Dear Adam,
I really enjoyed reading your post. I appreciate the fact that you have
asked some risky questions.
This is the sort of (Foucauldian) nominalist approach that I am
currently writing about. Over the past several months, I have made a
number of interventions here with respect to eliminating the ‘object,'
which I would identify as the category of "impairment" and people with
impairments (or "disabilities"). You have (and I agree) identified the
human "sciences" as *producing* this object in the first place in their
role as a mechanism of this individualizing and totalizing power. You
have (and, again, I agree) argued that what we really we need to do is
examine how practices produced in these domains objectify us (rather
than contributing to the grip of that objectification).
Like you, I would welcome some serious debate on these matters. Some
months ago, I questioned the claim that the social model has broken the
causal link between impairment and disablement by pointing out that only
people who have or are believed to have "impairments" get to count as
disabled (i.e. disadvantaged in this way). To my dismay, some people on
this list seemed to interpret this to mean that we need to look more
closely at our "bodily experiences" of impairment/disability and took up
my suggestion in order to talk in this way. This is not at all what I
intended. Rather, my point was this: the social model (which has become
the hegemonic organizing tool) may *seem* to show that disability is not
a necessary consequence of impairment but it is in fact the inevitable
consequence because that's why the classification, designation, etc.
emerged in the first place: to provide ‘scientific' legitimation for the
existence of certain social hierarchies and techniques of "social
cleansing". ‘Impairment' is of a piece with social disadvantage. It is
simply fanciful to claim that ‘impairment is no less than a description
of the body' (as if there could ever be a description which was not at
the same time a *prescription* for the formulation of that to which it
is claimed to innocuously refer).
You have asked and challenged those of us in struggle to consider why
(and how) we have taken on (rather than spit at) this subjection. I
certainly don't have all of the answers. Perhaps we have become so
"docile" (to use Foucault's term) that to think differently is indeed
unimaginable. I am grappling with these questions. I too found Lynne
Roper's post interesting. In my current work, I am trying to illustrate
these arguments by showing how the category of ‘sex' operates in the
domain of sexuality to serve reproductive interests.
Thanks again for introducing some polemics here. I hope others will
feel motivated to do continue this discussion. And, Adam, I would also
be pleased if you were to contact me off-list at some point to discuss
these issues.
Best regards,
Shelley Tremain
Adam Greenow wrote:
>
> 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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