Cultural Disability Studies in Education

Interdisciplinary Navigations of the Normative Divide

David Bolt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351593441
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Handicaps en sociologie

Over the last few decades disability studies has emerged not only as a discipline in itself but also as a catalyst for cultural disability studies and Disability Studies in Education. In this book the three areas become united in a new field that recognises education as a discourse between tutors and students who explore representations of disability on the levels of everything from academic disciplines and knowledge to language and theory; from received understandings and social attitudes to narrative and characterisation.

Moving from late nineteenth to early twenty-first-century representations, this book combines disability studies with aesthetics, film studies, Holocaust studies, gender studies, happiness studies, popular music studies, humour studies, and media studies. In so doing it encourages discussion around representations of disability in drama, novels, films, autobiography, short stories, music videos, sitcoms, and advertising campaigns. Discussions are underpinned by the tripartite model of disability and so disrupt one-dimensional representations.

Cultural Disability Studies in Education encourages educators and students to engage with disability as an isolating, hurtful, and joyful experience that merits multiple levels of representation and offers true potential for a non-normative social aesthetic. It will be required reading for all scholars and students of disability studies, cultural disability studies, Disability Studies in Education, sociology, and cultural studies.

1

Visions from the Yellow Decade

Disability, aesthetics, and residual existence

Preliminary discussion: Disability studies and aesthetics

When engaging with CDSE one of the many fields and disciplines on which tutors and students can draw is aesthetics, roughly defined as the study of beauty and the sublime. Although arguably ‘indebted to rhetoric’, aesthetics has part of its history in rationalism, the dominant philosophy of the early 1700s, but was developed greatly in the late 1700s by German philosopher Immanuel Kant (Poulakos, 2007: 335). Imported to Bulgaria in the 1890s, the ideas of another German philosopher, Johannes Volkelt, reveal social considerations in the contention that ‘aesthetic qualities are not the physical properties of things’ but the ‘psychological products of our minds’, from which it follows that aesthetics is both relative and normative, for something or indeed someone must conform to a number of rules and conditions in order to qualify as beautiful (Spassova, 2001: 112). This being so, the philosophical form of aesthetics produces a social variant concerned with ‘an epistemology – an understanding of space or place and social structure – and communication’ no less involved with contemplations of emotion (Coleman, Hartney, and Alderton, 2013: 10). Social aesthetics can therefore benefit greatly from openness to the non-normative knowledge of cripistemologies (Johnson and McRuer, 2014), which is why in recent years disability studies has helped to recognise beauty otherwise deemed broken; to prize physical and indeed mental differences as valuable in their own rights (Siebers, 2010). Be it normative or non-normative, aesthetics concerns the representation, assessment, and currency of beauty in many forms of human interaction.

A significant aspect of social aesthetics is the visual representation of society (Coleman, Hartney, and Alderton, 2013), especially for Victorians with a fascination in the ‘act of seeing’ (Flint, 2000: 1), as in the ‘“Aesthetic movement” of England’s yellow 1890s’ (Gates, 1993: 233). In this ocularcentric cultural context, against convictions about the necessity of moral or political messages, came the contention that art could be gazed upon and celebrated for its own sake; the rise of the aesthete whose social interactions involved dandyism and other exaggerated preoccupations with appearance. Amid cries of hedonism and decadency, the figure of the aesthete was endorsed by a number of periodicals, notably The Yellow Book that marked out the 1890s as the ‘most colourful decade’ of the century (Claes and Demoor, 2010: 133). Different meanings of the adjective colourful became entwined as the philosophical, psychological, and visual aspects of aesthetics impacted variously on the social norms of the human environment and beyond.

The present chapter identifies the yellow decade as a key cultural moment in which dominant normative positivisms expand into prominent non-normative negativisms that shape representations of blindness, the result being that blind characters are ascribed what I call a residual existence (given that value lies only in their sighted past). First published in 1891, New Grub Street chimes on many levels with The Yellow Book, to which the author George Gissing was a contributor, and tells the story of a literary community in Britain. The tragic sequence that exemplifies the meaning of residual existence is that Alfred Yule loses his sight, the ability to be productive as an editor, and then all social worth in that his life is ‘over’ and ‘wasted’ (Gissing, 1996: 335). This rendering of existence resonates in other works of the same year, including Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Blind and Rudyard Kipling’s The Light That Failed. Both are considered here but the main focus is on Maeterlinck’s short play, which proves especially provocative if tutors and students can find time to read it together in class (perhaps with reference to the faceless and hopeless image of blindness appropriated on the cover of the present book).

