Hi Adam
I am not sure if your message is referring to the same conference I
mentioned. The conference I mentioned doesn't have an
'object' of study in the sense you suggest.
It is really aimed at therapists and academics who want
to deconstruct mind-body splits and re-evaluate psychoanalytic ways of
thinking about perception, difference and experience in relation to the
body.
As you will see from the programme, its not about disability and there is
only one workshop (mine) which addresses disability and it is grounded very
much in a critical social perspective. It may be of interest to some people
on this list. There
are a number of researchers on this forum interested in theorising the body.
I just feel puzzled about why you think this conference claims to be
scientific.
My concern is there are so many so-called scientific medical and
psychological conferences that assume disability is pathological and located
within an individual rather than socially constructed. The conference I
mention is not one of these. The two keynote speakers, Suzie Orbach and Bob
Young. (as well as being psychotherapists) are political radicals. Suzie is
a feminist, and founder member of the woman's therapy centre. Bob is a
Marxist. They have spent decades challenging a range of social oppressions.
I think it is helpful to make links with such activists in thinking
critically about disability, in a wide range of contexts.
Finally please don't worry, I don't take your remarks in the least bit
personally,
since I don't think we've met!
Best wishes
Deb Marks
>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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