to climate change. Most directly, Sophie Lewis et al. (2017) explicitly tried to recruit the catchphrase away from media framing and ‘instead propose the more precise concept of the time of emergence of a new normal (ToENN)’ (1141). This involved setting a particular year as a standard (not a norm, more a convenient axis to refer to), in terms of which the frequency of anomalous weather events, understood in terms of magnitude or intensity, could be tracked. The immediate point of such a measure was arguably less of meteorological interest, where understanding causes of variations in weather events is of paramount importance, and more for the purpose of making a general perception of climate change evident where it might not be otherwise. Having a ‘new normal’ time tracking of this sort is especially useful because climate change might otherwise not register in ‘normal’ perception of weather events. That ‘normal’ perception of weather variations adapts quickly so that change is constantly normalized and climate change seems imperceptible and is apt to be treated with scepticism was argued persuasively by Francis Moore et al. (2019). Their paper proposed a method for measuring adaptations in normal perceptions of variable weather events by analysing data from Twitter comments. Such researches, we may say, do not define the ‘new normal’ but erect a conceptual apparatus to measure relativizing perceptions of the ‘normal’ in the sphere of everyday communications and attitudes. This kind of argument effectively underlines the sense of relativized normality that the catchphrase suggests, and generally goes along with the notion that the ‘normal’ in ‘new normal’ is both its own consonant and contradistinctive term. The ‘new normal’ remains grounded in everyday and popular usage even when seemingly subjected to content analysis and measurement. In this regard, the Covid-19 context has not offered any significant advance in academic engagement with the catchphrase. In fact, as the previous chapter shows, the catchphrase was interrogated to some degree within the sphere of the popular and the everyday itself, especially in commercial and political circuits.

By way of bringing this chapter towards a close, I finally consider a specialist turn given to the term ‘normal’ which has some affinity with the catchphrase ‘new normal’, especially in the Covid-19 context: ‘post-normal science’. The formulation of ‘post-normal science’ was offered by Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz (1993), drawing upon two academic catchphrases: Thomas Kuhn’s ‘normal science’ and ‘postmodernism’, or, more precisely, an academic vogue for the prefix ‘post-’ (which continues to have currency, see Sinclair and Hayes 2019, Callus and Herbrechter, eds. 2004). Insofar as ‘post-normal science’ referred to Kuhn’s concept of ‘normal science’, it came with several missteps which are of interest here, and call for a brief digression into that concept. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962, 2nd edn. 1970) had described the practice of ‘normal science’ with reference to a specific understanding of paradigms, which could be thought of, in imperfect summary, as fundamental principles that hold together a rational system for describing and explaining the natural world (as opposed to the social world) at a given juncture of knowledge acquisition. Kuhn made an important distinction in using the term ‘paradigm’ from its standard usage:

In this standard application, the paradigm functions by permitting the replication of examples any one of which could in principle serve to replace it. In a science, on the other hand, a paradigm is rarely an object for replication. Instead, like an accepted judicial decision in the common law, it is an object for further articulation and specification under new or more stringent conditions.

(Kuhn 1970: 23)

This distinction is important for understanding both what Kuhn meant by ‘normal’ and by ‘science’, and therefore the phrase ‘normal science’. This sense of ‘paradigm’ holds for the purpose of describing and explaining the natural world in a rational system, whereas the standard application is relevant to the social world and sociological analysis. Given this scientific sense of ‘paradigm’, which is constantly being further articulated and specified in scientific practice, the idea of ‘normal’ appears—as indeed the term usually did in well-defined usage—in relation to some contradistinctive terms. Kuhn offered, in fact, several terms with different degrees of contradistinction to the ‘normal’ in ‘normal science’. Two of these were within the broad area of normal scientific practice, but put increasing pressure upon its paradigms by testing the limits of description and explanation on their basis. Thus, there is the term ‘anomaly’, which refers, for instance, to observations which seem not to fit into the descriptions and explanations offered by existing scientific paradigms. These call for intensive analysis in terms of the existing paradigms and may lead to some adjustment therein, but still within the precincts of ‘normal science’. Somewhat more forcefully, there is the term ‘crisis’. This suggests, for instance, a growing number of observations which seem to be out of synch with the paradigms of the prevailing rational system. These are still addressed insofar as possible through the prevailing paradigms, so are still within ‘normal science’, but it is felt that these paradigms are now not quite sufficient or equal to describing and explaining adequately. Nevertheless, feeling that insufficiency, Kuhn observed, is not enough to give up on ‘normal science’—the latter is still the basis of ongoing practice even though its limitations are admitted. The prevailing scientific paradigms of a rational system are only abandoned when they can be replaced by another set of paradigms erecting a distinct rational system, which has superior descriptive and explanatory powers and can overcome the growing ‘crisis’. This then becomes the basis of an updated ‘normal science’. This replacement is designated by the principal contradistinctive term for ‘normal science’: ‘revolutionary science’ or ‘extraordinary science’ (Kuhn used both).

