For eight years on this blog I have tried to describe disability as a way of knowing. To that end I’ve been ardent, philosophical, poetic, and often nuanced, for the provenance of this idea owes a great deal to the late Enlightenment rather than the early, and accordingly degrees of doubt are the correspondent self-questioning rhetoric one requires. I know as a blind person my intuitions and doubts are the friends of my psyche and whatever it is I call my personality. In turn doubts are more interesting to me than precepts. I’m in mind of this because I find as this century unfolds I no longer have intellectual affection for one of the tenets of disability studies, the nearly ubiquitous claim that culture has produced and continues to produce compulsory able-bodied-ness. My take is that culture is poorly understood by rhetoricians and cultural theorists and all too often what’s meant by compulsory able-bodied-ness is what Bobby Seale used to call “the Man”—all fine and well, but Seale knew he was using a metaphor and I’m not convinced many in disability studies know the same.
Culture is so elastic its nearly impossible to describe. The Victorians, understanding this, entered into a century long taxonomic mania, cataloguing, classifying, photographing, measuring, statisizing everything from mollusks to milk maids. But in the end history outlasted them, and if not history, women, people of color, the colonized. Culture cannot create compulsory hetero-normativity, able-bodied-ness. It can only insist on these things and then fail.
Disability studies isn’t sufficiently interested in how the “compulsory” fails. In fact many theorists have a vested interest in arguing that it continues. I understand. It pays for sabbaticals and conferences. It props up academic journals. The “it” an affection for a neo-Victorian ideal that has long since died.
It takes the oppressed a long time to know they’re free.
I suppose I’m reflecting Jameson’s notion of superficiality. In this instance I’m rejecting a much older signifier and signified.
Thoughts on a Sunday night. Our age is decentralized and infinitely plastic. Let us hope for sharper class consciousness. The issue is still labor.
Where’s my TV remote?
Planet of the Blind 