https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7304-9249
![Sample our Social Sciences journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110822/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Social-Sciences.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
The present article extracts the normative and the crypto-normative from the polemical contexts in which they have been deployed as charges to study them in their more affirmative dimensions. Polemics increasingly contribute to a disabling dismissal of normativity that ultimately blocks nuanced re-conceptualizations of normative operations. Against this backdrop, the article attempts a first theorization of crypto-normativity as a concept in its own right independently from the Habermasian-Foucauldian polemics that initially framed it. However, instead of emerging as an escape route from normativity, crypto-normativity is defended as part and parcel of a broader set of normative “technologies” that assist human beings in their critical reshuffling of themselves and of their realities.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse, ch.10. Foucault’s position has also been considered “crypto-utopian”, “crypto-liberal” and, as Richard Rorty put it, “crypto-private” but all this remains outside the scope of this article.
2 Hence, I take issue with Dianna Taylor when she attributes to Habermas that Foucault’s work is seen as non-normative: “the uncritical acceptance of Habermasian notions of the norm and normativity necessarily posits Foucault’s work as non-normative and therefore ethically and politically irrelevant or harmful” .Taylor, “Normativity and Normalization,” 48. I hope that my article will show inter alia (though indirectly) that this is not the case. Many of Foucault’s own followers endorse anti-normativity or non-normativity irrespective of how normativity might be defined. Mark Kelly’s position in his For Foucault is a case in point.
3 Challenges of modern shibboleths affected normativity of various kinds and coloration: for instance, contesting Cartesianism and the normativity that chimed with it made room for “the view that the normative is a realm of tragedy” “suffused with ignorance”. Srinivasan, “Normativity without Cartesian Privilege,” 274.
4 Hansen, “Non-normative Critique”. Already in the early nineties, as R. Delgado had then remarked, “the critique of normativity” was “at the intersection of several strands of emerging scholarship”. Delgado, “Norms and Normal Science,” 935.
5 Zanghellini, “Queer, Antinormativity, Counter-normativity”; Daniels, “On Ambivalence and (Anti-) Normativity”; and Rutzou, “Strange Bedfellows?”.
6 See, for instance, Fraser, “Foucault on Modern Power,” 285.
7 Finlayson, “Morality and Critical Theory”.
8 Papastephanou, “Distinctions of Justice”.
9 “A matter might qualify as normative by implying, not statements about what ought to be done, but statements about what may or should not be done”. Whiting, “Is meaning fraught with ought?,” 541.
10 Zanghellini, “Queer, Antinormativity, Counter-normativity,” 4.
11 For instance, Amy Allen explicitly states this and, up to a point, I agree, that is, so long as this may concern the fact that empowerment as such does not say much about the power that it involves. Allen, “Normativity, Power, and Gender,” 61. But I take issue with this non-nuanced reduction of empowerment to value-neutrality for reasons that I explain in the sentences that conclude my introduction.
12 The reasons were that I was not adequately qualified to such a task and also that the paper was not, in any case, an effort to apply a Foucauldian “toolbox” to the topic and, in this sense, it would not satisfy Foucauldian standards of archeology or genealogy. From my perspective, what I was attempting was an exploration (with many limitations) of the conceptual history of curiosity that had clearly longitudinal rather than cross-sectional elements, a combination of aspirations to objective and critical/effective history and non-relativist historicization and politicization of the epistemic. In that respect, my approach was neither archaeological nor genealogical in a strict sense (for more on these terms and for an interesting discussion of them, see http://pages.uoregon.edu/koopman/pub/2008jph_gnlgy_archlgy-final.pdf). Hence, what may appear to Foucauldians as hubristic appropriation of the terms archaeology/genealogy and unmerited application of them to what I was doing, from my perspective, such application would be much more than just unmerited: it would be an undesirable (and certainly not intended) channeling of what I was doing into categories that, despite their significance and acclaimed status, cause me unease. It would make me feel that my approach is being disciplined to conform to a specific expectation.
