I poked around in Durkheim’s Suicide yesterday, to see what he had to say about anomie.

I do not want to discount the magnitude of his theoretical breakthrough, which was mere foreground to his deeper methodological breakthrough, but the theory does suffer a bit from retroactive obviousness. That is, his concept of anomie is more historically important than it is freshly relevant to the anomic situation we face today.

To summarize, Durkheim’s diagnosis of anomie is that, at the individual level, without external societal constraints human desires are unlimited and lacking form. Society, by imposing limits, gives us norms, goals, defined desires and milestones for assessing the progress of our lives. When society stops providing this structure, we lose our bearings, and we are lost in a horizonless chaos, where motion is just arbitrary difference without any reference point by which biographical progress can be experienced.

Though now, just in the process of writing this summary, it is starting to feel freshly relevant.

In the spirit of showing my work, I am changing the original thrust (which was to expand anomie beyond Durkheim’s conception) to seeing how much I can find within it.

For years, I have played with a term, “misnorm“. Think of misnormality as a cousin to anomie. A misnorm is more or less a social category mistake. We misunderstand the essential nature of some domain of activity, and misjudge the behaviors that sustain it. We have a false image of how things happen, and so, when things go as they should go and must go, we judge that things are going wrong. And if we are in a position to control the situation, we will force it into conformity with what we think should happen, thereby making things impossible.

(Misnorming happens to designers all the time, and most of my career has been spent battling them, in order to win conditions for good design work. Someone who expects design to work linearly, with steady progress toward a straight goal, without moments of confusion, doubt, conflict and intense anxiety, in complete and polished iterations does not know what design is. And if such person attempts to lead design projects, he literally does not know what he is doing. Such a person is likely to misrepresent design to his organization, or accept misrepresentations of design, and sets himself and his team up for a truly traumatic failure. Either the design team will insist on doing design the way design is done and fail to conform to the wrong expectations of the ignorant leader and his ignorant stakeholders. Or the design team will try to work under impossible conditions within impossible constraints and fail to deliver good design, which is, frankly the fate to which most designers are damned. Either way, the project will fail, and it will fail because, once again, the leader failed to win conditions where success is possible. No amount of demanding, or bullying, or bullshitting can change this fact. And, by the way, this failure is even more a failure of leadership as it is failure to understand design: such people also suffer from misnorms of leadership. They confuse leadership with tyranny.)

Misnorms cause us to compare the human condition to a fantasy norm, and to misjudge something normal and relatively good as something atrocious and deserving destruction, or, as today’s timid radicals put it: dismantled.

Today’s misnorms are fed by fictional images produced by our media — news, entertainment, and the blending of the two in the propagandistic missions of various political movements. This propaganda projects misnormal ideal positive images into the world, in comparison to which everything real is distorted as inadequate, and ideal negative images blamed for the inadequacies. And at the theoretical level, we have ideologies and weird theologies which purport to enlighten us to what’s really going on, but in fact dysilluminate the world with false clarity, which always “reveals” the world as hopelessly corrupt, irredeemable and irreparable, requiring nothing less than total ground-clearing and rebuilding from scratch. It is hard to avoid wondering if all this need for rebuilding from scratch doesn’t just serve as justification for sating an insatiable appetite for destruction.

And so a great many people wander around interpreting everyday, ordinary frustration as evidence of something extraordinarily bad, while misinterpreting disproportionately violent responses, and corrosive policies meant to correct nonexistent problems, as good and necessary. And it all makes conditions of normal life increasingly impossible. And it is very difficult to maintain, repair and improve something that is being undermined, bombarded, and demolished from within, so the critiques gain credibility through their own negative outcomes: the deterioration of what they critique.

And so, today, instead of experiencing lack of references, orientation and sense of progress, as with anomie, we have impossible and deeply phony references and perverse misorientations and rapid regressive velocity.

Anomie : misnorm :: nonunderstanding : misunderstanding