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What if the most joyful act was not to transgress a norm but to erect it? What if creativity consisted in enunciating a law under the pretext of violating it? And what if it turned out that you, who claim to prefer exceptions, only talk about them because they allow you to imagine the rules?
This book proposes a provocative interpretation of the dynamic relationship between the normative and the transgressive. Combining sociology, biopolitics and satire, it offers a surprising theory of normative imagination as a cognitive mode characteristic of the era of emotional capitalism. Gender, fashion, artistic creation and surveillance are analyzed from the perspective of a regulatory drive, a continuously renovated and imperative push for normalcy that no longer comes from factual powers but from citizens themselves. These, united in a spontaneous popular court, armed with smartphones and driven by juridical compulsion, become the axis of societies of control. In this way the affective ways of constructing subjectivity are replaced by the distinctive pathology of our times, the name of the globalized game: normopathy for all.
List of contents
Translator's Note vi Grey Alert, Blue Pill 1
The Nomographic Imagination 10
Why Do They Call It "Sex" When They
Mean "the Ethical Dimension of the
Doctrine of Relation"? 34
No One's Style 48
Desigual, or Difference 63
On the Norm Considered as One of the Fine Arts 79
Notes 117
About the author
Eloy Fernández Porta is Professor of New Literary Trends at Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona.
Summary
What if the most joyful act was not to transgress a norm but to erect it? What if creativity consisted in enunciating a law under the pretext of violating it? And what if it turned out that you, who claim to prefer exceptions, only talk about them because they allow you to imagine the rules?
This book proposes a provocative interpretation of the dynamic relationship between the normative and the transgressive. Combining sociology, biopolitics and satire, it offers a surprising theory of normative imagination as a cognitive mode characteristic of the era of emotional capitalism. Gender, fashion, artistic creation and surveillance are analyzed from the perspective of a regulatory drive, a continuously renovated and imperative push for normalcy that no longer comes from factual powers but from citizens themselves. These, united in a spontaneous popular court, armed with smartphones and driven by juridical compulsion, become the axis of societies of control. In this way the affective ways of constructing subjectivity are replaced by the distinctive pathology of our times, the name of the globalized game: normopathy for all.
Report
"Eloy Fernández Porta has invented a new way of thinking that impresses us with his freedom and mordacity."
Le Monde
"Eloy Fernández Porta has established himself as one of the best - and most sardonic - analysts of contemporary society in an age when transgression has become the norm. In this book he explores the new regime of normativity at work in the collective farce in which "hypersensitive tweeters" are acting in a "normative happening" where transgression is an omnipresent norm, inscribed in the mind and body of everyone. A 'blow to the heart of social media'!"
Christian Salmon, Centre for Research in the Arts and Language at the CNRS, Paris
