DISCONSTRUCTION

If you’re in an extreme version of events, you may begin to crave or establish a desire for your own version of Normal — or what you think or want it to be.

Normal, from a Foucauldian perspective, is not neutral or self-evident. It is an effect of discourse and the operation of power. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault describes how institutions produce ‘normal’ subjects through techniques that do not merely enforce external rules but quietly shape how individuals come to understand themselves against shifting norms.

Confused? Exactly.

Normal, in this sense, becomes destabilised — an ongoing process of regulation.

Under conditions of uncertainty or disruption, the apparent stability of ‘normative’ structures yields. What once operated as an invisible background of assumption may become visible through its absence. In such moments, individuals begin a process of “disconstruction” — a gradual reassembly of what counts as ‘normal’. This is not a rejection of norms, but an attempt to re-establish intelligibility.

This personal reconstruction of ‘normality’ does not occur outside power. To reassemble a corrupted sensibility is to remain within a discursive field which shapes what may be sustainable. Therefore, what appears as an individualised “normal” is composed from socially available material. Cultural expectations, curated memories, hierarchies of value. Thus, Normal is historically contingent — at the borders of thought.

Extreme circumstances do not simply disrupt ‘normality’ — they expose its construction. They expose an everyday dependency upon repeated alignments: a familiar choreography which, under strain, begins to misstep. As these alignments loosen, the person (the subject) is left to negotiate a provisional form of order which remains conditioned.

Related perspectives may be found in Goffman’s analysis of institutions, where identity is reshaped through environments which regulate behavioural patterns. In Asylums, the self is shown as produced within constraint, as opposed to simply expressed. What emerges is not a return to a pure or original ‘normality’ — or “usualness” if you like — but an ongoing improvisation.

Taken together, these accounts suggest that ‘normality’ is never simply lost or recovered. It is made, unmade, remade. Sometimes slowly. Sometimes abruptly. These processes become visible precisely when stability breaks.

Perhaps it is through lifework that we return to the core of our being. As Martha Graham wrote, there is “a quickening that is translated through you into action” — an inner force made real through movement, expression, and form. In answering it, we inject integrity into what we want from life: the desire for a Normal of one’s own.

It begins again there.