The contradistinctive terms ‘normal science’ and ‘extraordinary/revolutionary science’ excited considerable interest on being proposed by Kuhn. Notably, it led to a sort of debate with those subscribing to Karl Popper’s account of scientific practice in The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934, in English 1959). In a colloquium in 1965, Kuhn and Popper addressed their differences from each other, and these were debated by others (proceedings published by Lakatos and Musgrave, eds. 1970). In the event, it appeared that they did not consider their differences to be quite as significant as has often been made out since. Kuhn suggested that Popper’s account, centred on falsifiability, overly emphasized ‘revolutionary science’; Popper objected that Kuhn had made too much of his notion of paradigms in ‘normal science’, since several competing or uncertain paradigms were not uncommon in ordinary scientific work. However, Kuhn’s concept of ‘paradigm’ in relation to ‘normal science’ passed into frequent, albeit occasionally misdirected, usage across disciplines as a specialist catchphrase, especially in social and philosophical investigations. It was in the spirit of a catchphrase that Funtowicz and Ravetz (1993) referred to it in their formulation of ‘post-normal science’.

Funtowicz and Ravetz’s formulation was offered from the perspective of policymakers and managers. The argument was that for certain pressing social issues which are identified in and derive from scientific research, scientists are unable to offer decisive guidance for policy directions and management decision-making. Examples of such issues could be the evidence for climate change in the 1990s so as to legitimize a decision to decommit from fossil fuels, or, of particular moment in early 2020, to make a decision on lockdown given the available evidence of the effects of a pandemic. Such issues could be contested within scientific practice, or scientific methods may well be insufficiently developed to allow conclusive results. However, the social consequences of not acting in policy and management terms could be so momentous that decisions cannot wait for the uncertain or slow processing of rigorous scientific conclusions. Further, at the same time such decisions may have immediate social effects which would cause significant discord and therefore need clear scientific validation. Under these circumstances, Funtowicz and Ravel argued, it is necessary for scientific practice to offer more than uncertain advice based on rigorous methods—to do more than, as they thought, ‘normal science’. It is incumbent on scientists then, they argued, to also actively help management and policymaking by validating their decisions for broad publics. That would involve scientists taking an active part in public persuasion, and involving interested parties with no scientific background (‘stakeholders’ in industry, communities, etc.) in the process of assessing scientific research and findings. Thus, they proposed having extended ‘peer review communities’ including those non-scientific interested parties, having scientists designing policies with broad publics like ‘professional consultants’, and the like. A great many catchphrases and buzzwords from scientific and management circles were tacked together to present this argument.

A significant tacking together took place in the formulation of the would-be catchphrase ‘post-normal science’ itself, as if it is to be understood in contradistinction from Kuhn’s ‘normal science’:

For [Kuhn], ‘normal science’ referred to the unexciting, indeed anti-intellectual routine puzzle solving by which science advances steadily between its conceptual revolutions. In this ‘normal’ state of science, uncertainties are managed automatically, values are unspoken, and foundational problems unheard of. The post-modern phenomenon can be seen in one sense as a response to the collapse of such ‘normality’ as the norm for science and culture. As an alternative to post-modernity, we show that a new, enriched awareness of the functions and methods of science is being developed. In this sense, the appropriate science for this epoch is ‘post-normal’.

(Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993: 740)

Kuhn was to pass away three years after this appeared and possibly did not hear of it, otherwise he would have been profoundly shocked by this characterization of ‘normal science’. The sales-pitch cadences which put ‘normal science’ down in normative terms as ‘unexciting’, ‘anti-intellectual’, ‘routine’, and its ‘normal’ practice as ‘collapsed’, and the idea of ‘post-normal science’ as ‘enriching’ and ‘appropriate for this epoch’ made negligible academic sense. At any rate, this ‘post-normal science’ had nothing to do with Kuhn’s contradistinctive ‘extraordinary/revolutionary science’. More importantly, the would-be catchphrase ‘post-normal science’, approached thus, courted some dangerous consequences. Simply by tagging ‘post-normal’ to ‘science’ and thereby referring to Kuhn’s ‘normal science’ in a hostile tone, Funtowicz and Ravetz suggested that what they proposed had something to do with the scientific practice that Kuhn (and Popper) was theorizing. In fact, the latter, as noted already, had to do with a rational system for describing and explaining the natural world, as opposed to the social world, at a given juncture of knowledge acquisition. Funtowicz and Ravetz were concerned, as they noted in their paper, with applied science, that is, with what to do with those descriptions and explanations to serve a social purpose, which is usually distinguished from the term ‘science’ itself as ‘technology’ or ‘engineering’. Kuhn’s ‘normal science’ is not about application, technology, or engineering, or social purposes; his understanding of paradigms that enable ‘normal science’ were pertinent insofar as description and explanation go. Had Funtowicz and Ravetz spoken of ‘post-normal technology/ engineering’, that might have made better sense, subject to suitable definitions. But being lured by the Kuhnian catchphrase ‘normal science’ simply invited confusion. Such confusion could well have deleterious consequences for the practice of science generally, whether normal or extraordinary, and therefore for application/technology/engineering, which are dependent on rigorous ‘normal science’. If managers and policymakers wished to be absolved of justifying their decision-making at difficult times by pressurising scientists to concede to or court the opinions of political, commercial, and community interests—by enforcing diverse ‘peer review communities’ and ‘professional consultancy’ diktats and the like—then the temptation to massage descriptions and explanations in doing science according to political and popular demand would be strong. The integrity and usefulness of scientific practice could well be fundamentally undermined.

