Interesting post from Pete of Deontologistics on rationality as norm and commitment, and the disarticulation of the domain of norms from that of human animality. The crux here seems to be that “man” is not in himself a normal animal: normative accounts of human being are best taken as descriptions of the commitments we make to ourselves and others as preconditions for various kinds of social being, and the capacity to bear such norms is rather haphazardly instantiated in our animal selfhood.

This split between the normed human being and the ab-normal human animal plays out in Badiou, for example, as a tension between the “de-subjectivising” pull of egoic self-interest and the possibility of constructing a political “subject” which affirms (or “verifies”) egalitarian norms. But there’s a problem here: egoic self-interest is arguably also a normed expression of human being - neo-liberalism explicitly affirms it as a norm, as a precondition for higher forms of social organisation (e.g. those based on competitive markets). The conflict between Badiou’s ethical “good” (tenacity in the construction of truths) and “evil” (de-subjectivation, the saggy victory of the flesh) can be seen as a conflict between rival normative commitments rather than between committed and uncommitted being as such. What Rowan Williams calls the “false anthropology” of neo-liberalism does not merely declare, in social Darwinist fashion, that human beings are intrinsically self-seeking creatures: it also goes to considerable lengths to modify the “soul” of society (its basic normative commitments and symbolic co-ordinates) so that individuals will perceive this to be their true nature and act accordingly.

We’re used to hearing it asserted that when someone talks about “human nature” they are “naturalising” or “ontologising” a set of norms which underpin a particular mode of human social being, in order to secure some aspect of social organisation which is threatened or undermined by putatively “deviant” behaviour. Gender norms are an obvious example of this: there’s a tug-of-war between “stabilising” and “destabilising” forces with respect to binary gender and the institutions it supports, and the leftist critique of those institutions (marriage, the nuclear family and so on) has tended to ally itself with those aspects of human animality which make trouble for heteronormativity. (This can get a bit morbid, and risks inflating the political significance of fairly trivial impulses, when what’s really at stake is property relations, same as always).

It would be naive, for instance, to suppose that the Christian Right in the US doesn’t know that heteronormativity defines a set of commitments rather than providing an accurate map of the chambers of the human heart: they’re acutely conscious of the possibility that human animals, following their own inclinations, will renege on (or withhold assent from) those commitments, which is why they’re so concerned to hedge them about with punitive and obscurantist forms of deterrance. The fact is that they regard their image of sexual fulfilment as representing a form of (divine) will, as being one (fairly fundamental) aspect of an overall plan for human earthly existence, rather than a “natural” state of affairs.

Faced with this kind of “divine plan” conception of heteronormativity, which is tied in to an explicitly politico-theological programme, the assertion that gender norms are not ontologically grounded has less polemical force than it’s often credited with. Increasingly I think this is true of the neo-liberal framing of the human image as well: in place of serious belief in “Thatcherite individualism” as an accurate portrait of our best and truest selves, there is now a kind of fetishist disavowal: we all know that people (well, non-psychopaths anyway) are actually pretty uncomfortable with self-seeking profit-maximisation in ruthless competition with all around them, that nobody much likes the idea of being “motivated” by bonuses and management-set attainment targets as opposed to pride and interest in their work, that we are all caught up in a complex web of material and affective interdependencies and so on, and yet we persist in honouring a normative conception of economic rationality whose sole purpose is to condition us to be good participants in systems modelled as market simulacra. What is needed here is not less belief in the ontological reality of such norms, but more acting according to different norms.