Adam wrote:
>In one sense, I think you could argue that only words and ideas exist. I
>think Focuault said that one day people will look back and ask: What was
>madness? For madness doesn't have a material reality, madness is a word.
>Focuault wanted to do away with things. Madness exists as an object only
>through a practice, but the practice itself is not madness.
Is this not also touching on the distinction between Locke's distinction of
nominal and real essence? Foucault made very similar claims about
'homosexuality' and 'homosexual practice', but I think he suggested that
the latter preceded the former (am I right Shelley?) and so, if we assume
that he draws the same parallel with 'madness', then he is not wanting to
do away with things, only to emphasise that things can be read in the same
way that words are. That links in to the arguments about visualism and
realism - 'a picture is a fact' and all that. I think the experience of
deaf people and blind people is hugely important for unpacking that
particular monolith unless of course you deal with the world through
'normative' assumptions.
This, as Paul
>Veyne points out, is a positivist idea. madness is purely metaphysical,
>'only through word play can one depict a madness "that exist materially"
>apart from a form that shapes it as madness; at most there are neural
>molecules arranged in a certain way ... ' certain behaviours etc. that can
>be interpretated in numerous culturally specific ways.
I think perhaps the important point is the ritualisation, naturalisation
and objectification of the word play so that it materializes a particular
class of people as 'mad', who then become a site of surface onto whch
particular practices are inscribed that reinforce the ritual, that
re-materializes ...etc etc. In other words, the whole thing is circular. It
doesn't really matter which part of the circle you enter at, you also end
up back in the same place. But in either/or accounts, the circle itself is
depicted as a unidirectional causal cycle, in much the same way that the
'life course' is seen to be a linear movement from child to adult so that
the child is perpetually an adult-in-becoming.
>
>To say that impairment does not exist is not to claim
>disabled people are the victims of prejudice or to deny it;
I think it is to make such a claim if you insist that impairment is
'foundational', and also cannot be analysed *in* its relation to
disability, as most materialists do, because this troubles the boundaries
between the two.
>It means that a particular
>practice is needed, an objectivization for it to exist.
>
>What we need is a philosophy of relation. The objects of 'impairment' or
>'disability' only exist in their relation to certain practices. To be
>impaired materially is not to be impaired. To become impaired you have to be
>objectivised as impaired. This is why the social model itself is an
>objectifying practice, it takes a state of affairs and calls it impairment
>when truly it is just a state of affairs. That this objectification results
>in disability is hardly surprising. In this sense it isn't revolutionary or
>liberating at all.
>
I have one slight problem with this. I agree with the first part about the
need for a philosophy of relation and this was discussed on the list a
while back. I have begun to explore this through an examination of the
difference between dialogics and dialectics as described by Bakhtin.
However, I don't think that the social model 'takes a state of affairs and
calls it impairment' so much as it re-iterates the individual model's
achievement of the objectification of impairment, but reverses the focus to
place it on disability. It doesn't 'call' impairment except in the sense of
a collective and foundational corporeality - at least in dominant accounts
- but it does, as a result, restricts the range of 'unique social
realities' that are possible. This perhaps results from the limitations of
Marxist analysis in the area of language and dialogue - as reflected in
attempts to separate 'doing' and 'thinking'. This I think is the strength
of Shelley's argument because such a perspective pre-empts a *nuanced*
account of disability and so can only be liberatory for those who fit the
narrow picture.
I'm not at my most lucid, but I hope this makes sense.
Best wishes
Mairian
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