Normativity is usually treated as a domain apart: the realm of values, principles, and obligations that tell us what ought to be done. From a relational perspective, this separation is artificial. Normativity does not descend upon systems from above. It emerges from within coordination itself.
What feels like “ought” is the pressure exerted by intelligibility under constraint.
1. Why Norms Feel Objective
Norms often present themselves as objective requirements: standards that hold regardless of context or perspective. This apparent objectivity is a by-product of successful stabilisation.
When a pattern of coordination is reliable, efficient, and widely shared, deviation from it feels not merely different, but wrong. The system resists variation by exerting pressure toward alignment.
Normativity is the name we give to that pressure once it becomes socially recognised.
2. From Coordination to Obligation
Consider how obligations arise in practice. They rarely begin as explicit rules. They emerge when:
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certain actions repeatedly enable coordination,
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alternatives repeatedly cause breakdown,
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and participants begin to anticipate these effects.
Over time, expectations harden. What once worked becomes what must be done. The transition from “this works” to “this ought to be done” is gradual, not principled.
Normativity is sedimented coordination.
3. Moral Language as Retrospective Justification
Moral discourse often arrives after the fact. Once coordination is established, moral language provides:
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justification for enforcement,
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rationalisation of exclusion,
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and insulation against critique.
This does not mean moral language is insincere. It means it is secondary. It explains and stabilises pressures that were already operating at the level of practice.
4. The Danger of Moral Absolutism
When emergent norms are mistaken for timeless principles, they become brittle. Systems lose the ability to adapt, because deviation is framed as moral failure rather than as a signal of changing conditions.
This is how normativity becomes oppressive: not through cruelty, but through over-sedimentation.
What once enabled coordination begins to suffocate it.
5. Relational Ethics Without Foundations
A relational account does not abolish ethics. It relocates it. Ethical attention shifts from rule-following to:
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monitoring coordination pressures,
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detecting when norms no longer serve their function,
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and preserving the revisability of constraints.
The ethical question is no longer “What is the right rule?” but “What patterns of coordination should be allowed to stabilise, and for whom?”
6. Normativity as a Site of Intervention
Because normativity emerges from practice, it can also be reshaped through practice. Reconfiguring cuts alters coordination pressures, which in turn alters what feels obligatory.
This is why subversion aimed at norms rarely succeeds through argument alone. Norms change when new ways of coordinating become viable.
Conclusion
Normativity is not imposed; it is felt. It is the experiential residue of stable coordination under constraint.
In the next post, we will turn to how this plays out when systems interact at scale — examining how subversion can operate without collapsing coordination into chaos: Subversion Without Chaos.
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