Hopefully Deborah will forgive me for taking up this opportunity of
responding to her post to try and raise a discussion that I feel needs to be
raised in the interests of a struggle. It isn't meant as a personal attack,
it just happens to be a convenient time for me to air my thoughts on this
subject and hopefully provoke some debate. I am myself, in a sense, a
member of one of the 'sciences' that I am about to attack. But I am also in
a strange position of being one of the objects of these sciences also.
Perhaps I am at heart a cynic, but these conferences, that are continually
advertised on this list, seem to be the problem rather than the solution.
These human practices that desire the status of science are a self
fulfilling prophecy that see disabled people or some other varied group of
people as the target of their work. But in reality the thing that they have
problematicised and chosen as their object of scrutiny does not in fact
exist in reality except to the extent that it has been created by these
objectifying practices. Instead of studying the object of these practices
(which is a cycle of inquiry with no end), should we not as people who are
seeking some sort of liberation (?) be analysing the practices themselves
and how through some particular historical formation they have come to claim
some sort of sovereignty over our lives? Surely these practices are the very
enemy that have created us, made us into objects; into things that have an
existence when before we did not exist or were comfortably invisible to
their gaze?
Yet, we persist in using the paradigm of the oppressive regime and continue
to objectify ourselves as well as allowing others to objectify us in a
particular manner. Is it not time that we assigned these gurus of the
disabled, sick and abnormal to their rightful place alongside TV evangelists
and other quacks? This is not to have a go at anyone in particular who
attends these conferences but it is to ask a question of the gurus who claim
some unique insight into the condition of those it has chosen to sustain in
the first place. It is to ask disabled people also (as they have been so
designated) to turn away from this bizarre formation of human sciences that
lay claim to some hidden truth of something that is only in reality just a
mental simulacra. Namely the false designation of a multitude and variety of
people as disabled or mad or abnormal.
What ever we are as 'disabled people' (or cripples or whatever the buzz word
might be) it is varied and multiple to the extent that we do not exist as a
category in reality except at a particular moment when these sciences
through their function designated us, herded us, objectified us and coded us
as objects of their inquiry. To try and discover a truth in an object that
doesn't exist is like trying to find gold in the middle of a rainbow. It is
like asking for some significance in a gust of wind. In short it is a
complete and contingent nonsense. But more than this it is a technology that
continues to delineate and divide. It creates a space for us that is on the
edge, but worse an enclosed space on the edge that we cannot even escape to
enter into a new domain. In the new domain where the abnormal could be
normal and the disabled non disabled? Not even that, but where these false
oppositions and categories did not even exist. In this utopia there can be
no room for false dichotomies and labels. That which doesn't exist cannot be
studied; indeed generalisations cannot be studied for generalisations are
merely a semantic thing rather than a tangible reality. What is abnormal is
part of what it means to be normal; a unity that we have chosen to divide in
the name of a strange science. We are in short a people who have been
oppressed by semantic word games that have become reified to the extent that
they have become the truth. Perhaps we cannot see that which is so obvious.
Perhaps having a broken leg means that one has a broken leg; perhaps having
difficulty with hearing, simply means having difficulty with hearing. Is
that possible? Is it necessary to then take these conditions and analyse
them as part of something larger, something that is the domain of particular
sciences with the result that this myth constructs someone with a broken leg
as not simply someone with a broken leg but someone who is sick, oppressed,
in need of therapy etc. And so these practices make a truth out of the
disabled condition that the problem naturally seems to be in the domain of
the object rather than in the practice that created the object (people) in
the first place. And thus the object people cannot see that liberation is
simply to deny the part of their reality which was constructed *for them*.
It is perhaps to refuse the techniques and language of these sciences, to
spit at labels and to be simply someone with a spinal injury or a difficulty
in speaking.
To put it succinctly, why should we allow these sciences ownership over a
problematic part of our lives that they created in the first place? That is
the question I would like to pose to the list. Is it possible to escape from
a trance that we believe to be a reality? Can we imagine a time when we are
not categorised and studied and would that time be preferable to the
present?
Adam
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