i watch a lot of things that I recognize are timefillers. passing the time till i decide to work on whatever it is that i need to for the moment. one of these many time wasters are these dating shows. they crystallize contemporary relations of desire in ways that are revealing, so long as you remember that they are also mediated by a desire to commodify both the video, and the participants' business/career.
accordingly, the relations are consciously informed by a desire to either find love, or a romantic connection, and to appeal to the audience in a way that potentially guarantees future financial success. There's also a secret third option: not embarrassing yourself in front of potentially millions of people online. These three desires inform the ways in which the participants behave to differing degrees, with im sure, pre-existing interpersonal relations adding a fourth dimension that I can't touch on now.
The ways in which they understand the tastes of the public informs the way they present themselves, primarily on the basis of social norms i.e. what can they do without getting in trouble either on the set or beyond. informed by their habitus tho, differing perceptions of acceptable behaviour lead to differing actions as well as their engagement with one another dramatically affecting what they do and why they do it. to an extent, they are aware that they are functioning as entertainment for others, and where love and connection often stems from vulnerability, such a public display of vulnerability requires care and a maturity that often, 20smth year olds don't always have, or care to display on this platform.
I saw a video in which a contestant was rejected for being too normal, and I think i get it. being normal is rather abnormal; it requires an attenuation to what is socially considered normal and choosing to live along these lines or being disciplined into conformity on these lines. its display can either demonstrate a failure to question your origins, or it can highlight a falsehood, where a person is choosing to behave normally for whatever reason as means for avoiding their real/authentic personality.
my intention here is not to motivate intentionally deviant behaviour for the sake of demonstrating difference; in my mind, the goal is authenticity - reflecting who you are at the stage you are at. Normalcy then is an affront, but also a communal link. its a safe media for people to connect and then develop authentic bounds, but, when dwelling in normalcy, it becomes challenging to communicate deviance. the effort taken to be normal comes with a sacrifce of self and distinct identity, and takes normalcy as a goal worthy of accomplishment. it isn't though.
normalcy is rooted in a specific time frame, and a specific power distribution. in seeking to be normal for normalcy sake, there's an affirmation of what is as what should be. or even worse, an inability to even understand that what is, is actively constructed and maintained. taking normalcy as natural, misconstructions of difference are bound to emerge.
Perhaps what im speaking to stems largely out of a reification of normalcy, where as part of the effort to be normal, the costs of being normal - suppression of self, refusal of alt experiences etc - weigh heavily on the self's psyche. This leads me to consider why someone would want to be normal. normalcy being understood as a social construction, the desire for normalcy represents a desire to be enveloped within the social, accepted socially for communicating sameness.
if sameness or normalcy is not natural, but rather social, everyone normal, consciously or unconsciously, has adopted the patterns or accepted the advice or influence of those whom are perceived to be normal (as presented by what is understood to be their degree of social embeddedness). therefore everyone deemed normal, knowingly or unknowingly has paid the cost to enter into the bounds of social acceptance.
those who are able to therefore gain social acceptance without conforming to normalcy can either expand the bounds of normality or become targets for revulsion in the ways that their difference constitutes a challenge to the construction of normalcy as natural and accordingly, justified in its naturalness. understanding that being normal represents little threat to the social order, we can also understand that it represents minimal threat to the power distribution and the distribution of benefits stemming from this. those who get specific jobs are identified by their cohesion with a corporate and cultural context. conceptions of attractiveness are mediated by ideals of normalcy (although frequently disrupted by real desires borne out of a deeper connection, which i cannot tell if it stems from a recognition of completion within another or a purely human based identification that denies existing structures.)
at any rate, normalcy is an essential precondition within many societies and subcultures. it can serve to foster a specific identity. it's created actively through continual self sacrifice for the sake of achieving a perceived social or material goal (which isn't always distinct). its also subject to change, when communicated or affirmed by those believed to be most embedded within the identity, that their actions even when contrary to the norm can help redefine norms as their identity can represent a bedstone in which the norm is preserved (i.e. a figure representing a bank). it can also be changed from the grassroots when enough people integral for the continuation of the community - often materially - adopt certain changes collectively
this is particularly evident with the construction of white identity
i would like to go further in this discussion as i've only touched the outerlayer, however, i have other things to do. what i will point out before leaving off however, is that the construction of normalcy comes in concert with a power system reifying relations between people and groups of people within a society or network as well as conventions for relating with one another within said networks. normalcy's changes can therefore come in a variety of ways, so long as they do not disrupt the underlying bedrock of relations. if things can change without changing fundamentally, the bedrock hasn't been touched, but simply the relations between people. the bedrock may have, in fact been strengthened.
normality represents an active calcification of relations and if we understand these relations to be built by both people and structures of people, we can understand that these ordered relationships must be able to persist through some form of distribution and maintenance of said distribution channels. accordingly, what im working through right here, is understanding normalcy and then considering ways to understand normalcy's production and existence. building on that, im pointing out the ways in which the normal can be changed, or its change can be identified as a substantial difference or an insubstantial difference.
substantial difference here considers a shift in the ways that structures of people are constructed, relate, and distribute relations in conjuction with people both in and outside of these structures. insubstantial difference changes the people within the structures without challenging the structures or logic of operation for the structures.
i was trying to avoid using the terms production and reproduction, as they are charged with marxist meaning, but i think that they quite accurately represent something which must occur in any society. i do think another phrase should be conceived but again, i presently have other plants to water. x
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