13 The presentation ended with a reconstructive plea, amongst other things, for allocating space to epistemic restraint and for reconsidering curiosity in a more nuanced way acknowledging its ambiguities and political complicities.
14 I make a related point later on when qualifying and complicating the imperative to renewal, displacement, and change and when critiquing discourses that dictate a normativization of the “new”.
15 And it brought many more questions, some not related to the I, not placing the speaker centre-stage; but, I leave these aside for reasons of space.
16 Sophocles, Ajax, 665: “but people’s proverb is true that the gifts of enemies are no gifts and of no good” [“All’ esti alethes he vroton paroimia echthron adora dora kouk onesima”/ αλλ’ ϵστί αληθής η βροτών παροιμία ἐχθρῶν ἄδωρα δῶρα κοὐκ ὀνήσιμα’].
17 Plutarch (De Recta Ratione Audiendi, 18, 47, c). my translation of this point; (ου γαρ ως αγγϵίον ο νους αποπληρώσϵως αλλ’ υπϵκκαύματος μόνον ώσπϵρ ύλη δϵίται, ορμήν ϵμποιούντος ϵυρϵτικήν και όρϵξιν ϵπί την αλήθϵιαν: ou gar os aggeion o nous apopliroseos all’ ypekavmatos mono osper yli deitai, ormin empoiountos euretikin kai orexin epi tin aletheian).
18 Taylor, “Normativity and Normalization,” 46.
19 Ibid.
20 Olson and Sayer, “Radical Geography,” 188.
21 Zanghellini, “Queer, Antinormativity, Counter-normativity.”
22 See, for instance, Zanghellini’s excellent theorization of this tendency to confusing meanings of normativity in queer theory. Zanghellini, “Queer, Antinormativity, Counter-normativity,” 9.
23 Kelly, For Foucault, 13.
24 Thought through to its deeper implications, this means that they have to be against even that normativity in virtue of which a thinker would criticize the sway of heteronormativity. I believe that one of the major efforts to deal with this predicament (although it is not explicitly mentioned in relevant texts) has been Ernesto Laclau’s distinction between the ethical and the normative along lines of the ontic and ontological. But a discussion of this and of why I think that it is not convincing goes beyond the confines of this article. As concerns the example of heteronormativity and such predicaments burdening queer theory, an account that is very similar to my use of this example but more developed can be found in Zanghellini, “Queer, Antinormativity, Counter-normativity.”
25 It is “The Analytical Philosophy of Politics”, a paper that Foucault presented as a lecture at a conference in Tokyo. To my knowledge, it has not yet been translated into English. It is included in Foucault, Dits et Ecrits.
26 The term “performative self-contradiction” is Karl-Otto Apel’s. Apel, From a Transcendental-semiotic Point of View.
27 Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse, 276.
28 They also overlook other normativities implicit in their approach, some of which will come up in the article later on.
29 This is how B. Han-Pile puts it: “Foucault is usually careful to avoid directly evaluative terms but it is clear that he values difference over identity: ‘do not ask me to remain the same’, he famously said in the introduction to the Archaeology of Knowledge”. Han-Pile, “Foucault, Normativity and Critique,” 90. Consider also the following contrast of “sameness” to “the new” and the normativization of the latter in Paul Rabinow’s remark that, to Foucault, “what was needed was not a means of making everyone the same, but of creating new modes of being together”. Foucault and Rabinow, Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, xxxvi-xxxvii.
30 To concretize the example even more, consider, for instance, a “gut” reaction of much Western academia to a conflict issue (between a minority and a majority population) about which they hear something but are not versed in any of its details: they spontaneously side with the minority and imagine all sorts of possible ways in which the minority may be oppressed. In this manner, they are already biased and often deaf to any account that shows how things may be more complex and how power may be distributed very differently in that particular conflict.