Funtowicz and Ravetz kept up a steady production of papers on ‘post-normal science’ thereafter, and others joined in over subsequent decades. Though this phrase did not quite seep out of specialist circuits, and certainly not with the purchase of ‘normal science’, it has had not insignificant success. A Google Scholar search in early 2021 with the phrase came up with over 6,600 distinct academic texts which used it—often as title or keyword—for 2010–2020. Several journal special issues have been devoted to it; it features in management curricula in a number of tertiary education institutions worldwide. In a way, as a catchphrase it appears to have had an effect in specialist and professional circles which is analogous to that of ‘new normal’ in everyday and popular usage. ‘Post-normal science’ muddies the waters of Kuhnian ‘normal science’ in much the way that ‘new normal’ has muddied the waters of the popular conception of ‘normal’: the contradistinctive and consonant qualifications seem to disappear in the interests of serving elite interests. My impressionistic observations earlier about the ‘new normal’ might equally be repeated here with reference to specialist and professional circles: ‘post-normal science’ is used as a means of moderating the relationship between elites and citizens, leaders and followers, managers and the managed, sellers and buyers, employers and employees, governors and the governed. In this case, that moderation is done by elites passing the buck of their responsibility for taking tough decisions to an interim layer of workers—scientific researchers—at some risk to the integrity and effectiveness of doing science. Not unsurprisingly, the two catchphrases have been put side by side at times, especially amidst the obviously challenging conditions of the Covid-19 outbreak. Jerome Ravetz (2020[1], 2020[2]) had himself weighed in on a couple of occasions, mainly to suggest that the catchphrase ‘post-normal science’ should not only replace ‘normal science’ but up its reach to the level of the wildly popular ‘new normal’ under Covid-19 conditions.

Other catchy terms

By way of examining the conceptual underpinnings of the ‘new normal’ as traced in the previous three chapters, this chapter has first taken recourse to existing historical accounts of the term ‘normal’, principally from Canguilhem to Cryle and Stevens. These offered some insights into the steps through which the term ‘normal’ has moved from well-defined scientific and specialist usage into popular and everyday usage. Scientific usage involved definitions in terms of contradistinctive and consonant terms; everyday usage involved context-specific relevance-determinations from accruals of contradistinctive and consonant terms. The distinctions in usage from well-defined to undefined usage have been considered in this chapter, as have the rule-of-thumb and subjective dimensions of ‘normal’ in some specialist usage, and the role played by institutions. Returning then to the currency of the catchphrase ‘new normal’, firmly grounded in everyday and popular communication, I have argued that it has tended to elide even the relevance-determination of contradistinctive and consonant terms in everyday usage of ‘normal’. Instead, the phrase, somewhat paradoxically, seems to contain its own contradistinction from and consonance with ‘normal’. This turn, I have argued, seems to have the advantage of serving elite political and cultural interests. The passage of the catchphrase ‘new normal’ from everyday and popular usage into specialist and scientific usage—a kind of reversal of the pathway of ‘normal’—was taken up thereafter. Academic studies in which the concept of ‘normal’ continues to be significant were considered. So were studies which use the catchphrase as a catchphrase, and others which unpack how it serves management and governance, and yet others which try to give it a measured and well-defined character. Finally, the nuances of the specialist catchphrase ‘post-normal science’ were considered. I have argued that this phrase has had, within a narrow professional remit, a similar management orientation as the ‘new normal’ has in popular and everyday usage.

These observations draw a tentative line under the contemporary historical tracking of the catchphrase ‘new normal’ which occupied the previous two chapters and this one. My account thus far has been, evidently, somewhat unevenly weighed by the currency of the catchphrase amidst and after the Covid-19 outbreak in 2020, so that the picture of the previous two decades, 2000–2019, in Chapter 2 now seems relatively sketchy. To fill in some lacunae in that picture, I turn next in Chapter 5 to two catchwords, ‘austerity’ and ‘resilience’, which I have already mentioned in relation to ‘new normal’. I have not yet mentioned the catchphrase/slogan I explore in Chapter 6—‘the 99% and the 1%’—but its relevance to the account in Chapter 2 will become evident. These have distinctive histories and institutional trajectories which complement observations presented so far.