Rethinking Disability

Bodies, Senses, and Things

Michael Schillmeier

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136993404
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This text is a critical and empirically-based introduction to disability studies. It offers a comprehensive, book-length analysis of disability through the lens of Science and Technology Studies (STS), and presents a practice-oriented discussion of how bodies, senses and things are linked in everyday life and configure "enabling" and "disabling" scenarios. Relevant to a broad spectrum of medical practitioners and practicing social service workers, the book will also be essential reading in the fields of disability studies, sociology of the body/senses, medical sociology and STS.

Part I
‘The Social’ in Question

Rethinking Modern Di/visions

1
The Social and the Religion of Modernity

I very much endorse the counter-politics of the social model of disability that is primarily concerned with fighting the negative effects of everyday practices of disablement of impaired people. No doubt, it is has been politically and strategically necessary to delimit ‘society’ or ‘the social’ as a domain where personal, collective, and scientific interests could meet. It is also extremely important to give the experiences of dis/abled people their own voice(s) through a public discourse. Yet, if we want to ensure an adequate understanding of dis/ability at the beginning of the 21^st century that is very much embedded in and performed by the normalizing and individualizing ‘bio-power’ (Foucault, 2003) of technoscientific and biomedical innovations and practices, it is also very important to critically research and reflect upon related understandings and controversies of dis/ability. If one is willing to diagnose a crisis of the social model of disability, then, it is primarily a crisis of distinctions upon which the description of ‘disability’, and its relevant re-presentations as a social matter of fact, rests.

The predicament of the social model, then, denotes the dilemma of ‘either/or’ distinctions and names what I like to call the limits of the religion of modernity. The religion of modernity is rooted in what A. N. Whitehead has called the ‘bifurcation of nature’ that separates off different realities given by culture on the one hand and nature on the other. This is a correspondent with the bifurcation of subjects and objects, as well as the bifurcation between ‘the social/society’ and the ‘individual’ or that of ‘disability’ and ‘impairment’. Within modernity it is left open as to which side is given superior reality. This indecision is the very force that fosters the conceptual and ideological controversies concerning dis/ability nowadays. Still, the religion of modernity demands a decision as to which reality you are part of. You belong to either the one or the other. This is precisely what governs the discourse of and about the social model of disability and articulates a certain dominance of the religion of modernity over what I like to call the religiousness of human dis/abling relations. The notion of ‘religiousness’ circumscribes highly abstractly the very concrete, everyday (re-)configurations of the socialness of human conduct.

The German sociologist Ulrich Beck (2008) stresses:

religion is treated as a noun, which implies a clearly demarcated social set of symbols and practices that constitute an either/or. You have only the choice of believing or not believing them, and, as a member of a faith community, you cannot belong to another such community at the same time.

This background understanding of ‘religion’ is doubtless monotheistic, i.e. it is based on the tacit premise that each person can choose one God and one God alone, and must exclude all others.… As a noun, ‘religion’ organizes the religious field according to an either/or logic. The adjective ‘religious’, by contrast, organizes it according to a ‘both-and’ logic. To be religious does not presuppose membership (or non-membership for that matter) of a specific group or organization; it signifies a specific attitude towards the existential questions of man in the world.

If we consider the religiousness of humans in its most general sense, it refers to the experience of humans depending on others (human and non-human), whereas the religion of humans (and things) refers to that dependency as seen from a single perspective. Through the single perspective, given by a single religion, the complex religiousness of existence is normalized by one perspective. The better a single perspective, a set of practices is normalized, the more it is ‘black-boxed’ and seen as a natural relation, and treated as a matter of fact that explains the given reality.

The distinction between ‘religion’ and ‘religious’ (or ‘religiousness’) is vital for the following discussion, since it is closely related to new ways of understanding ‘the social’ of dis/ability that I am interested in. In order to rethink disability it is necessary to reconsider ‘the social’ as advocated by the social model of disability. And it is precisely the relationship between ‘religious(ness)’ and ‘religion’ that is able to do so. In this way, (monotheistic) religions are strictly delimited (and explained) by social practices initiated by humans constituting not only the clear and distinctive difference between those who believe and those who don’t, but they also distinguish for their membership what is to be believed and what cannot be believed. Religiousness, on the other hand, is about a specific attitude concerning existential questions of human beings. As I said earlier, that attitude expresses the acknowledgement of the fundamental principle of depending on others. In its concrete practices it refers to the very (re-)configurations of the socialness of human beings.

When seen in this light, the notion of dependency is not merely negative, nor is the notion of dis/ability. Rather, it brings to the fore the fundamental constituency of practices that relate, and by doing so, configure differences, heterogeneities or ‘otherness’ that make up humans as social beings and may create short or long term, enabling as well as disabling existing realities and future possibilities.