Divided and divided again: The imaginary of doom and gloom

CDSE discourse about residual existence must begin with the issue of division, whose significance is evident right from the start of The Blind. Set on an island, in the dark shadows of an ancient forest, the ‘gloomiest’ of plays (McCannon, 2004: 454) opens with the corpse of a sighted priest holding centre stage, on the right of whom there are six blind men seated on stones, tree-stumps, and dead leaves; on the left, separated from the men by an uprooted tree, there are six blind women, one of whom is said to be mad, and a sighted baby. The sex segregation of the scene, which remains constant and explicit throughout the play, reveals the extent of the community’s institutionalisation and as such resonates with the day-to-day experience of many contemporaneously disabled people (divided from broader society and then again from each other to further discourage non-normative reproduction).

The normative divide is fundamental to the premise of Maeterlinck’s play, whose gripping quality, at least according to a late twentieth-century introduction, rests in its simplicity: ‘The blind depend on the priest to see them to safety; the audience can see the priest is dead, though the blind cannot; so the blind are without succour, although they do not know it’ (Slater, 1997: xv). There is little in the way of action but dramatic tension results as the implied sighted audience peaks across the normative divide and sees what the characters cannot see (a one-way dynamic indicative of the normative divide before which non-normative positivisms seldom reach).

In the dramatic dynamic, while Maeterlinck’s implied sighted audience is furnished with nothing positive about experiences of visual impairment, ocularnormative values and aspirations readily circulate among the characters, as dominant normative positivisms bring about numerous non-normative negativisms:

THE YOUNG BLIND GIRL . They told me he’d be able to cure me. He says I’ll be able to see one day. Then I can leave the Island.

FIRST MAN BORN BLIND . We all want to leave the Island!

SECOND MAN BORN BLIND . We’ll all stay here for ever!

THIRD MAN BORN BLIND . He’s too old; he won’t have time to cure us!

THE YOUNG BLIND GIRL . My eyelids are closed, but I can feel my eyes are alive…

FIRST MAN BORN BLIND . Mine are open.

SECOND MAN BORN BLIND . I sleep with my eyes open.

THIRD MAN BORN BLIND . Let’s not keep talking about our eyes!

SECOND MAN BORN BLIND . You haven’t been here long, have you?

(Maeterlinck, 1997: 23)

Although the island is rendered beyond the normative divide, the community of blind characters is convinced by the necessity of eyes and sight from which a longing for cure evidently follows. The counterintuitive implication, moreover, is that the longer someone remains part of this non-normative community the more they become so affected by dominant normative positivisms, the values and aspirations also shared by the implied audience.

The dominant values and aspirations are constructed before rather than beyond the normative divide and have epistemic dimensions that run in complete opposition to cripistemologies – along what I therefore term anti-cripistemic lines. Accordingly, although problematised recurrently in disability studies (e.g. Rodas, 2009; Vidali, 2010), commonplace confusion between seeing and knowing means that The Blind can be easily comprehended as a ‘drama of human incomprehension’ (Taggart, 1994: 627), one of Maeterlinck’s ‘parables of ignorance’ (McCannon, 2004: 455), occupied by ‘feeble, puerile, unadventurous people, with an obvious handicap preventing them from seeing the realities of life’ (Slater, 1997: xvii). After all, the community in The Blind confuses seeing with knowing, and vice versa, on a number of levels, one of which pertains to the time of day. Although the first man born blind knows it is late when he grows hungry, the sixth blind man only deduces darkness from the absence of a blue line that, in the past, he has been able to see when in the sunshine and suggests the answer for all is to look up to the sky. Stranded in the forest and thus deprived of the institutional context, the community becomes ‘intolerably abstracted from the concept of time’ (Taggart, 1994: 630). But notably it is not the sixth blind man alone who looks skyward for an answer; on the contrary it is only the three men born blind who ‘go on looking down at the ground’ (Maeterlinck, 1997: 14). In other words, the normative positivisms are so dominant that nine of the twelve blind characters delve into their past resources and endeavour to see in order to work out the time of day.

The anti-cripistemic dimensions of dominant normative positivisms endorse a related notion of social aesthetics. In their interactions with the environment, the characters are stifled by visual preoccupations exemplified in a number of references to the aesthetic quality of the sun. In a conversation about being rudely awakened by the priest, the third man born blind wonders whether the annoying alerts to sunrise were even true, recalls noticing nothing himself, and bemoans never having seen the sun. The oldest blind man and the oldest blind woman are both very quick to say that they could see the sun long ago, although the memories have now faded. But the issue for the third man born blind is that they should not be expected to get up and go out in the sun; that there is neither benefit nor reason; that it might just as well be midnight. Even when the sixth blind man argues that he would prefer to go out at midday, when it feels brighter, the real incentive is that his eyes just might open. The aesthetic of the yellow decade is betrayed as the conversation circles the exemplary beauty of the sun that the characters comprehend in largely if not purely visual terms. The implicit irrelevance of heat, sounds, smells, and emotions brought by sunrise has anti-cripistemic implications in this unhappy interaction with the environment because even knowing the difference between midday and midnight comes to require the sense of sight.

