206 RüdigerKunow
from the material effects shaping the lives of non-normative people to
theshapeandforminwhichnormsappearonagivenbody.
NormsandtheInstitutionalizationofJudgment
Norms, whatever else might usefully be said about them, are first
and foremost socio-cultural means to achieve essentially socio-cultural
ends, namely to ensure the continued, iterative reproduction of the
formation that put them into place. As such, they are markers of social
and cultural certainties, but also, and perhaps unexpectedly so, they are
also markers of their very opposite, of doubts and uncertainties among
individuals and the collective. Contrary to what most people think,
norms are not conservative, shoring up the status quo; rather, they are
generative:normsproducesubjectivitieswhichtheythen"invite"people
to embrace and inhabit.As the collective voice of oughtness, they are
fueled by, and in turn fuel, the desire for more of the same, for other
normativities. This is where Canguilhem's idea of the correlativity of
norms finds an empirical corroboration. As clusters of regularity, or
what I have here also called a grammar, norms channel individual as
well as collective behavior into preordained paths and courses, even in
moments of exception and emergency, as the Lorde case illustrates. In
that, they are a lot like roadmaps (even while they may change faster).
To elaborate further the map-analogy: normsare maps also in the sense
that they represent in an abbreviated spatial form the public sphere, the
highways and byways through which the currents of power and interest
ofagivencollectivityarepassing.
In this important sense, then, they are institutionalizations of
judgments. Because of this judgmental character, the relation of
normativity to power has long been the focus of philosophical and
cultural critique, as in Foucault. What is sometimes overlooked,by him
but also in everyday, pre-reflexive practice, is the fact that norms as
crystallizations of social or cultural agendas are never simply "there;"
one can register their presence also, dialectically to be sure, in the
ceaseless contestation of what passes as "normal." This is also the
momenttoreiterateapointmadeseveraltimessofar:normsdonotonly
producecompliancebutalsocritique.Andfromaperspectiveverymuch
favored by American Cultural Studies, the point is notmeetinga given
norm butbeatingit. To look for contestations of norm is an important