With this in mind the experience of dis/ability and in effect dis/ability studies can have a great impact on researching and conceptualizing social life—its good as well as bad effects. Dis/ability matters! It matters precisely since it opens up the black boxes of highly normalized, veiled, and most powerful social orders. Dis/ability turns our attention to the different ways the bifurcation of nature is practiced. Moreover, it highlights the socialness of that bifurcation, which points to the very assemblages of differences, of all the elements, that is, human and non-human alike, that are necessary to make up the conditions of possible bifurcations in the first place. Additionally, the experience of dis/ability not only brings to the fore the way in which ‘the social’ is created, stabilized, normalized, and black-boxed, but also how it is disrupted, questioned, and altered. Dis/ability, one may argue, makes the socialness of human beings traceable precisely since it disrupts, questions, and alters ‘the social’. Thus, dis/ability renders the social questionable and it has to be explained, rather than being explained by a reality of ‘the social’ (disability) that differs from the reality of ‘the individual’ (impairment).

In this sense dis/ability studies becomes an ontological project that not only is interested in how we live but also engages in ontological politics of how we want to live (cf. Law & Benschop, 1997; Mol, 1999, 2002). Hence, Rethinking Disability is trying to bring back the attitude of ‘religiousness’ of human relations inasmuch as it values existing and possible relations with others. This does not mean, however, that we need a religion to do so. On the contrary, it is the very socialness of dis/ability that questions any religion that values dis/ability in either this or that way. Neither does it mean that Rethinking Disability wants to get rid of the different models or ‘religions’ of disability; to exclude existing differences would only nurture the ‘either/or’ strategy of modernity. Rather, Rethinking Disability refers to the controversies that make up our dependencies on others and with it our dis/abilities. Rethinking Disability adds another controversy of understanding the very socialness of dis/ability that cannot be separated off in either (social) disability or (individual) impairment and then be explained from one side only. In that sense, to draw on the religiousness as an attitude that is interested in the socialness of dis/ability articulates an anti-religion. We remember (and in due course we will see more explicitly) that it has been the legacy of monotheistic forms of religion and their ‘either/or’ strategies that brought a specific way of seeing and practicing religiousness and in effect enunciates a very specific understanding of the social that Rethinking Disability questions.

RELIGIOUSNESS AND RELIGION

If we refer to ‘religion’, to be religious demands a decision to believe in one God, in one belief system, from which the relationship between self and others is interpreted. Religiousness, on the other hand, is not a question of to be or not to be; one always already is religious in the different ways one has relations with others. The socialness of the latter then refers to the constant re-assembling of these relations—in our daily practices and in our ways of conceptualizing them. A brief look at the etymology of ‘religion’ is helpful to retrace the religiousness, viz. socialness, of human being. Etymologically, ‘religion’ is derived from a fourfold trajectory: (a) relegere (re + lego) which means a re-reading, and to (b) religare (re + ligare) which means re-ligation, re-connection, re-ligament, re-association, re-assemblage, (c) from res + legere which means a gathering, or binding a thing, and (d) religiens ‘careful,’ opposite of negligens. But one may ask what is actually (re-)assembled? The etymology of religion refers to the ‘bond between humans (the world) and gods’ and ‘it introduce[s] the note of interpretation’, as the philosopher A. N. Whitehead says (Whitehead, 1978: 341).

The etymology of religion then provides an indication of how to re-read the social discourse of disability and to rethink the ‘the social’ of dis/ability as a matter of re-assembling collectives. In that sense, Rethinking Disability is part of the modern religion inasmuch as it suggests a re-reading of the socialness of dis/ability. This is typical for modern affairs since it is precisely the socialness of human affairs that appears contingent, i.e. not fixed by tradition (a religious system, God, nature, etc.) but dependent on the perspective with which it is seen (cf. Luhmann, 1998; Weber, 1951). Hence, what is understood as dis/ability remains contingent and controversial; there is no single understanding of disability but only polycontextual practices, experiences, and descriptions of dis/ability.¹ As we have seen when outlining the differences of the social model and the medical model of disability, different perspectives enact different natures of dis/ability. Thus, in order to consider ‘the social’ of dis/ability, we are enmeshed in a process of re-reading what dis/ability means, we are interested in the ‘religiousness’ of human conduct and so we are part of the ontological politics of dis/ability that is able to ask how we want to live.

