We hit here on the limits of a constructivist conception of morality. As much as contemporary political economy has been minded to refute the fact that norms are merely brute, objective facts, it still relies on the assumption that their effects tend to correspond to their manifest meaning. Norms are seen as operating through inscription or interpellation, or, when actors are seen to play a more active role, through internalization or rule-following. This model, however, is too literal, linear, or ‘clean’ a reading of the role of norms in contemporary society. It underestimates the complexity of the process of moral constitution: it is too preoccupied with the overt meaning of norms and has little interest in their latent content. In pursuing this line of argument, this article draws inspiration from scholars who have highlighted the centrality of affect to issues of political economy. Such approaches also concern themselves with the normative dimension of human life but situate this in a wider and more complex constellation of human motivations. Our political imaginary is layered, composed not just of norms and discursive representations but equally of drives and affinities that have a certain degree of autonomy and interact with the more cerebral and conscious aspects of moral life in complex and often surprising ways.
Seen from such a perspective, norms are not like external principles that inscribe themselves on us or that we internalize; instead, they are immanent, emerging from within the connectivity that is the stuff of social life. That is not to deny that there are strongly hierarchical aspects to the operation of norms in modern life, but rather to argue that the operation of this normative force reflects the distinctive process through which it emerges: precisely because norms are immanently generated, their influence tends to become more deeply and organically embedded in the basic structure of our personality and character. That is, our relationship to social order and political authority becomes invested with emotional energy. Norms do not cleanly shape the world in their image but operate through a complex affective economy on which a concept like rule-following provides little analytical grip.
Martjin Konings, "Imagined Double Movements: Progressive Thoughts and the Specter of Neoliberal Populism"
