NotNormativelyHuman 209
of appearance and disappearance in which norms find "their"
representation.
Forgoodreason,theequationofwhoorwhatapersoniswithhis/her
surface appearance has always been viewed with suspicion in the
cultural history of the West. Health, youth, but also age and disability
are markers that rely to a large extent on such appearances that fail to
conformwithwhata"normal"humanbeingissupposedtolookandact
like. I have chosen to focus on disability and late life not only because
the cluster of normativities is particularly dense here but also because
they showcase how norms and the power vested in them to identify
people perform important social and cultural work. Moreover, these
fieldsalsodemonstratewhatIwouldcallthe"spillovereffectofnorms":
thefactthatnormsdoregulatenotonlywhattheyostensiblyrefertobut
also a larger context: thus, norms regarding who or what is considered
old or disabled affect also, as I will show below, people who are not
addressedbythem,becausethey(still)havenormativebodiesbutexpect
orfearthatthiswillchange.Forthisreason,thespilloverofwhichIam
speaking here (perhaps unexpectedly) registers in side-effects, many of
them highly affective. Norms relating to age, for example, can generate
scenariosoffear,strategiesofavoidance,evenamongthosewhoarenot
yetoldorarehealthy.
Most normativities that have their basis in the biology of human
beings are without doubt an inheritance from, perhaps expressions of,
Enlightenment rationality and its celebration of the independent, self-
possessed individual whose condition of possibility is shored up by the
broadarsenalofnormspertainingtothehumanbodyandhumanbiology
more generally. But as the previous discussion has shown, this ideal,
which one might regard as a meta-norm, is a highly unstable
constellation.Thatabodymightconformtothisnormisasplausibleas
the idea that it might not. For this reason, biology-based normativities
are also not exempt from what the Frankfurt School is calling the
"dialectic of Enlightenment." In their discussion of the human body
under the sway of Enlightenment reason, Horkheimer and Adorno
noted: "Those who extolled the body above all else, the gymnasts and
scouts, always had the closest affinity with killing... They measure
others, without realizing it, with the gaze of a coffin maker [and so call
them]tall,short,fatorheavy"(HorkheimerandAdorno235).