Bearing this in mind, it is important how we talk and write publicly about dis/ability as researchers—be it scientifically or/and philosophically— since we co-produce dis/ability and the ways the collectives of dis/ability are re-assembled. Thus, to speak about, study, research, and conceptualize dis/ability is not an innocent practice as Ingunn Moser rightly points out:

Words matter. The way we describe and thus constitute both ability and disability affects the frames of possibilities for disabled people, including the conditions on which membership is granted. ( …) Descriptions of reality constitute, order and mobilise reality, discursively. (Moser, 2000: 210)

The different ways we understand dis/ability enact the different realities of dis/ability and how these realities change in time, i.e. in the ways dis/ability is practiced, experienced, and described. What is changing, one may say, are the very assemblages, the ‘collectives’ (Latour, 2005) that configure the shifting ‘religiousness’, as these assemblages come into being and make up the different ontologies of dis/ability.

In that sense (and here lies my interest), religiousness is similar and not in conflict with science, as Georg Simmel argued so convincingly; it is ‘a form according to which the human soul experiences life and comprehends its existence’ (Simmel, 1997: 5; cf. Simmel, 1992c). For my concerns, it offers a possibility to rethink the socialness of dis/ability. Religiousness, Simmel adds, refers to ‘religion before it becomes religion’ (Simmel, 1997: 103). According to Simmel, religion is a secondary derivative of religiousness of (inter-)mediated relations. Simmel argues that ‘these social ties, irrespective of the religious data, arise as a purely interindividual, psychological relationship, which later exhibits itself abstractly in religious faith’ (Simmel, 1997: 110). For Simmel religiousness is not bound to religion but is found with the very psychology and sociality of human beings, that is, the affects and effects of relations of (inter-)intermediation between humans which—in modernity—are very much mediated by nonhuman technologies, tools, and things (cf. Simmel, 1990). The socialness unravels the abstract idea of the religiousness of human being; it brings to the fore the concrete relations—the content—of the abstract form of religiousness.

Hence, it doesn’t come as a surprise that the etymology of ‘religion’ closely links with the etymology of ‘social’:

‘Social’ as ‘characterized by friendliness,’ and ‘allied, associated,’ from M.Fr. social (14c.), and from L. socialis ‘united, living with others,’ from socius ‘companion,’ probably originally ‘follower,’ and related to sequi ‘to follow’, meaning ‘living or liking to live with others, disposed to friendly intercourse’. (cf. http://www.etymonline.com)

Thus, ‘social’ refers like ‘religious’ to the assemblage of opposites that desire each other in order to become what they are; they are different because they relate and they relate because they are different.² Strictly speaking, the desire for the other names the very metaphysical principle of order that connects the known with the unknown; it is the very belief in another who or which that cannot be properly be known that names the condition of possibility of existence. Existence is the inclusion of the other. ‘Existing means differing’ as Gabriel Tarde summed up the metaphysics of existence as a social, viz. religious, moment (Tarde, 1999b). It is precisely this double process of relating and non-relating that defines the ‘double bind’ being of existence. Hence, all beings are religious and social in their process of becoming actual as the ‘creative origination’ of binding heterogeneous things. Simmel made this point very clear:

Creative life constantly produces something which is not itself life, something on which it somehow peters out, something which raises its own opposing legal claim. It cannot express itself except in forms that are, and signify, something from themselves independently of life. (Simmel, 2006a: 103)

Both religiousness and sociality are not something added to entities— humans or non-humans alike. Understood in a cosmological sense, all things are religious and social, in order to become what they are, they desire the other. As Tarde has put it in his cosmology of the social, ‘Au fond de chaque chose, il y a toute chose réelle ou possible. Mais cela suppose d’abord, que toute chose est une societié, que tout phénomène est un fait social’ (Tarde, 1999b: 58).

In other words: Actual entities are real since they are religious/social and they are religious/social since they are real; this concrete relation composes the possibility of things. Societies do not consist of actual entities—human and non-human alike—but actual entities are societies, a gathering, togetherness, a collective of heterogeneous entities becoming a unity. It teaches, according to Gabriel Tarde, the ‘symbolic character of truths’—human and non-human alike (Tarde, 1999b: 55; cf. Whitehead, 1978, 1985).

Hence, what we find if we look at the etymology of religion without any exclusivist reference to existing religions is—and this what I would like to propose—that religion is all about the relation of how heterogeneous elements bind together, come into being anew and how it names its value. It is this affirmation, the caring (religiens, care) of and for the desire of others that make up the possibilities of a unity (a belief, un croyance) as the ‘association of two directions of relations’ [eine einheitliche, aus zwei Beziehungsrichtungen zusammengesetzte Tatsache]. It marks the...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in Science, Technology and Society
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I ‘The Social’ in Question
• Part II In Medias Res
• Part III Dis/abling Practices1
• Notes
• References
• Index