The unhappy interaction with the environment is induced by normative positivisms so dominant as to render the community profoundly lost. The sixth blind man posits vision as a necessary condition for bringing meaning to location when he asks if anyone has memories of seeing the island in the past and, if so, ‘can they tell us where we are?’ (Maeterlinck, 1997: 16). This compulsion to make a connection with the lost Self (Taggart, 1994) comments indirectly on the predicament in which the blind characters find themselves, oblivious to everything about their journey despite having it described to them by the priest. Their own sensory information is rendered irrelevant and the fact that it has not been supplemented by verbal information implies a lack of communication and learning that, again, contrasts with the sighted Self of days gone by. More than a big country far across the sea, the young blind girl cannot say from where she comes, believes she would need to make signs that cannot be seen. But she can remember seeing the faces of her parents and sisters; flowers and mountains; water and fire; the seaside and the sun. In brief, she can remember seeing many things mistakenly thought to be lost to her on the island.

The implication of the lost community is that vision is a necessity when it comes to learning and communicating about location, the full profundity of which becomes apparent as place merges with time and results in an empty form of not only knowing but also existing. This is why a number of the unhappy characters ‘embark on an attempted description of their other life, long gone, and themselves as they then were’ (Taggart, 1994: 632). Indeed, the ocularnormative rendering of place locates any sense of belonging firmly in the sighted past when the oldest blind man exclaims that they have not seen the house they call home: ‘it’s all very well to run our hands over the walls and the windows, we don’t know where we live’ (Maeterlinck, 1997: 24). It is as if knowledge of home, that most profound exemplification of place, is somehow predicated on vision.

The dominance of normative positivisms is at its strongest in relation to how the blind characters interact with each other. Illustrating why disability is sometimes known as the ‘master trope of human disqualification’ (Snyder and Mitchell, 2006: 125), the community is rendered unsocial and unhappy because (rather than conversation, shared experience, smell, sound, taste, touch, and so on) vision is the sole means by which people get to know and indeed love each other. When asked if she is beautiful, like someone from far away, the young blind girl says only that she has not seen herself, as though logically unable to answer the question. This implied logic is confirmed when the oldest blind man laments that they have not seen each other; that talk, touch, and togetherness are no comparison; that they might as well be alone; and that it is impossible to ‘love someone without seeing them’ (Maeterlinck, 1997: 25). In these terms, vision is required to validate the very existence of Self and Other and thus fundamental to any connection between the two, a relational problem that impacts on compassion, for the blindness of Maeterlinck’s characters ‘strikes at the very heart of their being’; ‘prevents them not only from seeing each other, but also from feeling for each other, from understanding each other’ (Slater, 1997: xvi). When referring to the fact that prior to the priest’s death he had been crying for several days, the young blind girl says with some puzzlement that it made her cry too, even though she could not see him, empathy rendered mysterious by assumptions that only sighted people are able to identify with another’s feelings. The anti-cripistemic rationale is illustrated when the oldest blind man refers to the death of the priest and says they did not know anything because they have never seen him: ‘When have we ever known what’s in front of our poor dead eyes?’ (Maeterlinck, 1997: 40). In this dramatic account of residual existence the community becomes increasingly hopeless as the play draws to its shambolic end; dominated by normative positivisms the blind characters endeavour to benefit from the eyesight of a dog first and then the baby, ultimately unable to pull together and escape their pending doom.

Shambolic but symbolic: Revolutionary misrepresentation

Despite what we learn from disability studies, tutors and students must acknowledge that problematic representations are sometimes defended in the name of aesthetics. Maeterlinck wrote in French and, in Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (Freedman, 1990: xx), is likened to Irish writer Oscar Wilde as an aesthete and precursor of the culture industry. The play, moreover, is said to have made a ‘revolutionary advance in the theatre: its emphasis on mood and ambiance over plot and character helped in part to give rise to the surrealist and the symbolist movements’ (Kornhaber, 2005). Hence, the ‘reality and the details of what blindness is really like are not a central point of interest’, according to an understatement in the introduction, for the ‘innovative’ Maeterlinck rejects realism in favour of ‘symbolic blindness’ (Slater, 1997: xx). That is to say, the pre-surrealist play heralds the surrealism of the early twentieth century and so moves, by definition, beyond the realms of realism.

On considering symbolic blindness, tutors and students are likely to follow multiple lines of CDSE discourse. Mindful of the ancient story of Oedipus in which the mythical king unknowingly broke the incest taboo by having sexual intercourse with his mother and, on realising what he had done, gouged out his eyes, we might say that the blind characters are symbolically castrated; that the dead priest on whose knowledge they depend and the sun whose beauty they covet represent the father and mother respectively. Alternatively, given that the dramatis personae consists of a priest and twelve blind people, the same number as Chri...