Archaeology of the Legible Human
Now live on the Anti-Enlightenment Project (Zenodo | PhilArchive)
Modernity’s most enduring fiction is that somewhere among us walks the normal human. This essay digs up that fossil. Beginning with Quetelet’s statistical conjuring trick – l’homme moyen, the “average man” –and ending in our age of wearable psychometrics and algorithmic empathy, it traces how normality became both the instrument and the idol of Western governance.
Along the way it dissects:
- The arithmetic imagination that turned virtue into a mean value.
- Psychology™ as the church of the diagnostic self, where confession comes with CPT codes.
- Sociological scale as the machinery that converts persons into populations.
- Critical theory’s recursion, where resistance becomes a management style.
- The palliative society, in which every emotion is tracked, graphed, and monetised.
NB: The audio is split into chapters on Spotify to facilitate reading in sections.
What begins as a genealogy of statistics ends as an autopsy of care. The normal is revealed not as a condition, but as an administrative fantasy – the state’s dream of perfect legibility. Against this, the essay proposes an ethics of variance: a refusal of wholeness, a discipline of remaining unsynthesised.
Lucidity, not liberation, may be the only virtue left to us – knowing the apparatus intimately enough to refuse its metaphysics while continuing to breathe within it.
The Myth of Homo Normalis is the sixth instalment in the Anti-Enlightenment Project, joining Objectivity Is Illusion, Rational Ghosts, Temporal Ghosts, Against Agency, and The Discipline of Dis-Integration. Together they map the slow disassembly of reason’s empire – from epistemology to ethics, from governance to affect.
Read or cite:
🔗 Zenodo DOI
🔗 PhilArchive page – forthcoming link
Philosophics 
The norm has migrated from the biometric field to the economic domain. Homo economicus, this individual supposed to act rationally to maximize his utility, has become the modern substitute for the “normalis”: he structures public policies, justifies market choices, and imposes an ideal of utilitarian rationality on all. Like the average person, he is a figure that does not exist in reality, but which allows us to classify, exclude, and correct those who do not fit the mold of productivity or profitability.
“A democratic deficit sets in, where normative power is exercised without popular legitimacy or transparency. The citizen is relegated to the role of mere executor, subject to rules they have neither chosen nor understood.”
https://homohortus31.wordpress.com/2025/10/08/normative-opacity-an-obstacle-to-genuine-democracy/
“Innerarity’s methodology offers a new perspective to analyze our complex societies. Conceiving philosophy as a tool of espionage, he encourages critical and independent thought capable of stepping away from established norms to better understand and interpret social complexity.”
https://homohortus31.wordpress.com/2025/09/25/philosophy-as-espionage-decoding-the-invisible-society-with-daniel-innerarity/
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“Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval reveal the unprecedented nature of neoliberalism and contemporary capitalism: institutions no longer stabilize in a fixed configuration but exist in a relentless dynamic of creating and transforming social, economic, and individual norms. This permanent « normative production » turns the entire society into an experimental laboratory governed by technical, managerial, and algorithmic rationality that invades and shapes all collective domains.”
https://homohortus31.wordpress.com/2025/10/08/permanent-normative-production-the-self-instituted-society-under-technological-control/
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