31 I mean this in the sense of giving exceptional moral status to just any numerical minority, making it stand out in the position of the distressed Other, placing it automatically in the place of the victim, romanticizing it, “othering” it and uncritically granting it “citizenship” in the “state of exception”.
32 Having said all this, however, let me clarify that these considerations in no way entail Schadenfreude for the catastrophic ending that the manipulation of the Sudeten had for the Sudeten community as such after the defeat of Nazism.
33 Kelly, For Foucault, 9 (my italics).
34 To undermine it one needs one’s analysis to involve crypto-normative terms that “tint” the analyzed thing in such a way that the reader may feel a whole spectrum of affective reactions to the analyzed thing, from being merely bemused to being uneasy, up to being appalled or repelled by the analyzed thing.
35 “Things” here is a very intriguing word that importantly connotes both a positivism of facts and a notion of “pragmata” in the ancient Greek sense (which is a negatively politically loaded sense of a conventional political stance toward the politics of the polis – consider here the connection with ancient imperialist curiosity qua polypragmosyne). Papastephanou, ed., Toward New Philosophical Explorations, ch 1.
36 Apel, From a Transcendental-semiotic Point of View.
37 Kelly, For Foucault, 149.
38 Descriptive and normative statements cannot be segregated as neatly as many commentators assume: p describes a specific “should” or “ought” in, say, a remote locality on the planet; thus p is descriptive of a normative given elsewhere. Apart from the propositional content, p can also be punctuated in a way that gives it a normative tint: an exclamation mark at its end may indicate bewilderment, bemusement, downright indignation, in a nutshell, a whole range (and thus cryptic qua only partly visible) of reactions to the propositional content and to the corresponding normative statement that is propositionally described but, through punctuation, simultaneously evaluated. Punctuation and, in oral communication, non-verbal semiology (e.g. sardonic smile, raising eyebrows, etc) perform discursive normative tasks.
39 Compare here how, as Richard Bernstein put it in commenting on the Habermas-Foucault debate, Foucault felt blackmailed by Habermas to the grid of Enlightenment. Bernstein, “Foucault: Critique as a Philosophical Ethos”.
40 See, correspondingly, Kelly, For Foucault; Choat, “Review of For Foucault”; May, “Genealogy, Problematization, and Normativity”; and Vatsov, “Rethinking the Paradox,” 243.
41 Kelly’s book For Foucault is a paramount example, though he does not use this term to describe the residues of normativity or normativization that he detects in the philosophies he discusses.
42 Consider here again Kelly’s book For Foucault criticizing those philosophers who somehow remain normative despite their sympathy for Foucault.
43 A case in point that could be read through my vocabulary of effects of crypto-normativity and the plea for theoretically and politically enabling disclosure is the following: “since normative commitments clearly animate the Queer project (and neither could, nor should, it be otherwise), it is a failure on Queer’s part not to acknowledge, articulate, reflect upon and interrogate its own normative commitments”. Zanghellini, “Queer, Antinormativity, Counter-normativity,” 1. The reasons, indeed compelling, that Zanghellini offers inter alia are: “a commitment to the idea that personal autonomy and diversity are intrinsically valuable (other things being equal) appears foundational to these queer critiques of mainstream understandings of law. Without such assumptions, queer analyses and critiques, if they do not become outright unintelligible, at least lose their bite, or do not seem to matter much”. Ibid, 6.
44 Consider here, for instance, crypto- operations in bracketing (epoche) and in “sous rature”. Sous rature as an originally Heideggerian philosophical “technology”, usually rendered as “under erasure”, operates by crossing out a word within a text, while also permitting it to be legible and intact. Especially in Jacques Derrida, it evokes semantic inadequacy yet necessity.
45 I do not think that Habermas has supported this either. A cautious reading of his related work shows that he applied the charge of crypto-normativism in a limited way to those philosophies which incriminated the normative sweepingly.
