164 RüdigerKunow
The dualism encapsulated in these terms is not only conceptual and
temporal; it is in fact highly charged intellectually and emotionally, a
site of intensive and ultimately political economies of desire and
differentiation.Inthisdualisticconfiguration,normsareunambiguously
positionedonthesideofsollen,animportantpartoftheorganizationof
individual and collective life, not least because they are effective—but
also,asIwillshow,affective.Norms,despitetheiroccasionalviolation,
aremarkersofcertainty,andifthiscertaintyisundermined,ifnormsare
violated, such acts tend to produce reactions, from dismissive shoulder-
shruggingto violentclashes,reactionswhichin manycasescanberead
dialectically as re-assertion of the norms in question. And these
engagements with norms are likely to leave traces in the individual and
collectivememory,asIwillshow below.Onemightwellasktherefore,
can one ever normalize without moralizing?^11 The evidential and
compelling nature of norms has in many instances turned them into
"excellent intersubjective communicative and organizational strategies
in the absence of any transcendental values" and legitimations (Heyes
34); they are means to shore up and stabilize social but also cultural
agendas. In a very general sense, then, normative clusters are an
instantiation of what the Frankfurt School has famously called
"instrumentalrationality"andequallyinstrumentalaffectivity.
Given their crucial role as what I called above the grammar of
individual and collective lives, norms have been the object of intense
theoretical scrutiny and have stood at the crossroads of various
disciplines.Muchhasbeenwrittenabouttheepistemologicalquandaries
attending the finding, founding, the maintenance, and disposability of
normativestructures.Philosophershavesoughttogroundtheirexistence
Oughtofpracticalfeeling,"moreprecisely,"theincompatibilitybetweenwhatis
andwhatoughttobe"(EncyclopediaofthePhilosophicalSciences§472)ispart
of the moral order which can and must be remedied within that order; by moral
practice emphatically also collective moral praxis: the "substance, in which the
absolute 'ought' is no less an 'is,' has actuality as the spirit of the nation"
(EncyclopediaofthePhilosophicalSciences§514).
(^11) Garland-Thomson has sought to capture this idea in her concept of "the
normate," understood as "the veiled subject position of cultural self, the figure
outlined by the array of deviant others whose marked bodies shore up the
normate'sboundaries"(ExtraordinaryBodies6).