46 I offer only illustrations of my point about space allocation to explicit normativity and to crypto-normativity because anything more substantive would render the claim of space allocation a non-formal principle and a specific task for philosophers. The space that should be allocated to diverse normativities is a context-sensitive issue of actual debates rather than a monological duty of the moral-philosophical subject.
47 See, Papastephanou, “Michel Foucault’s Limit-experience Limited” and Papastephanou, “Of (f) Course”.
48 Crypto- is defined as hidden or secret. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/crypto
A crypt is “a room under the floor of a church where bodies are buried”. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/crypt Etymology: from Latin crypta “vault, cavern,” from Greek krypte (short for krypte kamara “hidden vault”), fem. of kryptos “hidden,” verbal adjective from kryptein “to hide”. Meaning: “underground burial vault or chapel in a church”. https://www.etymonline.com/word/crypt
49 Religious undertones should not be missed here, as they relate to a post-secular era where the religious in Western thought may operate politically in a “crypto-” manner too.
50 Justice in the negative, the unjust as a felt reality, is considered a safer term in times when various claims to justice are treated as deconstructible and the concept of justice is regarded as elusive.
51 “Partisan” requires special attention, not because it was part of my response to the question last year, but more generally because it is sometimes a post-modernly welcomed term due to being leftist enough to bring along the aura of the progressive. But there is no space here for dealing with it.
52 The “(un-)desirable” is a post-modernly desirable and acceptable term, that is, its normativity is obscured and therefore not obtrusive, because it is authorized by the fact that, as a prima facie affective term, “(un-)desirable” appears not to be ethically rigorist and moralist. Thus, it operates in similar ways to more explicit normativities but it goes down better than they do.
53 Papastephanou, “The Philosopher, the Sophist”.
54 See, Papastephanou, “Michel Foucault’s Limit-experience Limited” and Papastephanou, “Of (f) Course”.
55 Choat, “Review of For Foucault,” 2.
56 Ibid.
57 May, “Genealogy, Problematization, and Normativity,” 425.
60 Another possible hyphenation would be that of the prefix “pseudo-”. But “pseudo-” would not do in a post-truth era because it involves an implicit contrast with “true” normativity.
61 Kelly, For Foucault, 7.
62 Kelly, For Foucault, 9 (my italics).
63 Han-Pile, “Foucault, Normativity and Critique,” 86.
64 I believe that my view on this is in line with the following upshot: “normativity is not reducible to simple ‘oughts’; it consists first and foremost of evaluations, and evaluation is not legislation”. Sayer, “Power, Causality and Normativity,” 191.
65 Olson and Sayer, “Radical Geography,” 194.
66 For the need for such criteria and judgment, consider the following remark: “Radical or critical social science’s most basic claim is that social phenomena could be otherwise and can be changed, hence countering the common tendency to portray them as matters of fate. Another world is possible. However, while it is indeed vital to appreciate this, there is nothing necessarily radical, in the sense of progressive, about such a claim. It does not distinguish progressives from, say, fascists and misogynists, who could use it to argue that we don’t have to accept a democratic or non-sexist society. Conservatives could accept it too; clearly, those who believe that we live in “the best of possible worlds” accept that things could be different, but they think that they would be worse if they were”. Olson and Sayer, “Radical Geography,” 184.
67 Papastephanou, Educated Fear.
68 See, for instance, Finlay, “Defining Normativity,” 1.
69 Here are some examples again: prescriptive, implicit, quasi-, counter-, meta-, crypto-, non-, etc.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Marianna Papastephanou
Marianna Papastephanou teaches philosophy of education in the Department of Education at the University of Cyprus. She studied at the University of Cardiff and researched in Critical Theory in Berlin. She is the author of books and numerous articles on cosmopolitan political philosophy, the modern-versus-postmodern divide, utopia, and the Frankfurt School. Correspondence to: [email protected]